High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel

by Scott Cheshire

  “You could just go to Florida, open a store. Not so far away. Or upstate,” she said. I tried to respond, but she stopped me, and said, “I shouldn’t say that. Don’t listen.”

  “Josiah!” Dad shouted from upstairs. “Is that you?”

  Mom looked up at me. She put both hands on my hand, and squeezed my hand. Her eyes were so very anxious. “You know that I want you to go, don’t you? You know I am not your father.”

  “It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “I promise. And the moment you don’t feel good, you call me. I’ll jump right on a plane.”

  Dad’s footsteps were on the stairs. “Josiah?”

  Mom pulled at me weakly. I crouched down and we looked at each other face to face. My God, I came from inside this woman. Life was inside her, my life, and her life, and the very void I came from. Her cells would rise up and kill her, the second time around.

  Dad’s footsteps were in the hall. “Josiah?”

  I took her face in my hands, pulled her close, and kissed her head.

  “Up,” she said. “Before your father—”

  I shot up at the sound of his steps in the kitchen.

  “So,” he said. “A big day for the big shot.”

  A shadow, probably of some cloud, or of a passing plane, must have fallen over the house as the light gave way to dark through the blinds. The three of us stayed quiet, waiting for the daylight to right itself, because it always does. The next morning, I left for California, a brand-new millennium inching over the horizon.

  It was high time for inventory: and what lovely things can I say of that storeroom? Not much. Then again, how was it that a room a third the size of all of Otter Computer contained so many things, more than the rest of the store combined? Boxes on shelves, on tables, on the floor—where was the floor? I could barely see it. I remembered painting the floor when we first moved in, a slate gray color, and we even tried to get fancy. We started painting decorative yellow caution lines around the shelves. They were tall shelves. But we abandoned the idea halfway. Who was ever back there, anyway, but us? Plus, business got busy so fast—back in the beginning, I mean—that we never got around to finishing. A good problem to have. But now we had plenty of time, a good thing, too, because it would take all day.

  The storeroom was a mess. Rubber storage bins bursting with unwieldy spools of wiring, tools new and rusting, plastic tabs and drive plates removed from system cases, packages of nonscuff floor pads, of batteries and power cords. The cases themselves, desktops, large, small, and huge, arranged along the floor, against the wall, like VCRs tipped on their sides. And monitors! The dinosaur parts of the ’90s and early 2000s. Because they took up so much space. Like a television showroom in there, but stacked (of course, everything stacked), and precariously balanced on top of one another, 13-inch, 15-inch, 20-inch screens. Some were missing glass altogether, looking like cubbyholes for shoes. Screens were cracked, even shattered, broken shards protruding from the sides like teeth. My God, there was so much media, too. Zip discs, floppies, and compact discs. Bags of magnetic tapes. And the drives for each and every one, floppy drives and hard drives, the all of a sudden everywhere CD-ROM. And of course the boxes, so many boxes—of brand-new products, or broken products, or wrong products waiting for RMA return authorization stickers from distributors so we could hopefully, let us pray, get our money back. Laptops piled like impenetrable textbooks. Keyboards piled high like delicate rectangular plates. Green translucent motherboards like slices of vegetative earth, freeze-dried for science and posterity. And not just the current, but the past, the long and recently dead stuff mercilessly mined for parts, from manufacturers who had long ago disavowed their products. It was overwhelming, gloomy, and cold.

  Amad on the other hand was out front, with people—customers, maybe. Warm sun coming through the windows.

  I stepped on a screw; it went right through my sole and into my foot. I cried out.

  “Josie?”

  “I’m fine!” I heard Amad coming closer, talking to someone, maybe Teri.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Stepped on something, but I’m good. Just leave me alone and we’re in business.”

  “Good!”

  He walked away.

  I saw in a far corner, by the back wall, a small clear space. By the memory and CPUs. The central processing units, each no bigger than a stamp. I went over there, with clipboard in hand, and made sure my pen could write. I decided to start with the memory and the CPUs, which hold a special place for computer technicians, for someone like Amad, because without them you have no computer. Not so unlike a human, a computer can always do more, and know more, but only with respect to the capacity of memory and the CPU. The two hemispheres of a computer’s brain. As for computer sellers, like me, the processors were special because they were expensive.

  They were the only carefully ordered things in that room. Memory chips set in foam, in shut black cases. In neat rows like caviar tins. I read each label and made careful notes of what memory we actually had, what we thought we had, and before long my mind strayed away to other precious things.

  I used to at one time actually believe Sarah had always been waiting for me in California. But tragedy generally works on us this way. We retrofit, like a prophecy in reverse. Sarah and I met in the Otter Beach Bookstore (also now out of business). I was standing there holding a large used King James Bible bound in soft leather, very old, and it fell open in my hands like a small animal dozing in my arms. Oversize and heavy, with a crimson silken bookmark hanging from the pages like the tongue of some serpent encased in a large block of yellowing cheese. I used to sometimes go to the bookstore in the middle of the day just to hold the massive thing in my hands. Never really read from it, except for the times I scanned for typos. I’d never once seen a typo in any Bible whatsoever and this had worried me for years. I wanted to look at it and hold it, open it and smell it, try to imbibe it in a way I’d not done before. To the point that I once tore a small corner piece from a page and let it soak on my tongue like a wafer. That was only the once, and I felt stupid afterward. It tasted the way old pillows smell. I was thirty-two when this happened.

  Nathan Two Foot was the grumpy and vaguely Native American man who owned the bookstore. He would say something like, “Just take it already. From me to you.”

  And I would say, “But then I’d have no reason to come here and bother you.”

  And then I would usually leave, because my store needed me. Actually, at that point, my four stores needed me.

  When I met Sarah, I guess I was something of a retail mogul, a respected businessman of the community. Amad and I led in points on the company’s league bowling team. Here I was, a man with a 180 average and a custom red leather bowling glove. Team captain—a reluctant one, though. I liked being in charge, and part of me liked the attention. It came naturally to me, but it also made me feel uncomfortable. What I liked most was maintaining a cool and quiet presence at work, making random check-and-sees at the other locations. Employees looking up from a computer screen surprised to find me standing there and smiling. I never said much. But when we bowled or had a barbecue at Amad’s or an employees’ night at a local Chili’s, I liked the opportunity to command. I would stand, and surprise them again. I would be charming, magnetic, if I wanted. But on most days, I didn’t feel the need. I watched Sarah walk into the bookstore, not so much walk in as fall in, with her thin black running shorts, and her nearly sheer and wet-with-fresh-sweat T-shirt, aqua blue running bra showing beneath. The lenses of her glasses fogged. She came falling in with her hands on her knees, completely out of breath.

  She said, “What’s new, Nate?”

  I had never once thought of calling him Nate, and was immediately filled with jealously for the level of intimacy Nathan Two Foot obviously had with this small woman, glistening there in a shaft of beach light.

  Nathan looked up from his book and asked how much.

  “Sixteen miles,” she said. “Give or take.”

>   He said, “There is something wrong with you. Who works themselves like this on a weekend?”

  “You’re working,” she said.

  “This isn’t work.” He looked back at his book and turned a page.

  I must have looked ridiculous. My mouth open like in a cartoon, that tremendous book in my hands.

  She walked over, ducked beneath the cover some, looked back up, and said, “If that’s a King James: terrible translation.” Her hair was a bit knotted up and back in a wet feathery bunch. Some frizzy wisps were dancing.

  “My hair.” She pointed at it. “Is it ridiculous? I was running and the wind is crazy.”

  I said, “A little bit. Yeah.”

  “Who buys a Bible?”

  “I like to look at it.” Her hair was in the hinge of her glasses. “Your hair.” I put my hand near it.

  “What.”

  “It’s in the hinge.”

  “The hinge.”

  I laughed at how she said it.

  She carefully took off her glasses and freed the red tangle. She looked at me and I could see she was straining. I moved in closer. Her eyes were hard at first, and then I swear we didn’t speak for a long time. She just looked at me, trying to see me without any help.

  She finally said, “For a second or two I can see you clearly without my glasses. Then you go blurry again.”

  I said, “I can see you clearly. Very clearly.”

  “Well, you got strange kind of quickly.”

  I said, “I don’t feel so strange.”

  “Me neither. Maybe.”

  “What did you mean about the translation?”

  She laughed. “Ah, you broke the spell.”

  She looked toward the front of the store, like she was waiting for someone. “It’s beautiful, I’m kidding. Bad joke,” she said. “I’m a translator, Hebrew,” gesturing Blah, blah, it’s boring.

  We were still standing there.

  I said, “And you’re here for…”

  “Catching my breath.” She looked back to the front of the store again.

  “You’re waiting for someone.”

  “I get a little restless some places. But I like it here. And I like Nathan. You’re waiting for someone?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Me neither.”

  “And I come here to run, a good path. Isn’t that heavy?”

  I put the book back on the shelf.

  She walked toward the rear of the store. And I followed.

  The door was wide open, and she was in the narrow restroom, washing her face. She threw water on her face and on her hair, and every time she lifted her arms the T-shirt lifted, too. Just enough. And, my God, is there anything in this world as intoxicating as that pink rise of hip skin all crimped from the elastic band on a pair of running shorts—has to be shorts—and peeking out from where you shouldn’t see, like a rosy and puckered sun; I wanted to press my face against the skin of her hip—

  “You’re following me.”

  “What can I say, I think you’re cute,” I said. “And you’re not waiting for anyone. And I’m not waiting for anyone.…”

  She turned away from the mirror smoothing back her hair, smirking just barely. She was softening. “You think you’re charming. When really you’re just a weirdo who hangs out in a bookstore.”

  I laughed. “No, no, no. I run a store down the street. I just come in sometimes. At lunch.” I cleared my throat. “You know, I actually have four stores.” I showed four fingers, wiggled them. She laughed.

  And then she tripped, walking out of the restroom.

  I should’ve caught her, but I didn’t, and she went flailing into the aisle. She stopped herself just short of smashing her chin on the floor. I rushed to help her up, and she let me.

  Really I wanted to laugh, because people falling down always make me laugh, but she seemed so put together and maybe a little bit hard and serious. I decided in a split second that whether or not she laughed would determine everything else from now on. And then she cried out. Laughing like a shameless little kid, showing me her palms, scratched all bloody and littered with dust and grit and sand. She laughed and really she couldn’t stop laughing. She covered her mouth and I fell for her, hard. Now I was also undeniably staring at her mouth, how her laugh was total and vulnerable and how she was fine with that, I’d never laughed like that, and how she bit her lip because she was starting to get nervous, and then I realized that I was the one making her nervous because I was also obviously imagining what she looked like in not so many clothes—but not in some lascivious or creepy way, but because I was totally overtaken by her skin and her hair and the small belly rise just above her shorts, and, my God, that glorious little crescent swath of skin—

  “You’re just staring at me like it’s normal.”

  She studied me. She took her glasses back off and looked at me, her eyes scrunched and then open wide, trying to see more clearly. Then she grinned. It was a half grin, like I know exactly what you’re thinking, mister. There we were beside the extraordinarily narrow restroom in the back of the store, beside the art books and the coffee-table books (where I first met Blake and his angels), and I wanted to put my mouth on the salty rise of her so slight belly.

  “You work on this street?” She walked away from the restroom.

  “I do.”

  “Prove it.”

  We walked over. I introduced her to Amad, and I think she was impressed, this also thanks to Amad who has never failed to make a good showing for me.

  I offered to buy her lunch.

  “Look at me,” she said. “I’m a sweaty mess.”

  “Or a coffee.”

  We all walked outside.

  “I do have a change of clothes in the car.” She looked at Amad like, Can I trust this guy or what? He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I can get us a seat outside.” I pointed to the diner at the end of the street, across from the pier. “They have a mean breakfast burrito, and it might not be too late.”

  She looked at her watch and then walked away, yelling, “What about your store?”

  I didn’t answer.

  She turned around and saw me watching her, laughed, and shook her head.

  She changed in the diner restroom and then we sat outside on the deck, facing the water, where she relished every last bite of her burrito, which I found exhilarating. And watching this made me enjoy my omelette like no omelette I’d ever had before or have ever had since. She stretched back and yawned, reaching for the sun, and said, “I have nothing to do all day.” Then she ordered a Bloody Mary and asked for a bottle of hot sauce.

  I joined her.

  And then we had another Bloody Mary.

  And then we had a few petite margaritas each, and before you know it we were drunk in the middle of the day, fully alive in our liquor-dumb bodies. Just for the hell of it, we started acting like a couple very much in love, like we’d known each other for years. And then it kind of stuck and started to feel real, even though all the while our afternoon was abundant with the most wonderful of surprises, like her name, who she was, and where she came from, her parents, my parents, and at one point I apparently launched into a sermonic diatribe about God, the Devil, and the World and Everything in It. I’m told I instructed an entire deck full of people on the finer points of Armageddon and Y2K. We walked on the beach in the late afternoon, smashed on tequila and falling on each other, acknowledging that what we were doing was ridiculous and we’d have to face the consequences in the morning. I begged her, Please, just let me just kiss that pretty little ribbon of skin on your hips, and she said What on earth are you talking about?

  “On your hips.” I hiccupped.

  “What.” She started looking about herself. “What?”

  “From your shorts.” I pointed to the place, now safely cushioned by the hug of a gray sweatpant.

  She folded down the pant at the waist one inch, and said, “Here.”

  I knelt down in the sand and I lightly kissed her hip. S
he patted my head.

  Then I vomited on the sand right beside her, not a lot, but enough to cause her to start laughing, and kick sand over my mess like a mother would or a girlfriend would, I imagined, and she led me to the water where she sat me down. She leaned me back and wet my hair and washed my soiled face in the lapping tide. Drunk, too, she stroked my head, laughing out, and remembering to cover her mouth. I never went back to the giant King James.

  She moved in three months later, I insisted, and we threw ourselves at each other whenever possible. And this wasn’t just sex, mind you, but face-petting and back-kneading on the beach come sundown, and making out in restaurant bathrooms like we were in high school. I liked to watch her eyes go wet with a kind of boozy zip when we drank white wine. And then we’d fall on each other in the stairwell. Sarah took to me much like one often takes to a puppy, impetuously, absolutely, lovingly. In the beginning we were on fire, and I knew one thing: that I lived in the world, and for the first time I was really living on Earth Time, my feet firmly planted on the hard ground, here in this place of no angels or demons, where clocks make sense and never go backward, only forward, and who knows what all awaits us when we get there, and how we got here and where we come from makes no real difference at all. I believed myself worthy of that time with her. She was a woman who wanted to spend herself in love because, well, her rock-hard parents never let her spend love on them, and I was the kind of man, it turns out, who’d eat it all up, a cheapskate at a buffet stuffing his pockets with bread. I have to say here in the interest of fairness that I really did love her for this.

  Sarah and I got married, quietly, on the beach, in the fall of 1997, on Otter Beach by the legs of the Main Street boardwalk. By a local judge. Just Sarah, and me, Amad and Teri. White flowers, flip-flops, and the crash of water in the surf. Tidal foam. It was lovely. I called my parents two days later to tell them. They’d known about Sarah, of course, and were happy to hear it, happy just to hear I was happy. That we were happy. So we flew out to see them as soon as possible. It was one of those rare times in life when happiness reigns; not that we became unrealistic or lived with rose-colored glasses on our noses—and I never did get that saying, actually, because I’ve worn real rose-colored glasses, orange-colored ones, too, and it’s nothing less than wonderful, and in no way stops you from seeing the everyday ugliness that people are capable of; it merely changes the light, and I like light. It felt like we were wearing those white clothes, and holding those white flowers in our hands, for days.