Cherished (11 page)

Stevo finally arrived, only a few minutes before Sam was usually home from school. I wanted my brother to hurry and put Sadie in the car, but it was too horrible to think that Sam might catch him sneaking Sadie out like a burglar stealing our TV. So I breathed miserably, and prayed to be up to the task. Steve sat beside Jamie. Then Sam arrived home and found us. He cried out sharply and sat on my bed alone, above Sadie. His eyes were red, but after a while Sasha made him laugh. She kept running over to the dead, exquisitely boneless mountain of majestic glossy black dog in repose on the rug.
And she leaped on the bed to kiss Sam, before tending to the rest of us, like a doctor making her rounds.

Soon things got wild: My friend Neshama came over, and sat down beside me. I had called her with the news. Then a friend of Sam's stopped by, with his father, who slipped behind Sam on the bed like a shadow. The doorbell rang again, and it was another friend of Sam's, just passing by, out of the blue, if you believe in out of the blue, which I don't; and then a kid who lives up the hill came to borrow Sam's bike. He stayed, too. It was like the stateroom scene in
A Night at the Opera
. There were five adults, four kids, one white Czechoslovakian circus terrier, and one large dead black dog.

Sadie looked like an island of dog, and we looked like flotsam that had formed a ring around her. Life, death, dogs — something in us was trying to hold something together that doesn't hold together, but then does, miraculously, for the time being.

Sometimes we were self-consciously quiet, as if we were on the floor in kindergarten, and should stretch out and nap, but the teacher had gone out, so we waited.

The boys eventually went downstairs and turned on loud rock 'n' roll. The grown-ups stayed a while longer. I got a bag of chocolates from the kitchen, and we ate them, as if raising a toast. As Sadie grew deader and emptier, we could see that it was no longer Sadie in there. She wasn't going to move or change, except to get worse and start smelling. So Stevo carried her on the rolled-up carpet out to my van. It was so clumsy, and so sweet, this ungainly car size package, Sadie's barge, and sarcophagus.

We could hear the phantom sounds of Sadie for days — the nails on wood, the tail, the panting. Sam was alternately distant and clingy and mean, because I am the primary person he banks on and bangs on. I stayed close enough so he could push me away. Sadie slowly floated off.

Then, out of the so-called blue again, six months later, some friends gave us a five-month-old puppy, Lily. She's a Rottweiler/Shar-Pei/shepherd, huge, sweet, and well behaved — mostly. She's not a stunning bathing beauty like Sadie. But she's lovely and loving, and we adore her. It still hurts sometimes, to have lost Sadie, though. She was like the floating garlands the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy made in the documentary
Rivers and Tides
: yellow and red and green leaves, connected one to another with thorns, floating away in the current, swirling, drifting back toward the shore, getting cornered in eddies, drifting free again. All along you know that they will disperse once they're out of your vision, but they will never be gone entirely, because you saw them. The leaves show you how water is like the wind, because they do what streamers do in a breeze. The garlands are a translation of this material; autumn leaves, transposed to water, still flutter.

W
here to put Gabe was our most immediate problem when we ended up at Lot no. 78 in the Enchanted Hills Mobile Home Park.

Gabe — and I say this without trace of hyperbole or hint of exaggeration — was one of the most beautiful geldings ever to bear hoof upon the earth. I see him again each time I go to a movie theater and the logo for TriStar Pictures appears on the screen — the strong white chest, the thundering legs, the wings of Pegasus spreading across the darkness, illuminating each person's face for a moment. Gabe too was pure white, and built like he could carry the world yet still take flight. Because of his Arabian dam, Gabe had a finer nose, and his eyes were rounder, blacker globes. The pink-and-gray speckled skin of his muzzle showed his Appaloosa side, but apart from those small differences he could have been that
Pegasus. The fact that his name was Gabriel never felt like coincidence, archangel of the Annunciation, bringer of new order, of mercy and redemption for those who responded to him. Our love for our Gabriel was the only point of total agreement my mother, grandmother, and I ever shared.

I will write about him many times in my eventual career, and I will once receive a dismissive note from an editor at a New York publishing house going over one of my essays, incredulous that it was possible for me to own a horse if we indeed lived in a trailer park. Oh, Tiffany-Buffy-Madison of the hunt club ponies and the show horse circuit, of the Connecticut address and the Seven Sisters education, three words made it possible: Sacrifice. Determination. Delusion.

M
OM WAS ALWAYS ADEPT
at securing me free or cheap horses, owing to the confidence with which she said everything. She had a Scotch-and-cigarette voice, wore black cowboy boots, and could raise her eyebrows independently of each other. She was tall, big boned, and wore her extravagant auburn hair long, and then later in a wavy cap around her face. She bore only two expressions normally, either anger or amusement, as if she were perpetually getting a big joke going over everybody else's head.

The way I remember it, a friend of a friend in Santa Fe had this beautiful white horse she was afraid to ride; he shied, he bolted, he was too much of a handful. “My kid can ride him. She can ride almost anything,” Mom told the woman.

She exaggerated, of course. I have never been that talented a rider, but I am tenacious, thanks in no small part to Mom setting me back up on a young bay who had run away with me when I was only seven years old. I was too young to ride that horse, and that horse was too young to be ridden by
anyone, so I don't remember how the circumstance happened in the first place. But there I'd been, shaking and crying after someone grabbed the reins of the runaway bay. Mom was at my side and put her arms around me for a moment, then was telling me I was OK and to goddamn get back up there. It was scarier for me to look into the disappointment on her face than to return to the saddle, so that's what I did.

Anyway, Mom assured the woman with the white horse that I could ride. We would give him a good home and pay her a hundred dollars when we could, as I needed a new mount right away. A gray Arabian gelding she'd procured for me — a mean son of a bitch prone to biting and kicking that she'd gotten from the estate of some doctor who'd been her “friend” — I didn't ask questions — had died suddenly of a brain aneurism. Right away I fell for another horse, a lanky buckskin named Sunny owned by a cowboy in Santa Fe, but we hadn't been able to come up with the five hundred dollars to buy him, so off he went to a ranch near Clovis. It was my first real heartbreak; I cried for a good two days after seeing his black tail hanging out the end of a trailer on its way south.

My fickle heart recovered the instant I saw Gabe, before I even put my foot in the stirrup. It didn't matter that he sidestepped and tossed his head, bolted like a sidewinder and had the power to whiplash the neck of any timid rider. Whatever had made him that way, I understood. I knew that kind of anger; I was at home with it. In exchange for my understanding, he gave me his beauty when I rode him, he gave me power to move freely, and it seemed that his arched neck and even gait conferred on my family a kind of nobleness, a respectability, that was otherwise hard for a single mother, an aging grandmother, and a young girl to come by on their own.

Man's best friend may be the dog, but for a girl such as myself, the horse is not only best friend but also protector and confidant. I rode Gabe so much, so far, that I came to believe my heartbeat was the sound of his hooves. I rode him as if we were running for our lives, until he was so tired his head hung like a dog's, and then I would get off and walk beside him for miles into the open horizon of the New Mexico llano. I swam with him in lakes. One time I rode him in a relay race at a gymkhana and the saddle slipped at a full gallop. I was knocked out, a tangling rag doll underneath him as the herd of other riders thundered around us, but he stood stock-still, not daring to lift a hoof. He was still standing still, muscles quivering, when people reached me. Gabriel, angel of mercy.

M
OM HAD ALWAYS MANAGED
to pay for board at various stables and for riding lessons for me with a former rodeo queen named Kathy, who told me Gabe's only problem was that he'd kill himself trying to please me. Mom even paid for my membership in the Santa Fe Junior Horseman's Association, and the occasional entry into a local horse show, so that Gabe and I could run the barrels or vie for a ribbon in pole bending. Mom could pay for this only because she never bought clothes for herself, had my grandmother cut and dye her hair, manicured her own nails, said yes to every double shift and any chance at overtime, and took payouts rather than vacation days. She seemed to know instinctively which bills could be paid late or totally ignored, and she was also the kind
of woman men called “saucy.” A knowing laugh, a smart retort, a dirty joke delivered with impeccable timing — these made for their own currency and could buy another week or a month of nonpayment, or sometimes get things thrown in altogether for free.

But by the time we made it to the Enchanted Hills Mobile Home Park, it seemed to me something had extinguished her ability to conjure. She had quit wearing makeup, her deep-set green eyes seeming small and no longer so catlike without the deft application of mascara and eyeliner. She had gained so much weight her polyester pants pulled across her rounded stomach and hips. Bad credit might have been the reason we arrived at Lot no. 78, but it was also a problem in finding a place to stable our Gabe, and so Mom ended up striking a deal with some guy across the road from the trailer park who had a few horses in a dirt corral with a sheet-metal lean-to for shelter and two old bathtubs for water troughs. The guy said he'd feed Gabe along with his small herd if we just supplied the hay. Deal.

I rode Gabe the few miles from the place he had been pastured to this corral as Mom dropped off some bales of alfalfa. While I hugged Gabe around the neck, she put my saddle in the station wagon. Around us, chickens scratched at the dirt. A rusting car fender and some old bald tires littered one corner of the corral.

“We'll figure something out,” she told me. I continued to hug his white neck and felt the warmth of his breath as he nuzzled my side.

“This is only temporary. C'mon. Sam, damn it. C'mon.” Mom sounded annoyed. She always sounded annoyed.

T
HE NEXT PART
I
BLAME ON MYSELF
.

I was busy with school, the weather turned rainy for a few days, I tried out for the track team and, because the coach needed “big” girls for the shot put and discus, I got in — even though I couldn't run fast enough to save myself from a burning building if I had to.

What I'm trying to say is that two weeks went by before I went to the corral to check on Gabe. Mom always worked and Gram didn't drive, and besides, the deal was that if I wanted a horse I had to take care of him. The guy who owned the place was feeding him, I reasoned, so Gabe could get by without his usual grain and carrots and grooming for a couple weeks. We'd all had to get by, make do; this was Gabe's part. Besides, he'd probably even be happy for some time off from our long rides.

I got up on Saturday morning to walk the good mile it was through the trailer park, over the old highway, and down the road to the corral with Gabe's bridle slung over my shoulder like a purse and carrots stuck in the back pocket of my jeans. When I got there, it took a moment for my brain to understand what my eyes were seeing, to even recognize my own horse.

Standing head down in a corner with his hind leg cocked
was Gabe, or what had to be Gabe, but I could see the ribs on this white horse, his hide bloodied from the kicks and bites of the other horses. Tangles pulled at his mane and a piece of baling wire snarled the end of his tail.

“Gabe!” I yelled, climbing over the aluminum gate and running to him. He lifted his head for a moment then looked down, as if embarrassed, not walking toward me.

I threw my arms around him, feeling his bones, seeing the eye sockets sunken from dehydration. If any food or water had come his way in these two weeks, it had been by chance. I felt the pain of guilt like a smack to the face, which made me want to either cry or kill something. Luckily at that moment the guy who had made the arrangement with Mom came out of his grubby adobe, saving me from having to cry.

I think this is what happened: I think I turned on him the way women in my family are known to do, with shoulders back and teeth bared, my body drawn to the fullness of its five feet eight inches, a flood of the most vile Spanish words ever known to a white girl spewing from my mouth.