Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  “Did she say something?”

  “She said you were after that Ginger chick, you know, the barn guy’s daughter,” said Frank. “Did you fuck her?”

  “No,” said Martin. Ginger. He squeezed his legs together and took a deep breath. Ginger.

  “Ginger’s hot. My type, an athlete,” said Frank.

  Martin felt the incoming tide of blood washing over his genitals and face reverse course behind a wave of fear. “Did you?”

  “What?” said Frank.

  “You know, do it. With Ginger,” said Martin.

  “I totally would fuck her, but no. She wouldn’t even talk to me. Except once, and that was to ask about you. You missed your chance, man. She totally would have fucked you. I could tell.”

  The bubbled back of the two-toned Pacer in front of the station wagon swam in Martin’s tearing eyes. Oh Jesus, he was going to cry. And from what? Relief that Frank hadn’t fucked Ginger? Joy that Ginger might have fucked Martin? Regret that Martin hadn’t fucked Ginger?

  “What’d Ginger ask about me? And can you please stop saying fuck?” said Martin.

  “Christ, I can’t say ‘cancer,’ and I can’t say ‘fuck,’” said Frank, “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Just tell me what she asked about me.”

  “She asked how big your dick was, and I said, ‘Ever seen a roll of Certs?’” Frank bayed. Martin didn’t join in. He jerked the station wagon around the Pacer.

  Frank tried another laugh, this one less authentic and less harsh. Martin remained silent.

  “I’m sorry, man. I don’t remember what she said, but I remember thinking she would have f—, had intimate relations with you, if you wanted.”

  Martin eased up on the gas, took a deep breath. “Thanks,” he said.

  “No fucking problem.” Frank shut his eyes again. “‘Fucking’ isn’t the same as ‘fuck,’ right?” His head drooped, and he hacked out a snore.

  Frank slept as I-90 gave way to I-94, and the factories gave way to scrub trees and furrowed fields, greening here and there with early corn. Martin’s thoughts about Ginger gave way to more thoughts about Ginger. In the six weeks since he had returned to Hyde Park from Arizona, he’d managed to convince himself that the carnal adventures he had had, without complaint or regret, with Julie Newport had come at no cost, except maybe the premature extinction of a sweaty fantasy about a sweet ranch hand’s daughter. Ginger and he could never have coupled, he knew that. The mighty Mississippi was the least of that which separated them. There were their families, their lifetime income expectations, their social classes, their equestrian abilities, or lack thereof, their familiarity with the pre-Socratics, or lack thereof. He had convinced himself that their meeting was a fluke, a brief and meaningless flirtation of two unlike souls over the words of the cowboy poet Ben Arnold.

  But they had met. And they had flirted. And he had read “The Campfire Has Gone Out” with the vim of a seasoned hand reciting around the chuck wagon after a hard day on the Chisholm Trail. And she had stood and cheered. And he could have made love to her that night. He could have fucked her, Frank said, so it must be true, because Frank was a savant when it came to the sexual proclivities of teen girls. Maybe, then, it was not a fluke. Maybe, then, Martin and Ginger could meet again. And they could flirt again. And they could this time let the bonds of cowboy poetry lash them together in sublime physical union, saddle to stallion, calf to teat, bacon to beans—dare he imagine it?—husband to wife. It could happen, he knew, just as sure as he knew it could never happen in Hyde Park, Illinois. Not in a place where poetry is examined as an artifact rather than recited as a creed. Not in a place where hands are for typing dissertations and ropes are for designating academic honors. Not in a place that smelled of burnt coffee and molding books instead of sunburnt dust and gunfire.

  Martin noodled on like this all the way to the Michigan border, there adding remembered snippets of verse learned from Beaufort and pornographic daydreams featuring Ginger’s body and Julie’s tongue. By the time Martin pulled into the Oliphant’s garage, he had come to believe his early departure from U of C might not be the disaster he had assumed, might even be an opportunity to be of honorable service, to live a life, at least for a few weeks, of action and meaning. A life he’d be proud to tell Ginger about, when they met again. In Ben Arnold’s words, “to strike out further West.” Technically Pierre was due east of Chicago, but spiritually, with the issues of life and death and family duty Martin was taking on, it seemed to be a few degrees further west than even Jimmy Sneedle’s. And for this reason, he waited a minute after the automatic garage door thumped closed, breathing the air that smelled of exhaust fumes and, maybe, freedom, then gently shook, rather than slugged, his sleeping brother awake.

  Where a family fell in the caste system in place in Pierre in the 1980s was best predicted by what time they sat down to their evening meal: 5:30, 6:00, or 7:00. The half-fivers were the factory workers (the ones that were left), the shopkeepers, widows, fruit farmers, hairdressers, plumbers, secretaries, small-engine repairmen, and residents of the Oaks Home for the Aged. If it was eaten during the five-o-clock hour, it was called supper. Those who ate at six, ate dinner: middle managers, junior professionals, golf and tennis pros, unmarried teachers, the younger car and insurance salesmen, people who had grown up dining at 5:30 but added a cocktail half-hour to the evening routine and felt modern as a result. Seven p.m. was for the elite, those with trusts funds and continental airs, families who went to Austria for Christmas or to Aspen for spring skiing, people who had been to Rio or might one day go. Seven p.m., of course, was when the Fuzzy Balls ate.

  And thus it was when the Oliphants ate. Before Carroll’s acquisition of the bubble, though, they’d been solid six-o-clockers. At exactly that hour, Dottie would snap off her Liberty London print apron, switch on the kitchen black-and-white, and sit down. They raised their first forkfuls to the local CBS anchor wishing them “good evening” backed by a fanfare of recorded trumpets.

  Now that dinner was at seven, it was a less orderly affair. Carroll watched the news in his den, usually with a second pitcher of martinis or a bottle of wine from his new cellar, just like the one Bitsy’s husband had. Dottie would struggle with a recipe from Julia Child and Company, cursing the scorched puff pastry around the ham pithivier. Frank often ate at McDonald’s after practice with his best friend and doubles partner, Ron Seeds. And Martin, for most of that period, was in Chicago.

  The evening Martin returned to Pierre, he and Frank arrived at 6:45 p.m., so they had missed neither dinner nor the surrounding chaos. Martin hadn’t fully extracted himself from the front seat when his dad threw open the door from the house to the garage.

  “Come in, come in,” he slurred, one arm waving them forward, one swinging an open bottle of wine. “It’s the commercial, but Dan Rather’s about to do a bit on a new drug, the LSD of the eighties. Ecstasy! What do you think?”

  “I think I’ll go say hi to Mom,” said Martin and squeezed around his dad, who swayed in the open door.

  “Put this on the table for dinner then,” said Carroll and handed the empty bottle to Martin.

  “I’ll be with Dad,” said Frank.

  “That’s my boy,” barked Carroll. “Ecstasy!”

  Martin continued to the kitchen, a rectangular space, running along the backside of the house and bifurcated by a half island separating the cooking area from the dining nook. He passed the dinner table, noting that it had been set with cloth rather than paper napkins and that the usual centerpiece, a fruit bowl except at Halloween when it was a pumpkin, had been replaced by a columnar candle with Day-Glo orange, lime, purple, hot pink, and yellow stripes. Wisps of smoke formed a cirrus cloud over the stove, and the room smelled of fireworks and bait minnows, as if there had been an explosion in a fish cannery.

  Martin rounded the island. His mother sat on the tile floor, legs splay
ed, staring at her reflection in the oven door.

  “Welcome home, dear. I think I’ve burned the cod,” she said.

  “Are you okay?” Martin said. He felt he should give her a hug, but there was no way to accomplish that without getting on the ground too. He feared that would leave them both stuck until his dad and Frank finished educating themselves on the latest recreational narcotics. Martin settled for patting her on the head.

  “I’m great,” said Dottie and leaned forward at the waist until her forehead rested on the oven door. “How are you? Easy drive?” She turned to him, one temple still on the oven. “Why don’t you put that on the table and call your dad and Frank for dinner?”

  “Empty,” Martin said and waggled the bottle.

  “Then open another. Your dad brought up three. Open them both.” Dottie pulled her legs underneath her and reached a hand toward the sky. Martin bent toward her.

  “Let me help you.” He wondered whether this was a preview of his summer’s employment.

  “No,” said Dottie. “I want the bottle. Bitsy and I make goblets out of them.”

  Martin put the empty bottle in the sink, then placed his hands under Dottie’s arms and boosted her to standing. It was too easy, like hoisting a grocery bag of packing peanuts. She gasped and all above her neck palsied.

  “I’ll get the wine,” she said. “You get the others. It’s seven.”

  The new centerpiece was what Dottie called a “Conversation Candle,” a staple, she explained, at Fuzzy Balls’ dinner tables. Everyone was to stay seated for the forty-five minutes it took to burn through one band of florescent wax, enough time to move beyond the petty disputes about who got more rice and why they never had sloppy Joes anymore and onto more serious subjects. Such as his mom’s cancer, Martin thought, and wondered how that would go, given the ban on talking about it. He was also curious how his dad would fare through forty-five minutes of sedentary small talk. He couldn’t remember Carroll sitting still for longer than fifteen minutes, save for car or airplane trips, those punctuated with, on land, finger drumming, radio switching, and lane changing or, in flight, restroom visiting, tiny-bottled-gin drinking, and stewardess-ass patting. But he seemed calm tonight. He was also smashed, more so than usual. He’d probably gotten wind earlier of the impending confinement period and liquored up appropriately.

  Frank, on the other hand, was clearly caught by surprise and spent the first fifteen minutes of the candle’s flaming appealing the sentence. He had to pack. He had to say good-bye to Ron. He had to shower. He had to say good-bye to the PPHS JV cheerleaders, especially those he had not gotten around to deflowering yet.

  Frank went on until Dottie pulled the Midwestern Methodist version of breaking into hysterical sobs: She folded her hands on the table, pursed her lips, blinked several times, and started her sentence with “I just wanted…”

  “I just wanted to talk about what we’re all going to do this summer, since we won’t see each other again…” She paused, and Martin feared she might be at a full stop, which was far more information about her illness than he was prepared to take in over charred fish.

  “…for quite a while,” she finished.

  “At least you and Martin will get to spend some time together,” said Carroll and poured a healthy measure of Cabernet down the side of his glass.

  “And you too, Dad, right?” Martin said, deploying his napkin to dam the river of red wine headed toward his placemat. “Isn’t your speech Tuesday?”

  “The conference goes until Thursday,” Carroll said. “And after that there’s a business I want to look at in Kansas City. A pet cemetery deal.”

  “Like the Stephen King book, which I read all of,” said Frank, throwing Martin a look that invited him to challenge.

  “I heard you could read now, congratulations,” said Martin.

  “Boys,” said Dottie. More lip pursing, more blinking. “I just wanted…”

  “Not like Steven King at all,” said Carroll sharply. Martin always marveled at how, no matter how much his dad drank, when discussing business, he rivaled Carrie Nation in his sobriety. “The idiot running it has no idea what he’s got. Pet morticians located next to funeral homes. Be buried with your beloved Fido. Franchise possibilities out the wazoo. I want to open one in Pierre.”

  “Okay,” said Martin. “But you’ll be back for when mom comes home from the hos—”

  “The procedure,” barked Dottie. Frank raised an eyebrow and shook his head. The linguistic obstacles to navigating this summer were mounting, Martin thought.

  “Then there’re these sports stores in California,” continued Carroll. “One is right near Frank’s camp. People out west, they exercise.”

  “Like Jane Fonda,” Dottie said.

  “Right. Just like her. And men too. I gotta think about the next generation.” Carroll inclined his head toward Frank. “Once this guy here’s done tearing up the pro circuit, he’d be great at the sports equipment racket.” He guffawed at his pun.

  “Don’t you have to be able to do long division to run a business?” asked Martin and took a mouthful of haricots verts. He didn’t like the way this was going. Seemed like he was expected to abandon the U of C so his dad could spend three months making sure Frank would have gainful employment someday.

  “And Martin would be great at putting animal carcasses in the ground,” said Frank.

  “Right,” said Carroll and reached over his shoulder to pluck the final bottle of wine from the island. “Exactly,” he mumbled and poured a full glass.

  “Of course, you won’t be gone the entire summer,” said Dottie with a weak laugh. “It would get kind of lonely, just Martin and me, and you’ll need clean clothes.” Her voice became quiet. “Won’t you?” Martin almost couldn’t bear to look at her.

  Carroll didn’t seem to notice. “Oh no, hotel laundries are the best. They’ve got these machines that do the pressing, and they bring it back on hangers.”

  “I just thought, I guess I thought…” Dottie’s voice trailed off, a handful of pebbles plinking into a deep well.

  Carroll’s head jerked up. “Dottie, Jesus, we talked about it. I’d be in the way. You’ll be busy, busy.” He looked around the table.

  “Recovering,” offered Martin, which won him a grimace from Frank.

  “Of course,” said Dottie, her face smoothing back into the cold and gracious smile she’d worn pretty much continuously since Carroll bought the bubble. “Summer is all about the ladies leagues, isn’t it? Bitsy and I will hardly have a moment to spare, organizing for the July Fourth round robin and the Dog Days Challenge Ladder at the club.”

  “So what about you, Martin? What are your plans for the summer?” said Carroll, in the hearty tone of a sitcom dad, obviously relieved that the emotional interlude had passed and without any crying. “Probably a little late to get a lifeguard job, eh?” Frank snorted at that. “But you heard your mom, she’s gonna be swamped, so you stay out of her hair.”

  Martin looked hard at his dad then harder at Frank. With popping eyes and contorting lips, they both telegraphed the same message: Go with it.

  Martin bowed his head. Was silent sacrifice nobler than heralded deeds? Not according to Homer or Virgil. But maybe according to Ben Arnold. Or Beaufort. Or Ginger. Who remembered the names of the countless cowboys who tamed the frontier and fed the nation? No one asked them to ride the cow trails, to brave the summer storms, to turn the deadly stampede. They did it because that’s what needed to be done. They did it without much in the way of recompense or acknowledgement. It was enough for them to know that, at the end of the day, the angels would greet them: “Oh, here they come to Heaven, their campfire has gone out.” It was enough for Martin too.

  “This summer, I think I’ll…”

  “Times up,” shouted Frank and pushed back his chair.

  “Martin, would you clear please,”
said Dottie, also rising.

  Martin stayed seated. “This summer,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, though he was certain no one was listening, and Frank was already out of the room. “This summer, I’m going to make a study of cowboy poetry.”

  Jimmy Sneedle’s Tennis and Dude Ranch Chronicles: Summer Edition, May 15, 1985, p.4

  The View from My Corner of the Barn, by Beaufort Giles

  Well, another dude ranchin’ season’s come and gone, and Ginger and I are packing our gear and getting ready to head out to our summer’s employment. We said goodbye to the barn hands and a heap of the wranglers on Sunday: Travis, Beau, Wylie, Jesse, Tray, Jeb, Herbert, Quentin—we’ll miss each and every one of you. On Monday, the last two went: Zane and Lucky Robert loaded the ponies up in the trailers and made for the cooler pastures of the K Bar T Ranch in Little Springs, Montana. Of course, Ginger kept her cutter Minnow with her, and she’ll be traveling the rodeo circuit, running the barrels and adding to her pile of silver buckles. I head out tomorrow to Elko, Nevada, to meet up with a few other old-timers and recite some rhymes. It’s the First Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, a pretty high-falutin’ name for a bunch of worn-out hands tossing around the prairie coal, if you ask me, but as usual, no one has.

  From the bottom of our hearts, Ginger and I want to thank the guests at the ranch here for allowing us to spend one more season on the Giles family homestead. I pray to the good Lord that he sees fit to have our trails cross again someday and to bless you and yours with starry nights, placid dogies, and a soft saddle. I leave you with a couple of verses from the great Badger Clark. May they bring you the comfort they have always brought me.

  A Cowboy’s Prayer

  (Written for Mother)

  I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,

  that You have made my freedom so complete;

  that I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,

  nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.

  Just let me live my life as I’ve begun