Falling for June: A Novel

by Ryan Winfield

  He would wait for an opportunity—usually when one of the other students had done something unsafe and was being scolded by Sebastian, most often in Spanish, which nobody understood—and then he would slip away and try to find her. It was a large property with many outbuildings; the stunt lessons took place away from the rescue animals, so when he found her David would have to pretend he’d been sent by Sebastian on some errand. He suspected that June was onto him, though, since he’d returned on this particular afternoon to the stables to ask for various bits of tack more times than could have possibly been necessary, even if they had been working with horses that day, which they weren’t. But he did finally manage to strike up a conversation with her.

  A yearling filly that had been born blind and abandoned by its owner had just arrived, and June was spending quite a bit of time acclimating it to its new surroundings. She was brushing its coat and humming to calm its nerves when David crept back into the stable.

  “Need another halter there, do you, darling?” she asked.

  “This one you gave me wasn’t big enough,” he said.

  He was a terrible liar.

  “Oh, is that so. You must be working with Scamp then, since that halter’s plenty big for any of the others.” When David nodded, she grinned and added, “Well, perhaps you should bring Scamp up with the halter then since he’s in the stall there next to you.”

  David just nodded again. “Oh, sure,” he said, hardly hearing a word she had said. “Sounds good.”

  She was captivating to watch. He could have stood there and looked at her forever, despite feeling like she saw right through him—although she still hadn’t acknowledged whether or not she recognized him. She hadn’t mentioned anything about his supposedly being a reporter either.

  June giggled quietly and shook her head. “The halter’s over there, darling. In the tack room. Just swap them out.”

  When he came out of the tack room with the bigger halter, June had settled the young filly down and was feeding it grain from her hand. She caught David watching her and waved him over to her side.

  “Do you want to pet her?” she asked. “Don’t be shy, she needs to be socialized.”

  David shook his head, but June ignored it.

  “Give me your hand.”

  She took his hand in hers and placed it on the filly’s head. The black velvety hair was soft and warm against his palm, but it was June’s hand on his that made him shiver with excitement. He couldn’t explain it exactly, but he felt magnetism in her touch. There was life churning inside of her, fighting to get out, and it made her vibrate with a sort of contagious energy. She was looking at the filly, but he was looking at her. He couldn’t seem to look away for a moment.

  “See,” she said, “there’s no reason to be afraid.”

  “No reason to be afraid?” he asked, coming out of his trance to realize that her hand was still on his, guiding him as he stroked the filly’s head.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Especially not of horses.”

  “Maybe if you haven’t been pulled through a six-foot pile of fresh cow shit meant for fertilizer, like I was by that crazy quarter horse the other day,” he said.

  “Oh, Lord”—she let a chuckle slip—“I heard. That was you?”

  He could tell she was trying to contain her laugh. He had noticed while watching her that she was a little vain about her teeth. They weren’t terrible, just somewhat crooked, but in a cute way, he thought—although she seemed to try to hide them. He wondered if maybe this was partly why her smile was so much in her eyes. He had first noticed it as he watched her talking with a visiting veterinarian the afternoon before. They were telling one another jokes, he assumed, and whenever June laughed she kept her lips sealed tight, holding it back, keeping it in, until her head would finally tilt back and her mouth would open and let loose the most captivating laugh he had ever heard. It was a beautiful thing to hear and see. So beautiful one might follow her around just waiting for it. Which, of course, was exactly what he had been doing.

  But this laugh she seemed to contain as much for David’s wounded pride as she did for her own vanity, and when it had passed, she said, “Don’t feel too bad. That Billy’s a five-gaited horse: he’s got Gallop, Stop, Turn, Buck, and Drag. Our comrade Sebastian put you on him for some fun, I suppose. You just have to get back on and let him know who’s boss.”

  “Oh, I plan to,” David said, trying his best to sound rather brave. “And if he tries to buck me again I’ll play a round of horseshoes while he’s still wearing them.”

  June laughed, out loud this time.

  “You should put that line in your newspaper article,” she said.

  His hand was still on the filly’s head and June’s hand was still on top of his, and she looked up at him with a closed-mouthed grin, waiting for a response. Did she recognize him from the roof? he wondered. Or was she only aware that he wasn’t the reporter he had claimed to be? He couldn’t be sure which; she was impossible to read.

  He decided to risk it, although what he ended up saying sounded more cryptic than he had planned.

  “It wasn’t just a cry for help, you know.”

  “Oh, I know, darling,” she immediately replied. “Who would have heard you from way up there anyway?”

  So, she did know. She knew and she had just been waiting this whole time for him to say something; she’d been watching him follow her around from barn to barn with his seemingly endless need for lead ropes and halters and bits, but knowing all the while that what he really wanted was to speak with her about that day on the roof.

  “I’m glad you’re keeping your promise,” she said.

  She even remembered their conversation.

  David nodded. “I guess I’m lucky you were there.”

  Her smile deepened, this time making its way down to her mouth. “Maybe lucky. Or maybe you were exactly where you were supposed to be that day, and perhaps I was too.”

  A moment of understanding passed between them. At least David thought it did. But then she removed her hand from his and stepped over and turned on the hose to fill the watering trough of a neighboring stall. His hand was still on the filly’s velvet head, but June’s was gone, and he felt as though she were gone too.

  He turned to say something to her, something more about that day on the roof, but her back was to him now, and in addition to monitoring the water, she was busy scooping grain into feed bins. It was almost as if she had gone directly back to work, forgetting their conversation as quickly as it had happened, forgetting that he was even there.

  David lingered for an awkward half minute or so before he took up the halter from where he had hung it and eased out of the stable without a word. He thought about their conversation a great deal that night. He would have thought about it more the following day too, except that was the day the busload of hippies with a wounded ostrich arrived, and the day he first learned what it felt like to really fly.

  9

  IT WAS A terrible place to leave off telling the story, it really was, but I’ll be damned if the old man hadn’t fallen asleep right there at the kitchen table in midsentence. He had just segued quite eloquently from his encounter in the stable with June to telling me about a bus full of young hippies who had arrived to drop off an injured ostrich they’d been traveling with—you’ll have to wait for the story; I was just as curious as you are—when his chin dropped to his chest and he started snoring.

  I was worried at first, before I heard him snoring. Like maybe he’d up and kicked the bucket on me or something. I’ve had a lot of crazy stuff happen on these pre-foreclosure visits, but no one’s ever died. One guy in our office had a homeowner set the house on fire, then try to lock him in it. But that’s a story for another day.

  With Mr. Hadley snoring, I didn’t know what to do. I noticed he had hardly touched his sandwich, although a drying
ring of tomato soup clung to the white whiskers surrounding his lips. Sleeping like that, with the soup around his lips, he looked more like a little boy than an old man. I decided I’d try to clean up the kitchen, if I could do it without waking him. It was kind of out of character for me, but I really had wanted to help when I’d offered before.

  I carried our dishes to the sink and began washing them, stealing glances at my sleeping host and being careful not to make too much noise. There was a window over the sink and it looked out on an apple tree beside the house. If you had to wash dishes it was a nice view. I was looking at the tree, focusing on being quiet, when the phone rang. I nearly dropped a plate. I turned around, but Mr. Hadley had not woken so I stepped over and caught the phone off the wall midway through the second ring.

  “Hello.” I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece to muffle the sound.

  “Yes, hello, Mr. Hadley,” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “I’m calling from the department of planning about your cemetery inquiry.”

  “Oh, no. I’m not . . .”

  Just then the old man opened his eyes and looked at me. I felt more than a little awkward standing in his kitchen on his phone speaking to someone who thought I was him. He looked down at the table, as if searching for the missing dishes. Then he looked back at me.

  “Hello . . . ,” the phone said in my ear. “Mr. Hadley?”

  I hung it up. I’m not sure why, but I just did. I guess I panicked.

  “Who was that?” Mr. Hadley asked, fully awake now.

  I didn’t want to lie so I answered as honestly as I could. “I don’t know, he didn’t say his name. I didn’t want to wake you. I’m sorry I answered your—”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I get wrong numbers calling almost every day. And people selling siding or awnings or Lord-knows-what. They really are pushy. Sometimes I talk to them if I’m bored. You might be surprised to know that you can keep one of those time-share salespeople on the line for a good four hours before they’ll give up and call someone else. She never did send me my prize, now that I’m thinking about it. Say, where’d my sandwich run off to?” he asked. “I hadn’t touched it yet.”

  After we had finished cleaning up the kitchen together, despite his trying to shoo me off again, he softened an apple in the microwave and chopped it into slices. I was worried that they were for us—I’d had quite enough fiber already—until he squeezed on a little lemon juice and said, “She’s blind as a beetle and can’t really tell if they’re brown, but I prefer them to look nice when I feed them to her.”

  Then I thought maybe they were for June—since her whereabouts were still a mystery to me. But he dried the apple slices in a paper towel and handed them to me to carry, then grabbed his cane and walked me out to the barn.

  The barn was across the drive and down a bit, at the edge of a field. It was even more weathered than the house, with only a few remaining flakes of red paint clinging to its exterior walls. The big door was already slid half open on its tracks and I followed him inside. It was dim and smelled of hay and moist dirt. Shafts of sunlight filtered in through old skylights that had been mended and covered over with green tarps.

  “I don’t bother to turn the lights on anymore, since Rosie’s the only one left and can’t see a thing anyway,” he said. “I came out here once in the middle of the night to check on her in a storm, and every bulb was burned out, it had been so long since I’d turned on the switch. Have you ever heard a thunderstorm from inside an old, empty barn? You don’t know whether to feel awestruck or forsaken. It’s quite a sound. June and I spent the night in a barn once, waiting out a rainstorm. But I’ll get to that later.”

  By the time he finished talking we had arrived at the last stall. He hung his cane on a hook and slid the stall door open, almost without thought, as if he had done it a hundred times before, even though the effort appeared to take a lot out of him. An old black mare was lying on her side in the back of the stall. Her head was lifted, as if she’d heard us coming. Her eyes were milky white. David entered the stall and signaled for me to follow. I held the apple slices out on the towel and he took one and fed it to the old horse.

  “Not exactly the crunch of a fresh-picked apple, is it?” he said, feeding her another. “But then she hasn’t got many teeth left, have you, you old dame, you? Just like your partner here. Gumming up our boiled apples until we return to fertilize a new crop.”

  Then something happened to me: a revelation of sorts, or, more accurately, a massive realignment of the world as I knew it, occurring in just an instant. It had only happened a few times before. One of them being when my father opened that package from my mother, the one with her picture, and I suddenly knew, even at that young age, that she wasn’t ever coming home. The other being when my father died and I stood looking at him in his casket. There have been very few moments as momentous as these in my life, but this was one of those times.

  I was standing there with that paper towel and those apples in my hand, watching Mr. Hadley feed them to Rosie, and I suddenly knew this was the yearling filly that June had laid his hand on in his story, and I knew this was probably that same barn too, maybe even the same stall. Now here they were, all these years later, the old man and the old horse. It was the first moment I truly grasped that time will catch up to each of us, as it must with all things, and I wondered where I would be standing thirty years on, what I would be doing.

  I stood in the trance of this epiphany, this revelation swirling around me with the stirred-up dust, and when I came to my senses, the old man had his hand on Rosie’s head and they were both watching me, although she could not see.

  “Here, you feed her one,” he said, nodding toward Rosie.

  I stepped closer and squatted to feed an apple slice to the old mare. She slurped it up, then licked me as if to get familiar with this new hand delivering her treat. Then she sighed a heavy, hollow-sounding sigh, and I could see her ribs in the low light, beneath the slick black coat.

  “This is the same horse that June was caring for, isn’t it?” I asked. “All those years ago. The filly in the stables.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “She was just a yearling then.”

  I was suddenly curious about June again—maybe because I was getting impatient; maybe because that call I’d answered about the cemetery was still on my mind—and I turned to Mr. Hadley and said, “Is your wife . . .” I almost said dead, but I caught myself and changed it at the last second: “I mean, is she still around?”

  The old man closed his eyes for a moment, sighing, not unlike the horse. “Sometimes I think so,” he finally said. Then, as if suddenly very tired from standing, he stepped over and reached outside the stall for his cane and used it to lower himself onto a bale of hay in the corner. He looked as though he wanted to speak, so I sat on the hay next to him. It was quiet for a minute. Dust swirled in the dim light. The horse let out another heavy sigh.

  “She really was something,” he said. “My June was. I wish you could have met her.” He had his hands folded over the cane where it stood in front of him, his moist eyes turned up to the skylight. “I wish everyone could have met her. She had a contagious optimism.”

  “What happened after your conversation with her here in the stables?”

  “Is that where I left off telling the story?” he asked, glancing over at me.

  “Actually you had just started to tell me about a busload of hippies with an injured ostrich. But mostly I was curious about you and June.”

  He laughed. “I’m not surprised. Even hippies with an ostrich are hard-pressed to compete for attention when it comes to June. Everyone who ever spent five minutes in her presence was ready to follow her to the end of the Earth. Or, I should say, off the edge of a cliff, as was the case with me that night those hippies arrived . . .”

  10

  SUNDAY WAS WILD-CARD day at stunt camp and the stu
dents had voted to do high jumps. A young woman they called Hollywood Heidi was up on the scissor lift and saw it first. She pointed and said, “There’s a pink bus tearing up this way.”

  They all turned to watch as the bus barreled up the drive in a wild rush of spitting gravel, followed by a cloud of dust. It came to a rocking halt in front of the house. The windows were covered over with old curtains and cardboard signs with slogans like LOVE IS A WAY OF LIFE, and you could not see inside. But you could sure hear.

  There was a wild ruckus emanating from the bus’s interior. It sounded like someone was being murdered. The noise progressed from the rear of the bus toward the front, and the students all stood watching the door and wondering what on earth would emerge, David among them. As the noise grew even more absurd, Sebastian stepped in front of his students and held out his arms, as if he would protect them. His courage, as it turned out, was not just talk.

  When the bus door finally opened, a man popped out with a kicking ostrich in his arms. Although from David’s point of view, it appeared more like an ostrich popped out with a kicking man clinging to its back. The bird was that big. The man had long dreadlocks and was dressed in a tie-dyed robe with tassels, and he came away from the bus turning in wide circles like some kind of carnival dancer, trying to keep ahold of his crazy catch. Several pale and dirty faces appeared in the bus’s doorway, looking out. “Help him,” one of them called. “That giant turkey’s tryna kill him.”

  There was blood on man and bird alike, although it was hard to tell from which it had come, and David didn’t understand why he didn’t just set it loose. He was about to suggest as much when Sebastian said, “This is our time, comrade. Men of courage must act when called upon.”

  The next thing he saw was Sebastian rushing in to save the day. He came alongside the hippie, getting his arms into the mix and helping to subdue the fighting ostrich. Of course, as so often happens when one tries to help, the hippie took advantage of the offered aid by passing off his problem entirely, and he let go and stumbled back toward the safety of the bus, leaving Sebastian holding on to the wild bird.