Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  “Your pony,” said Lattner, with a bow to Dottie. The rope tightened and the horse tossed his head and coughed.

  “Don’t kill him, Christ,” said Julie.

  “Oh, Chopo,” said Martin’s mom.

  Martin wheeled her toward the tailgate. She reached for the pony’s flailing head, leaned forward in the chair. Julie placed her hand on the frail woman’s shoulder.

  Martin hesitated. He wasn’t sure he ought to push her within reach of the animal’s clattering teeth.

  “Forward, Martin. I want to touch him,” Dottie said. Martin snapped to and pushed. His mom’s voice had not rung so clear in over a year.

  Faux Chopo, perhaps sensing this moment might provide his salvation, perhaps even recognizing the once-girl in blonde pig tails who had sat so softly on his back so many Texas summers ago; that girl who was not now Dottie Oliphant, but no matter. This whole charade depended on everyone playing a role not really theirs, a role dictated by that muse of muses, that temptress of temptresses, that promiser of open ranges and deliverer of, in the end, just words. Cowboy poetry.

  “Put me on Chopo. I want to ride him.” Dottie again. And she was on her feet and out of the wheelchair, striding—striding!—toward the truck. “Give me the rope, Robert, and open the back.”

  “Don’t give her the rope,” Martin yelled.

  Dottie had made it to the back of the truck, reached up, and patted the pony firmly on the nose. It took this without budging, perhaps as stunned as the rest of them at the sight of what had been, seconds ago, mostly corpse, now transformed into the Pecos River Queen, ready to unload her trusty cutter and get started on the cow work.

  Lattner did not hand her the rope, something he raised in his defense later, but he did drop it when he figured out what Dottie intended to do. He dropped it and lunged toward the woman but too late. She flicked open the latch with a practiced hand and let the gate fall.

  “Out you come, dear Chopo,” said Dottie, and, clearly annoyed that the pony wasn’t heeding, reminded him:

  You’re always in fix and willing to go

  Whenever you’re called on, my chico Chopo.

  As Dottie Oliphant’s last earthly words echoed among the lawn mowers and rusted bikes in the garage, the pony sunk back on his haunches and jumped.

  It would be many years before Lattner would talk to Martin about the specifics of what happened that night, and Julie never would. For Martin, forever, it would flip through his head like a washed-out slideshow, each flash of scene marked with a scream, a wail, a crack of hoof on skull, a crack of bat on bone.

  There: his mom upright, open arms to the airborne animal, then a pile of flesh, horse and human, on the concrete, the pony’s front hoof in a spray of blood. The striations on the horse’s hoof, the chink before the horseshoe, remembered in detail, no memory at all of its crash into his mother’s skull.

  There: Chopo crumbled in front of him, Dottie’s arm stretched on the driveway, one hand opened and lightly cupped on top of the kitty litter spread to soak up spilled car oil.

  There: his childhood Louisville Slugger leaning against the garage wall.

  There: his fist on the handle. Not his fist. A fist.

  There: the arc the bat defines. Again. Again.

  There: the blood and mane and blood and one red eye dangling down.

  There: two deaths, not one. Martin’s fury draining, mingling with horse blood, Dottie’s blood. Julie’s screams fading.

  There and there and there, always there, putting it all to music. Cowboy poetry.

  Beat your drums lightly, play your fifes merrily,

  Sing your death march as you bear me along,

  Take me to the graveyard, lay the sod o’er me.

  I’m a young cowboy and know I’ve done wrong.

  Interlude

  In May of 1986, the Second Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence concluded on the same day Dottie’s funeral was held in Pierre. Martin recited Herbert Henry Knibb’s “Where the Ponies Come to Drink” over her casket, which was closed. Even the eldest and most skilled Stark brother of the Stark Family Funeral Home could not reconstruct the crushed skull Dottie was said to have sustained when tumbling from her bed on her last day in this mortal realm.

  On that Saturday, Martin listened to a cowboy poet named Vess Guffry host an NPR special featuring clips from several of the confluence’s performances. This was the first Cowboy Poetry Hour, the weekly two-hour Saturday night live variety show that, for the next thirty years, would popularize the Western arts among public radio listeners. In each of those years, the Cowboy Poetry Hour would broadcast live from the Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, Vess Guffry would never miss an Elko show, and Martin would tune into all but the last.

  In May of 1987, Martin again didn’t go to Elko, as he had intended. He stayed in Pierre to cover Earl Dewitty’s trial on charges of animal cruelty, fraud, bribery, breach of contract, and criminal battery. The year before, Councilwoman Judy Marietta had stumbled over the mangled body of a dead pony on her way down the back path to Earl’s porta potty before the council’s inspection of the Dewitty’s Delightful Ponies’ stables. Dewitty had tried to stem her hysteria by slapping her repeatedly. He got twenty years.

  In May of 1988, Martin went as far as to inquire via post after tickets to the Fourth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, but before he received an answer, Julie decided to move to Denver to study to be a vet tech at Colorado State, and Martin stayed in Pierre to help her pack.

  In May of 1989, Martin planned to drive cross-country to Elko, but two days before he set out, his right foot was crushed by a runaway Shriner’s minibike at the Blossomtown parade, and he was unable to make the trip.

  In May of 1990, Martin went west, but not to Elko. He and his father attended Frank’s college graduation. They stayed two weeks, during which Martin discovered Julie was living with Frank in his one-bedroom apartment.

  In May of 1991, Martin again went to Denver rather than Elko. This time, it was to explore taking on, with Frank, a chain of sports equipment stores Carroll had pillaged from two elderly brothers. It took Martin exactly four days to figure out he neither cared about nor comprehended the capillary action of various wicking athletic bras. Frank, on the other hand, was a natural. Carroll turned the stores over to Frank, Frank renamed them “Frank’s,” and Martin returned to his job at the Leader Telegram.

  In May of 1992, the Eighth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence was not an option for Martin. Its final days coincided with Julie’s wedding to Frank on the deck of the Newport’s home on the shores of Lake Michigan. Martin served as best man.

  From May of 1993 through May of 1996, Martin hardly thought of the Ninth through the Twelfth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluences. He had latched onto the Serenity Prayer from a scrap of the AA literature Mrs. Trinkle often provided Lattner, and Lattner always threw out. Martin decided to accept his absence from Elko as a thing he could not change. He dated a former Blossomtown queen and current orthodontic hygienist, practiced TM, listened regularly but with only half an ear to the Cowboy Poetry Hour (though he always caught the live Elko broadcast), and considered taking up jogging. The hygienist ran off with her boss in December of 1996, and Martin began ordering cowboy poetry books off Amazon.com.

  In May of 1997, Martin scotched his plans to attend the Thirteenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence after Carroll suffered a heart attack that kept him in the ICU for twenty-three days.

  In May of 1998, Martin listened to the Cowboy Poet’s live show from the Fourteenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence from Carroll’s room at the Baroda Better Acres, a very nice home for the demented. Carroll had moved there only the day before, at Frank’s insistence.

  In May of 1999, Martin did not attend the Fifteenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence in a fit of pique. He had decided the previous January, he would apply to perfor
m and was rejected by the Fifteenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence Selection Committee the following March.

  By May of 2000, Martin had begun to soften and even eyed with some enthusiasm last-minute airfare deals to Salt Lake City, a short drive, by high desert standards, to Elko. But in the second to last week of that month, Lattner, who had diagnosed the Leader Telegram with terminal intellectual and financial degradation a decade before, put the paper out of its misery with one last issue published on Sunday, May 23, 2000. In it, he memorialized in ink each rumor, slander, morsel of gossip, and indelicate confession that each bastion, official, and blowhard in the greater Pierre metropolitan area had whispered, disclosed, or bragged of to Lattner in his thirty-plus years of drinking at The Silver Dollar. The morning the final edition came out, Lattner disappeared, leaving only a collection of Jägermeister bottles dating back to the 1930s, a burgundy leather couch in remarkably good condition, and a 1984 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. Martin spent the week of the Sixteenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence consoling Mrs. Trinkle, fending off defamation lawsuits, and filing for bankruptcy.

  In May of 2001, Martin passed the week of the Seventeenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence helping Carroll to fulfill his dying wish: to see his son Frank at the helm of his own thriving business. Martin and Carroll, who should not have been allowed to travel, travelled to the Denver suburb of Greenwood City to spend six days in Frank and Julie’s over-air-conditioned family and guest rooms.

  In May of 2002, during the week of the Eighteenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence, Martin read Sharlot Hall’s “Beyond the Range” at Carroll’s funeral. Martin chose the work less for the poet’s final words of religious redemption than for its third stanza paean to the art of rapine:

  Now, stake for me a last, last claim

  And lay them there to rest,

  The trailworn feet, the weary hands,

  The still heart in my breast.

  Earth’s last prospecting trip is done,

  But somewhere, strong and sure,

  My spirit seeks the motherlode

  Whose treasure shall endure.

  In May of 2003, Martin hardly had time to tune into the Cowboy Poetry Hour’s coverage of the Nineteenth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. He had, early in that month, finally rented out his childhood home and moved to a second-floor apartment above Murphy’s Cameras in downtown Pierre. Further, the Confluence coincided with several meetings with the local bank and Frank, via Skype, over the level of investments necessary to render Final Paws Pet Mortuary ’n Cemetery, Martin’s bequest from his father, a functioning financial concern.

  In May of 2004, Martin spent the week of the Twentieth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence in Pierre rather than Elko, comforting Julie, who had returned to her childhood home to recover from a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and divorce.

  In May of 2005, Martin again traveled west as far as Denver, but not as far as Elko, for Frank’s marriage to CeeCi Seaborne, former head of athletic footwear sales at Frank’s Sporting Goods and present motivational speaker.

  From May of 2006 to May of 2013, Martin, sometimes adamantly, sometimes resignedly, put traveling to the Twenty-Second through the Twenty-Ninth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluences out of his mind, though he stayed devoted to the art form itself. He continued to apply to perform each year, and his applications continued to be rejected.

  In May of 2014, Martin spent the week of the Thirtieth Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence in Cabo, visiting Mrs. Trinkle, her ex-husband, Paul, and his lover Maurice.

  In May of 2015, Martin was again in Cabo instead of Elko, this time for Mrs. Trinkle’s burial at sea. He recited Arthur Chapman’s “Men in the Rough” over her batik-shrouded body.

  Men in the rough—on the trails all new-broken—

  Those are the friends we remember with tears;

  Few are the words that such comrades have spoken—

  Deeds are their tributes that last through the years.

  Men in the rough, prairie and mountain—

  Children of nature, warm-hearted, clear-eyed;

  Friendship with them is a never-sealed fountain;

  Strangers are they to the altars of pride.

  Men in the rough—curt of speech to their fellows—

  Ready in everything, save to deceive;

  Theirs are the friendships that time only mellows,

  And death cannot sever the bonds that they weave.

  The Third Horse: Zach

  d. 2015

  Martin stood at the entrance to his childhood home and watched Bev Pitzke of Pierre Premier Households wrestle a For Sale sign out of the back seat of her Jetta. It was only mid-September, but already someone was burning leaves, and the smoke registered in the cold tip of his nose, like all those dry winter smells do.

  “Need some help?” Martin called, hoping he’d waited long enough for the answer to be no.

  “I got it,” she said. She leaned into the car and tugged left then right, her helmet of slate hair bobbing in time with her shoulders, like a metronome clicking out the cadence of her continued patter: “Just…need…to…get…it…over…the hump and, whoopsie-daisy, here it goes.” She staggered backwards onto the front walk and hoisted the sign, almost as tall she, which was not very. “Nils put the post hole in yesterday, so we don’t have to worry about that,” she said, lugged the sign onto the lawn, and propped it up with another robust “whoopsie-daisy,” stepped back, and added one more “whoopsie-daisy,” this one quiet and thoughtful, in the tone of visitors to St. Peter’s coming on Michelangelo’s Pieta for the first time.

  Or maybe Martin just heard it that way. Because everything about this moment felt epochal. Because, more than he had wanted but exactly as he had expected, the evening’s task, finally putting the Oliphant home on the market, hollowed him out. His heart pounded in his throat and his breath came in whistling gasps. He put a hand on one of the front portico’s faux pillars to stop himself from charging the tiny realtor, chasing her back to the VW, and chucking her sign through the rearview window.

  Renting out the place after his dad died had been so much easier. Mrs. Priebe arranged it all: lined up Dr. Sharma and his family, just arrived from India, to occupy the house; got rid of all the furniture, via Goodwill and a yard sale, except the kitchen table and chairs, which the Sharmas kept because they fit the space so nicely; handed over the rent collection and maintenance scheduling to a young local lawyer, who had just opened his own practice and needed the work. Martin had only visited once in the last thirteen years, a reception for the Sharmas’ eldest son newly graduated from Columbia Medical School. In a haze of curry fumes and tandoori smoke and through the crowd of what had to be three-quarters of the Swinehurst Hospital staff and all of the Sharmas’ home state of Goa, Martin recognized little. It was like one of those dreams where the familiar was still familiar and also decidedly not.

  “This is where our piano used to be,” he had found himself telling a pre-teen girl in a red silk half-sari over a sequined blue blouse.

  “That’s Vishnu,” she said, inclining her head toward the statue that was the current occupant of the plot. Martin half-bowed to the god, and the girl smiled him a mouthful of braces and darted off. He left the party five minutes later.

  It wasn’t that he wanted to keep the house for himself. As far back as the summer he left Chicago and moved back in, he felt his presence here in this red brick colonial, in Pierre at all, was temporary, a waypoint on the long and one-way expedition west. He still felt it. And because of that, guilt—guilt that he had never been able to do more than squat in this, his ancestral home.

  “We’re going to lose our light soon.” Bev materialized next to Martin’s elbow, toting an armful of shiny blue folders. “Maybe we should start looking around without Judy.”

  “Julie,” said Martin. “And I want to
wait for her.” He didn’t care that he sounded brusque. He hadn’t wanted to use Bev. She wasn’t from Pierre, had moved here only a few years ago after marrying the State Farm Insurance rep, Stephen Pitzke. He’d been on the PPHS swim team with Julie, and she argued to Martin that Bev’s ignorance of the house’s history would make it easier for her to sell it. Perhaps, he thought, but it would also make it impossible for her to value it. Julie was the one who had wanted to put it on the market, though, so he acceded to her.

  “That’s got to be her,” said Bev. A white Chevy Cruze, pulsing with rental car vibe, rounded the corner into the cul-de-sac and skidded to a stop a millimeter behind the Jetta’s bumper. Julie emerged from the driver’s seat clutching a paper bag. Even at twenty yards, Martin could spot the familiar black neck of a Christian Brothers brandy bottle poking out of the top.

  “Great, let’s start here,” Bev said. “Meticulous landscaping, mature trees with well-tended auxiliary plantings. I’m just going to put these inside.” She pointed her chin at her folders and stepped in the front door.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Julie said to Bev’s back and pulled Martin into a hug. She had to stretch past his sixty-inch waist, maintained since high school, and her 36D chest, acquired after her 2003 bilateral mastectomy, and could just reach around his neck. She still managed to clock him with the liquor bottle at the base of his skull, and he saw stars. “I hope you still have our tumblers in there,” she said into his ear.

  “Julie.” Bev rematerialized on the porch, hand extended, whitened front teeth beaming like tractor headlamps. “Stephen talks about you all the time.”

  “Really,” said Julie. “Because I’ve been clear with him, phone sex is as far as I’ll go with a married man.” She locked eyes with Bev for a moment, then matched her frozen smile, Julie’s teeth smaller but just as iridescent. “Let’s do this,” she said.

  Martin had never bought or sold real estate before, so he was happy to leave to Bev and Julie the negotiations over what would get fixed, repainted, or discounted. They feinted and dodged like Siamese fighting fish in adjacent tanks, ready to go all in should somehow the glass walls come down. Julie seemed to be winning on points and only stumbled once in her absolute certainty about the maintenance requirements and outstanding features of a house she hadn’t been in for over twenty years. It happened in the driveway.