Four Dead Horses

by KT Sparks

  “‘The Forgotten,’” she said. “Bruce Kiskaddon.”

  “How do you know that?” said Martin.

  “We were friends for a long time,” said Julie. “You and me, I mean. Not me and Bruce Kiskaddon.”

  “He died before you were born,” said Martin.

  “Anyway, I don’t hate cowboy poetry,” said Julie. “Sometimes it gets things just right.” The Hero doppelgänger pushed her head out of a scrum of bickering animals and whinnied.

  “Exactly,” said Martin, rocking back on his heels, thrilled to the point of gulping. He looked at Lattner and grinned a “you too?”

  Lattner cleared his throat. “There once was a cowboy named Puckett…”

  “But cowboy poetry doesn’t always get everything right.” Julie dusted off the front of her jeans. “I like it sometimes, but it’s not my North Star, Koran, Lonely Planet Guide to the Galaxy, and Magic 8 Ball all wrapped into one.” Martin must have let his crest fall too obviously, because she patted him on the arm and added, “Sometimes I look at my horoscope too.”

  The chestnut mustang was almost the last up for auction, and Virgil Ermine pushed its price up over $400.

  “Goddamn it,” said Julie, flicking her number the last time. “He thinks I’m with Colorado Mustang Rescue. He’s trying to bankrupt us.”

  “Why would he think that?” said Martin.

  “Because I volunteer with Colorado Mustang Rescue. How do you think I got a bidding number?” said Julie.

  “What does he care?” said Martin. “Mustangs can’t go for meat. It’s the law. I signed a letter to my Congressman.” Martin remembered how empowered he had been when he put his name on the online petition to save that great symbol of the West, the American mustang, from the slaughterhouse. He was sure the legislation had passed. He’d shared a Facebook status about it.

  “I once called in about the minimum wage,” said Lattner. “Fat lot of good that’s done.”

  “There’s a law,” said Julie. “But there are plenty of slaughterhouses in Mexico. And there’s lots of bad men who are happy to haul off unwanted horses, mustangs, thoroughbreds, you name it.” She put her hands on her hips and squinted toward where Virgil Ermine was using a bull whip to move frightened horses toward his truck. The mustang, their mustang, stood alone in the center of the pen, shifting its feet, crouching away from the rest of the caterwauling, head-tossing, balking mass of horseflesh. Julie whispered more than said the poem’s final lines.

  She stands still. She ain’t none worried,

  fer she knows she’s played the game

  She’s got nothin’ to back up from.

  she’s been square and ain’t ashamed.

  Fer no matter where they put her

  she was game to do her share

  Well, I think more of the pony

  than the folks that left her there.

  Lattner took a few steps back, cracked the empty cup in half. Martin watched the slaughterhouse-bound horses, then looked at the one he had bought. Or that CeeCi had bought. He fingered the money clip buried deep in the pocket of his tan duster coat. The mare took two small steps in their direction.

  “C’mon, let’s go load your corpse,” Julie said and turned from the corral.

  Martin was sulking. He ignored Julie’s fiddling with the radio. She switched it off, hummed, and blasted the air conditioner. He studied the strange rock formations and scrubby brush whipping past along the side of the highway. In the side mirror, he watched Lattner, also fiddling with the radio, follow the horse trailer attached to the bumper of Julie’s F-10.

  “Be reasonable,” Julie said after turning the radio on and off one more time. “It’s called the ‘kill pen,’ not the ‘kill-ED pen.’”

  “You told me that the horses that aren’t bought from there are kill-ED,” said Martin, still concentrating on the mirror. Lattner looked to be texting.

  “Well, Helen was sold. To us,” said Julie. She had dubbed the mare Helen. “And if we hadn’t bought her, she would have been kill-ed, horribly killed at the slaughterhouse, if she didn’t die in transport,” said Julie.

  For many years, Martin had agreed to purchase the 4-H blue-ribbon-winning hog at the Pierre County Fair. As the first freckle-faced lad who had talked Martin into the deal had explained, he had to do nothing but write a check. The prized pig would come to him cut into recognizable hams and roasts or ground to sausage and sealed in airtight packaging. He had thought the kill pen would be a similar experience, sans, perhaps, the dismemberment and vacuum-sealing.

  He had been wrong. And now they were pulling a very much living Helen. She had tripped up the ramp into the trailer Julie had borrowed from her boss. He had used it for house calls until last year, when an epidemic of goat giardiasis swelled the practice’s coffers and allowed him to buy a three-bay number. Julie suggested that the vet might be willing to sell for nine or ten bills off CeeCi’s roll of hundreds, still thick and warm in Martin’s left front pocket. There were bloodstains on the trailer’s wooden floor, equine dentistry gone wrong, which made the vehicle too morbid for most weekend equestrians. But it had the slings Martin needed to prop up the dead Hero—soon-to-be-dead Helen—and it was, if not exactly black, then dirty gray. It would do. It would have to do. But for a dead horse, not the live one they were transporting.

  As they continued into the Denver foothills, Martin couldn’t shake Kiskaddon’s censure. Well, I think more of the pony than the folks that left her there. But Martin hadn’t left her, someone else had. Someone else had condemned her. Martin was just a pawn, or maybe the pawn was Helen, or Julie. In any case, it was all just pawns now, no kings, no power, just pawns in an increasingly costly and complex journey to Elko.

  “So what’s the plan?” said Martin, though he knew the plan. He just wanted to hear Julie explain it again. Frankly, she had muttered, “She’s a good horse” one too many times today. He was afraid she might be having second thoughts.

  “Back to the office, we, or I, euthanize this girl. We’ll leave her in the trailer. It’s got these strappy things Lee uses when he sedates horses to work on their teeth.”

  Lee, not Dr. Strachen, Martin noted. Dr. Lee Strachen was Julie’s boss and, Martin was beginning to think, her lover. Julie lived rent-free at his five-bedroom log lodge, complete with wrap-around plank porches and wide rockers, hummingbird feeders, hanging geraniums, and mountain views straight out of The Sound of Music. Housesitting, she said, while he did his frequent charity work; he had left that morning to spend a week at a street-dog rescue shelter in Rio. The lodge was on the same grounds as Dr. Strachen’s office, Conifer Veterinary Associates. Martin wasn’t jealous, exactly, but Julie seemed to have a good thing going on out here. Out West. A good thing without Martin. Out West. He had spent his whole life striving to get here, so why was it he was the last to arrive?

  “What did you tell your—Lee about me?” said Martin.

  “You mean after you lied to me and ruined our cross-country trip?” said Julie.

  Martin said nothing. He had no desire to go through this particular lecture again.

  “Truth is,” she continued, “I told him from the start you were a woman, a high school girl friend with severe depression who needed a Thelma and Louise type adventure to buck her up. I didn’t say anything about Elko because I knew Lee would think it was stupid. Because it is.”

  Martin chose to ignore the dig. “What was my name?”

  “Louise,” said Julie.

  “Very creative,” said Martin. “And what happened to the trip?”

  “You, Louise, died in a crane accident the day I got to Pierre.”

  “I was a crane operator?”

  “Bystander.”

  Martin supposed he deserved the ignoble fictional death. He watched the rock walls of the foothills rise to either side of the truck.

  “Why a
re you doing this?” said Martin. “Helping me.”

  Julie answered as if she had rehearsed. “Helen was going to die either way. Colorado Mustang Rescue doesn’t have enough money to go to every auction. No one was scheduled for that one. Too small. And I didn’t really think we would find a match.”

  That last part, to Martin, at least sounded honest.

  “But we did,” she said. “And this way, Helen can go out with some dignity. Even a little pomp, right? Besides, I still do want you to succeed, I really do. I know it’s dumb to still care. But you’ve taught me something Martin, you and Frank and cancer and your mom. It’s not how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose. I want to be with the winners. I want my friends to be with the winners. And you’re still my friend.” She flipped her eyes to her rearview mirror and honked. “What the hell is Bob doing back there? He’s all over the road.”

  Martin swiveled his head around in time to see Lattner drift onto the shoulder, overcorrect, kick gravel every which way behind him.

  “You know what she does?” said Julie.

  “Who?” said Martin.

  “CeeCi,” said Julie. “Her seminars. They’re about cancer, like treating cancer, preventing it, ‘Don’t Say Ta Ta to the Ta Tas,’ as she says on her website.”

  CeeCi preached the power of positive thinking as the ultimate balm for the breast cancer sufferer. Her “Banish the Thought!” weeks, offered at top-dollar destination spas throughout the West and West Coast, schooled mostly young, mostly healthy women on how vitamin D and daily affirmations could keep cancer away and, should some negativity accidentally slip in with the sunlight, could cure cancer without resort to chemo or other therapy.

  “Blame the victim,” said Julie. “That always works. It’s a medical fact.” She banged her palms twice at ten and two on the steering wheel. “It’s how they met, you know, she and Frank. She was counseling him on how to help me not be so sick.” Julie banged again, and Martin readied himself to grab across and steady the car, if need be.

  “Frank’s an ass,” said Martin, and meant it, as he always did, but felt it mightily right then.

  “I know,” said Julie. “I’m better clear of him. But goddamn it, I built those stores with him. Now they run themselves and the profits fund her ‘don’t metastasize, be happy’ bullshit. I’m glad you took her money. I’m glad we’re buying a dead horse with it. Only thing better would be if we could leave its head in her bed.”

  Julie jerked the wheel to the right and skidded onto an exit ramp. Lattner followed smoothly, his faulty wiring apparently better able to handle erratic driving then the alternative. They kept on past a strip mall with a boarded-over video store and a Kick It Out Little Dancers studio, then turned left into a long valley with foothills and mountains on all sides. Another left through a tall lodge pine gate, the sort that only worked when the sky was this big, and they were bumping down the dirt road to Conifer Veterinary Associates.

  Julie bypassed a concrete block clinic building and continued to a parking area next to a large log barn that matched the main house a hundred feet beyond. Martin turned around to make sure Lattner was still with them, but Julie kept her head fixed forward, staring across the yard of shin-high sagebrush, where a middle-aged man strode toward the truck.

  “Shit,” she whispered. “Change of plan. Tell Lattner.”

  Martin turned back. Julie snapped off her seat belt and opened the door.

  “Lee, I thought you’d gone,” she said.

  Dr. Lee Strachen was short, Martin was pleased to note, and almost completely bald. He walked with bowed legs, not like a rodeo rider, more like a former wrestler with a touch of arthritis. He had a big grin that spread out the entire bottom of his tanned face. When he reached Julie, he kissed her cheek. “Never left. The flight was cancelled, damn LIAT. I’ll try again Monday.”

  Martin unwound himself from the seatbelt and hopped out of the truck. He heard Julie introduce Lattner to the vet and heard the vet address Helen’s rear end.

  “Who do we have here?”

  Martin came around the back in time to help lower the trailer ramp. He received his own introduction to Lee, who, with Julie, then set about moving Helen out of her confinement. As they fussed over the mare, Martin tried to mime to Lattner to let Julie do the talking and believed Lattner mimed back that he was not a complete idiot.

  “She’s sound,” said Lee, patting the mare’s neck. “And well trained.”

  “Kill pen, if you can believe it,” said Julie distinctly, enunciating each syllable as if she were miscast in a poorly rehearsed community theater production of Black Beauty. Martin waggled his eyebrows at her. She opened her eyes wide and hunched her shoulders up.

  “We need to be able to use our words,” Lattner hissed in Martin’s ear, and Martin nodded with vigor. But it wasn’t until much later that evening that they got that chance. Lee turned out to be an enthusiastic and ever-present host. Insisting they stay for dinner, stay the night, take a hike in the nearby mountains, take a nap in the porch hammock, no friends like old friends, right, Jules?

  Jules?

  Over the course of pre-dinner G and Ts, Julie brayed out their cover story with such persistence and at such volume that Lee leaned over to Martin and asked, “Is your friend Bob hard of hearing?”

  They were going to deliver Helen to Mustang Manor in Elko, a nonprofit run by a dot.com magnate’s ex-wife with whom Lee, Julie, and Colorado Mustang Rescue had worked before. And wasn’t it marvelous that Julie’s childhood friend and her first real boss were, at the very same time, traveling to Elko for the Thirty-Second Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. Oh, how wonderful to have some company for the long drive! Oh, how forced the whole thing sounded, and Martin couldn’t believe that Lee was buying it, but he was. Such is love.

  “You two must have known Louise,” said Lee at one point. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Martin blanked for a moment on the tragic life of his doppelgänger, but Lattner picked up the slack. He took Lee’s hand, looked in his eyes, and said, “Thank you. It’s been difficult, but she would have wanted us to continue.” Go with it. Lattner should have the motto tattooed across his forehead.

  The evening passed from Bombay gin to an Oregon Bordeaux to a local whiskey artisanally aged in first-use American oak casks, the composition and making of which Lee knew more about than Martin thought seemly in a man without a financial stake in the distillery or a serious drinking problem. They talked of cowboy poetry. Lee hadn’t heard of the confluence, thank God, and showed polite interest, but not so much they had to fear he might look it up. Lee loved NPR, but only the morning shows, Morning Edition and BBC News Hour, thank God, and gave no sign that he had listened to the Cowboy Poetry Hour. Lee knew Martin was Frank’s brother—the less said about him the better they all agreed, thank God—and did not seem to view Martin as any sort of ally to Julie’s tormentor or rival to her affections. Thank God.

  After the second tumbler of Whiskey River’s blended malt scotch, Lee excused himself. He had to get up the next morning for church.

  “Church?” said Lattner, once Lee had left the room, and grabbed the bottle, poured them each another slug.

  “Unitarian,” said Julie. “So not really.”

  “Is that Mustang Manor stuff real?” said Martin, pulling his glass toward him.

  “Of course, it’s real,” said Julie. “They have over nine hundred square miles and at least a thousand rescued mustangs.”

  She would bring what she needed to euthanize Helen with them and do it on the road someplace, she had decided, since offing the animal at the clinic wasn’t a possibility with Lee in the house. Martin could drop the body at the rodeo ring at the fair ground, which was where the PBS crew was staging the funeral, according to Mac.

  “Done and done,” said Julie. “Our only problem will be if Lee gets too attached to Helen. S
he’s a nice horse.” There it was again. “And it’s happened before. He’s got two in his barn right now that started out rescues and ended up pets. But he’s off again Monday. When do we need to leave?”

  “It’s eleven hours to Elko,” said Lattner, looking at his phone. “Up through Salt Lake City then straight across.”

  “We’re not due in Elko until Wednesday night,” said Martin. “NPR got us rooms at the Red Lion Casino. I’d like to do it in two days, but I maxed out my last card at the Quality Inn.”

  “I’m not camping with a dead horse,” said Julie.

  “How much of CeeCi’s money is left? After we pay for the trailer,” said Lattner.

  Martin pulled out the clip and tossed it on the table. Julie picked it up, counted out eight bills, then unfurled two more. “Oh my God,” she said.

  “I don’t know how long it has been since you’ve stayed in a Motel 6,” said Martin, “but we need two rooms and two hundred is not going to do it. And don’t even think about a Hilton Garden Inn. Plus we’ve got to eat.”

  But Julie wasn’t looking at the bills, which lay crumpled and glowing ochre in the candlelight filtered through her scotch glass. She held a black card. “The Centurion,” said Julie.

  Martin turned to her and she showed it to him. He had never seen one before. The most exclusive credit card in the world. American Express, invitation only. Membership fees of upwards of $7,500 per year. Million-dollar annual spending floor. No spending ceiling. And the promise of exclusive, gilded, magical money doors open to exclusive, gilded, magical places all around the world.

  “It’s not yours,” said Martin.

  “Oh, but it is,” Julie said, squinting at the card’s face. “Or was. Look.” She held up the card. “Julie Oliphant. These things don’t expire. Looks like the bitch was too lazy to get a new one.”

  “You didn’t change your name back?” said Martin.

  “Not on my license. I renew by mail,” said Julie. “Good thing, right? Another point for inertia as a lifestyle choice.”