Cherished (12 page)

“
¿Que estas haciendo, carbon? ¡Pinche puto!
Have you looked at this horse lately? Have you,
pendejo
, have you?” I am pretty sure I screamed at him. He stood with his hands on the hips of his dirty jeans, not wearing a belt, his face red but his shoulders shrugging.

“Don't be talking to me like that!” I vaguely remember a scruff of gray beard and mustache hiding what must have been surprise on his face. “Your momma don't pay me nothing. I was doing her a favor — ”

“Oh, just
callate
, you stupid asshole.” Respect for my elders was never a concept well taught to me. I slipped Gabe's
bridle over his head and started to lead him from the corral, my look daring the guy to say anything else.

He shook his head and turned away.

G
RAM PUT HER HAND ON THE SPLINTERY RAILING
of the porch as if to steady herself. “Well, Christ Almighty.” She looked back over her shoulder and yelled to the door. “Deanne! Come see this! Dee! For god's sake!”

I'd put a halter on Gabe and had looped the lead rope through the chain link in front of the trailer, crying now as I picked up the brushes from the grooming box I'd pulled from the shed.

Gram reached out to run her hand down the length of Gabe's head, murmuring there, boy, easy, boy, as she did. She bent and kissed his muzzle, leaving a red bow from her lipstick in the center between his nostrils. She knew how to touch a horse, her fingers expert and reassuring. Growing up on Yankee Bush in rural Pennsylvania, she had never known life without horses. The way she told it, she was riding a pony named Buster as soon as she could walk, and then later her grandfather's saddlebred, Belle. As an adult she would have Salty and Becky and Captain, an iron-mouthed Morgan purchased for my grandfather that he never could ride successfully. Gram never rode now; in fact, I hadn't ever seen her on a horse except in the old black-and-white photos stashed in the cedar chest, but I never doubted she was a horsewoman.

“Sammy, go get some carrots from the fridge, and get my shampoo and conditioner from under the vanity.” She didn't take her eyes off Gabe as she spoke.

I didn't say anything as I headed into the trailer, passing my mom in the kitchen as I went to the bathroom to find the Breck shampoo and conditioner Gram always used. I could hear the loud bellow of Mom's voice outside and Gram's sharp nattering that followed, the two going on like that for some minutes. I didn't need to hear the words, because I knew the tone, so I stayed in the bathroom and thought about what a bad person I had been to let Gabe suffer. Gabe, the only totally good thing I had ever known. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and hit my thighs with my fists, but no matter how hard I hit I could not hurt myself the way I thought I deserved.

I seem to remember hearing Mom on the phone after a time, her voice shaken slightly, absent the usual resonant swagger. I think she was talking to Fred, our farrier and a sheriff 's deputy. I think she said, “I need your help.”

By the time the sun was leaving a terra-cotta trail across the horizon, Fred and his brother, and maybe a few other off-duty deputies, had strung some barbed wire across the open section in the otherwise fenced couple acres next to the trailer park. Mom had found the land's owner, managed to talk him into leasing the pasture, and prevailed on Fred's good nature to spend his one day off putting in a fence. He promised to come back the next weekend and put up a loafing shed for some hay and shelter against the elements, and he did. I think the men worked for beer, but I don't know about the money for the pasture, where Mom came up with it. Those things never
occurred to me then. I just wanted life to work, and when it did I didn't ask questions.

On the pavement outside the trailer, Gram and I had bathed Gabe with her Breck so that his coat looked almost as silvery and lustrous as usual. Gram put iodine on the cuts, and I put Vaseline on the outside of his hooves — a useless gesture for a horse in pasture, but I wanted him to feel my care as I held each hoof in my hand and massaged the petroleum into it.

For a water trough, we scrubbed out an empty garbage can and filled it with a garden hose we ran across the pavement and into the pasture. I was happy when at last he was in the pasture and he ambled up to the can, drinking long and deep from it. I stood by the bay window and watched him until dusk bled out into night.

O
F ALL THE YEARS WE SPENT TOGETHER
, Gabe and I, the images of that day play back as if they were happening now. Maybe it's because the day signaled the first in a series of times I would not be able to protect he who had protected me.

Eventually I was lucky enough to get out of the trailer park, first as an exchange student and then to college. Gabe, well over twenty years old by then, was turned out to pasture on a nearby horse farm, acres of lush grass. An idyllic retirement.

After a while, though, money got tight — again — and we fell behind in the board for his care. I didn't find this out until one Easter when I went back to the Enchanted Hills, Lot no. 78, on a break from school. I was ferreting around in the shed, looking for Gabe's halter, when my Gram asked me what the hell I was doing out there.

“I thought I'd go over to that farm and see if I can't catch the old guy in the pasture. Maybe take him out bareback,” I told her.

And then I saw the look on her face, the pinched corners around her mouth. “What?” I said. “What?”

“Oh, Sammy,” and I knew by her calling me by my childhood name that she meant to deliver bad news.

The story she told was that she had sold Gabe to a children's summer camp to pay off the back board. I asked her the name of the place; she said she'd have to look up the papers, and the papers were buried away in the cedar chest. And I shed a few tears at that, but then imagined happy children's faces as they sat on what was now his swayback and bounced at his choppy trot. I imagined his big hay belly growing fatter, his mane ever shaggier.

But then a few days later I woke up in the middle of the night, my heart pounding, my chest so tight I couldn't gulp enough air. There were no children's camps around here. And even if they'd shipped him somewhere else, what kind of a camp would take an ancient, swaybacked gelding? Gram, a horsewoman, would know only one kind of horse buyer would be interested in such a prospect, and that was the feed-lot buyer, headed for the slaughterhouses in Texas.

No.

Nonononono.

Then, another possibility occurred to me. Maybe Gabe had
merely died, as old horses will, and Gram, not wanting to upset me, made up a story — truth never having much currency in our home as it was.

The only way to know for sure would be to go to the farm and ask. Once Gram committed to a story, she was not one to change it. So, I made a plan to go there the next morning.

Except, I didn't.

Either way, I knew how powerless I was. I was a college student lucky to make my tuition every semester. Of the three possible fates for my Gabriel, one offered me comfort, another sadness but acceptance, and the final one more anguish than I could possibly deal with. And so I took the path of not knowing, which, as the years have gone by, has meant a kind of purgatory, the image of a white horse forever invoking my lost Gabriel, angel of mercy.

W
e know the ones we love by the things they love. Molly loved to dig. Left on her own, she'd transform any likely patch of ground into a whorl of flying dirt.

She loved the car. If we were taking a road trip, she'd go sit inside it long before we were due to leave. I'd find Molly behind the wheel, upright and eager in the driver's seat, as if impatient to peel out with me as her passenger.

She loved to destroy things left within her reach and was endowed with a cast-iron stomach. She chewed, and eschewed nothing: shoes, pens, even double-A batteries became fodder and then debris.

She loved to burrow to the bottom of a sleeping bag or bed. Though she slept tucked beneath a blanket in her living room chair (good thing, since her snoring was robust), she'd trot in during the early morning hours to paw at my bedside till I sleepily pulled aside the covers so she could crawl into the depths.

She loved Thomas the cairn terrier, a quarter of her size and power and endowed with an ear-bruising bark. Molly's maternal side surfaced when she wrestled with him, an endless entertainment. They'd leap and roll and fall upon each other like a pair of mismatched movie dinosaurs, teeth ferociously bared, but Molly moderated the intensity of her attacks so that Thomas never got injured. She'd endure his lunges and nips like an old boxing coach indulging a newbie-in-training.

She loved to run. She'd been hell in her wild youth. There was a long, deep scar around her neck, from the time she dashed out of a dog park to be hit by a car.

A scar on her right side was the ghost of a cancer. Maybe these brushes with death contributed to Molly's mature equanimity. By the time I met her, she wasn't easily excitable. She was calm in repose, and her long nose gave her face a sleek femininity instead of the squat, bullish look of your average Am-Staff. Like Petey from
Our Gang
, she had one eye encircled by a patch of brown fur on her white face, and that eye was haloed in black, as if mascaraed. Possessing a soulful gaze with a centuries-old stare, Molly had a regal air of autonomy. When she chose to sit beside you, you felt privileged.

Q
UALIFIED LOVE: WE HAVE PLENTY OF THAT
— from exlovers, step-siblings, de-frienders. Live long enough, and the chambers of your heart will be lined with the shrouds of expired passions. The love that never questions, that never
swerves from its devotion, seems more common to the movies. Too many of us hear of it only in pop songs.

I count myself among the lucky few who have walked down that paradisiacal path. So I'm not here to complain about what's gone, because love of the purest strain lives on. It's as strong and everlasting as the loss.

C
ERTAIN PEOPLE ARE PORTALS
. You meet them and your world widens, deepens. My wife-to-be, Judith, came with two dogs and two cats. I walked with her into the animal world. The felines were an easy add-on, and Thomas, a dead ringer for Toto, was suffused with cute-osity. But when I first met Molly on the end of Judith's leash, she terrified me. Knowing nothing of the truth, I thought all pit bulls were enraged and homicidal. In that first view of Molly, an introduction as cue-thunder ominous as a horror movie clip, she was a shadowy, bulky figure who seemed bigger than Judith. All that was missing was the chewed-off human hand clomped between her massive jaws.

Yet as I fell in love with the owner, I began to get comfortable with the dog. Judith and I were by then living side by side in adjacent units of a bungalow in Venice Beach. On nights when I came home before Judith and puttered around my apartment, I assumed that the barking next door was the dogs' standard response to hearing a human nearby. When I walked over to let them out, Molly bounded up to me with intense excitement, doing a crazed butt-wiggling dance of celebration, whining with happiness, batting her long head against my thighs. I figured she was doing what any dog did
when released from human-less confinement, but Judith chastised me for keeping Molly waiting and making her so unhappy. “She's barking because she wants to be with
you
,” she explained.

Suddenly I had a dog. Every morning, Molly would ask to be let out of Judith's place. Judith would let her out. Molly would then walk around the back of the bungalow and come knocking on my door. Once admitted, she'd trot right up into an armchair she'd claimed as hers on one of her first visits. From there, she surveyed the domain or stared at me adoringly.

I was her dutiful bitch in no time.

A Few Things that Bonding with a Dog Introduces You To:

The local trees and greenery — sidewalks, and the lawns.

The number of objects that might be edible.

The pleasures of sitting in the sun, among them the ability to suspend time.

Every other dog in existence. As well as the world of foolhardy squirrels.

M
OLLY HAD RAISED
J
UDITH'S CATS
— two orphaned brother-and-sister kittens — from birth, saving their tiny lives with her faux-mom ministrations, so why should it have been surprising that she would adopt me? She used to hold down the Bean and then his sister, Flower, while she thoroughly licked their nether regions clean, the cats yowling protests, Molly impervious, so I could imagine her thought process in sizing me up: Thinks he doesn't need a dog, does he? I'll set 'em straight.

Having never experienced dog devotion, I was flummoxed when this gentle, kindhearted babe of an animal made her claim on me. Molly was all about the tribe — on the trail, she'd be lead dog, but she'd periodically run back to make sure you were coming along, and if you got up from a city gathering to go to the bathroom, she'd shepherd you both ways — but this was different. If Judith and I were walking Thomas and Molly, and I had to leave the group for any reason, she'd use her hind legs like superbrakes, refusing to walk onward.