Author: Heidi Vanderbilt
Category: Other
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CHAPTER 4
A HUNDRED AND fifty years ago, the Depot Feed Store had been a stop on the Butterfield stagecoach route. The adobe building had sheltered travelers waiting to be picked up and transported west to San Diego or east to El Paso. Tickets sold from behind an iron grille were passed from ticket agent to passenger over a mesquite counter. The dirt floors had been covered with coarsely woven rugs and horse blankets worn to tatters by filthy boots. Not much had been done to spruce up the Depot since then. Over the years the roof had thickened, layer being added to layer of whatever was available to keep things from blowing off—tiles and shingles, tar paper and tin, and finally, in the last twenty years, tires from cars and trucks heaved up and arranged in rows by size. A half-moon of dirt swept to the edge of a wobbly porch whose splintered stairs sagged under piles of buckets, metal horse troughs, and exhausted potted saplings.
Billie parked beside a silver dually one-ton Dodge truck, a monster with two tires in front and four behind, loaded with bales of alfalfa and Bermuda hay. She imagined she could smell the clean of that brand new dually, see the salesman’s fingerprints still on the side mirrors. The truck wasn’t even dusty. She glanced around, looking for its owner. But all she saw in the yard was the Depot’s trio of antique red gasoline pumps.
She opened her own pockmarked truck’s door to let Gulliver out, propping it with her foot it so it wouldn’t swing shut as the terrier leapt down. She climbed out after him, slammed the door, and left the Chevy unlocked. With its single headlight and missing tailgate, no one would try to steal it anyway.
Inside the old adobe, the iron grill hung in its original place, and what remained of the rugs were nailed to the walls for decoration, along with feed sack covers, antique spurs, and twisted amber curls of flypaper.
“Hot ’nuf for yeh?” the owner, Ty Wilde, son of her neighbors, asked.
Billie was too tired for the tattered cowboy routine. She knew that Ty had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Arizona with a degree in equine studies. She had found his diploma in the Depot bathroom a couple of years before, framed and under glass, tucked into a stack of catalogs advertising chickens and their accoutrements. She hadn’t told him she’d seen it, but she knew damn well that Cow Patty wasn’t his native tongue.
One night last year at DT’s Bar and Grill out on the highway, he had asked her if she’d care to join him. He hadn’t specified where or for what, but she sensed he didn’t want to be alone. She had perched beside him on a barstool and hooked her thumbs around her wine glass stem while he expounded on an elaborate conspiracy theory about chemtrails and jihad.
“You’re kidding, right?” she had asked when he wound down.
He stared into his mug of Tombstone Double IPA. “Maybe. You never know.”
“Never know what?”
“I thought you’d be interested.”
“I was interested, just not persuaded.”
“Not persuaded by me?”
She felt wary, as if she had to be careful or she’d hurt his feelings. “I don’t believe the government is spraying me with chemicals, Ty. And if they are, I don’t think I can do anything about it, so I’m not going to worry about it.”
“Ah.” He had looked for a while longer at the dregs of his beer while she tried unsuccessfully to think of something to say that would change the subject. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and placed a ten-dollar bill on the counter, smoothing it with the side of his hand. “Okay.” He stood and, tucking his shirttail into his belt, gave her shoulder an awkward pat. “Well, I’m off to see my folks. Hope to see you around.”
DT had lumbered down the bar toward the money and pocketed it while pouring Billie another white wine.
“He strike out?” the old man asked her.
She hadn’t answered.
Now in the Depot, sniffing along every aisle, Gulliver toured Ty’s store, tail wagging. Ty leaned against the counter, a pencil balanced on top of his ear, an order pad folded back to a blank page in front of him.
“Can I help you, Billie?” he asked.
“I need some Equine Senior feed.”
“Gotcha.” He never referred to their drink that night. “One? Two?”
“One.” At twenty-five dollars for each sack of grain, a single fifty-pound bag was all she could afford. It wouldn’t last long, a day or two if she was careful about doling it out. All the horses she rescued at the auction had gained weight, but Starship was middle-aged and couldn’t maintain his weight on hay alone. She needed to supplement his diet.
“Nothing else?” Ty asked.
Billie shook her head no, thinking of the long list of things she really did need, oats and fly spray especially. Hashtag had already torn her fly mask, and Billie didn’t want to tell the owner her mare needed a new one. Running up someone’s board bill pretty much guaranteed that the boarder would be taken away and business lost. She would replace the mask herself when she could.
While Ty went to the storage shed to get the sack of senior feed, and Gulliver nosed through a bin of shrink-wrapped trotters, Billie wandered toward the bulletin board at the back of the store to check on the flyers she had put up yesterday. Maybe they would all be gone by now, signaling a rush on her services. And maybe when she got home later, the answering machine would be filled with requests to board horses, dozens of horses, hundreds at her place. They’d ask what she charged and pay her double. Sure.
At least someone was looking at them. The man was just a bit taller than Billie, maybe five foot eight or nine. He was stocky with curly hair streaked with gray that once might have been red. Afternoon stubble speckled his jaw. His shirt looked clean, and he had rolled the cuffs above his elbows. She could tell he needed reading glasses by the way he leaned away from the board and squinted.
“That’s my flyer,” Billie said.
He turned to look at her.
“I board horses.”
“Devoted care,” he read aloud. “Sounds pretty nice.”
“It is nice,” she said. Inane, she thought. I’m an idiot.
“What do you charge?”
Billie quelled an urge to offer him a deal.
“Is that all?” he asked. “Back home board runs two, three times as much.”
“I could charge you more.”
He laughed.
“Where’s home?” she asked.
“Tennessee. But I live here now. I bought a place, other side of the highway.” He offered his hand. “My name’s Richard Collier.”
Billie’s hand felt like it was being undressed and taken to bed. She put it in her pocket as Ty hefted the bag of Equine Senior feed onto the counter and slapped open his receipt pad.
“This is your new neighbor, Billie,” Ty said. “In a distant sense. He’s south of the freeway, you’re north.” He folded the pad’s top sheets underneath and pulled the pencil stub from behind his ear and licked the tip.
“I could use some dog food too,” Billie said, even though she didn’t need any and wouldn’t for another week and shouldn’t be running up the bill. It was out of her mouth before she could stop herself. It kept her from leaving.
“Is that your little dog I saw in here?” Richard asked.
“Gulliver,” Billie said.
The screen door banged hard behind her, and Billie felt Ty’s attention slide past her and get stuck on something.
“Dad?”
She turned to see the blonde girl she had watched riding in the show, dressed today in a blingy pink T-shirt and shorts as small as pot holders. She had long tan legs and slender feet in cheap rubber flip flops. On her, they looked like props for a Vogue magazine shoot. Ty’s eyes were big and bright. Sylvie, Billie remembered the girl’s name from somewhere deep. Yeah, she had won at the horse show. Billie noticed that Richard’s eyes were silvery blue.
“You almost done, Dad? I want to get…home.” Sylvie hesitated before she said home. She looked from her father to Billie. “Oh,” she said as if Billie were a pool
of barf on the floor.
“My daughter, Sylvie,” Richard introduced her. “This is our neighbor across the highway, Syl. I’m sorry. I missed your name.” He looked at Billie as if she were the most interesting item on a long and complicated menu.
“Billie Snow. I saw you ride at the show, Sylvie, and win.”
“I saw you, too.” Sylvie’s lips parted in a smile. She had pretty, smooth, young teeth. “So you got those flyers up someplace. Here, right?”
“Right.” Billie wondered where Sylvie’s obnoxious brother was.
“Da-ad?”
“Okay, Sylvie. Going!”
He unfolded a thick pad of bills from a roll and set them on the counter. He headed for the door, his hand on the back of his daughter’s blonde head. When he looked back, Billie was staring at him.
“What kind of dog food you want?” Ty asked, looking out the door, watching the slim tanned legs topped by the tiny tight shorts.
“Never mind,” Billie said. “I’ll get it later.”
She made out a check for the bag of Equine Senior and hoisted it from the counter onto her shoulder.
“You didn’t use to be able to do that,” Ty said.
“I bet there was a time when you couldn’t either.”
“I’ve been lifting sacks since I was a little kid, Billie. You came to it late.”
“But I’m good at it.”
Outside, she flipped the sack over the truck side. In a shimmering heat haze, she watched the dust plume raised by Richard’s dually on the dirt road headed south.
Gulliver took his time peeing on the gas pumps, sniffing first, circling, sniffing again. A thick coating of white dust settled onto Billie while she waited for him to finish. She licked her parched lips and opened the truck door for the dog to jump in.
“Billie?” Ty seemed to waver in the heat beside her, almost a mirage.
“Yeah?”
“You went to that walking horse show?”
“Yeah. By accident. I was at the showgrounds. I’d never seen one of those shows before.”
“I heard it was coming here, but I didn’t believe it.”
Billie pulled herself into the truck. The cracked leather seat seared the backs of her legs. She settled her feet on the pedals. “Why not?”
“Whatever we have wrong here with horses—and there’s plenty,” Ty said, “at least it isn’t that.”
“Isn’t what?” She wondered if he knew what went on at walking horse shows or if he was talking about something else.
He pushed the Chevy’s door closed for her, so it latched easily and quietly. Then he hung on the open window by his fingertips, stretching onto his heels then pulling himself back up close. He was as long and supple as the bamboo growing in Billie’s barnyard.
“Didn’t you see?” he asked her.
“See what?”
“What they do to those horses? C’mon Billie Snow, you’re the first person who’d notice and start hollering about it.”
“Yes, I saw. I even called Doc to ask him about it. But I still don’t understand. Why do they do it?”
“Well, Google it. I bet you’ll find a ton of stuff on it. My point is, we never had them—the walking horse folks, the Big Lickers—here before this.” He stood up, his head above the window so his voice floated down to her. “What are they doing here, Billie? That’s what I wonder. Why have they come? What have we got way out here in the desert that they want?”
CHAPTER 5
BILLIE STOOD AT her kitchen window, looking out over summer-dry grazing land. In the distance, half-starved cattle struggled to survive for another month or six weeks on brittle love grass and withered cactus. When the rains finally came, the land would green up almost instantly. The desert would look as lush as Kentucky for a couple of months and be soft on the eyes.
She finished making a nopalito salad for dinner and carried it to the futon to eat. She couldn’t get Ty’s questions out of her mind. Earlier, as she fed the horses, her eyes ran over their legs. She remembered what she’d seen Charley do to the filly tied in her stall. Each of his movements, the sound of his voice as he scolded her, ordered her to quit trying to escape. The way he had seemed indifferent to her pain, annoyed when she struggled to save herself. But Billie had also seen him stroke her neck when he was done. And she was sure she’d heard him say, “I’m sorry, baby…”
She awoke hours later from an unintended sleep. She got up and made a cup of coffee, drank it gazing out the kitchen window, trying to shake off the dream that had been part of her life since childhood, strangling her sleep. It wasn’t apnea; she’d been tested, eagerly hoping for a cure, a mask to wear at night that would solve the problem. Every time the dream came, she woke shuddering with horror and bolted from the futon to stand at the window, grasping the sill. From his spot under the sheet, Gulliver watched her. Outside, a falling star caught the edge of Billie’s vision, arcing to the north. She closed her eyes, exhaled, and opened them to see a thick splash of stars sprawled across the sky.
At last she knew what had been bothering her, what she had to do. She opened the door with Gulliver at her heels and jogged down the driveway to the barnyard, starlight all she needed to see her way. The horses nickered, hoping she would give them treats. Not even the low light affected her ability to line up and back the truck to the trailer. A lifetime spent hauling horses made every step as familiar as brushing her teeth. She set the brake, got out of the truck, winched the trailer tongue onto the hitch, coupled them, and slipped on the safety chains and emergency brake wire. She tossed the trailer’s wheel chocks into the toolbox, whistled her dog up onto the seat, and they took off.
Gulliver stood on the ripped bench seat beside her, his paws on the dashboard, alert for any nocturnal excitements—the flight of a nightjar, a bat, cattle on the road, jackrabbits—that he might spot through the windshield. As the truck chattered down the ribbed dirt road toward the highway, the mug of coffee Billie had in the cupholder at her knee sloshed onto her leg. The empty trailer, jolted by every ridge and hole in the road, rattled behind. Years of dirt roads had jarred its welds loose. Gulliver pushed off from the dashboard and planted his forepaws on the passenger side door, peered out that window, then curled against Billie’s thigh, licked the drying coffee, and sighed himself to sleep.
At the interstate, they joined the nightly convoy of big rigs headed to California, driving into the headlights of other rigs driving east. Billie turned on NPR and listened to Dave Brubeck for a while. Gulliver stirred then settled.
The road to the Rio del Oro showgrounds was narrow, winding, unlit, and deserted except for Billie. She needed to be finished and out of there before dawn, when people would begin moving about and she would be spotted. She wanted to get in and out while it was dark and the trainers and grooms were asleep. The dashboard clock read 2:17, so she had about two hours before daylight. She pulled into the showgrounds and parked behind the barns, between a huge pile of dry, old manure and a row of dumpsters. Certain the rattle of the trailer would bring someone to investigate, she sat with the window down, listening for voices, footsteps, the sound of a door closing. But except for a couple of whinnies, she heard no one.
She pulled the keys from the ignition before opening the door so the alarm wouldn’t sound. It did anyway, warning beeps so loud she was sure it would summon security. Panicking, she fumbled with the steering wheel controls and discovered that she had left the parking light wand cocked on. She twisted it off: silence. Her heart made its own racket while she waited to see if anyone would show up to find out who she was and what she was doing there in the middle of the night.
After a few minutes, satisfied that no one had been disturbed, she whistled softly for Gulliver and headed for the filly’s barn. A few blue lights outside fried bugs, making loud zapping sounds, but the arena and barns were dark, lit only by an occasional dim bulb.
The barn doors were locked, but the shutters on the filly’s stall window stood ajar, and when she checked
, they were unlatched. She climbed in over the sill and dropped into hay that reeked of something she couldn’t identify that made her eyes water. Behind her, Gulliver scratched on the outside wall and whined.
“Okay. Up!” she whispered and he jumped onto the sill and from there down into the stall with her. Instead of startling, the filly seemed frozen in place.
Billie waited for her eyes to get accustomed to the darkness, deeper than the starry night outside. She heard banging and what she thought were moans. Feeling her way along the wall, she went to see what was wrong. In the other stalls, horses stood tied, their heads only inches from the walls, their hooves beating against the wood. A few who weren’t tied lay stretched out in filthy bedding.
She unlocked the big doors at the end of the building then entered the stalls, untied each horse, and left the doors open.
The horses didn’t move. But at least now they could.
She returned to the filly’s stall. Billie could just make out the fleece bandages that wound up her legs to her knees. Billie knelt beside her and struggled with the Velcro closure at the top of one of the wraps, finally getting it to open. As fast as she could, she unwound the bandage then the plastic wrap that covered the horse’s lower legs. Something thick and slimy filled Billie’s palm. Flesh had pulled off with the wraps. Appalled, she scrubbed her hands against her jeans. The filly tried to pull away from her. Billie didn’t know what to do—keep unwinding and pull off more of her skin or stop and let the chemicals stay on her legs. Billie stopped. Since she didn’t know what to do, she would do nothing more. The lead rope, pulled taut by the filly’s efforts to get away, was knotted so tightly Billie couldn’t undo it, so she grabbed the filly’s halter and led her down the aisle, shushing as the filly nickered to her barn mates.