The News in Small Towns (Small Town Series, Book 1) (6 page)

“Hold that thought,” Ginette said.  “Where’s your bathroom?”

“Back through the bedroom,” I told her, pointing the way.  “Don’t trip over anything.”

I put my head back against the couch and closed my eyes.  I didn’t feel as bad as I had earlier.  My heart rate seemed closer to normal and I was calm.  I gave myself up to daydreaming.  A kaleidoscope of images rushed by—some disquieting, some peaceful— ranging from Army Jeeps to my mother riding in a dressage show in Kentucky only a few months before she died.

“Do you still rahd?”  I opened my eyes, but Ginette’s voice came from the bedroom.  I squinted and saw that Ginette was making my bed, smoothing down the blanket and fluffing the pillows.  I jumped up and crossed to the bedroom.

“What are you doing?”

“Cleanin up some.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Sure you do.  Everybody wants somebody to clean up for em.  Almost nobody ever gets that particular wish granted, but today, you do.  So lay down there and tell me about your rahdin.”

“Forget it,” I answered. “Anyway, I haven’t ridden in I don’t know how long.”  Instead of lying down, I went to the open closet and began picking up the clothes from the floor, brushing them off with my hand, and slipping them back on their hangers.  “When I was growing up we lived on Decatur Street, near the library.  My parents both worked full-time jobs.  You probably knew my dad; he was the art teacher at Pine Oak High.”

“Ah never took art,” said Ginette, “but ah knew who he was.  And ah knew your mama.  She sold us the house we lived in when Jim and I were married.”

“She was a really good saleswoman.  It was her father’s—my grandfather’s—business, but she pretty much ran it from the time I turned ten.  It was about that time that one of her customers got her interested in horses. 
Back
interested, I mean—she had ridden when she was a girl.  She started taking dressage lessons on weekends.  I went with her every once in a while, but I think she preferred to ride alone.  That’s when I went through my little hunter-jumper phase that you already know about.  I liked it, but there are a lot of other things a girl can do when she’s growing up.”

Ginette was rolling my pile of dirty clothes in one of the sheets she had found on the floor.  “Tell me about it,” she said.

“It wasn’t more than a year after I went off to college that Granpapa died and Mom inherited some money and some property.  She sold the business, renovated this old farmhouse, and she and Dad moved out here.  She had the barn and stables built at the same time.  She bought horses, went to riding clinics, and competed in shows.  But I had gotten into archery by then so I only rode when I came home for holidays or whatever.  Still, I think it was kind of extreme for my father to sell everything without even telling me.”

“But you were supposed to be telling me whah you moved back to Pine Oak,” Ginette said, toting the bundle of clothes out of the room.  I ran after her and showed her the laundry room.  When the water was hissing into the machine, she walked back to the couch and carefully rolled another joint, licking the ash-thin paper, then toking hard on one end while holding her lighter to the other.

“I forget what you asked,” I said.  I was feeling muddled and strange, and a hit on the new joint didn’t help.

“Whah you came back.”

“I was getting to that,” I said, “and it’s simple: When I got back from Iraq I didn’t like my job anymore.  That and the fact that I broke up with my boyfriend.”

“Your boyfriend?” Ginette asked.

“Oh, didn’t I mention him earlier?  While I was screwing my brains out in

Baghdad, I had a boyfriend in Richmond.”

“No you didn’t,” Ginette said, looking shocked.

“I did,” I told her.  “And the first thing I did when I got back to Richmond was tell him everything.  Took him awhile, but he split to a motel until I finally moved out, and I didn’t really care; Jack’s a nice guy, but he stifled the shit out of me.  Damn, Ginette—I mean Gina.  I’ve never seen better looking fingers wrapped around a joint before.  Tell me who your manicurist is.”

“
Ah
used to be a manicurist, didn’t ya know?  Ah learned to take care of mah hands pretty good.  Feet, too,” she said.  I looked down and saw that Ginette had slipped off her shoes and was wiggling her toes.  They were perfectly proportioned, neatly filed, and painted the same pretty shade of red as her fingernails.  I took the lit joint from Ginette and inhaled, still staring.  I was high as an astronaut.

“You must have good genes,” I told her.

“Beauty’s only skin deep.”

We passed the joint back and forth and I could tell that Gina was getting as ripped as I was.  “Anyway, that’s my story.  I came back here, got the only job I could.  Now I’m trying to make ends meet and stay alive at the same time.  Ever date Donny?” I asked.

“Too young for me.”

“Two years, yeah,” I answered.  “If we were still in high school I wouldn’t have given him a second of my time.  It might be different with you,” I smiled, “but when I reached my thirties, younger guys got more appealing and I got a lot easier to flatter.  I should have known that sometimes boys will remain boys.  Donny’s nice enough, and has a good body, but he doesn’t have much courage.  I mean, he’d rather run from problems than face them.”

“And you were his problem? Gina said.

“It was more like he was my problem,” I told her.  “But he had some doozies of his own.  Usually I can handle other people’s problems, but I haven’t been up to it for a while—ever since I came back from Iraq.”

“What about your guy in Richmond?” Gina asked.

“Same thing.  I’m a magnet for helpless men.  I can never say no and it’s only in the last year that I’ve learned to say git.”

“And in all the datin ah’ve done,” Gina said, “ah’ve never had anybody that needed me at all.” 

“Cal needs you,”  I suggested.

“He needs me for
The Courier
; ah’m not sure he needs me emotionally.  That’s sad, ain’t it?”

“It’s sad and odd, too.”  I didn’t know how it had happened, but I knew that Gina Cartwright and I had, over the last hour or so, formed some kind of tenuous bond.  And what was even more surprising was that I felt glad about it.

We sat silently for a while, but finally Gina said, “Ah had an affair with a woman once.”

I sat up rigid.  “Gina! 
You
?  With a
woman
?  I’m totally shocked.  And why would you tell me something like that?”

“You told me stuff.  Seems only fair.”

“Well I’ll be a . . . ”  I shut my mouth in mid-sentence and looked sideways at Gina with wide eyes.  “Did you like it?”

“Boy howdy!”  Gina said, and we both burst out laughing. “It’s . . . it’s not really funny, ah guess.  Ah mean ah’m not a lezzie or anythin.  It was just a one- or two-naht thing years ago. College girl ah met in a bar in Tallahassee.  Her name was Carrie.  We spent the weekend together.  Never saw her again after that.  Kind of ashamed, ah guess.”

“Does Cal know?”

“Hell, no!”  We laughed again.

“How did you meet Cal?”  I asked.  “There at the paper?”

“Raht.  Ah’d had a few different jobs after ah came back from travelin, but none of em lasted more’n a few years.  This one ah lahked, an ah think ah may actually be good at it.”

“You
are
good at it.”

“An hells angels, ah told the guy down at the Exxon station that ah’d bring him his ad by the end of the day.  Ah forgot all about it.”  She put her shoes back on and stood up unsteadily.

“Can you make it?” I asked her.

“Ah’m a drivin fool,” she said.  “Do you want me to come back and finish cleanin up?”

“I think I can manage,” I said.  “But thanks.”

“Don’t forget to put your clothes in the dryer.  If you don’t they’ll get sour.”

“I’ll remember.  And Gina, thanks, really.”

I opened the door for her and stood there while Ginette walked a few steps, then turned around.  “This was nahce,” she said.  Then she was gone.

Chapter 4

Let’s step backwards into 1990 for a few minutes and let me catch my breath.  I was sixteen and I was riding in my first jumping competition in quiet Connitchee Horse Park, just outside Panama City.  The course was small with a rich grassy infield dotted here and there with small puddles, as it had been raining the night before.  The jumps were all fairly easy, made up of different arrangements of logs.  I remember that one of the jumps was a single tree trunk about two feet in diameter; others were built of smaller logs set atop one another.  Red and white course flags tacked onto the jump standards added a touch of gaiety to the surroundings.

I was proudly wearing a new riding outfit, and my heart was thumping for all the right reasons.  I was sitting on a roan mare belonging to the barn where my mother was just starting to learn dressage.  Roanette was a safe, well-trained schooling horse and I was both scared and excited about actually riding before judges for the first time.  Dozens of other girls, along with a few boys, rode up and down the practice area, awaiting their turns on the course.  An occasional voice came through a loudspeaker, but it was impossible for me to listen—I was too busy watching other riders on the course, trying to make sure I would ride the correct pattern when my turn came.  My mother was nearby; she had the order of go and knew who I would be following, so I left it to her to give me my cue.

The girl riding the course—she was three or four riders ahead of me—was astride a black gelding that must have been 17 hands high.  Both horse and rider were magnificent—simply one creature with two heads—and they made most of the logs seem like twigs as they flew over them.  In reality, it was not a clean run; the gelding’s back hoof tipped over at least two of the logs, but that was unimportant to me.  I knew I was way outclassed.  There was applause and the rider exited the course and rode past where me and Roanette were waiting.  The girl’s eyes were shining and triumphant knowing that she had done well, that she would finish high despite the penalty points.  But when she happened to glance at me, her gaze hardened and she gave her horse a nudge with her leg.  It was only then that I recognized the rider as Ginette Cartwright, the Barbie princess that went to my school and who I hated.  I hadn’t even known she rode, much less that she was so accomplished.

I didn’t even see the next riders, although my eyes might have been pointing in that direction.  I was thinking about the monstrous coincidence that Ginette and I were probably the only two competitors from Pine Oak—over a hundred miles away.  The coincidence was more blatant in that the two of us had been competitors in school ever since we had become aware of each other.  First it had been on the playground when we were little kids; I found that I could outrun every girl in school except her.  In turn, she found out that I had better hand eye coordination in games like softball or volleyball.  As we grew older, she became the better gymnast, and was on the cheerleading squad, which I then talked trash about; I led the bowling team to an even record—the best it had ever done—while Ginette stayed away from any organized team events.  In the classroom it was the same; if I excelled in a course, such as English, Ginette would let it slide with a toss of her long blonde braids, but when she outtested me in home ec and typing classes, I pretended that I would never have any use for those particular skills.

The most recent conflict had to do with boys, who we had both only just discovered.  Ginette had a boyfriend first, of course, because she was prettier and much more social than I was.  But when her boyfriend, whose name was Marty, was assigned to be my lab partner in honors biology, I suddenly became worldly and flirty.  When, a few weeks later, I received my first kiss from Marty as he walked me part way home after school, Ginette heard about it and was livid.  I stopped flirting with Marty almost immediately—not because of Ginette, but because I had started being friendly with a boy who played the lead in our school play that year.  I felt warm around him, enjoyed talking to him about the theater, and people knew we were a couple.  Ginette knew too, and although it took her a few months, she managed to make him break up with me; made it a point to walk past me in the hall holding his hand before she lost interest.

There were many other examples of conflicts between me and Ginette, yet none ever led to words between us; we had never had an argument or even deigned to notice that we had appropriated each other’s boyfriends.  It was a mental thing and so far, on that Saturday at Connitchee Horse Park, it was a stalemate.

This is what was going through my head as my mother’s voice woke me from my reverie and told me that my name and number had just been called.  Ginette was nowhere in sight, probably grooming her horse.  That was good.  I took a deep breath, looked over the course whose jumps now looked impossibly high, and gave Roanette a gentle nudge with the heel of my boot.  That was all the incentive the mare needed, and she shot forward onto the course in a canter.

The first two jumps went smoothly, although my time was nowhere close to what Ginette’s had been.  As I rode toward the third, which was made up of four logs fastened to two long poles set in the ground, the wind suddenly whipped up, causing the colorful banners on each side to flap furiously.  To Roanette, the plastic pennants must have sounded like fierce animals stalking through brush, because she shied just before the jump, then stopped abruptly.  My momentum almost carried me over the mare’s head and into the logs, but my left foot caught in the stirrup and I went over sideways instead.

My foot still entangled in the stirrup, I hung almost upside down with the sound of flapping banners in my ears.  Roanette was trained well enough and long enough for her to be aware that I was in trouble, and had it not been for the wind, there would have been no danger of her spooking further.  As it was, she took a step in one direction, wheeled, and took another in the opposite direction.  She knew her job—which was to stand perfectly still—but she was also scared, and didn’t know what to do with the contradiction.  With each step she took, she dragged me with her, wrenching my ankle.  I was crying out when I saw a man run out onto the course and reach for Roanette’s reins.  It was one of the officials, but his movements were so clumsy and his voice so loud as he shouted “Whoa!  Ho!  Stop!” that Roanette shied away from him as she had from the banners.

I was gritting my teeth and trying to reach up for the stirrup, thinking there was a chance I might pull myself up before the pony bolted, when I heard another voice, female this time.  It said, in a carefully modulated but firm voice.  “Git away.”  It puzzled me until I realized that she was talking to the official.  “Git over there and rip off those banners,” she told him.  My heart sank like an anchor into the muddy turf when I realized that it was Ginette’s voice.   She had taken the reins in one hand and gripped Roanette’s nostril in the other and I could feel the mare’s wildness lessening.  As soon as the banners had been silenced, Ginette let go of Roanette’s nose and, reins still in one hand, she unbuckled the girth so that both me and the saddle slipped to the ground with a solid plop. 

Ginette handed Roanette, calm now, to the official or someone else that had come onto the course.  The whole episode had taken no more than ten or fifteen seconds.  And in that few seconds, Ginette had been superb.  I, on the other hand, had become scum, but I was too worried about my ankle to have more than a fleeting idea of how this was going to affect my life.  I felt Ginette’s hands, firm but gentle at the same time, lift my leg and carefully extricate my foot from the stirrup.

She looked at me without triumph, with the concern she would have felt for anyone in her sport that had gotten injured.  “You okay?” she asked.

“I—I guess.  My ankle hurts.”  I was trying my best not to cry but I knew that tears were streaking my face and that I had mud in my hair and on my new clothes.  Vaguely, I noticed that others were hurrying onto the course.  I heard my mother’s voice and running footsteps.

Ginette picked up my saddle and I struggled to a sitting position. 

“Um, thanks,” I said miserably and forced myself to look her in the face.  “You want me to do your homework or somethin?”

Ginette dropped the saddle at my feet.  Then she lifted her head, turned and walked away without a word.  After a few steps I saw her waver, stop, and turn again.  The expression on her face was almost impossible to describe, but it was a mixture of sadness and hauteur, pride and hurt.  But what she said was clear enough. 

“Mebbe you should rahd more and do homework less,” she said, and walked toward the stables, her head as high as it had ever been.

I remembered that look as clearly as a reflection in a still pool; it was the same one I had seen in the last chapter when Ginette had stood up in my archery room with the intention of leaving me alone with my misery.

Back in the present I worked on making my house livable again.  It was less difficult than I thought because Gina—it was now impossible for me to think of her as Ginette—had not only picked up all my dirty laundry, but had carefully put away the things that had been pulled out of my dresser.  The computer desk had been straightened and dusted and the wads of crumpled paper—false starts for several articles—were in the trash can under the desk.  But the strangest thing, and the thing that moved me more than all the others, was that she had carefully wiped the lipstick letters off the blades of the fan above my bed. 

She had told me she admired me; had typed up stories about me for the paper.  She had said . . . but my mind stopped there; I was stoned; all my sensations were altered, heightened and I couldn’t trust them.

My high wore off slowly, and by the time I finished making my bedroom and living room presentable, I was conscious of a growing fatigue.   I was also very hungry, so I picked my way through the debris of the kitchen and made myself a tuna sandwich.  It made me nauseous but I ate it anyway, then gave the rest of the tuna to the cat.  I drank half a glass of water and decided to retrieve the arrows I shot earlier before they got exposed to the elements.

Passing the stalls always brought up vivid images of the horses that had been such fixtures on my trips home over the years.  Although they generally lived in the fenced-off pasture beyond the dressage ring, they always trotted in for their scoop of feed morning and evening.  And Cindy McKeown had always brought them in during thundershowers.

It feels odd to refer to my mother as Cindy.  It seems like the name of a younger person, and it is certainly one I never called her by.  It was always Mom or Mother. Yet it’s likely that I’ll have to mention her many times in these pages and I want to portray her as more than just somebody’s mother.  Cindy.  I kinda lahk it.

The stables were constructed of sturdy two-by-six pressure-treated boards nailed to tall six-by-six poles and protected with a corrugated red tin roof.   The floors were dirt, but had been bedded occasionally with shavings or straw so that they seemed clean and inviting.  There were four stalls, although Cindy only had three horses.  The fourth was for friends who sometimes trailered out to the farm to ride for a day or a weekend.

Each horse had its own stall.  The stall nearest the house belonged to Facilitator, a black Hanoverian gelding just past his prime.  The next was where Trifecta stayed.  She had been Cindy’s top riding horse—a mare that had been trained and competed at the highest level by one of the top riders in the U. S.  But I knew that her pedigree and training came with a high price tag.  Cindy had bred Trifecta to a top Hessen stallion and the result had been Alikki.  That third stall had been hers.  Cindy had doted on Alikki and had insisted on training the filly herself.  Alikki, at three years old, had only been under saddle a couple of months when the accident happened.

Alikki’s stall door was halfway open; the ground inside held scattered shavings and the dusty patch of what was once a small pile of manure.  Her blue water bucket was dry and dusty.

Now all three horses were gone, scattered around the south—or around the world for all I knew.  I had never asked my father where they had gone, and I should have.  Cindy’s death affected me deeply; my time in Baghdad and my ensuing illness made it impossible to concentrate on anything that was not right before my eyes.  Although I had only ridden Trifecta once and Facilitator a dozen or so times, I always loved to be around them, to press my face into their necks and smell the fresh clean horse scent that is far more exciting than any perfume, any flower or breeze.  I badly wished I could have seen them all again, to say goodbye.  I wished I could have said goodbye to Cindy, too.

I pushed myself away from the stalls and walked toward the target shed.  The first arrow I shot had almost managed to bury itself completely in the tall grass in front of the shed.  But not quite—the white nock was still peeking out.  I bent down and carefully pulled the end toward me, succeeding in getting it out without bending the aluminum and with a minimum of damage to the feathers.  I smoothed them out.  Good as new.  I extracted the three that were in the target without much difficulty, then looked at the one that had stuck in the woody edge of the shed.  I grasped it firmly near the point and was surprised when it came loose at once.  The shot had been weaker than I thought. 
I
had been weaker.  In back of the shed the grass was so high I knew that finding the last arrow was futile, but I dutifully searched anyway.  When I bent down to see the ground better, my nausea returned and I sagged to my knees, vomiting tuna, water, and bile.  The stench was repulsive and I spat several times to rid my mouth of the taste.  I felt better, but there would be no finding the last arrow.  It wasn’t the first arrow I’ve lost and won’t be the last.