Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  Lina looked at Martin and Martin looked at Mac. “What is it you like about this picture?” Martin said, trying hard not to screech. Maybe, just maybe, what they liked were the clothes. That instead of Western, the clearly dementing Cowboy Poet had decided he wanted the funeral to look like a day at the Royal Ascot.

  “It’s her.” Lina pointed to Princess Anne.

  “If we can’t get David Ignatius, I am fairly certain Princess Anne won’t be available,” said Martin.

  Lina ignored him. “Vess wants to do that. That final pat good-bye. We showed it to the PBS folks, and they went nuts. It might even be the reason they decided to tape it for TV. So read “Walking Man” or “Where the Ponies Come to Drink” or “Yankee Doodle Dandy” for all I care, but we’ve got to get that shot.” She tapped the picture three times.

  “You can do it, right?” said Mac. “Because if not, well, I mean I know some people in London. We could talk to the undertakers there.”

  “Pet memorialists,” said Martin and blacked out.

  Later that day, still in Denver, or at least in its foothills, in another windowless conference room, at another faux wood veneered table, Martin contemplated another framed poster of the Maroon Bells and yearned to get out of enclosed office spaces and take a look at the Rockies for himself. He had a hard time believing there were really that many lupines.

  This conference room smelled of iodine and cat piss. And the McDonald’s french fries Lattner was eating one at a time, dangling each in front of his mouth, as if it were a worm on a hook, nibbling delicately, leaving the very tip intact.

  Martin’s stomach tilted, and he held the ice pack Julie had given him to his forehead. No bruise yet, but definitely a knot where he had cracked his head on the edge of the conference table in the Cowboy Poetry Hour’s offices. He remembered discussing the Bradlee and Starwood funerals, a flash of that room’s Maroon Bells poster, and black. He had heard Lina’s nasal diagnosis—“altitude”—and a door slam. Next thing, the young receptionist in the Radio Lab dancing cat sweatshirt was guiding him to the elevator, one manicured hand at his elbow, pressing a plastic bottle of water on him.

  “Hydration, it’s the key to everything,” she had said as the elevator doors shut. The key to everything! That’s just what he needed. A key to everything. Or, at minimum, a key to turning Hero’s paltry remains and rest stop dirt into an embalmed horse corpse in a funereal trailer.

  “Why are we here again?” Martin asked Lattner.

  “Because you need a dead horse, and Julie works for a vet,” said Lattner, not moving his eyes from his work arranging french fry tips into letters.

  Julie walked into the room, paused, as if considering what sort of greeting this called for, tilted her head, and sighed. “Bob says you need a dead horse. Again.”

  “Chopo was alive when we took him,” Lattner said.

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Martin,” said Julie, “that the cost of your literary hobby, in terms of equine lives, is oddly high?”

  “You were right,” said Martin. “If I want to go to Elko, I’ve got to do what it takes to go to Elko. And what it takes right now is a dead horse. Again.”

  “Also, has it occurred to you that I work for a vet?” Julie continued. “And that the job of vets is to keep animals healthy and alive, not to serve as a Shoppers’ Food Warehouse for every wacko in need of a horse corpse? And how’s your head?” She walked around the table to where Martin sat, placed a hand on his ice-bedewed bump. Her touch was warm and dry. Martin leaned into her.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Oh, Martin,” she said. “You idiot.”

  Martin shut his eyes and was mortified to feel tears escape onto his cheeks.

  “We can pay,” said Lattner.

  “Actually, we can’t,” said Martin, turning away from Julie. “We’ve maxed out my credit cards and blown through any cash Final Paws had on hand.”

  “Ask Lina for an advance,” said Lattner.

  “To buy the body for her funeral?” said Martin.

  “Listen to me,” said Julie, who had taken the seat next to Martin. “I don’t have a corpse to sell.” She hung her head for a moment, as if exhausted. “But there’s an auction tomorrow. I can take you. You can pick up something from the kill pen and for not that much. But you will need cash.”

  At sunrise the next day, Martin pulled the Mustang onto a parking pad at 414 Mumford Drive, Evergreen, Colorado.

  “You have reached your destination!” Martin’s GPS chirped as she had been chirping since he made the turn into the driveway. Normally, he appreciated her enthusiasm at the end of a successful journey. But today he thought he heard a buzz of condescension just below the surface of her usual panegyrics. Maybe he had just had enough of her this morning, and she of him. It had been a long ride, with multiple turns and switchbacks, through the foothills to Frank’s mansion.

  Martin rocked himself out of the bucket seat, looped back around the car, and tested with one booted toe the inlaid river stone path to the front door. It shone slick as if recently hosed down, and perhaps it was. This looked like the sort of place where a uniformed lackey might creep out at dawn to sprinkle the walkways and dew wash the staged natural outcroppings of rock and native wildflower.

  Martin stopped several yards from the front door to admire the mountain view.

  Did you ever stand on the ledges,

  On the brink of the great plateau

  And look from their jagged edges

  On the country that lay below?

  Martin had not heard this particular paracusia before, though he knew who it was: Bruce Kiskaddon, the poet. Most knew him for “When They’ve Finished Shipping Cattle in the Fall”—perhaps the saddest, truest portrait there is of a wrangler without a steer to wrangle. But “The Time to Decide” was one you didn’t hear that often. Martin had videotaped himself reading it for this year’s Elko entry, hoping to impress the known Kiskaddon devotees on the panel.

  Beyond the stone facade of the house, the Continental Divide floated in a cushion of backlit cirriform clouds. Martin placed his hand on a boulder and took a deep breath. The air bit at his nose with the scent of flowers and ice. He looked for, but couldn’t see any, lupines.

  How long had it been since cowboy poetry had come to him like this, unbidden? It seemed it had always been there when he was younger, much younger. Always whispering in his ear, waking him at night, reminding him of who he was, or at least who he was meant to be. When had it stopped chasing him, when had he started chasing it? That must have been when he went wrong.

  “You’re not going to faint, are you?” Frank stood silhouetted in the golden light streaming from his open front door. “Lots of you flatlanders can’t deal with the altitude. Come in and have some water. FIJI Water, the expensive kind.”

  Martin followed his brother into an open kitchen; glowing amber cabinets of polished wood encased stainless steel and black gloss appliances. It was the most beautiful wood Martin had ever seen, and not just the cabinets. The floor, the chairs at the obsidian granite kitchen island, the built-in window seat with beige leather top, the round table there, the living room beyond. A river of wood, the felled and planed bodies of virginal wood nymphs, wood flowing around sleek couches and armoires, wood floating rugs of muted and intricate design, wood rising up beyond the stone fireplace in graceful shelving. Wood in the browns of single malts, fawns’ coats, and coffee con leches; in the oranges of hearth fires, winter sunsets, and Velveeta; in the reds of summer’s roses, Irish Setters, and their mother’s favorite lipstick shade, Divine Wine.

  Frank stood on tiptoe on a patch of this glorious wood and poked in the higher regions of a massive kitchen cabinet.

  “Is it too much to ask that we keep chia seeds in stock? How am I supposed to have this without chia seeds?” Frank pointed at the green drink he had pulled from the refrigerato
r. Martin did not answer because he could imagine no condiment, chia seed or otherwise, that would induce him to ingest what Frank had introduced as a “power gut smoothie.” He had offered Martin one too, but Martin chose to stick with the FIJI Water, the expensive kind.

  “Halle knows that this is a problem,” said Frank, pouring the sludge into a pint glass and abandoning it on the kitchen counter. “We have food intensities that have to be respected.” He walked around the island, at which Martin had taken a seat, onto the expanse of, of course, burnished wood between the kitchen and the living room, and squatted.

  “Chair pose,” he said.

  “I thought her name was CeeCi,” said Martin.

  “CeeCi’s the wife. Halle’s the chef and supposedly a certified nutritionists and herbalist,” said Frank. He straightened up, stood on his right foot, wrapped his left leg over the right, twined his arms in front of his head. “Eagle pose,” he said.

  Martin watched his brother contort and tried, and failed, to see any familial resemblance. Frank was lean, and his muscles bulged and stretched into easily identifiable individual units, as if he were an exhibit at a science museum, one of those crystalline castratos, rotating on a pedestal above clumps of snickering middle schoolers, its organs lighting up one at a time as a sonorous voice drones the liver, the testes, the heart. Martin’s muscles—and they were there, he was not a weak man—were smothered in cellulite, his stomach a perfect moon he carried just in front of his own orbit.

  “Is she home, CeeCi?” Martin asked.

  Frank untwined, spread his arms, and opened his fingers. “Mountain.”

  Martin looked out the curving picture window, as if a tiny CeeCi might appear on the side of the range just now emerging from the morning fog.

  “Mountain pose,” clarified Frank. “CeeCi’s at Rancho La Puerta running a seminar. She does a lot of them. Good money. But the pantry goes to shit every time.” Frank spun away from Martin, dropped to the floor, stretched on his back and propped his head up. “Fish.”

  Martin looked into his brother’s upside-down eyes and flashed to a long-ago summer. Frank hung like a sloth from a low branch of a maple in their backyard. Martin stood at his head, spotting him. Frank stretched back, smiled, shut his eyes, and let go. Martin reached out, caught Frank, tumbled with him, giggling, into a pile of leaves. Was that the last time they had laughed together? Was that the last time Martin had cared whether Frank cracked his head open or not?

  Frank hopped back on two feet and faced Martin. “You want money, right? That’s why you’re here.”

  “No,” said Martin, though he did. But he didn’t just want money. He needed it.

  “Look, you already owe me for the meat grinder,” said Frank.

  “Large capacity companion crematorium,” said Martin. “And this is for a business expense, for a trip. To Elko.” Martin had said too much. But for a second, maybe it was Frank’s upended head, maybe it was remembering hanging onto to him, cushioning his fall, but for a second Martin thought Frank might get it.

  “Oh shit, your cowboy stuff,” said Frank. “Then the answer is definitely no. Grow up, bro. You’re redefining pathetic.” He hopped to his feet, padded back to the kitchen, picked up the glass of green gunk, and tilted it in the sink. “I’m going running, then I’m going to the Highland Frank’s for a demo of some Mamba 8.1 Creekers. Whitewater kayaks. You ought to come. We’ve got rapids, inside. It’s awesome.”

  “I’m sure it is,” said Martin, who suddenly felt sick. “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “Use the one in the master—it’s that way. Let me show you; you got to see the view. We had this house built so we could lay in bed and look at that view.”

  Martin followed Frank around a large stairway, with a slate-framed babbling brook as its bannister, and into a bedroom suite as large as the large living room and with the same curved floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Continental Divide. The vision of the range, now purple and dappled in flickering morning light, stunned Martin. He forgot about the bathroom.

  From behind him, Frank said, “I’m just grabbing my shoes and going. Take as long as you need.” He sniggered. Martin thought, but did not note aloud, that perhaps Frank’s lifelong preoccupation with toilet humor was at least as pathetic as Martin’s own lifelong preoccupation with cowboy poets.

  “Finish the water if you want. Have another,” Frank continued. That Martin was so obviously impressed with Frank’s view seemed to have made him generous. “The front door locks automatically.” Martin turned from the mountains and watched Frank emerge from a walk-in closet. He waved one hand at Frank’s back and swiveled again to the windows.

  It was as if Martin were looking at an inverted triptych in the vibrant hues of the cleaned-up Sistine Chapel. First the quivering rows of aspens, their spring leaves more yellow than green. Then the pointed and stretching pines, emerald and beryl and tall. And finally, the mountains themselves, filmy, dreamy, removed, as if separated from all that vert by a sheet of fine-spun gauze.

  Martin had to look away. That Frank had this frontier majesty at his feet every night. That Frank lived here in this house of Western timber for walls and mountain streams for handrails. That Frank lived in the West at all and that Martin did not. Martin choked on the waves of privilege and pine scent, gasped for even the smallest breath of justice. All of it had been easy for Frank; all of it had been hard for Martin. He had nursed their mom and their dad, then stayed by their graves to mourn them. And for that, he had received almost no thanks and a pet cemetery. And Frank got this, Martin’s West.

  Martin moved to leave and caught the glint of something—fire, one could only hope, or water or something on one of the bedside tables. He looked closer. The blink was of diamonds, a money clip, topped with winking white stones shaped into a C. The top bill, Martin could see, was a hundred. He walked to the bed and picked up the clip, rifled through the edges of the notes compressed there. Hundreds, all of them. Martin slammed the money back on the table. He pushed his hand into the diamonds and felt them bite into his palm.

  Martin needed one thing, cash for a Hero corpse. And Frank had everything. CeeCi wasn’t even here. It was probably just her spare money, probably one of ten or twenty money clips she left lying around, littering the landscape, clogging up the disposal, tempting poor sods like Martin. He couldn’t unglue his hand from the tabletop. He appealed to the mountains, for perspective, for truth. And Kiskaddon, again, whispered the answer in Martin’s ear.

  While you’re gazing on such a vision

  And your outlook is clear and wide,

  If you have to make a decision,

  That’s the time and place to decide.

  Martin closed his hand on the clip and left the room.

  “Hero’s a chestnut, right?” said Julie.

  She and Martin leaned on the chipped blue metal gate that led into the corral of loose horses. Maybe twenty of them, many lame, with overgrown hooves or open sores, the few healthy ones scared and skittering. They shifted and pawed the dust and bit at their neighbors’ flanks and shivered away flies in a space suited for ten animals, no more. Martin couldn’t tell where Julie was looking. He saw a lot of grays, a white, or more likely a cremello, a palomino.

  “More sorrel than liver,” said Martin. Both were shades of chestnut, though liver was, to Martin’s eye, straight-up brown. Sorrel was reddish gold, the color of the sun, or a new penny, or Hero when he lived.

  Several years ago, Martin had taken pains to learn the specialized lexicon of horse coats and their tones and marks, sensing that there was poetry therein: dark bay, blood bay, chestnut, brown. Dapple gray, rose gray, brindle, dun. Appaloosa, varnish roan, palomino, pearl. Piebald, skewbald, silver dapple, white. Several years after that, Martin had heard a young Montanan on the Cowboy Poetry Hour read a poem cataloging the colors Martin knew and some he did not. He was gra
tified his instinct was correct. He was crushed his contrivance had been co-opted.

  Julie stepped up on the lower rung of the corral fence, leaned over the rail, and nickered. A golden head shagged with a blonde mane pushed between two darker horses and headed for Julie’s outstretched hand. Martin had to agree. It looked like Hero.

  The horse edged close to the fence and settled its muzzle into Julie’s chest. “She’s been handled. Somebody loved her,” said Julie. “And she’s a mustang.” Julie ran her hand over the just visible BLM brand on the horse’s neck. “And a mare.” The horse cocked her head and one chocolate eye flicked between Martin and Julie.

  “God, I hate this,” Julie said as the horse bobbed her neck against Julie’s open palm.

  “What do you think she’ll go for?” said Lattner, joining them and blowing on a steaming Styrofoam cup, carrying with him the smell of slightly burnt coffee mixed with a waft of horse manure, a potpourri Martin was coming to understand as definitively Western.

  “I don’t know. Virgil Ermine is over there. He’s a meat buyer, and he’s not going to want to pay more than seventy-five dollars a head, but then again, I don’t know how big his order is and there aren’t that many here.” Julie pushed the horse’s snout away and, after a baleful look at Martin, the mare bumped her way back into the thick of the herd.

  Now she’s stiff and old and stumbles,

  and she’s lost the strength and speed

  That once took her through the darkness,

  ‘round the point of a stampede

  And her legs is scarred and battered;

  both the muscle and the bone.

  She is jest a wore out cow hoss

  so they’ve turned her out alone.

  Bruce Kiskaddon again. Maybe it was his birthday or something. What other reason, except of course, their utter applicability to Martin’s current situation, would the poet’s words keep ping ponging through Martin’s psyche. This time, though, it was no auditory hallucination. This time, it was Julie.