Author: Heidi Vanderbilt
Category: Other
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“You’re a liar,” she said.
“And you’re drunk.”
Billie considered this and decided he was probably right. She was drunk. But not drunk enough. She was still seeing Hope’s burned body. She was still thirsty. She grabbed Josie’s glass and drained it.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, Josie. Thought it was mine. I’ll buy you another.”
Sam leaned across his wife. “Billie you’ve had a horrible day. We’re all sympathetic. How about calling it quits while we’re still friends? Josie and I’ll drive you home.”
Billie liked the way Josie’s wine had her feeling, like Peter Pan flying over London. She wasn’t ready to leave DT’s. DT himself stood with a couple of beer mugs in his hands, looking at her. Billie noticed that her vision was extra sharp. She saw everything.
“You are part of that world,” she told Richard.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
“The world of gaited horses that go to shows,” she explained. “Like that little filly. Just a baby! You know what?” She stood up to draw attention to herself then realized she already had everyone’s attention. The whole big room was thick with listening.
A few years ago, she’d gone to a boxing match with Frank, when they were still married. He was doing a feature on the featherweight champion, a fine-boned muscly man with freckled skin who was pretty enough to model for GQ and bright and outspoken enough to be interviewed for Frankly. “The Allure of Blood Sports” was the title Frank had planned for the piece. It never ran; Billie forgot why. Maybe the guy had lost a fight, got his aquiline nose smashed, or maybe something else had happened. Whatever. Standing up in DT’s, she remembered that she loved the feel of ringside, the flecks of sweat, the thuds of gloves on flesh, the deep grunts. She loved the way men looked at each other before attacking. She loved the way she felt before she fought.
“You,” she pointed at Richard, “are part of that whole world that tortures horses. I’ve been reading up on it. Burning their legs with acid and wrapping them in chains!” She was playing to the room. She spoke loudly so everyone would hear her and was pleased at the gasp that followed her accusation.
Josie buried her face in her hands. Billie ignored her.
“Here now, Billie,” Sam handed her a big glass of something. “Try this.”
Billie drank, not liking the taste. Maybe it was gin, which she didn’t like, but hey, it was still a drink. Richard stood up, said something to Sam, and walked away.
CHAPTER 11
BILLIE WOKE AT home with a don’t-lift-your-head-if-you-want-to-live hangover that brought with it a huge thirst, nausea, and a sticky shroud of guilt.
She lay on her stomach on the futon and tried to reconstruct what had happened between then and now. She couldn’t come up with much. Who had she insulted? How had she gotten home? Where was her truck? If it was here, at home, had she driven it, and if she had driven it, had she hit anything or anyone?
She licked her cracked, parched lips. She could tell that her breath stank.
Where was Gulliver? She sat up fast, saw him watching her from the end of the futon, and quickly lay down again to wait for the room to stop whirling.
When she was able to open her eyes again, she saw the light on the answering machine blinking. Then her cell phone beeped to tell her she had a message. Hashtag’s owner, Kristine. “Heard you had a fire out there! Call me!”
Gulliver, now tucked up under her arm, licked her chin.
Billie decided that she probably hadn’t killed anyone or she would have woken up in jail, not on her scruffy futon with her dog beside her and her head dividing into wedges. The one time she was jailed, she’d been arrested for assault. Frank sent her to a loft in Tribeca to interview a family accused of molesting their foster children. She went to use the bathroom and mistakenly entered a bedroom where the foster mother was in bed with one of the kids. Billie lost it. The foster father called the cops. The cops called Frank, who bailed her out and got the charges dropped.
She’d written a good article.
She drifted away again.
She heard people talking nearby. She wanted them to be quiet, so she ignored them. Someone said her name. She tried to ignore them some more. But they were insistent, repeating themselves, “Wake up, Billie! Wake up!”
She really didn’t want to. She knew that as soon as she connected with their voices, opened her eyes, she would feel a billion times worse than she already did. Which was very damn bad.
She heard Josie and a man, probably Sam. She decided to stay safely behind her eyelids, in the dark, but Josie said, “Honey, wake up. You’re scaring Gulliver.”
Bright, scalding light, divided into sharp spikes of color, snatched at her temples. Gulliver sat on the bed beside her, staring at her. His paw rested on her forearm. Josie stood beside the bed, looking blurry.
“I bet your head hurts,” Josie seemed to scream. “You’ve got to have an epic hangover.”
Billie wanted to throw up. Instead, she faded out.
She woke later, feeling like shit. The horses were hungry. She could cope no matter how badly she felt. She had fed with the flu and injuries; she could feed with a hangover. At least she was alone.
She was disappointed not to find her truck outside the casita. That meant someone had driven her home, got her into the house, and put her to bed. She hoped it was Josie, but Billie wasn’t up to calling her yet to find out and maybe thank her. She trudged down the hill to the barnyard, each step sending shards of glass through her eyeballs. The truck was parked beside the hay barn. Billie found the keys under the floor mat with a note:
I think I understand how you feel. I’d like a chance to explain and defend myself. When I call you later, please don’t hang up on me. Richard.
Billie considered lying down on a hay bale and going back to sleep. But Starship banged his feeder against the fence and whinnied. The pain of that noise propelled her through her morning chores.
She and Gulliver got back to the casita a little after eleven, much later than usual, but at least the horses were all fed and watered. Billie poured herself a glass of ice water and sipped it. Halfway through, she swallowed a couple of Advil, promising herself two more in a couple of hours. She’d worry about liver damage later. She just wanted the pain to ease. She turned off the house phone and switched her cell to vibrate. When it went off a little before noon, its motion felt like an assault.
“What?” she groaned.
“This is Richard. How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Billie said. “How are you?”
“Fine.” He didn’t say anything else. Then, “Did you find my note?”
“Yes.”
“Well…?”
She didn’t answer.
“You still up for dinner like we’d planned?” he asked. “Say at seven? That’ll give us both time to get our horses fed.”
Absolutely not, she thought, but before she could stop herself, she asked, “What can I bring?”
“Could you pick up some milk for the kids? That way I won’t have to go out for anything.”
Milk for the kids? Was that a dig at her drinking? What about a bottle of wine for the adults?
She hung up and noticed that the light on the answering machine signaled three messages waiting. She played them.
She was into her overdraft protection.
She hadn’t paid her Visa bill.
The charitable donation she had promised to make to a horse rescue in Colorado was past the date she had promised it by.
She shut her eyes.
Later, when Billie returned to the barnyard to feed, she crawled up the haymow and dragged three bales onto the truck bed. She drove around the barnyard and fed each horse, throwing huge flakes of hay over the fences into the feeders. Each twist of her body, each grunting effort, made her feel like she was going to pass out or be sick. She promised herself she would never get drunk again. While she fed, Gulliver waited in the passenger seat, one p
aw on the dashboard, braced.
When Billie had finished feeding, she climbed into the truck, turned on the air conditioning, pulled Gulliver onto her lap, and cried.
“Can I help?”
Gulliver looked at Ty leaning against the truck door next to him and wagged his tail.
“I’m fine,” Billie said
“I can see that.”
She hadn’t even heard him drive in. She wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms.
“How about I give you a lift up the hill to my folks’ and make us some dinner?”
“I’ve got a date. I’ve got to get dressed.”
“Oh.” He stepped away from the truck. “Well.”
Her head still hurt. Her stomach still felt churned up. “I’m never drinking again,” she said.
Ty turned back to his truck. “Might not be a bad idea. Have a nice night.”
She thought there was an edge to his tone, maybe irony, or sarcasm.
For a few moments, she sat in her truck while memories ganged up on her. She was putting up roadblocks as fast as she could, but the images were sliding around them. The light she saw as she rode home on Starship. The flames. Hope dead in her stall, her legs pulled tight as if she were running. The smell.
CHAPTER 12
BILLIE SHOWERED AND dressed in a pair of navy shorts and a fitted white T-shirt. Her buzzed hair dried fast and in spikes, and she wished she’d remembered to use conditioner. Instead, she squirted hand lotion onto her palm, rubbed her hands together and finger-combed it through her hair. Not great but better.
There was no time for makeup, but she grabbed a tube of tinted lip gloss and swiped it over her lips.
She quickly rubbed cream on her arms and legs and found her flip-flops under the futon. Sunglasses hid her puffy eyes. She was still full of resolve and righteous anger, still ready to fight. But she wondered about his house, his horses, his kids. Him. She gave Gulliver a bowl of water and a beef-basted chew, stuck a steno pad into her handbag, made sure she had some pens and her cell phone, and headed out.
She almost forgot the milk and had to double back to the Depot, hoping Ty would have some in the cooler. She paid the kid, who worked there in the evenings, for the milk and a dozen eggs with dung and feathers still stuck on.
She slid out of the truck at Richard’s, suddenly aware of the wet spot on her thighs where she’d held the bottle as she drove. Richard came out to greet her, wearing faded jeans and a softly worn denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“Unpasteurized.” She held out the milk. “Might be organic. Who knows? Came from a cow I know down the street.”
“I’m glad you came.” He took the bottle from her, his fingers grazing hers.
The door swung open, and Billie saw Sylvie with a teenage boy behind her, taller than his sister, but younger by a couple of years—the boy Billie had watched ride at the horse show. “My daughter Sylvie you’ve already met. And this is Bo, my son.”
Billie smiled and said hi to them.
“Put this in the fridge, will you, Syl?” Richard asked.
Sylvie reached for the bottle and read the label. “It’s from the feed store,” she said. “Tuberculosis.”
Billie felt her smile tighten.
“You’re a total bitch,” Bo said. “I like this kind of milk the best, with cream on the top.”
“Whatever.” Sylvie swanned her way up the porch steps and into the house, letting the screen door slam.
“I got you some eggs too.” Billie reached back into her truck and handed them to Bo.
He opened the carton and looked inside. “All different colors,” he said. “Those really are the best kind.” Then he sang a snatch of the old Beastie Boys song “Egg Man.”
“Shut up, Bo,” his sister yelled from the house. “You sound like a cow in heat.”
He grinned at Billie.
“Come in,” Richard said.
Inside the house, log walls were whitewashed from the baseboards up to the vaulted ceiling. The plank floor gleamed, and the chairs and sofa were made from driftwood laced together with rawhide.
Billie felt as if she had known each cow whose hide stretched over a pillow.
“Did you kill and skin these?” It was out of her mouth before she even knew she was going to say it.
He blinked at her. “They came with the house. I bought it furnished a couple of months ago.”
So this wasn’t really his taste yet. She was relieved. The house felt like the architectural equivalent of a frozen dinner.
As if sensing her disappointment, he said, “I have added a few things. Mostly practical stuff to the barn and pastures. But that’s mine.” He pointed toward a small Navajo rug that hung on the wall, woven in earth tones with deep red arrows arced in flight above a forest of stylized pine trees.
She ran her fingers over the tightly woven wool. “It’s gorgeous!”
“I bought it when I was about Sylvie’s age. I had no idea about its history. I just thought it was pretty.” He showed her to a glass-fronted cabinet. “I found these just lying around here. Mostly from the corrals near the barn.”
Pottery shards, a couple of arrowheads, a mano, and part of what had been an axe blade lay on a shelf.
“I’m learning about the tribes who left these behind,” he said. “Their lives, how they hunted and farmed, what they ate. It’s fascinating.”
“Did this interest you in Tennessee?”
“Not so much. It’s all new to me here.”
His enthusiasm made her grin.
Richard offered her a glass of wine, which she accepted with more gratitude than she hoped showed. He grabbed a Dos Equis from the fridge door, opened it, and perched on a stool, elbows on the counter. The kids had disappeared out the kitchen door. Billie heard them laughing.
“Before we eat, we need to talk,” Richard said.
Billie settled onto a stool that faced him. “Okay.”
He slid his fingers around the beer can’s lip, staring at the tracks he made in the condensation, watching small droplets roll to the bottom.
“You were right about me,” he said. “Don’t look surprised. You did your research and you found out about me. I’ve sored horses.”
“I’m surprised you admit it.”
“I don’t have a choice, do I? I grew up in Tennessee. My family raised walking horses and fox trotters and spotted saddle horses. We trained and showed them. That was how my folks made a living.”
“How could you…?”
He raised his hand asking her to wait.
“Listen to me. Soring started in the 1950s. Horses who walked big started to win big. If that’s what it took… So my folks learned how to do it, to win.”
He looked at her, his eyes troubled and serious.
“They taught me how to do it, and I did it. Thought nothing of it. We all did it. It never meant anything. We all got caught from time to time. We’d get a ticket and that was all. No fine. No punishment, certainly no jail time. Getting caught was just another rite of passage. Once you’d been written up, you were a real trainer.”
He looked at her to see if she understood. Billie wished she could pull out her pad and take notes, because as he talked, she saw everything he said in quotations in her article. She was mentally underlining for emphasis, restructuring for clarity.
“And?” she prompted.
“I married another trainer, Mary Lou, the mother of the kids. We ran a really topflight barn. Won a lot. Had wealthy clients. Sylvie was born. Then Bo. They grew up in that world too.”
“I saw them ride at the show.”
“Right,” he said. “Sylvie loves Big Lick horses, and she’s a gifted rider. She’s got a big future in this business.”
Billie rocked back off the stool and stood. “You taught her to hurt horses?”
Hearing the anger in her voice, Richard looked down at his hands on the counter. “We did, me and my wife. We taught her—and Bo—everything they’d need to know to become succ
essful.”
Billie finished her wine and set the glass on the counter, trembling. “You son of a bitch.”
He looked up at her. “I know. I know. But then I quit.”
He’d quit? Billie had a dozen questions for him, maybe a hundred. While she was deciding where to start she heard, “Daddy?”
The little girl standing in the doorway held a toy horse in one hand and a toy horse trailer in the other. Billie recognized her as one of several children who had come out to the ranch on a kindergarten class trip in May. Billie remembered her as the star of that visit. While the other kids had chased each other around, climbed the haymow, and pretended to be disgusted by manure, this kid had stood at a corral gate, her elbows on the railing, and discussed Billie’s horses with her, asking their names and whether or not they were trained to ride.
“Alice Dean, this is Billie Snow. She lives nearby.”
“I know,” the child said.
“You came out to my ranch with your class, right?” Billie asked. “We talked about my horses.”
“You have a gray horse named Star Wars.”
“Starship. Yes, he’s mine.”
Alice Dean grinned, a smile like her father’s but missing her front teeth.
“Why are you here?” She spoke with her father’s accent. The why pronounced wha. “Daddy?” Alice Dean tugged at her father’s jeans. “Foamy won’t load. I need help.”
Richard dropped to his knees beside her. “Show me what you’ve been doing with him.”
Alice Dean repeated her movements. The plastic horse twisted to the side at the trailer door.
“Maybe you’re asking too much too soon,” Richard said. “Have you let him just stand at the back of the trailer to get used to it?”
“I want him in NOW. Git UP!” She flicked Foamy’s haunch with her fingernail, but he still wouldn’t load.
“Think about what I suggested.” Richard rose smoothly.
“When can I ride, Daddy?” Alice Dean asked. “Now?”
“Honey, it’s late!”
“I want to ride now. Please?”
Richard gave Billie an I’m helpless look and opened the patio door. “BO!” he called. “Bo!”