Borrowed Horses (16 page)

He smiled, and the devil was in his grin again. He said that I was doing something bigger than him, but from where I sat, it didn’t look that way. I was just another white girl with a pony and a selfish dream. He was trying to find the fulcrum and lever with which he could move his world. He sipped his coffee.

“Sad thing is, they’re probably right. I mean, the education I got on the rez didn’t focus on college prep. Half the books we had were falling apart, missing pages, and everything was out of date, so I’m playing catch-up most of the time. It’s not practical that I’m here, but I came anyway, and I’m going to stick it out.”

“No one can take that horse from you.” I said it under my breath, looking away from him.

“Damn straight,” he said, and his voice too was low but firm. “No one can take that horse from you.”

Solitude was freedom. If you were alone, you could travel anywhere your heart led. Dreams came at the price of love. We shared this, but sharing it was a bar between us.

He looked to the wall for a moment then leaned in, taking me into an alliance. “When I was in high school, my buddy and I got into science—mainly because if there is one thing an Indian is not expected to be, it’s a scientist. We were a couple of jokers, but we were angry jokers. We’d look at the people around us and just get fed up with the ambivalence. Things should
matter
, so we decided to shock them out of complacency—almost literally. We’d tie a copper wire to a shoelace and throw the shoe so that the wire arced the power-lines. The pop was so loud, we’d have to yell for the next hour to hear each other. People jumped out of their dark houses, trying to figure out what happened while we hid under the shrubs and tried not to laugh our asses off. We called ourselves the Electron Liberation Front. Our ideals, of course, were impeccable: We wanted people to question their dependency on the white man’s power, to see how they paid for it and enslaved themselves.”

“You were a punk.”

“All Indians are punks; some have just forgotten to show it. Anyway, anarchy looked a lot cooler when we were sixteen and heavily under the influence of the Clash.”

“And now, you’re getting your degree to join the Establishment?” I shook my head in mock despair.

He grinned broadly. “If you can’t beat them, join them, right?” The coffee cake sat uneaten between us. “Actually, I like to see it as unseating the power from within.” His smiles had a gravity I hadn’t noticed until now. I couldn’t see him giving up school for a girl the way Dave had. Timothy’s eyes did not blaze when he spoke either of college or of anarchy—there was nothing there to ignite or quench, only the steady determination of one who would not be fucked out of his goals by someone else’s ideas of how life worked. I liked that. I recognized it.

He said, “You went all the way to Jersey and came back, huh?”

I nodded to the tattoo on his neck. “I guess even though salmon leave for the ocean, they all come home in the end.”

“Not all of them,” he said. “Some get eaten by bears.”

I laughed. “That’s uplifting.”

“Honest, at any rate.”

“And how
does
a salmon avoid being the one who’s eaten?”

Timothy gave this more serious thought than the question deserved. “It can’t. It just swims fast and hopes.”

I picked up the fork again. The coffee cake was raspberry with slivered almonds, and so good it made me catch my breath. Timothy smiled as he watched me eat a bite, then another.

“So, you grew up on the rez.”

“Sort of. We moved there when I was in junior high. Before that, I lived in Spokane.”

“But you went to high school on the rez?”

He nodded but said nothing more. I didn’t want him to stop, but I needed an offering, a
quid
for his
pro quo
. “My best friend in school was a girl named Mouse.” For years, I’d kept the story of Mouse carefully locked and guarded. I hadn’t spoken of her in years—not since the accident itself. Timothy’s grief made mine easier to confess. The flood waters of all those years broke and words poured out of me. “Actually, her name was Jennifer, but everyone called her Mouse because she was as quiet as one—but that was only if you didn’t know her. If you did, you realized she was always saying quiet little things, and that she was smart and funny. Best friend isn’t strong enough description, really. From the time we were little, she practically lived at my house. No one ever knew me so well. When my mom got sick—she has MS—Mouse was the only one who knew what I felt because she was feeling it, too. I didn’t have to say a word. It had always been that way. We never finished a sentence when we were talking to each other. We never had to. I’d start saying something, and before I finished, Mouse would know what I was going to say and would reply. I’d do the same. It used to drive our other friends crazy. The weird thing is, I never felt like I didn’t say my whole thought. I never felt like she was cutting me off. That was just how we talked, 50 percent speech and 50 percent intuition.”

Timothy nodded. “My brother and I used to be like that.”

“Used to be?”

“He moved to Chicago, got a job as a garbage man. Now, when he comes home, it’s different. There’s a space in the conversation that didn’t use to be there. It’s cool and everything. We still get along and all. Everyone has to grow up. Actually, I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but when he first left, I remember thinking that there was something precious lost.” He took the fork and ate a bite of cake.

“I lost Mouse even before she died.” On the wall hung a painting: two purple figures sculling across green water. The artist had laid sheet music over the canvas, and Mozart’s notes showed through the oil paint. “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. We had this huge fight over her asshole boyfriend. More than one fight actually. It was more like a series of yelling matches. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Maybe it was jealousy—that’s what people said. I loved her better than he did. Not in a sexual way, you understand, but who else would be there for me if she wasn’t? I knew it wasn’t my business, but her boyfriend was such a jerk, and I couldn’t understand why she didn’t see it. Then, when she died, it seemed like it was my fault because I couldn’t make her see it. I couldn’t make her stop seeing him.”

“What happened?”

“Car wreck. He was driving. They were coming home from a kegger just before graduation. Happens all the time, right?” If I knew one thing, I knew that I was not going to cry in front of Timothy. I took a big swig of coffee to steady my voice. Outside the window, the rain droned on. “The more I bitched about him, the tighter she clung.” I skimmed the surface of the problem, sculling the time-muddied waters. “Maybe, if I’d just shut up, she would’ve seen him for what he was. If I’d actually been there for her, instead of antagonizing her, maybe she wouldn’t have felt so alone. Maybe that would’ve given her strength to leave.”

Timothy pushed his cup in circles on the table, staring at it intensely. “The problem with maybes is that you can get trapped in them. Sometimes things just happen and there’s nothing you could’ve done.” He stopped moving the cup and looked up. “You ever read Cormac McCarthy?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I can’t quote him exactly or anything, but he said that the problem with using history as a guide is that there’s no control in its experiment. We never know what would have happened if everything hadn’t worked exactly as it did.
All the Pretty Horses
. You should read it.” He took a sip. “Maybe it’s the chemist in me, but I always loved what McCarthy said about history needing a control. We really can’t learn any truth from it. If it’s interesting or revealing, it is for other reasons. Like you and Mouse, it speaks a lot about you.”

“Nothing good,” I said, uncomfortable with having shown so much of myself so early, and with not showing enough to cast any kind of true light. He wouldn’t feel so kindly if he’d known how I’d acted, if I’d told the long-silenced story of the night before the accident, if I’d spoken the cruelty of which I’d proven capable.

“On the contrary.” He didn’t elaborate, except to smile. His eyes had a softness to them lent by their golden gleam. They were quiet eyes; he didn’t spook easily.

Losing Mouse had to mean something; it made
me
have to mean something. I thought again of Foxy; the thought carried a familiar ache. Maybe history had no control, but this much I’d learned: Life could not be wasted. “I shouldn’t have said all this.”

“Actually, I was just thinking it was nice to have a real conversation with someone.”

“As opposed to a fake conversation?” Here I was with a man in a coffee shop, not riding. I had learned nothing from my history and experiments.

“As opposed to a plastic conversation: pleasantries, the weather, what’s on television, the price of gas. All the stuff I talk about all day with customers and classmates.”

“Honesty doesn’t get you anywhere.”

His skin was smooth and clear. I wanted to press my face against his as he smiled, yet I loathed myself for the desire. He raised his cup and finished his coffee, thinking for a moment before saying, “It depends on where you want to go.” He stacked his cup in mine and slid his hand again toward mine, brushing the skin lightly with a gentle touch. “Me? I could go for a movie.”

This was the moment. I could make him need me as I had made Dave need me. He would stroke my hair. He would brush my cheek with the back of his fingers, cup his hand around my neck, draw me in for a kiss. He would hold me in the darkness. The darkness would recede. But darkness is solitude, freedom, and drive.

Foxfire
. I had committed heresy against myself once. It would not happen again. Timothy was right: Life had to
matter
. No more distractions. No more wasted time. In that moment, I saw the next fence and aimed for it. My throat closed around the words that must be spoken, but I forced them out. “I’m sorry. I have a boyfriend.”

Looking at me steadily but mildly, his eyes narrowed slightly, trying to work something out with that unreadable Eastwood gaze.

Emptiness filled me with its surprising capacity. I dropped Timothy and his ten speed at his apartment and spent several hours at the barn alone with Foxfire. I had lied in order to maintain myself. Without a horse, who was I?

It was late when I finally drove home. In the dark, the answering machine’s red light flashed its warning. I didn’t want to touch the button, sure that once again Dave’s voice would come out of it.

I was the epitome of privilege, a white girl with a horse. Timothy was an anarchist against privilege. I’d seen it in Jersey. The money, the entitlement. I was only on the edge of that rich man’s world, but it stained me nonetheless. And hadn’t I envied that wealth? Even still, didn’t I want the horse it could buy? Timothy’s intelligence, his calm, even his way of looking and seeing all seemed like an invitation, but how could he want me? He was above me, beyond me. I was silent. He was a man who could arc wires and make the night echo with a booming electrical thunderclap.

I reached to the machine, and Eddie’s voice unspooled from the tape. Eddie, a part of the determined course. My breath left me in a long, steady exhale.

“Joannie,” the recorded voice said. “Sorry not to call sooner. I got back last week, but things were crazy with the move. Anyway, I heard you were back and so I thought I’d see if you were interested in doing some riding. Give me a call.”

I closed my eyes and breathed, the old relaxation technique from the show ring. The red light was not the lighthouse flaring the news of rocks, but the lifeboat bobbing on the wave: Eddie. He was a drill sergeant of a trainer with a meticulous eye and a demand for perfection. There was no way to hide sloppiness from him—no way to hide days when you skipped the barn, or trained less hard, no way to hide today. He could see work that hadn’t been done, muscles that hadn’t been trained, and he’d have none of it. He was precisely what I needed: a reason to go back to the barn again, a reason to ride, even if I couldn’t jump.

Tomorrow morning, as soon as it was a reasonable hour, I would call Eddie and set up a lesson schedule, and then I would ride. I would ride like I used to. I would ride like I meant it.