He hated being inside the rodeo arena. He’d plod around, sneak mouthfuls of grass and basically ‘hang loose,’ perfectly happy outside the high plank gate to the inner arena. But, as soon as that gate opened and I nudged him toward it—all bets were off.
The secret was not to stop.
Have you seen barrel races on TV where the women have their horses at a full gallop before the cameras even see them? They fly out of the bowels of the arena like runaway trains. Now they ‘might’ be working on a better time, but they also might be depriving their horses of too many decisions. Decisions like, Do I really want to do this? There’s a term for it—ring sour. My horse, if given a choice, would turn around and climb over the fence rather than go into the ring for less than the 25 or so seconds it took to run the barrel course. Maybe he didn’t like the people watching, or the way the announcers pronounced his name. I’ll never know.
Anyway, he could assert his independence of my meager control at any time. He never dumped me in the dirt in front of all those spectators, but we came close a couple of times. The worst was when we flew through the gate, aimed across the arena toward the first barrel when the no-time buzzer sounded. I pulled up as the announcer informed the crowd—and me—that the timers were down. They’d have them fixed as soon as possible.
Well, that left me, and my adrenalin pumping horse in the middle of a place he absolutely did not want to be. Once my horse was primed to run—waiting left his mindset. I can’t imagine the look on my face. There was no talking him down. First he backed toward the gate, then, in a term called crow-hopping, he side stepped his way toward the gate. I could practically hear his mind working, if I can just get to the gate I can get rid of her and climb out.
My only option was to spin him in circles. So we did that, him spinning, me praying and spinning, while two cowboys scratched their heads on how come the timers weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. We were within ten feet of the dreaded gate when the buzzer went off again and the announcer said the timers were fixed. Needless to say after all that nervous spinning, we didn’t even place that day. I was just glad to live through it.
I don’t want you to think my horse wasn’t very smart, because in many ways, he was. He proved it when he decided to be an escape artist. If a fence stood between him and another horse he liked or greener grass, he would press his chest against it to measure the height—then, if it was doable, he would casually leap over it. He also knew his way around our small town. When I moved him from one ranch to another approximately eight miles away, he just jumped the fence and made his way back to his original home. In order to do that he had to cross two roads with moderate traffic and a bridge over a river. I used to wonder if he even stopped at the red lights and looked both ways.
Now I’ve made him sound crazy when in many ways he was a gentleman. He never bit, kicked or bucked. He’d take the bit easy. He didn’t crib or break reins. Once when he reared up and I fell underneath him, he stood absolutely still, even turning to look under his belly like, What the heck are you doin’ down there?
But, he hated lightning, or any loud noise for that matter. A crack of booming Florida thunder had put me off his back and onto my own butt a few times. It’s amazing how a two thousand pound animal can bunch up and disappear out from under you in a split second—an example of that speed I was talking about before. The problem is, they often jump in the absolute wrong direction. A big yellow school bus with screeching brakes should be something any horse would want to avoid—instead he did his best, over my objections, to run in front of it in a panic.
Now that would bring me back to our adventure in attending the drag races. Silly me, it never occurred to me that my horse had never been to a real tire squealing, smoke belching, jet-engine sounding drag race. Thinking back, maybe it was my own IQ that needed testing.
Well, my horse and I showed up just in time for the first race. I joined the group of spectators, guys who’d come along to bet or watch mixed with a few other racer’s girlfriends, standing off to the side. Needless to say I was the only person on horseback. The racers themselves were gathered around the cars of the competition—looking at engines, talking horse power. My boyfriend waved once from his car but didn’t come over right away. With a help of a friend of his, he was removing the baffles on the headers of his 57’ Ford—sort of like taking the muffler off a car. It made the car go faster—something to do with airflow—and it also made the engine sound like a roaring beast on steroids.
My horse did fairly well as the first two racers squealed off the starting line. His ears twitched back and forth and he seemed to stiffen up—ready to jump. I talked to him, rubbed between his ears trying to distract him. I don’t know how much he heard me over the engines. The next two cars had him stepping sideways—and you guessed it—moving directly for the starting line. I was beginning to realize that hanging around drag racing was a bad idea. Finally, in the hopes of calming him down I dismounted, determined to keep him from pulling away from me. It was a last resort since contrary to popular belief, most times—unless you’re The Horse Whisperer—it’s easier to control a horse when you’re on his back than when you’re standing next to him.
Well, it was my boyfriend’s turn to race then and, glory be, my horse kept his ears flat back and his butt bunched up but he didn’t make a break for it. Maybe he decided since my boots were on the ground he wouldn’t be required to do any racing himself. And he was okay with that.
Of course my boyfriend won his race. He pulled his car off the pavement on the back side of the starting line, collected his winnings, and came over to see me.
That’s when we heard the sirens.
Police cars arriving in the middle of an illegal drag race is like rocks thrown at a hornets nest. People ran in every direction, cars spun in the dirt and smoked tires on the asphalt. I had all I could do to hold on to my horse so I decided to remount with the help of my boyfriend. Since he was too far away from his car to make a run for it, he climbed up behind me. We were doing our best to look like innocent bystanders while the police looked over the cars they’d caught and pulled drivers out for a trip to jail.
We should’ve used my one horse-power to make like a tree and leave, but alas, my boyfriend didn’t want to abandon his car to the tow trucks if he didn’t have to, so we hung around watching the commotion. Unfortunately, it gave one policeman time to notice us and he waved us over.
“What are you two doing out here?” He gave my horse a wide berth.
“Watching the races,” my boyfriend answered.
“You have any idea who owns that yellow and white 57’ Ford over there?”
“No, sir,” my boyfriend said.
The policeman looked at me and I shook my head. I was hoping it wasn’t really a lie if I didn’t say anything out loud.
Then he asked for my boyfriend’s driver’s license.
Well, it didn’t take long to run the car plates and match them up to my boyfriend. When the policeman walked back over he said he’d have to take him in for racing.
“I was only watching.”
“Then why are the headers opened up? You can’t drive it that way on the street.”
It was kind of hard to explain to my boyfriend’s parents how he happened to get arrested off the back of my horse, but there you have it. Life in a small town. At lease he’d made enough money by winning his race to pay the fine.
As for my horse, that was the last time I ever took him to a drag race. I could tell he hadn’t enjoyed it much even though we’d become part of local legend. Drag Racer Arrested On Horseback. It had been a nerve wracking day for all concerned. My horse and I did have quite an adventure at a local Halloween carnival the next year but that’s a story for another day. Just take my advice—never try to put a sheet on a horse.
The Mermaid of Cow Pie Spring
by
&n
bsp; Deborah Smith
“A mermaid never lets herself sink to the bottom.”
—Patsy McGee
PATSY MCGEE was just 20 years old when she fled along the back roads of northern Florida on that fateful summer night in 1950, a green-eyed, sunburned head-turner with a lustrous swoop of auburn hair and a thick cracker drawl straight out of the dirt-poor fishing camps and watermelon farms far from the tourist beaches. She’d given birth down in Tampa only that morning. It felt as if someone had pushed a bowling ball out of her body, and her breasts ached with milk. Even her wedding band hurt as it lay heavy on her chest by a thin gold chain, hidden. Her newborn son, Paul, slept beside her in a half-bushel tomato basket on the black cloth seat of Patsy’s old Studebaker sedan.
Upon leaving Tampa Patsy had hurriedly swaddled the baby in the makeshift bassinet, lining the basket with a blue blanket on which she’d embroidered mermaids, daisies, and several fish who might be whales or might be largemouth bass. Tasteful art was not Patsy’s forte. Hidden in the Studebaker’s trunk were several costumes Patsy had stolen when Weeki Wachee Springs, near St. Petersburg, had fired her from their mermaid show. Beneath the beautiful mermaid tails lay a small blue suitcase crusted with dried mud and sand. Inside the suitcase was twenty-thousand dollars in small bills. Patsy had carefully wrapped the packets in aluminum foil before burying them inside the suitcase. She didn’t trust banks. She had grown up on the fading cusp of the Depression, listening to her granny curse them.
Patsy was nothing if not sincere in her beliefs, right or wrong. The first red-headed Scottish McGee had sunk his shabby boots into the muck of a Florida shore in the 1700’s, and, ever since, generations of McGee had made their staunchly ordinary Southern livings—farming, fishing, and drinking—in the sub-tropical pine forests and sandy small towns of the state’s panhandle, that less celebrated top half of Florida where a fall frost actually colors the trees and dulls the oleander shrubs.
But Patsy was special. She was a mermaid.
She had known so since childhood. A mother can run away, a father can die, and a grandma with nothing but a fish camp cabin for a home can raise an abandoned child with no more love than she’d give a stray puppy, but if that child finds a dream to hold onto, she’ll survive. Patsy had found her dream early on, in the water.
She’d grown up swimming fearlessly in the depths of a pond-sized puddle named Coohatchee Springs, on the Florida-Alabama border near Tallahassee, where Granny McGee worked as a cook for well-to-do businessmen who came from as far away as Jacksonville to rough it in cabins stocked with bourbon and cigars while casting their lines for giant catfish and bass.
Coohatchee Spring. In Creek Indian the word hatchee meant water, river, stream. But nobody could say for sure where the coo in Coohatchee came from, so as a child Patsy credited the name to the spring’s population of soft gray doves. Coo Hatchee. Dove Water. Patsy liked that image. Everybody said the doves were just ordinary birds, but the doves didn’t agree. They cooed and strutted happily among the far showier herons and egrets and kingfishers on the spring’s dock. Like Patsy, they refused to be ignored. The tiny spring was blue, like turquoise sky; to Patsy, swimming in it was like flying, like being a bird, escaping from the heat, the mosquitoes, the loneliness. Patsy searched for something that only seemed to exist in a fluid state, and she found it in the water.
“Little lady, did you know you’re swimming in the tiptop of a fluid world so deep it might come out on the other end off the coast of China?” a visiting fisherman had asked Patsy once. The man said he studied the ways of water for the government, so Patsy figured he knew what he was talking about.
“All the way to China?” she’d breathed, transfixed. The old folks like to say if you dug a hole deep enough you might go all the way through to the bottom of the world, and hit China. “Is it true?”
“Yes, indeed. A spring’s not the same as a lake, you know. A lake’s just a puddle on the surface of the earth; it gets its water from the top—from rain, from the creeks that feed it, from run-off. But a spring, ah! A spring gets its water straight from the heart of the planet. Spring water bubbles up through cracks and caves in the limestone bedrock. This whole part of northern Florida is sitting on that bedrock, as if planted on top of a flat rock sponge or a slab of Swiss cheese. There’s water trickling beneath every step we take, water slipping up and over and down and in and out through wondrous tunnels and caverns until it finds an open bowl in the limestone right up at the top, like this little spring, in the sunshine. And so that, little lady, is what Coohatchee Spring is. A bottomless limestone bowl.”
“Bottomless?” She had clasped her hands to her heart, trying to imagine. She was only ten at the time; infinity was a million years.
“Yes, bottomless, indeed. Because somewhere way down in the deepest, coldest pit of this spring you’ll find the spring’s pipes. Where the water squeezes up through layer upon layer of limestone.”
“If I dived down to the bottom I could swim inside one of those pipes?”
“No, now, little lady, even this tiny fishing puddle of a spring is too deep for you to do that. I’m sure its pipes—those limestone caves and tunnels full of aquifer water that feed it—are too narrow for even a little girl to squeeze into. But just you picture it! Endless roots of water, stretching from this very place you swim down through the limestone, down and down and down—”
“All the way to China!”
The man laughed and nodded. “All the way to the other side of the world.”
Patsy never forgot his description. He confirmed what she felt, that she belonged to a magical real of bottomless springs atop a hidden realm of moving water, connected to exotic and distant lands.
“Nothin’ but a bunch of hooey,” Granny McGee drawled at such ideas. She knew her place in life, and it wasn’t fancy. She cleaned and packed the fishermen’s catches in metal coolers of ice for the trip back to the city, or she’d cook up the fish for the men to gobble down right there at the camp’s picnic tables. Granny McGee floated forever in Patsy’s mind, a stout old manatee of a woman, grim and tough, always sweating in a straw hat and baggy overalls, her thick, reddened hands dropping cornmeal battered fish into huge cast iron skillets bubbling full of melted lard over a coal cook stove. Her kitchen had been a screened porch overlooking the lake.
When Patsy swam as a child she often lifted her head from the water to catch the scent of the open-air skillets. To her, the aroma was her grandmother’s way of calling her home, a sign of love that needed no words, some slim proof that Patsy might be wanted. Granny McGee only gave her one gift in all those years. When Patsy was about twelve the old lady bought her a book from a peddler.
The Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Anderson. Patsy read it until the pages fell apart, then glued them back together and read them some more. The tragedy, oh! The beauty of the little mermaid’s courage when she traded her fins for legs, the heartbreaking unfairness and betrayal when her prince fell in love with an ordinary mortal! The story wasn’t so much a fairytale as an anthem for unsentimental inspiration.
Don’t ever give up lovin’ the water, Patsy decided. It’s the only thing that’ll always love you back. The only thing that’s bottomless.
She promised herself she wouldn’t end up moping for a prince who didn’t appreciate her, that she’d never give up her fins for ordinary legs. Mermaids were destined for greatness, even given their darkest tribulations on dry land.
Life had seemed so easy to predict, then.
LIGHT-HEADED and in pain, Patsy swigged a bottle of tepid Coke-a-Cola with four aspirins and two packets of BC Headache Powder in it, trying to dull the pain between her legs as she drove. Sweat dappled her plaid blouse and pink peddle-pushers. Moths and bats darted in front of the car. With the window down to catch the breeze, she worried that they might zoom inside.
“Get away, you wild thing
s, I got a new baby in here,” she yelled, then downshifted the Studebaker and blew the horn. A startled deer bounded across the road and disappeared into the pines like a shadow. Somewhere in the forest, a wildcat screamed.
She slowed as the road narrowed to cross a rattling, one-lane wooden bridge. Lost and exhausted, she squinted through the narrow tunnel of light the dusty Studebaker’s headlights made on pale macadam flecked with crushed oyster shells. Pitch black forest and pine swamp crowded the road on both sides; there wasn’t a streetlight or house light to be seen in any direction. Frogs sang loud enough to drown out a hellfire preacher yelling about Communists on the radio, and the occasional low grunt of an alligator sounded from the woods.
U.S. 1, the old federal two-lane that funneled wood-paneled deluxe station wagons full of tourist families down the east coast to Florida’s Atlantic beaches, was less than an hour’s drive east of Patsy that night. If she aimed the Studebaker due west she could make Panama City, on the Gulf, by dawn. The state’s northern coasts were still mostly wild places of beautiful dunes and shifting sea oats, speckled with pastel motor courts and diners, reptile exhibits and parrot shows. There were no interstates, no super highways, no cookie-cutter hotel chains, no Disney.
Instead there were tiny motels shaped like teepees or igloos or any other thing the imagination could fathom, and restaurants shaped like pirate ships or castles, and candy shops tucked inside fake plaster volcanoes, and real alligators swimming decoratively along the blue concrete creeks of fake jungle gardens. Florida was the land of daydreams and entrepreneurial whimsy. Along the slow, sunny routes to the beach, colorful nonsense lured visitors and their money. Among all those oddball wonders of the world, Weeki Wachee Springs, with its mermaid show, was, in Patsy’s opinion, the pinnacle of true class.
More Sweet Tea Page 17
