by KT Sparks
“Did you go to the police?” Martin asked. He tried to bite into his Big Mac discreetly.
Treena laughed. “You know who owns it, don’t you?” Her breath smelled of cloves. Martin shook his head no, did not open his mouth, wished he had told them to hold the onions.
“Arnie Stem.”
Martin sat back. Ah, Arnie Stem. No idea who that was.
“Arnie Stem,” she repeated. “Arnie Stem. Sheriff Arnie Stem. The sheriff of Pierre County.”
“Of course,” said Martin, with feigned surety. They didn’t go much for politics at the Leader Telegram. They were more of a high school musical and bake sale operation. But once she said the name, he did recall the posters around town; it had to have been from several years back. A beefy man, as all Midwestern sheriffs seem required to be, pictured on a campaign sign waving a bulbous cherry-red thumbs up.
Treena looked at her watch. Her face said what a waste of time she was finding this. “Look, are you going to run something? Because let me tell you, you’re going to get blowback. Arnie makes a fortune from that business, keeps him and his mistresses in Michelob and Cheetos. The week I filed with the BBB, my mailbox got shot up, and my car was towed for parking violations.”
“Well,” said Martin, “the Pierre constabulary is known for its rigorous enforcement of the traffic laws.”
“It was in my driveway,” Treena said. “But look, on the half chance you have the cojones to go after those bastards, I’ll give you my notes. I’ve been watching them for a year. I’ve got pictures, even one of Earl dumping a dead horse in the back of that swamp he calls a farm. Maggots in the food, saddle sores, no water for days. He gets the ponies out west, pets of kids who have grown up or lost interest. He hauls them back here and works or beats them to death. Most only last a couple months.” She shoved a bulging file folder toward Martin and stood up. “Good luck.”
Martin choked down the bite of his burger he had been chewing and yelled at her back, “So Arnie Stem gets the money. What does Earl get out of the deal?”
She turned, one hand on the door.
“Earl? He just likes hitting horses.”
Martin presented the story to Lattner to run in the Sunday edition the first weekend in May. This was also the kickoff weekend for the annual Blossomtown festivities, the closest thing Pierre had to a Haj. Lattner had complained every day for the last month about having to cover the weeks of parades, Boy Scout pancake breakfasts, and disturbing toddler beauty pageants, so Martin assumed the editor would welcome the serious exposé.
Instead, Lattner told Martin that he was thinking of dedicating the entire Sunday spread to the blessing of the blossoms, the gathering of Pierre’s priests and pastors, and a rabbi—if one could be enticed to make the drive from Chicago—to bless the peach buds in a local orchard, the traditional first Blossomtown event.
“Last week you said it should be called ‘the last rites of the blossoms,’” Martin pointed out. Lattner had argued that almost every year, the peach crop was wiped out by a late frost, which often coincided with the Blossomtown closing ceremonies. He had said it gave the area’s German Lutheran farmers a socially acceptable excuse for their genetically predisposed depression.
“What about the Blossomtown Tiny Parade of Beauty?” countered Lattner. “The sheriff’s grandkid, Becky, is in it. She’s a frontrunner.”
“It has not escaped my notice,” Mrs. Trinkle said, “that Sheriff Arnie Stem’s highly average spawn have received extensive coverage in this paper.”
“I swam on the team with, what’s that scrawny one’s name?” said Julie.
“Hank Stem,” said Lattner. “So much potential.”
“Whatever,” said Julie. “You put his sorry ass on the front page. ‘PPHS Olympic Hope.’ The kid backstroked into the wall his first meet.”
Mrs. Trinkle looked up from her typing. “Maybe you’re right, Robert. Perhaps Sheriff Stem is as innocent a victim as those poor ponies. He’s shown such compassion in other matters, like his leniency in the, how many? Eight? Nine times he has pulled you over for drunk driving?”
Lattner slumped into the chair in front of her desk. “He’ll throw me in jail for fifty years.”
“Maybe you should stop drinking for a while,” Mrs. Trinkle said.
“Or driving,” Julie said.
“Just keep my name off the fucking thing,” Lattner said.
Martin and Julie climbed the stairs to the Leader Telegram offices the Monday after Martin’s story ran. They could hear phones ringing before they were halfway to the top. And a bellow, like a bison gut-shot from a west-bound train.
“You tell him to call me when he gets in.”
The door above them slammed, glass rattled, and Sheriff Stem barreled down the stairs. Martin reared back at the slap of Old Spice, old cigar, and old cheese that accompanied the sweating uniformed man. Greasy hair, bulging neck, protruding eyes, the sheriff looked as if he were on his way to audition for the part of the law enforcement rube in the next installment of Smokey and the Bandit.
At the bottom of the steps, he turned back. “You better watch out, Oliphant. It wouldn’t take much to push that mother of yours over the edge.”
“Be my guest,” Martin said. “I’ll just warn you, she’s got a mean left hook for an eighty-six pound, semi-comatose invalid.”
He and Julie entered the office and greeted a wild-eyed Mrs. Trinkle, standing at her desk, telephone receiver in one hand.
“The answering machine is full,” she said. “Your phone has been ringing since I got in. The mayor wants to talk to Lattner. And the sheriff’s department is having a press conference about it all at ten. A TV station is coming in from South Bend and maybe one from Detroit. Martin, this is big TV.”
Martin accepted a pile of pink slips from Mrs. Trinkle and wandered back to his office, a converted storeroom where he shared desk space with stacks of Xerox paper, but at least it had a door. He shut that now and ignored the clanging of the phone. He closed his eyes. He would let the story play out, cover the press conference, follow up with Treena, maybe a photo of her hugging him in gratitude. He’d package it all up and send it to the Denver Post, and they would beg him to come out, join the staff, maybe even the editorial board. They would be surprised when he brought up the idea that, along with his Pulitzer-prize-worthy reporting on travesties of justice and unfathomable wrongs done to the noble oppressed, he would like to start running a column of cowboy poetry. Why not, they would say. Give him a chance, they would say. Genius is as genius does, they would say. Beaufort would see it, call Ginger. Remember Martin Oliphant? How could I forget? I’m going to Denver. She would saddle up her mare, and in the pounding rain, which would make it difficult for Martin to tell if she was crying, but of course she would be, she would ride into the gates of his…
“Martin, phone,” Mrs. Trinkle stood in the office doorway.
“Can you take a message?” Martin grabbed a pen and scribbled his own name on a pad.
“It’s your mom.”
He picked up the phone.
Of course, it wasn’t his mom. She hadn’t spoken an intelligible word since Bitsy Newport’s visit a month before. And she hadn’t used the phone for several months prior to that. It was Amoya, the nurse. Martin was needed at home.
“Chopo”
By Jack Thorpe
Through rocky arroyos so dark and so deep,
Down the sides of the mountains so slippery and steep,
You’ve good judgment, sure footed, wherever you go,
You’re a safety conveyance my little Chopo.
Whether single or double or in the lead of a team,
over highways or byways or crossing a stream,
You’re always in fix and willing to go,
Whenever you’re called on, my chico Chopo.
You’re a good roping horse, you we
re never jerked down;
When tied to a steer, you will circle him round,
Let him once cross the string, and over he’ll go,
You sabe the business, my cow horse Chopo.
One day on the Llano, a hail storm began,
The herds were stampeded, the horses all ran,
The lightning it glittered, a cyclone did blow,
But you faced the sweet music, my little Chopo.
Chopo my pony, Chopo, my pride,
Chopo my amigo, Chopo I will ride,
From Mexico’s border ’cross Texas Llanos,
To the salt Pecos River, I ride you Chopo.
11
Martin had to pour three cups of highly sugared green tea into Amoya before he could get her to explain the crisis. Through sobs and slurps, she blabbered about the demon Keshi, a mythical horse that Krishna killed. Martin didn’t know, nor did he particularly care, how that Hindu archfiend became enmeshed in Amoya’s version of Obeah theology. But he did need to understand why she was convinced that Keshi had possessed Dottie’s fragile soul.
Amoya told Martin she had run through her morning routine as usual. A sip or two of Geritol for the semi-conscious patient, a warm bath, new diapers and a fresh nightgown, back to bed, where Amoya read aloud, usually the Bible. Today, however, she had decided on the Sunday Leader Telegram and Martin’s blockbuster story on Dewitty’s Delightful Pony Rides.
“She’s so proud. She loves you like a son,” said Amoya.
“Good to know,” said Martin.
Dottie had listened to the story, according to Amoya, with her usual lack of consciousness. But she woke up when the nurse held the front page up to display the byline: by Martin Oliphant.
“She rose in the air like a Moka Jumbie and did the zombie dance, yelling, ‘Keshi, Keshi, Keshi!’”
“Any chance she was yelling, ‘Chopo, Chopo, Chopo’?” Martin said.
Amoya looked at him with wide eyes, held up one broad hand, and guillotined the air three times.
“Like this?” she asked, shook her head no, then said, “Maybe.”
Martin knew what his mother had seen. It was not his name in Times New Roman font. No, it was the two pictures below that, before and after shots, in color. One was a corn-husk-hued pony with a light-tan mane rigged out in a purple-and-red woven halter. A tiny girl with blonde braids sat astride the little beast, smiling out from under a red straw cowboy hat. The pony’s head angled toward the camera, and it flashed its teeth in what looked like a smile.
The reader was asked to believe that the photo next to that happy scene was of the same horse, which even Martin would have questioned had he not seen the brand himself and talked to its former child owner, now a realtor in Dallas. Nothing suggested the healthy pet in picture one was the broken animal in picture two. Martin had caught Earl in the act of bringing down a board on the pony’s swayed back. It was already on its front knees, its head drooped. Earl’s mug was tilted toward the camera, and his teeth were bared.
Of course. Dottie saw the pictures, not the byline. She saw, not the granddaughter of a successful Texas oilman atop her birthday present circa 1972, but her young and entirely fictional self atop her beloved Chopo. Martin could only hope she hadn’t made the connection between the first and the second pictures, but he feared she had. His mom had been many things in her life—neglectful, jealous, petty, delusional—but she had never, never been stupid.
“Martin?” Dottie’s voice floated in from the living room. Martin and Amoya followed it to her bed. She spoke so infrequently, every word was treated by them both as possibly her last. Amoya scrambled for a notebook.
Dottie was up on one elbow, eyes open and sharp. “Not you, Amoya, just Martin.” She dropped her head back down but kept her eyes wide. She breathed irregularly. Martin sat beside the bed. There was almost nothing left of the woman he had known, all the chill melted from her cheeks, all the avarice washed from her eyes. Just fever and fear now, and he hated himself for liking her better like this. He turned to the window and the front yard beyond, where three robins pecked at the weeds in the perennial border.
“Martin,” Dottie said again, and he felt her hand on his, cold, as if drained of blood. “Earl’s got Chopo. You’ve got to get him back.”
Martin returned to the office at the same time as a sweating and grumbling Lattner arrived. “Christ, it must be ten miles from my house,” he said. His button-down shirt clung to the concave of his chest. Martin could not stop looking at the silver-dollar-sized nipples poking through the wet and transparent fabric. The man smelled like a feverish bottle of Jack Daniels.
“You walked?” asked Mrs. Trinkle.
“We discussed this,” said Lattner.
“You can drive if you don’t drink,” said Mrs. Trinkle.
“Noted,” said Lattner. “Should there come a morning I choose not to drink, I’ll keep that in mind.”
Julie came around the fabric partition separating her desk from the reception area. “I got you the stuff from the press conference. It was ridiculous. First Mayor Vernon went on about how they take animal abuse very seriously, and these allegations will be investigated, and that birthday party planners should rest assured blah blah blah. All the while, that little turd Earl Dewitty is sitting in the front row in a suit that looks like it came off a Skid Row weatherman. Then Sheriff Stem got up and said that, of course, the laws against animal cruelty would be enforced, but innocent until proven guilty was still the controlling legal principle around here, and that he was not about to start harassing innocent small businessmen on the word of a couple of besotted yellow journalists…”
“He said ‘besotted’?” Lattner stood in the doorway to his office. He had removed the sodden shirt. His tie still hung knotted around his bare neck.
“Or something like that,” Julie went on. “And he talked about property rights and prayer in schools and putting the ‘Christ’ back in ‘Christmas.’”
“That was it?” said Martin.
“No,” said Julie. “That lady from the council spoke, the one whose kid was the glue sniffer.”
“Paul Marietta,” said Martin. “He was in my class. I think his mom’s name is June, or Judy. She taught nursery school at the Y, remember? Paul used to eat paste.”
“Elmer’s and Magic Markers, gateway drugs,” said Lattner. “So what did Councilwoman Judy Marietta say?”
“She said that the council would take up the question of whether to honor their contract with Dewitty’s Delightful Pony Rides for the Blossomtown Parade this year at their next meeting,” said Julie. “Then two freaks from PPHS shouted something about getting the U.S. out of Nicaragua, and Earl yelled, ‘Git out of here you fucking commies,’ and the sheriff took the microphone back and said, ‘If you want to live in a place without due process where honest businessmen get railroaded out of their honest businesses, then Nicaragua would be a good place to move, and also that if you don’t sit down and shut up, I’m going to due process your sorry asses into the county lock up.’” Julie looked at her notes. “I think that’s it.”
“Mrs. Trinkle,” said Lattner. “Can you go to Butlers and get me another shirt? Also stop at the courthouse and find out when the council meeting is. I’ll have two editorials for tomorrow, one on Dewitty and one on Nicaragua, again. Not that it will get through the Swiss cheesy craniums of the David Stockman cultists that run this town, but if there is a windmill, I must tilt.” He backed into his office with a sweeping bow.
“You going to write up the press conference?” Martin asked Julie. Of course, she would, or should, say no. This was his story. She should hand over her notes, let him make a few calls. He could already picture the look on the Denver Post editor’s face when he opened Martin’s package, a series of clips, Martin’s work all, exposing not just a ring of animal abusers, but a city government and constabulary rife with corru
ption, incompetence, and unprofessional press operations. “What’s this?” the editor would mouth and pull on his tortoise-shelled reading glasses. “Why have I not heard of this reporter before?”
“Yeah,” Julie said, “I already did it.”
Martin blinked out of his reverie, and before the good part when the editor figures out Martin is only twenty-two and willing to relocate to Denver sometime around yesterday. Martin tried to keep the hurt out of his eyes.
“It was just because you weren’t here,” said Julie, looking concerned, but not concerned enough to turn over the story. “How’s your mom?”
“Bad,” said Martin. “And Chopo’s back.”
Martin had to admit Julie’s story was decent. It got nowhere near the reaction his story had, though, and was pushed to page three by an outbreak of fires in several peach orchards where farmers had placed smudge pots to stave off another killing frost. The air in town was still tinted gray and smelled of tar two days later when Martin went to cover the council meeting on Dewitty’s Delightful Ponies and the Blossomtown Parade. The issue was the only thing on the agenda after the “Official Honoring of the Blossomtown Princesses and Their Families.” The meeting started at six p.m. and Martin hoped the abbreviated agenda would mean he could pick up dinner at Wright’s before they shut.
His hopes dimmed as the Alex Baily Council Hall and Community Room filled with Blossomtown princesses—coiffed, polyester wrapped, and sashed—accompanied by family members stuffed into their Easter Sunday best. For a moment, he wished he had eaten dinner at 5:30 as all these people no doubt had. But he need not have worried. The fug of Clearasil and pink bubble gum lip gloss that accompanied the princesses soon smothered any desire he had for Wright’s olive-and-mayo burger.
