Borrowed Horses (20 page)

I turned down Mountain View and lengthened my stride on the long straight stretch of road. A man on a bike pedaled toward me, his cardinal red windbreaker flapping. He slowed as we drew close, a shy grin spreading over his face. “Good morning, Joannie,” he said, the metal tap of his clipped shoe on the pavement punctuating the sentence.

I stopped and looked closer at the man under the helmet. Dr. Rivers—only, I barely recognized him. His greying hair, always slicked and greased at work, now curled from the edges of his helmet. He looked young out here. In the sunshine, without his white coat, his skin had a healthier glow, but there was more to it than that. I stammered a “hello” and apologized for not recognizing him under his helmet. “I guess I was in my own world,” I said.

“That’s the whole point of being out here, right?” He actually smiled. A real smile. With teeth. “No patients, no roommates,” he grinned again, “no Cheryl.”

I tried to think of something to say. Dare I agree? I looked down. I was wearing the old navy-blue sweatshirt Dawn had given me for Christmas four years earlier. In large orange block lettering, the words “EAT SHIT ASSHOLE” were spelled across my chest.

I crossed my arms over the words. “Nice bike,” I said. It was, too—front and rear shocks, gears and gears, rapid fire shifters. The paint was well and truly scuffed; this bike had been on the mountains. The image of Dr. Rivers recklessly barreling down a steep decline didn’t square with anything I’d ever thought about him. “I didn’t realize you were into biking.”

“And I had no idea you were a runner.”

“I’m more of a flopper. But that’s only two steps below ‘jogger,’ so I’m not without potential.”

Dr. Rivers laughed, and his laugh seemed authentic. “I don’t believe that.” He was real out here, and the hospital version of him was only a ghostly replicant. “You seemed to be trucking right along.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Language failed me. I wanted to say something witty or sarcastic, but my mind was void except for wonderment: He’d just used “trucking” in a sentence. “Trucking” was a part of his working vocabulary. Even his smile was natural here. Lines I’d never noticed on his face before indicated that he’d smiled before—that smiling was actually something he did when he wasn’t wearing a white coat! And then there was the sight of his legs in shorts, scarred but tan and knotted with muscle. None of this squared with the Dr. Rivers I thought I’d known.

He seemed to want to say something else, but no words were coming to him either. His smile fell, and he picked absent-mindedly at an old scab at his knee. We were mired in silence. The pause was just becoming palpably uncomfortable when he said, “I’ll let you get back to it then. It was good to see you, Joannie.”

“Have a good ride.” I breathed and turned, relieved to be able to run away.

And yet, I couldn’t seem to find my stride again. My legs were awkward now, my knees ached, and my arms were in all the wrong places. My running shoes no longer seemed to absorb the road’s shocks. My shorts rode up my thighs. I stopped again and ripped off my sweatshirt, but my rhythm did not return. The scars on Dr. Rivers’ legs told of mountains and endurance—an entirely different story than the one told by his gleaming Montblanc pen and white coat.

I lay foot in front of foot, slapping the pavement down, trying to outrun the thought of infinite spaces. It was a policy of mine to avoid the terrifying thought of things going on forever: space, time, the soul, the emptiness where Mouse had been. It was too much like the old puzzle from sophomore geometry, can a line run along the side of a plane?

My mind could not make room for endless things. The idea of time stretching on forever always made me feel like my heart was dropping out from under me. It was all too much. The mind needs edges, containment, limits. The mind needs a fence.

Wednesday evening came, and I was once again seeking refuge in the barn. I had called neither Eddie nor Timothy, though I’d had a phone message from both. Connie came in as I finished with Fox. “You talked to Jenny lately?” she asked.

“Not today. Something wrong?”

“No, not wrong. She’s looking to buy a horse, it seems. She told me today that her husband is, and I quote,
letting
her buy one.”

Connie’s face was impassive. I turned again to Foxy’s coppery flanks as if it was possible to brush even more bloom into them. Jenny had gotten her apology all right.

Connie said, “I’ve got a couple geldings in mind, but I’m going to talk to Eddie first before I make any phone calls. He’ll have some thoughts.”

“It seems so fast. She’s only been riding a couple of months.” Jealousy rose as a lump in my throat.

“That’s more than most people who buy horses. And she’s got Eddie to help her.”

“I’ll have to call her tonight and say congratulations.”

“Too bad Foxy’s not jumping any more. Two or three years ago, he would’ve been perfect for her.”

I stiffened. Two or three years ago, he was jumping grand prix fences in Jersey for Jack Stewart Flaherty. “I’m not selling Foxy,” I said, not trying to keep the anger out of my voice. I slid the bolt home on his stall door and glowered at Connie.

She simply held up her hands and laughed it off. “I know, Joannie. Glad you’re looking out for him in his old age. Besides, I don’t think you could sell him now if you wanted to.”

I turned away from her. The knowledge that Connie was right didn’t make her words any easier to hear. As far as the market was concerned, Foxfire was worthless. Mild manners and gentleness, a heart of unparalleled size, all that meant nothing. No foot, no horse, as they say. Foxfire was losing his legs, and a horse without legs is barely a horse at all. By those standards, my mother was worthless, too. Tears pricked at my eyes but one fierce blink cleared them away.

“Well,” Connie said, “keep your ears open for decent starter horses. Something sane and reasonably talented. It sounds like she’s got some money to spend.”

“Will do,” I grumbled, still unable to look at her.

I put my stuff away and climbed into my truck. I didn’t open the windows or start the engine right away. Instead, I sat in its warmth for several minutes, thinking, allowing the truck’s trapped afternoon heat to seep into me. The dry, purifying heat helped stave off the chill of Connie’s news. I drank tepid water from a plastic bottle, opened the window, and turned the key.

At home, I lifted the receiver and dialed. When a male voice answered, I spoke. “I’ll work with Zephyr.”

“Joan?”

“You offered her to anybody else?”

“I just didn’t know if you’d made up your mind.”

“It’s made up.”

“O.K.” He hesitated as if he was thinking about asking a tough question, but, if so, he didn’t ask it. “Good. We’ll do your lesson on her tomorrow.”

“That’s settled then.” I hung up before I could say another word.

The Calm

T
imothy was ending his shift. Having made my decision, it was safe to see him again. I caught his sleeve just as he headed behind the Employees Only sign.

“Joannie,” he said. “I thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth or something.”

“I did, but I’m back now, and I could kill for a burger.” He raised an eyebrow, but wheeled his bike out and hoisted it into the back of my truck. He watched me as we drove, but he didn’t ask for explanations. I wanted to give him something, an offering of sorts, anything to pay for this patience.

The flowered and flounced curtains in the windows of Eric’s Café were grey with grease and dust, and the walls, once white, were scarred black where chairs dug gauges into the plaster. The tables wore waxy green and white checkered tablecloths, but though wiped continually, they too collected grease. What Eric’s lacked in atmosphere, it made up for in straw-bendingly thick milkshakes and emu burgers.

Between mouthfuls, I recounted the week: the decision to ride Zephyr, the strangeness of Monday night. When I told him about Jenny cleaning and cooking for her husband before coming to my house, Timothy nodded a single, curt, appreciative nod. “Strong woman,” he said.

My jaw slackened. “No. Weak woman. I can’t believe she did that, like it was the 1950s and she was Donna Reed.”

“Don’t you see, though? She put her anger aside and did what she thought she had to, what she thought was her duty.”

I stared into his calm eyes gazing at me under the casual flop of hair. They betrayed none of his secrets, none of his unfathomable history. I needed to know if this was really what he expected from a woman. “She made his fucking dinner like some galley slave. He didn’t deserve that.”

“That’s why it’s so tough. She didn’t do the work because he deserved it. It wasn’t about him at all. She made that dinner for some other reason.”

“What other reason?”

Timothy dipped his curly fry into fry sauce. “No clue,” he said. “Duty? Pride? Whatever it was, you can bet your ass it had nothing to do with him. He doesn’t control what she does. That’s a strong woman.”

I was not convinced. Mayonnaise, tomato, and burger juices had began to run down my hands. I fumbled to pull a napkin from the over-packed dispenser and almost missed Timothy’s quiet words. “My mother was like that.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Before my father died. She was one of those housewives from the old school of housewives. She had this regimented list of chores. Got them done every day—and best not get in her way if she had a mop in hand.” He smiled and laughed, but I noticed the past tense.

I let her past go and asked the safer question. “When did your father die?”

“When I was thirteen. That’s when we left Spokane. Why we left. We just couldn’t afford to live there anymore, so we went to my mom’s family on the rez. She sold tourist stuff at the trading post on 95, and we lived with my grandmother in a HUD house that was falling down around us. It was all a bit of an adjustment.” He smiled. “Anyway, housecleaning after a fight? That’s something my mother would’ve done.”

“But your father must’ve expected it, right?”

Timothy snorted. “My father wouldn’t have noticed if he had to wade through a pile of dirty clothes to get to the table. His mind was always back at the shop—he owned a shoe store, Llewellyn’s Fine Footwear, and he was there practically every waking hour. If I learned one thing from my father, it was never to own your own business. It ate him alive.”

I smirked. “So you went into chemistry?” The science professors I’d met worked ridiculous hours. Twelve-hour days during the week, several more on the weekend, always trying to finish the experiment or write the results for one deadline or another.

Timothy smiled and shrugged. “Before Dad died, my mom was every bit as much of a workaholic, even though she never left the house. You should’ve seen her hands and arms; they were all corded with muscle from scrubbing. And the look in her eye when a stain wouldn’t come out? I’ve never seen anyone look so fierce. I used to think that’s how eagles looked when they saw a fish: all hunger and ruthlessness.”

The flounced curtains hung limp and pathetic with the weight of grease. Beyond them, the parking lot was full of shoppers walking in and out of the mall. “I never would’ve thought of a housewife being like an eagle.”

“Sometimes people are tougher than we give them credit for.” He shrugged. “Sometimes they’re weaker.” He paused again. An unexpressed sadness hung momentarily in the air, but he smiled it away. “Sometimes they’re both.” His expression was soft as he said all this, but I imagined he’d inherited his eyes from his mother, the golden brown infection of an eagle’s stare. All around us, tables of people were having their own conversations, laughing at their own jokes, but Timothy’s words seemed to weave a cocoon around us so that even in the midst of all these others, we were protected and private.

He pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and began folding it into triangles. “You know, when we moved back, I heard a lot of gossip about my mom. People said she didn’t really want to be an Indian. They said she married a white man because she thought she was too good for her own people, but they were judging her based only on what they could see on the outside. She wasn’t one to wear her ethnicity on her sleeve, but she was proud for all that.” He unfolded and refolded the napkin, aimless origami, I thought, until he set it up on his plate, a little paper pyramid, a fragile house of secrets. “If they could’ve seen her like I did, I think they would’ve stopped talking. She was more Indian before my father died than she ever was once we moved back. When we moved into my grandmother’s house, it wasn’t my mother who came. It was her husk.”

We were silent for a long while. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted him to keep talking about his mother, his childhood, about life on and off the reservation. I wanted to know where he’d been and what he thought. I wanted to know him. Talking was like crossing one fence, but one fence alone is easily crossed. It is the combinations, the patterns and their related distances, that create the challenge.

Timothy smiled again and picked up his pyramid, crushing it and wiping his mouth.

“I don’t think Jenny’s an eagle,” I said.