Borrowed Horses (25 page)

The conversation buckled in as tight as a straight-jacket, a sudden vision rose before me: Dave and Jenny in bed together, her legs wrapped around him, her fingers in his hair, drawing his lips to hers. His hands, the ones that had stroked my own bare hips, crushed her to him. I could still taste his unlit cigarette in my mouth, but it was Jenny who got what she wanted in the end.

I don’t want Dave
, I reminded myself. Sunny swung a little close, and Zephyr aimed a kick at his side. It missed, but barely. “I’m going to run her a bit,” I said. “See if I can’t get some of the piss and vinegar out of her.”

Without waiting for a response, I asked for a canter, and after three good, balanced strides (the best I’d felt on her), we turned to jump the bank paralleling the road. It was a relatively short bank, a little over two and a half feet at that point, but we cleared it at an angle with feet to spare, a powerful, round, perfect jump. Dawn’s faint “yahoo” followed us over the bank, and then all I could hear was wind as we galloped the field, a true hand gallop.

My God, she was fast! A blood horse, a racing thoroughbred. Her legs extended themselves in impossible strides. Zephyr, indeed; we were the wind. I looked to the horizon, ever-distant but now seemingly attainable. Zephyr’s breath came in oxygen-rich snorts, cadenced to her stride. Our fused body was something mythological, something more than centaur; an unwritten thing, beyond physical possibilities: wind and blood and bone without corporeal limitations. We flew, all four hooves seeming to hit the earth simultaneously in the incremental nanoseconds between our stretching bounds. We skimmed through air along the earth’s uppermost crust like angels of the Apocalypse, traveling at the speed of God. Ethereal.

I squeezed the right rein slightly, turning her uphill. My own breath came in gasps, the muscles of my legs working in time with hers to maintain my balance. My lungs burned in my chest as if my legs were the ones doing the sprinting. I gently reined Zephyr in as she slowed with the incline of the hill, remembering only then to fight a little, tossing her head against the bit. Up the steepening incline, we went from gallop, to canter, to trot, to jog, then turned and walked back to the girls. I gave her a long rein and she dropped her head low, sides heaving under my thighs.

We’d covered a startling amount of ground, and it took some minutes to get back in sight of the girls. I waved when I saw them trotting over the field toward us. They waved back and I could make out their faces, smiling—no, beaming. I, too, was smiling uncontrollably. This was joy;
this
feeling.

Jenny was laughing. “I’ve never seen a horse move so fast!”

My cheeks hurt with grinning. I only nodded. Adrenaline pounded within, capillaries expanding with its surges.

“No shit.” Dawn’s voice was pitched high with her enthusiasm. “She’s a bitch on wheels—but damn, what wheels!”

Zephyr snapped at Zip, whose head was nearly in range of her teeth, but the snap was half-hearted. I turned her, both of us still panting, and we continued our ride. Though we never went faster than a walk all the rest of the way home, I floated on the power of that round jump, the rhythmic pull of those enormous strides. Talent—Eddie was right. This horse had something, if we could get to it, if we could make her trust us. This horse could be my ticket. I didn’t ask to what.

The combine was on the other side of the field when we arrived back at the barn. Zephyr didn’t deign to even look over; she merely snorted her disdain and walked on. My hips dipped and swiveled with the movement of her back, and I pushed her from one leg to the other, asking her for the leg yielding Eddie had assigned as this week’s homework. She moved grudgingly, walking sideways but trying to lead with the shoulder rather than truly curving around my leg. For two strides she got it, and I called it good enough.

When I pulled off her saddle in the barn’s cooler air, steam rose from her back. The muscles were filling in over her withers and haunches. Foxy paced as the aisle’s end, nickering now as if pleading for me to get him, his nickers hoarse from his earlier screaming.

Eddie pulled in as I led Zephyr out. We walked up to his open window. He would notice she’d been worked hard. Despite careful grooming, her fall-thick coat showed sweat marks, the rippling of drying salt that my damp cloth hadn’t totally erased. “How’s our girl?” was all he said.

“She’s good. Better than good.” Best to fess up. “I hope you don’t mind, but I took her out in the fields today.”

Eddie was impassive. “And?”

“And we should work her out there more often. It’s good for her. It’s like, with so much else to look at, she stopped worrying about me so much and actually yielded a bit.”

Eddie looked at his mare.

In my excitement to tell him of our success, I was holding her on a loose line, as I would have led Foxy. She hadn’t bitten me. Instead, her ears were perked and her gaze was off on the hills behind us. “I’ll put her back,” I said. “We can talk more if you want.”

Eddie shook his head. “I’ve got to get our Miss Jenny up to Lewiston to check out this horse.” He settled his eyes on mine, commanding my full attention with that look. “I’m glad you took her out; you two have made some progress today. But next time, you call me first.”

“Sure thing.” I understood perfectly: she was his horse, and I wasn’t to forget that. “I’m sorry I didn’t call this morning. A split second decision.”

Eddie merely nodded, and I led Zephyr back. Even after everything, the world was still permeated with the euphoria of that ride. I’d hoped to stretch it with an easy ride on Foxy, but he felt old and stiff in the cool of that morning, his legs stocked up from a night in the stall. His arthritic trot was becoming more jarring. I slowed him to a walk and closed my eyes, remembering how he used to move. His canter had been as comfortable and rhythmic as a rocking chair. Strangers used to come up to me at shows and say they liked even
watching
him move, his textbook stride: his canter so good it gave a vicarious thrill. Now, he leaned and tripped in that gait, guarding his hind legs from pain. I hadn’t asked for a canter in weeks.

I was folding laundry when the pounding began, the fist on my front door, the monosyllable of my name moaned long, “Joooan, Jooooan.” Dave lowed the word like an ailing cow.

I slid on the chain and unlocked the deadbolt, realizing as I did so that it was the first time I’d ever used the chain on that door. As I turned the knob, his weight flung the door hard into my hand in a movement so sudden that the chain sparked as it went fast. Every link strained against him. How thin and flimsy that chain looked against his strength.

“What’s your problem?” I hissed.

He laughed mirthlessly at this. “You. I can’t stop thinking of you. I can’t get you out of my brain.” Bourbon and cigarettes hung in the air like a halo around him. “It hurts, Joannie. It needs to stop hurting like this.”

I edged back. His face, pressed through the narrow space in the doors opening, was speckled with gold light, the reflection of the chain stippling him like a trout. Timothy’s fish was more permanent, I thought. Timothy’s fish was no fool’s gold. “This is sick.”

Dave’s eyes were somber now, and held the sadness of an unbearable wisdom, the desolation of a prophet who knows his truths will not be believed. “Don’t you remember what it was like?” His breath was molten: slow, dangerous, burning, inevitable. “You understood me. You could talk about intelligent things. Politics, literature. You’d listen to me. You respected me. No one does that now.” He pulled back from the door slightly, and I lost his face to shadow. Not seeing him was more terrible than seeing him in pieces. I stared, mesmerized, pulled by his strong gravity.

“What about Jenny?” I said, my voice little more than a whisper.

Dave’s voice was thick with alcohol and warning. “You don’t know a thing about Jenny.”

“I know she’s sweet and beautiful. I know she dotes on you.”

“I’m just a tool to her. A way to get money out of Daddy.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Is it?” His face illuminated again as he pressed it forward, twisted by the seething cocktail of whiskey, anguish, and rage. “You think
she
could work as Daddy’s foreman? You think he’d have that? You think I’d still be around if she could?”

“She worships you.” It was taking more will now to force the words out. I tried to think again of Timothy, but he was far away. “You’re all she talks about.”

“Yeah.” He gave a low, mad laugh that went straight through my spine. “I’m all she talks about at home, too. She doesn’t have another thought in her head. Do you know how boring that is? Or she talks about you and the horses. I don’t know which is worse torture.” He punctuated the words with a blow to the door that jerked the chain and made it hum. “I never wanted this life.”

“Bullshit,” I said, but my voice was low and soft, its edge blunted by sympathy. I tried again. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. If you hate your life, then do something about it.”

“Don’t you see, Joannie? That’s why I’m here. I’ve got a bag in the truck and I’m ready to go, but you have come with me. We can start a new life. I’ll go back to school. I’ll do my life over again, the way it should have been.”

“You don’t need me for that.”

“Don’t I?” He paused a moment to let the smoke clear from his voice. When he spoke again, his words were clearer. “If you’re not there, then what’s the point?”

I tried to think of a way through this spinning logic. “It wouldn’t work.”

“We could both be so happy.”

“No,” I said. “We wouldn’t.” It helped to speak the words. Hearing my voice speak them made me realize they were true.

“Yes,” he groaned the small word big.

“People aren’t happy. Maybe they are for moments, but it doesn’t last. That’s just how it is; we always end up wanting something more. You were happy with Jenny once, and now you’re not. It would be the same with me.”

“You don’t believe that.” The chain was level with my eyes, straining on its bolts, one slip away from everything changing. I could slide it backward, slide backward with it.

“I don’t love you,” I said, trying to reduce everything to one simple truth. The gold flecks played over Dave’s tan face, and I thought again of Timothy, wondering if he’d ever feel the love for me that Dave felt now. What would he do to love me, if he decided to love me?

Dave’s eyes were half-hidden in shadow. “Unlock the door.”

I backed a step but said nothing.

“Sometimes, I want to hurt you, Joannie. Sometimes, I want you to feel just a little bit of the pain I’m feeling. Just a taste. Then you’d understand. Then you’d come with me. That’s fucked up, isn’t it? But sometimes that’s how I feel.”

I did not know which way to move. I’d felt that way myself. I put a hand on the wooden door between us, heavy with the weight of him. If I were to let him in now, would it lessen the guilt I carried from losing Mouse?

“I thought I could live with it,” he said. “With our affair being over. At first it seemed like the weeks we had might be enough. Like I could live on the hope for little moments like those.”

The jumps in the course
, I thought,
the temporary flights
.

“But then, when I saw you again that night at dinner, when you were so close again, right within reach, and then hearing about you from Jenny all the time, and about the new guy you’re seeing, something had to change. Every day is worse than the last.”

But this wasn’t about me at all; it was about a way out. I was only the thing he equated with freedom. He’d made me into a pair of wings.

“I could buy you a horse,” he said, the desperate or despairing words rasping in his throat. “You don’t need anything that’s here. All we need is each other.” Each word was quieter and less convincing than the last.

The door started to shake on its hinges; he was sobbing, the muscled bulk of him resting on that too thin door. No sound escaped him now. He wouldn’t let me hear his grief.

And then, the chain went slack. It took me a full minute to realize he was gone. When I did, I fell into my orange armchair, letting its protective arms curve around me.

I stared at my hands, far at the ends of my arms: their dirt-stained calluses, their pronounced whorls, the bitten and broken fingernails. The knuckles showed sun damage, the elephant skin of a lady far older than twenty-seven. If destiny was in the hands, no palmistry was needed to make mine clear. These were not hands formed for love.

I rose and went to my truck. The whining roar of the aging belts as the engine turned over was a cry I felt but would not voice. I drove to the barn, empty of all but the horses now, and I groomed Foxfire. At every stroke, his coat burned redder, rich with oils, burnished.

He leaned into the soft brush, then rested his broad skull against my chest while I stroked the brush behind his ears. The long-tailed star on his nose resembled nothing so much as the star that hung over that long-gone manger and gave it place. I knew then what I’d always known: When a horse trusts you enough to rest the weight of that skull against your chest, you can’t help but be changed. Your heart absorbs the warmth of a creature of the land, and that warmth spreads within your arteries and veins, and your feet relate to the soil on which they stand. Not everyone who rides can love a horse, but you can see this understanding in those who do, those elect whom the horses choose.