Author: Heidi Vanderbilt
Category: Other
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“Don’t hang up, Doc!” Billie crammed the phone back into her pocket and pulled her T-shirt over her head. It didn’t look big enough to cover both of the horse’s eyes, so Billie sliced it up the front with the wire cutters. Hashtag seemed to struggle forever this time, banging her head against the ground, pawing, kicking, with each movement pulling herself tighter and tighter into the web of fencing. The minute she finally lay flat, exhausted, Billie lunged, knelt on her neck, wrapped the shirt over her eyes, and tied it in a knot under her jaw. She jumped away, afraid the thrashing would start again. But the blindfolded horse lay still. Moving fast, Billie cut the wire, untangling it as she went, and carefully lifted the barbs from torn flesh, freeing her.
Billie heard a distant voice. Doc, she realized, still on the phone, talking in her pocket.
“She’s squirting blood from her leg,” she told him. “She’s still lying down. I’ve cleared the wire away from her so she can get up.”
“Leave the blindfold on. It’s why she’s staying down and quiet. Now press on the wound until the bleeding stops. Press hard. And don’t get kicked.”
Billie grabbed Hashtag’s spurting foreleg and pressed into the blood with her thumbs while the horse lay quietly on her side, panting, soaked in sweat and blood.
“When it stops squirting…” Doc’s voice crackled. “I’m getting out of range, Billie, so I’ll try to get this said… When you can, roll up some cotton into a ball and stick it into the wound to keep pressure on. Bandage over that to hold it in place. That’ll stop the bleed… She’ll be fine…”
“Can you come?” Billie asked, but the call had ended.
She waited, counting one-one thousand, two-one thousand until she reached sixty. When she lifted her thumbs the bleeding had stopped. She had nothing to bandage with, so she took off her bra, cut it as she had her T-shirt and used that. Finally, she pulled the shirt from the horse’s eyes. Blinking, Hashtag lay still then struggled to her feet, testing herself for pain. Once she was on her feet, Billie led her, limping, to a small pen near Starship. Then she fed them breakfast.
What would Doc tell her to do now, if she could reach him? Antibiotics, she knew, a tetanus booster and pain medicine. Billie got them from the refrigerator in the feed shed and gave the antibiotic and tetanus booster injections, one on each side of the neck. She sprinkled powdered pain medicine over a scoop of oats and fed her that. At least the horse had an appetite.
The sun was way up, scorching. Billie ran out of hay before she ran out of horses and headed back to the barn. She swung the hay hook into a bale that looked like it would easily slide away from the others and into the truck bed, but it wouldn’t budge. She tugged and struggled until she gave up and climbed onto the mow to find the bale she wanted tied to another bale. She cut the twine and both bales skidded past her onto the ground. They were too heavy for her to lift into the truck. She’d have to cut the twine and lift each prickly, slippery flake, one at a time. From the corner of her eye, she watched Hashtag try, then succeed, to pull off her bandage.
Billie sank to her knees beside the searing truck bed and wept, half expecting someone to appear, Ty or Richard or Sam or Josie, or some stranger out in the middle of the desert. Someone who would say, “You always feed your horses naked?” and “Do you cry every day?”
She would scream, “YES! Every single fucking day! I cry because I am hurt and tired and broke, and my horses are hurt, and it’s so fucking hot, and there are flies and rattlesnakes everywhere, and the baby horse burned to death, and the others are hungry, and I have to buy more hay, and I don’t have any fucking money!”
But no one showed up and soon—very soon—it was too hot to cry anymore. So she loaded a different bale into the truck and fed the last few horses. She whistled up Gulliver, and this time she drove up the hill to the casita. She really needed to call Kristine back to return her messages, and now she would have to call her to report the injury.
Doc phoned just after noon. “How’s the horse?”
She told him what she had done to care for her. “Can you come see her?”
He said, “You did fine. Nothing more I can do now except wait and see how she is in a day or two.”
Billie felt bereft, abandoned, like a child left alone outside a new school. Even the realization that she wouldn’t have another monster vet bill to pay for a ranch call and treatment didn’t fill that hollow.
CHAPTER 14
ON THE EVENING of the horse show at her place, Billie climbed into the hayloft and sat on the edge, bare legs dangling out into the steamy, nearly still air. Maybe she should have worn jeans instead of shorts, but in the pre-monsoon humidity, she appreciated every little puff of breeze on her skin. Shorts and sandals felt a whole world better than jeans and boots in the heat. Hay stuck to her sweaty palms as she fiddled with the unfinished rope halter she had retrieved from the mess on the casita floor to finish tying. Gulliver lay beside her, pressed against her thigh, his paws over the sill too. The sun hung high in the western sky, a fireball more than an hour from setting. On the horizon, a few thick white clouds piled up into columns sparse and high enough that Billie was certain they would stay dry at least for the next day or two.
From this perch, she watched her barnyard fill. Trucks pulling horse trailers drove in through the gate and parked haphazardly on three sides of the big rectangular corral designated as the arena. Earlier, she had set up an area for the inspector to check each horse, marked with fifty-five-gallon water drums and posted with a cardboard sign: INSPECTION. It looked pretty iffy to her, but the people who drove in seemed to know what it was for, and they parked away from it.
She watched the drivers and passengers get out of their trucks, stretch, and get to work setting up. They unrolled carpets of fake grass, unfolded chairs and tables, and unloaded coolers from their vehicles. A white cargo van pulled into the arena, stopped, and a hefty woman in a spangled green dress emerged lugging first an electronic organ then a bench and a pot of geraniums. Within minutes, waltzes filled the air.
Starship and Hashtag leaned against the fence of their corrals, craning their necks to see as much as possible. As horses were unloaded they whinnied. Billie’s whinnied back. A line formed as people waited for the caterer’s truck to park and get set up, and soon Billie smelled fried meat and onions.
The inspector ran a yellow tape around the water drums Billie had put up. To one side he placed a table with a clipboard, pens, and a chair. Beside them, he set an ice chest. In the middle of the roped-off area, he put two orange cones on the ground. Immediately, a line of horses and their grooms formed, calling greetings to him, joking. One after another, the inspector examined the horses’ lower legs and hooves, observed them walking a figure eight around the cones, and released them to compete.
“Hey!” Richard appeared below her, his head tipped back. “You going to come down and join us?”
“I didn’t know you were here yet.” She slid back from the edge of the hay, tucked Gulliver under her arm, and climbed down the ladder, enjoying the feel of Richard’s eyes on her as she descended.
“Hold up.” When she was near the bottom, he placed one hand on her waist, and with the fingers of his other hand, he peeled something off the back of her thigh. “Foliage.” He reached around to show her the bit of hay, almost embracing her. She couldn’t keep from leaning slightly into him, her body asking him to close his arms around her.
It was hotter on the ground without the breeze she had felt up on the mow. She set Gulliver down to race off to play with the other dogs.
“Where are the kids?” Billie asked, hoping it was just her and Richard for the evening.
“Sylvie’s getting her horse ready for her classes later tonight,” he said. “Alice Dean is at the trailer with her. And Bo is working on your arena lights. Where do you want them? On those posts there?”
They moved out to where they could give Bo some help. He set portable lights around the arena and attached them to a generator. In
the early sunset glare, Billie switched them on, and she and Richard struggled to see if they were working or not.
“Hey, Billie! What’s going on here?”
“Horse show, Josie. Stick around.”
Josie was dressed in her outfitters clothes, real denim jeans and a snap-shut Western shirt with a bandana at her roadmap of a neck. It made Billie hot just looking at her, and knowing that she wore a cotton undershirt too made Billie feel even hotter. Josie had explained that the undershirt worked as a personal swamp cooler—sweat into it, and as the sweat dried, it cooled the wearer. Billie had tried it and never felt any benefit.
Josie marched over to take a look at the inspector checking horses. She rocked back and forth on the worn heels of her boots, squatted down to get a closer look at what the inspector saw, then returned to Billie. “Thanks, but this ain’t my kind of thing. I’m more of a rodeo and gymkhana kind of gal. Rocky trails in the mountains, ya know? Inspections not needed.”
Billie felt as if she should explain, tell her this was a show for sound horses, but that felt like asking for a kind of fight she didn’t want.
As the three of them stood there in awkward silence, the announcer’s voice welcomed the exhibitors to the show, thanked Billie for her hospitality in hosting it, and read an invocation. Everyone stood, hands on heart, for the Pledge of Allegiance. The national anthem, sung by the organist in a ripe mezzo-soprano voice, ended in cheers.
When the announcer called the first class, horses streamed into the ring, took up positions along the rail and waited to be told what to do. The riders wore tight pants in black, brown, red, olive green, and tan, with matching coats and bowler hats. It looked like a photograph from a much earlier time, maybe from the 1930s.
“Flat walk,” the announcer said. “Riders, please show us the flat walk.”
“I’m leaving.” Billie watched as Josie turned and headed back toward her truck. Even over the announcer’s voice, Billie heard her slam the door.
As the sun set and shadows lengthened, the temperature dropped, a breeze ruffled the horses’ manes, and the lights Bo had installed came on in the arena. Class after class was judged, applauded, and exited, ribbons fluttering from the horses’ bridles. Horse after horse passed through inspection, and as she watched, Billie imagined that this little show here at her place might actually be the future of all walking horse shows: sound horses, happy people.
Good slogan, she thought, and pulled her notebook from her pocket to write it down.
“You taking notes?” Dale stood close behind her, his mouth close to her ear, his tone sarcastic.
She hadn’t seen, heard or felt his approach. The tone of his voice flooded her with the adrenaline of danger.
She held out the notebook so he could read what she had written down for himself, and she also recited: “‘Sound horses, happy people.’ It makes a good slogan.” She nodded at a blue ribbon clipped to the trainer’s breast pocket. “You won.”
“More to come,” he said.
“I guess you’d know.”
“You’re pretty rude,” he said.
“You’re pretty crooked.” She said it before she knew she was going to.
He brought his face so close to her she smelled hamburger on his breath. His eyes drilled hers, searching, threatening. He stepped forward, to force her backward. She shoved him hard in the chest.
He stumbled, caught himself. “Oh lady, you have no idea, do you? No idea at all. Well, you will.” He turned and walked stiffly away.
She made it to the feed shed and turned on the lights, inside and out. Flies and moths gathered instantly, creating fluttering pillars of bug life that thickened by the second. They battered the windows and crawled on the walls: June bugs, kissing bugs, walking sticks, and praying mantises. She leaned against the side of the building in a dark, bugless spot and tried to stop shaking. Her mouth tasted like she’d chewed aspirin and hadn’t spat it out. Her skin felt clammy. She couldn’t breathe.
When that first breath finally came, she realized that Dale was busy talking animatedly to Richard by the arena in-gate, not paying any attention to her. Alice Dean was with them, playing at her father’s feet. Billie shoved herself off the wall and, wobbly legged, drifted back toward the trailers, looking for Dale’s rig.
Just as she found it, Dale’s groom Dom backed out of the trailer on hands and knees, patting the floor as he went, as if he had dropped something. He rose to his feet, gave the trailer a final searching look, and sprawled onto a lounge chair. A match flared. Slowly he lifted a joint to his lips and inhaled, the tip glowed. He held the smoke in his lungs, stretched his arm to watch the ember fade, and then put the joint back between his lips for another toke.
Billie pulled out her cell phone and started a lively conversation with dead air, chatting about her board rates as if to a customer. Pretending to be distracted by her conversation, she drifted over to the trailer and plopped onto its fender. The groom looked up sleepily. Billie gestured at the air for emphasis.
“No, I charge more than that,” she said. “And I add on a service charge for…”
She slid off the fender and wandered toward the back of the trailer, talking. Most of the trailer stalls had horses in them, but the one Dom had been searching was empty. She leaned against the trailer fender outside that stall, bracing herself with her free hand behind her. As she babbled on, her fingers explored the stall floor, searching where she had seen him looking. She touched something small and long and round under sodden sawdust, closed her fingers around it and slid it out of the muck just as Dom appeared in front of her.
“I know! I know!” she said to the phone, hoping he thought she was as oblivious as she was pretending to be.
He snapped his fingers to get her attention then waved her off the trailer. She stood, mouthed sorry, and walked away. When she looked for them, Richard and Dale were still talking.
She considered what she had found, a small syringe with a short slender needle, maybe 27 gauge, maybe even smaller, still in its guard. She held the syringe up to the light and saw that there was still some fluid in it. In the feed shed, she stored the syringe in a baggie on the refrigerator shelf beside other medicines.
She closed and locked the door when she left. As she stepped outside, a blurry movement, something dark at the edge of the shed wall, drew her attention. Maybe just a guy peeing where he shouldn’t. But he turned without hitching his pants, looked both ways as if worried he’d be seen, and limped away. She couldn’t see his face, but she had watched him limp away from that same building when they were in it the day he had grabbed her shoulder, the day he had asked her to work with him and she had said no. She recognized his shape and gait.
Charley.
She followed him around the shed’s corner. As if he felt her behind him, he stopped and turned. Their eyes met.
“What?” Billie asked.
Keeping his hands low, his gestures small, he waved her away.
“What?” she almost pleaded.
“Nothing,” he whispered so she could barely hear him. Then he turned and walked toward Dale’s rig.
She watched as, at the trailer, Sylvie checked her horse’s girth then mounted in a smooth arc. Like a ballerina waiting in the wings to go onstage—not in the full exaltation of performance but with a kind of inner preparation—an unconscious rehearsal of what was coming animated her body. Her back straightened, her shoulders dropped and squared, her neck elongated.
Charley walked alongside as Sylvie lined up her horse with the rest of her class, then he ran a rag over the stallion’s face and legs and over Sylvie’s boots, wiping away the minute amount of dust that might have settled during her short ride from the trailer.
Richard and Dale and Alice Dean were still there, next to the arena rails near the in-gate, the men still talking. Richard absently bent down and scooped up Alice Dean. Straddling his hip, she ran her toy horse trailer across his shoulders, up the back of his head.
When Billie
approached, father and daughter smiled at her.
“So what do you think of the show, Billie?” Richard asked.
She looked around. Her barnyard was full of people who had paid to be there. The horses looked well cared for and, as Richard had promised, they were in flat shoes and not wearing chains. The arena had bloomed with riders and music. She heard laughter and applause.
But she wasn’t going to make it easy for them. “There are horses in leg wraps in one of the trailers,” she said, looking at Dale. “Why do they need leg wraps if they’re sound?”
“Which trailer?” Richard asked.
Billie pointed toward Dale’s red truck. “Dale’s leg wraps look like the wraps trainers sore under,” she said.
“Everyone here tonight promised not to fix their horses,” said Richard. “Like Groucho Marx said, sometimes a bandage is just a bandage.”
She turned from them as the next class was called and Sylvie seemed to float into the arena on her stallion along with eight other riders. Sylvie steered her horse to the rail and stopped behind her brother. Bo looked like an illustration from the pages of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” skinny in a black suit, slumped in the saddle as if barely alive. Billie watched the first few minutes of the class, certain that Sylvie had won. The blue roan stallion she rode for Dale moved out with more animation than the other horses, lifting his feet higher and faster.
When she turned away, Dale had left Richard leaning on the rail, watching his kids. She saw Charley waiting for the class to end, ready to lead Sylvie’s horse back to the empty stall in Dale’s trailer.
She eased over next to him. “Charley.”
“Stay away from me.”
“You were at my feed shed.”
“I left you something. Now go.”
“What did you leave me?”