Rutting Season

by Mandeliene Smith

  * * *

  That terrible night, when Pam had spotted Brian lying so strangely on the frozen ground, her mind had refused. No was what she thought. Not a plea or a prayer but a command: No.

  Even as she ran to call the ambulance, even when the EMT stood up in defeat; even the next day, when she was making the funeral plans and relatives were arriving, she was secretly refusing. The blows that came after—the animals dying, the children’s bewildered grief, the nightly jolt of waking and finding him gone—these were nothing somehow, or rather they were more of the same, water poured into a torrent of water. She stood there and took it.

  But now her resistance deserted her. She had done this. If Ace died, if he foundered, it would be her fault alone.

  He raised his head and looked at her; then he burrowed his nose back in the bin and began eating in a frenzy, flinging grain against the metal sides. She made herself step forward and grab his halter; then she jerked his head out and backed him into the aisle.

  She clipped him into the crossties with shaking hands and went to get the thermometer and stethoscope. A fluttery weakness had come over her, and she leaned against him to steady herself while she took his vital signs. She had seen a lot of colic over the years but only two cases from grain: one in her first pony, the other in a dressage horse at the barn where she had trained. The horse had died when the swelling grain ruptured her intestines. The pony had survived, but afterward he had foundered—his hooves had curled back on themselves like elf shoes, and he could never be ridden again. They had kept him anyway, as a pet. You could do that with a pony.

  She put Ace in his stall and took the water bucket out. Then she went back to the house to call the vet.

  “Oh boy,” he said. It was Leland, the younger partner, the nice one. “Any idea how much he ate?”

  “No,” she said. “A lot, I think.”

  “Pulse and everything fine?”

  “So far.”

  “Well, get him walking and let me know how things progress.” He told her his cellphone number and she wrote it on her arm. When he had hung up, she called Trish to ask if she could take the kids overnight.

  “Of course,” Trish said. “Oh, Pam, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Pam whispered. She stopped to get control of her voice. “You still have their sleeping bags, right?”

  * * *

  She walked Ace on the driveway: down to the mailbox, then back up to the house, then again. He was bright-eyed and frisky, and every time he caught sight of the other horses, he tossed his head up and whinnied. Pam looked away, sick with guilt. He didn’t know what was coming. She had forgotten to change out of her riding boots and they were blistering her heels, but this seemed to her justified, so she did nothing about it.

  Around two o’clock Ace started nipping his sides; by three he was trying to go down on the driveway. She put him in the paddock, where he wouldn’t hurt himself if he thrashed, and went to call the vet.

  She waited for Leland in the scant shade of the linden tree, watching Ace paw and turn and bite at himself. He went down and rolled, and she pulled him up by the halter—if he twisted a gut it would be all over. He stood for a while sweating, his eyes anxious; then he went down again. The dogs came by, sniffed the air, and slunk off. When the vet finally came, an hour and a half later, Pam’s relief bordered on elation. But Leland’s face went still when he saw the horse, and he performed the examination in silence.

  “Is there an impaction?” Pam asked.

  “Yes, in the colon. I’m not sure if the cecum is involved or not.” Leland rubbed his jaw. “Well, we can give him mineral oil, see how that does.”

  Pam managed a nod. Mineral oil seemed to her a remedy from the nineteenth century, like cupping or leeches—well intentioned but useless. She held the twitch on Ace’s lip while Leland slipped the tube down his throat. When he was done, she trailed him out to his truck.

  He opened the door and put in his bag. “Do you have insurance on him?” he said.

  She nodded. What he meant was could she afford surgery, but she knew that if it got that far, Ace’s chances would be slim.

  “You might want to go ahead and hook the trailer up just in case we need to take him in,” Leland said. “If he hasn’t passed anything by nine or he gets noticeably worse, you know, pulse over fifty, an increase in distress—”

  “Sitting like a dog,” she added, grimly. That was what the dressage horse had done.

  Leland paused. “Well, yes, of course, if you see that,” he said. He put his hand on the truck door. “So, anything changes for the worse, call the answering service and they’ll page Norton.”

  “Oh,” Pam said, “Norton.”

  Norton was the other vet, and he didn’t like Pam. He was a homely man, with large, squarish limbs and the bitter arrogance of someone who expected to be slighted. His wife had left him, very publicly, for the local dentist a few years earlier. Pam would have felt sorry for him, but his dislike for her had been so immediate she never got the chance. When she had brought in the dead kittens, he had just raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Congenital would be my guess,” he’d said, and then he had crossed his arms and waited for her to go.

  She had stood there for a moment feeling frivolous, spoiled, shallow—whatever it was he disliked her for. Then she had picked up the box of kittens and left.

  “Norton’s good, Pam,” Leland said. “He’ll do a good job.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. She watched his truck until it disappeared from view.

  * * *

  The hours dragged on. Dusk fell and she brought the other horses back to eat. Later, she went to the house and called the children to say good night. She made a peanut-butter sandwich but her throat was closed, and she threw it away and went back out to the paddock. Ace was standing by the fence, his head sunk. He had extended his legs in an effort to ease the pain, and this made him look swaybacked and broken, like an old nag. She went up and put a hand on his dirt-encrusted neck, but his eyes reflected no awareness of her or anything else. The horse she knew had disappeared.

  She turned away, sickened. A terrible pressure was building in her head. She walked around to the back of the tree and sat down where she wouldn’t have to see him. The things she had done—against nature, against her own ability even—were coming back to her. Carrying the bloody puppy. Dragging the bloated goat bodies from the pond. Stacking the dead kittens in the shoe box.

  She gripped her head. She had the feeling of something cracking, of a tremendous force bearing down. What good had she been? She hadn’t even been there when Brian died. And when she had gotten there— Her mind recoiled at the thought of her exaggerated gasping, her stupid fingers fumbling to get under his scarf. There was something monstrous, something treacherous and insincere about the ordinary way she had gone on functioning while Brian lay there cold. And the dumb show of running to call 911—running, when she already knew it was too late.

  Ace’s hooves scraped wearily against the dirt. She put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes. She didn’t mean to fall asleep; she was just going to spell her eyes for a minute, but the relief of giving up was too strong. She let herself sink.

  * * *

  She was floating in a green dream, in the sleepy, droning calm of a summer afternoon. A horse took shape and went galloping, galloping, bright as a penny. Not lame, she thought. She could hear the hooves in slow motion, rising up and coming down on the dry, solid ground. But the rhythm was off; the hoofbeats were too far apart.

  She woke with a start. It wasn’t galloping she’d heard, it was Ace, rolling. She jumped up and went to pull on his halter, but he lifted only his chin; when she let go, his head flopped back into the dirt. Her watch said 11:05. She should have called the vet two hours ago.

  She phoned the answering service and then she went back to the paddock and sat down in the dirt with Ace’s head in her lap. Now it seemed right that it was Norton who would come—Norton, who had seen through her.<
br />
  He was there in less than a half hour. She stood unsteadily when she saw him walking up along the fence. He didn’t bother with a greeting, just took a stethoscope out of his bag and went straight to the horse. “How’d he get into the grain?” he said, crouching down to take the pulse.

  “I had him in the paddock—I was going to ride—” she began, but it was too much effort. “I left the door open.”

  Norton took the stethoscope out of his ears. “And what time did you find him?” He went over everything: when the symptoms started, what Leland had given him; how he’d been since. She answered blindly, hardly knowing what she said.

  “What was his pulse when you called?”

  Pam flushed. In her panic she had forgotten to take it.

  Suddenly Ace lurched up and sat on his haunches. Norton stiffened. The horse’s ears were back and his eyes had suddenly focused, as though attending to something they couldn’t see. For a long minute nothing happened. Then his back legs jerked. Please, God, Pam thought, but she was alone; she knew that. No one was going to help her.

  The horse’s legs jerked again. With tremendous effort he dragged them under himself and scrambled up. He lifted his tail.

  “Here we go,” Norton said.

  It was the sound of the manure falling that made her understand: He was past it; he was okay.

  * * *

  She stood at the horse’s head while Norton talked. Something had made him friendly—the horse’s recovery or maybe just the late hour—and he was chatting away about other cases, about founder, about a prank in vet school years before. She listened in a daze, not following. She would have liked to speak, to show her gratitude, but she couldn’t. The terrible knot of the day had unraveled; she had been spared. It made no sense.

  When Ace had passed the rest of the impaction, Norton folded his stethoscope into his bag and clicked the clasp shut. “He should be okay,” he said. “Leland will be out in the morning to check his feet again, but they seem all right now.” He pointed a finger at the horse. “Next time don’t eat so much,” he said.

  “Oh,” Pam said, “there won’t be a next time.”

  Norton slung his bag over his shoulder. “Well, everyone has to eat.”

  “No,” she said, “no, I mean I’m going to sell him.” She could feel Norton watching her. “I can’t, you know, I obviously can’t take care of him properly anymore. So . . .” She kept her brimming eyes focused on her hand, which was stroking the wide, flat bone of Ace’s head.

  “Everyone has to eat,” Norton said again.

  She did not understand his words; she couldn’t even attach them to the conversation they were having, but, like an animal, she understood the tone. Not forgiveness, not liking, but a kind of permission. Something rushed loose in her. She listened to Norton’s feet turn in the dirt, the slap of the fence boards as he ducked through. When she heard his truck door slam, she put her head against the horse’s neck and sobbed.

  Later she got a couple of horse blankets and lay down in the paddock where she could hear Ace. She gazed up at the dizzy, patternless sweep of the stars. Brian had died here, alone on this dirt. Her exhausted mind summoned up the shape of his body with startling clarity: the weight of his arms, the smell of his chest where her face had reached. He was gone; she would raise their children alone. She thought this; she felt the iron truth of it in her mouth, and at the same time she felt herself drifting away—into comfort and sleep, into the electric hum of her own pumping blood.

  * * *

  She woke before dawn to the silvery fluting of the wood thrushes. Ace was up, eating hay. The air was cold, but she could see that the light was coming, a bluish green band hung over the eastern hill. She threw back the blankets and stood gingerly on her blistered feet. She wanted coffee and a hot shower and an egg-and-sausage breakfast; she wanted the children back. She put her hand on Ace’s neck, and he bent around to sniff her. Then she climbed stiffly through the fence and started for the house.

  The valley lay quiet under the changing sky. She turned her head to take in the whole of it: the three dark hills, the broad, dim swath of the pasture; in the middle, hidden, the running stream. Soon the sun would break over the hill, morning would come. A thrill passed through her. It was Saturday. She would take the kids for a picnic, she thought, or maybe to the lake. She would get her hair cut.

  She stopped at the truck, which was still parked the way she’d left it, with the horse trailer hooked up. Better to put the trailer away now, she thought, when she didn’t have the children to watch. As she reached for the driver’s-side door, a flicker of movement caught her eye.

  Something was in there.

  Warily, she put her head through the open window and squinted into the gloom. For a long moment she saw nothing. Then, in the dim light from the windshield, she caught the unmistakable gleam of an eye.

  Aidan’s hamster. It was sitting on the passenger side, holding one of the shrunken French fries that collected in the cracks of the seats.

  Pam stood still, putting it together. It must have been Aidan, carrying it around in his pocket; he must have brought it into the car one day without her noticing, and accidentally let it go. It had been in there all this time, living off the food the kids dropped. Her eyes had adjusted, and now she saw it quite clearly: the twitching nose, the shiny, bulbous eyes. The old revulsion rose in her throat. And yet it had survived, she had to give it that.

  She stared, wonder and disgust battling in her mind. Reassured by the lack of movement, the hamster raised the French fry to its mouth and began to eat.

  RUTTING SEASON

  Carl had a secret thought about his boss, Ray.

  Ray had a secret thought about Lisa, one of the girls in fundraising.

  Lisa had no thoughts about Ray, secret or otherwise. At least that’s what she would have said if anyone asked her. And who would ask her? Ray just wasn’t the kind of guy a girl like Lisa would think about. He was old for one thing—she put him at thirty-five, minimum—and he had the slumped shoulders and jutting forehead of a Neanderthal. Also, he was short and prone to wearing V-neck sweaters in cheap synthetic blends. If for some reason his name had come up in conversation, she would have said something like “Ray? You mean Ray the computer guy?” as though she knew a number of Rays and couldn’t quite place him.

  In fact, Lisa knew exactly who Ray was. She had inadvertently been the cause of a long-running joke about him. Once, at an office party, Ray had gotten drunk and stared so closely at Lisa’s cleavage that his face practically touched the scoop of her scoop-neck bodysuit. In the bathroom afterward, when Lisa recounted the incident to a handful of co-workers, Lauren had wrinkled her nose and exclaimed, “Eeew! A booby gazer!”

  After that, whenever the database went down or the printer wouldn’t work one of them would say, “Better call Booby Gazer,” and they would throw their heads back and laugh. They always pronounced it in the Boston way: “Booby Gayzah,” although none of them actually spoke like that. Over time the nickname had morphed, first into “Bobby Gayzah,” then, after a number of months, into “Bobby.”

  “Why does everyone call me Bobby?” Ray asked one day. He was standing in the hallway, looking back at them with the meek, bemused expression Lisa had sometimes seen on her father’s face when she and her sisters mocked him. She felt sorry then and a little ashamed, and she pretended to be busy with a file on her desk while Lauren said, in a bright, false voice, “That’s not your name?”

  These two incidents were the exception, though; most days Ray never crossed Lisa’s mind. So it was a surprise one morning when she woke up to find that she’d dreamed about him.

  In the dream, Ray had a daughter. That was it, that was the whole dream: the fact of the daughter (she was about five or six years old), and a sweet, floating sense of joy—Ray’s joy—for he had been beside himself with happiness.

  “Yeah, right,” Lisa said out loud, throwing off the covers. The floor was cold under her feet but the air wa
s warm, an early-summer sensation. She stopped to stretch, naked, in front of the mirror and her breasts rose up a little, nipples erect. She stood there a moment on the cool floor, transfixed by the perfect wholeness of her reflected body. A nameless anticipation was blossoming inside her. The dullness, the shrinking withdrawal of the winter months, was over; she felt dilated and alive, like a flower tilting to meet the sun.

  Out of nowhere she thought of the VP of fundraising, the corded muscles of his forearms when he rolled up his sleeves. Not that this meant anything. He was married, he had two children; there was no way she’d go down that path. The thought was just an extension of the physical happiness she felt right then, of the heightened sense of perception that brought to her, as she dropped her arms and walked into the bathroom, the memory of his smell—sharp and slightly sour beneath the starch of his shirt.

  * * *

  Lisa had no intention of mentioning her dream to Ray. Why on earth would she? It was weird enough that she’d dreamed it. Later that day, though, when she saw him sit down alone at the other end of the office lunchroom, she heard herself call out, “Hey, Ray, I dreamt you had a daughter.”

  Ray looked up from his sub. “A daughter?” he said, his face oddly empty of expression. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Lisa said carelessly, “a little girl, like about five years old.”

  Ray tipped his head. “A daughter,” he said. A quizzical, wondering look came into his eyes.

  Then Ray’s assistant, Carl, lumbered in with a slice of pizza on a paper plate and Ray’s expression darkened. “You better not be coming in here if that server’s not backed up,” he said.

  Carl bent his head like a balky ox. “I’m not,” he muttered.

  Ray glanced at Lisa and snorted. “What do you mean you’re not? You’re not in here?”