Whitehorse (5 page)

"I just came to see my mare, then I'm outta here."

"That's what I'm afraid of," she replied with a thin smile, then turned for the house, allowing the screen door to slam behind her.

A Neil Diamond tune played on a radio cassette player set on a table near the entrance of the barn. Johnny picked up the empty cassette holder and flipped it over. A young Neil Diamond with wild hair and wearing a skin-tight jumpsuit stared up at him just as "Red Red Wine" rolled out of the speakers and filled up the silence with memories that he had stored away long ago—he and Leah at Lover's Peak drinking warm Sangria straight from the bottle, sitting on the tailgate of his father's truck, this very cassette playing in the background as he educated her on Apache spirituality. She had freely offered him her virginity that night, and he had accepted it like a starving man coveting a crumb of bread. Afterward, they vowed to love one another always—to stay together forever. They would marry soon after graduation and support each other's goals to go to college and attain their degrees—hers as a veterinarian, his as a lawyer.

Fantasies of the young and ignorant, and deliriously in love.

Johnny frowned and gently put aside the cassette box.

There was a bull with a grotesquely swollen scrotum chewing hay in the first stall. A donkey resided in the next, its back right leg stitched closed from its fetlock to its hock. A pair of pygmy goats, no more than eighteen inches high, stood like sentinels at the far end of the barn aisle, regarding him suspiciously and chewing alfalfa leaves. They twitched their curled tails from side to side before shaking their horned heads in an apparent warning—as if anything other than a jackrabbit would take their threat seriously.

Dr. Starr backed out of a stall in that moment. She did not see him, but focused instead on the spindly colt wobbling after her.

The rain the night before had obliterated her features as she stood in the dark on the side of the road. In his mind, as he lay in bed hours later, listening to Dolores breathe deeply in sleep, he had imagined that Leah had looked just as she had in high school. But seeing her now, dressed in baggy khaki pants and a man's denim shirt with sleeves rolled up to her elbows, he realized that there was little girlishness left in her. Her brown hair was in disarray, haphazardly secured with a rubber band at her nape. It was longer than he remembered her wearing it in high school. The color had not lost its richness, however. It suited her complexion, which was fair and prone to burn in the sun. He recalled rubbing sunblock on her back and breasts when they skinny-dipped at Copper Springs. With their bodies slick and smelling like coconut they had made love openly under the hot sun again and again, only to discover much later that the sunblock had done nothing to protect the sensitive, tender skin of their naked buttocks. Putting on their jeans at the end of the day had been excruciating. She had not been able to sit in hot bathwater for a week—even after he had sneaked into her bedroom one night and anointed her butt with ice-cold skin cream. Her idea, not his. He would have made up a paste of mescal and aloe. He would have chanted her one of his grandfather's medicine songs and made her sleep with a fetish tucked under her pillow.

The mare nickered with worry as the colt unsteadily rocked on its tiny feet and nearly fell. Leah jumped to its aid, wrapped her arms around its chest and rump and laughed as it did its best to buck her away.

She looked up unexpectedly, catching him off guard. There was a purple knot on her head above her eyebrow and dark circles under her eyes. The hair around her temples was slightly damp with sweat, and there was a smudge of mud on her chin.

"Oh," she said. "I didn't hear you walk up."

"Nice colt."

"Yes." She nodded and nudged the foal back into the stall. "The mare is going to be stiff for a while. Obviously, I can't give her too much for pain as long as she's nursing."

"I've brought your lunch."

"No thanks. I'm not hungry."

"No can do, Doc. I've been given explicit orders by your friend that you are to eat this or else."

She took the cup and plate and walked out of the barn. Johnny remained standing in the shadowed aisleway, still regarded by the suspicious goats. His first instinct, oddly enough, was to follow Leah, but he quickly checked it (he had not come here to talk over old times that were best forgotten) and entered the stall with his mare. Despite the previous night's accident, she looked none the worse for wear. Doc Starr had done a nice job suturing the cuts on her chest. There was a nasty swelling on her stifle that obviously caused some pain, as the mare kept the leg slightly cocked and pinned her ears whenever the colt stumbled against her in search of a teat.

He left the stall, adjusted his hat again, and moved toward the office, glancing toward the wading pool and then the back door of the house, where he could just make out Shamika staring out at him through the dark screen, her arms crossed over her chest.

Leah sat at a cluttered desk reading a magazine article. The sandwich had been discarded in the trash, along with balled-up gauze, newspapers, and unopened mail from American Express and MasterCard. He watched her silently through the screen door before knocking.

A moment passed before she looked up. Her face looked flushed and her eyes slightly glassy.

"You don't look so good," he said, stepping into the room.

"You were always a real smooth talker, Johnny."
Her
hand went up and brushed a tendril of hair back from her brow. "I guess you're wondering when you can take the mare home. I'd give her until the end of the week, just for safety's sake. Since I was partially responsible for the accident I won't charge you daily care."

"I'm not worried about the money."

She gave him a flat smile and sat back in the chair, which creaked like old hinges under her weight. Only then did he recognize the desk and chair as the same one that had belonged to his father. Then it had occupied a tiny office in the house—a cubicle off the kitchen that was more of a pantry than a room. After his father's death,
Roy
had stored a few furnishings in a warehouse. The others he had donated to Goodwill.

"Looks like you've done a good job fixing up the old place," he said.

"There's a lot to be done. I have no desire to sink any more money in to it than I have to. Hopefully, I won't be here long."

"Moving back to
Dallas
?"

"Hardly." Sitting forward, she absently looked at the magazine and turned the page. "Once I get my practice up and going I'll get a better place. Something closer to town. I have a meeting with Greg Hunnicutt at the track. I understand there's a need for another on-site vet. I'll take him my
résumé
and see what happens."

"Tough business vetting at the track. I can't see that you'll like it much."

"Like it? Or do you mean fit in?" She closed the magazine and tossed it aside.

"I mean like it. You know the race business. The horses aren't exactly someone's backyard pet. They're money machines. If they don't earn their keep, they're history, in one way or another. I can't see you putting down a horse because it came in last at a Futurity."

Leah drank her cold coffee, still refusing to look at Johnny directly.

"So why
did
you come back to Ruidoso?" he asked.

"Why not? It's my home. Where I grew up. I still have friends here."

"And family."

Her jaw tensed. Carefully, she set down her coffee cup and finally lifted her blue eyes to his. Hers were bright with anger. "Did you come here to discuss my father, Johnny? Perhaps you have some message you want me to pass on to him? Say, you intend to destroy his reputation by any means possible in order to win the next senatorial election?"

"I have nothing to say to your father that I can't tell him in person, Le."

"Or to every gossip-hungry reporter who's looking to break the back of yet another politician, and don't call me Le. Only my friends call me that, and as I recall, we are no longer friends."

He nodded and shrugged. "Sorry you feel like that. But as I recall,
Doctor
, if anyone has the right to feel pissed about what happened between us, it should be me. You unloaded me, remember? 'Been nice knowing you,
Whitehorse
, but I have my future to think about and you're not included.' Guess you couldn't handle the heat you would have gotten over showing up at the senior prom with an Indian on your arm. I was good enough to screw in the back of old pickup trucks, but not to be seen with in public."

Leah jumped up and threw the coffee in his face. He did not blink. She, on the other hand, turned white as the gauze in the waste bin. Her body shook. "You're a bastard, Johnny. A real bastard. No one but a cold-hearted bastard would have so proudly and arrogantly told my father to his face that he had been 'screwing' his daughter for nearly a year right under his own roof. But then, maybe that's why you were crawling into my bed in the first place. It was your way of retaliating against my father. How better than to seduce the boss's daughter. Pay him back for what you believed was shabby treatment of your father."

Johnny swiped the dripping coffee off his chin with his hand.

Leah's eyes pooled with tears, and she took a steadying breath. "You were always a hothead, Johnny. So full of anger you couldn't rationalize beyond striking out at anyone you believed wronged you. Fight first, then ask questions. You hated my father for his wealth and power and the fact that your father had to work for a white man in order to survive. Yet look at what you've become. You beat your breast over the stereotyping of Indians. You rant on
20/20
about the mistreatment of Native Americans by the government, and how the whites should strive to better understand the earth's people. Yet, look at how you live, Johnny. Where you live. Not on the reservation. Not among your people—"

"I didn't come here to exchange insults, Le—excuse me,
Doctor.
I just wanted to see my goddamn horse."

"So you've seen it."

They stood in silence, glaring.

"Fine," he finally snapped, then turned on his heels and hit the screen door with the palms of both hands. "See ya around, Doc. I'll have
Roy
pick up the mare and colt at the end of the week. Just send me a bill. I'm good for it."

THREE

«
^
»

F
rom her bedroom window Leah could lie in bed and watch traffic come and go along Highway 249. There were trucks, mostly, area ranchers traveling to and from the city, some hauling horse or cattle trailers, others hauling flatbed trailers of hay bales stacked as high as a two-story house. Occasionally a tractor lumbered by at a snail's pace, causing impatient drivers to pass on the wrong side of the road into incoming traffic. Just a month before, a teenage boy had driven his car head-on into an oncoming semi, too busy giving the old man on the tractor the finger to notice that he was barreling into death's clutches. Leah had attempted to give the young man CPR while waiting for the paramedics to arrive. But there was too little left of the kid's face and chest for it to do much good. He'd sailed through the windshield of his car and splattered against the
truck's grill as if he were a bug.