Down Under

by Sonia Taitz

  “Hey, cowboy!” Gretchen says to the man, who wears an oversize cowboy hat, chaps, and a bolo tie.

  “Hey, Gretch! See you’ve got a new victim!” he replies, his grin revealing perfect white teeth. When it relaxes again, his mouth becomes invisible, lost under an old-fashioned handlebar moustache that ends in waxed tips.

  “Come on over, Shy!” says Gretchen.

  Shy? Why is she talking about his shyness? Davey wonders if his mother has said anything to the staff here about the specifics of his supposed problem. Social anxiety disorder is one catch-phrase, he knows. Obsessive compulsive. Agoraphobia. Mom must have mentioned it; that was why he is here, while people his age (like his brother) are free to play paintball. He fumes with embarrassment, wishing he could turn and run away, or at least hide somewhere.

  But Gretchen isn’t talking to him when she uses the word “Shy.” She is stepping over to the man in the moustache and ten-gallon hat, who is stepping over to her. His mare begins balking, and the man stops patiently. Looking over at both Gretchen and Davey, he confides in a whispery growl:

  “Last class was hard for old Lula here. The kid couldn’t help pulling her mane. Had palsy, poor thing. Little fingers gripped like vises. We tried to stop ’im, but he kept on doing it. Brave girl just stood for it, didn’t you, girlie?”

  “Awww,” says Gretchen, reaching for a sugar cube in the pocket of her waist-high jeans. “Who’s a good girl?”

  “Don’t give her one. I’ve given her several. Plus an apple core. She’s right spoiled now, this li’l lady.”

  “May I pet her?” says Davey, as Lula comes up to him, nuzzling his jacket pockets.

  “Sure. That’s jest what she’s here for. ’Slong as you don’t pull her mane none.”

  “You from Texas?” asks Davey. He thinks he can recognize the accent, inconsistent as it is, and the exotic word choices.

  “Yep, you got yerself a Lone Star guy right here.”

  “Which part?” Not that Davey knows any part of Texas, really. But he is drawn to Shy and finds it easy to ask him questions.

  “All and any, pardner, all and any.”

  “And what brought you here?” Davey isn’t usually so forward, but Shy has something in his own eyes that is vulnerable, as though he, like Davey, is not always comfortable in his own skin.

  “What brought me here? You might say, the travellin’ road.”

  “I understand,” says Davey, sagely. He understands the need to flee, although his life has made it convenient for him to do so in his own room.

  “You’re a fine young lad,” says Shy, forgetting that “lad” is a word more Australian than Texan.

  “Probably the oldest one here, though,” Davey responds ruefully. Out of the corner of his eye, he keeps seeing little children, like five- to eight-year-olds, and it is embarrassing.

  “How old’er you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “You’re not old a’tall. There’s a couple of cute teenage fillies that hang out together, probably older than you, I reckon.”

  “Older than fourteen?”

  “Like I said, teen-age—got a ’teen in it—and they’re right cute. I think they might be kleptomaniacs, though,” he adds with a wink. “They got here a week ago, and I’ve been counting up the carrots. And it don’t add up.”

  Davey nods, confused.

  “Kiddin’ ya about them carrots. It’s good for ’em to be here, the lassies. No shopping malls, just nature. Horses, hay. It’s paradise, mate, if you can handle the bloody saddles.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “ ’Bout a week or so. Oh, yeh, I was the newby then. I thought it was like a real ranch, you know? So when I first saw this place, I asked them—I asked them, right in their faces:

  ‘You call this dust?’

  ‘You call this a corral?’

  ‘You call these horses?’

  ‘You call this a saddle?’

  ‘You call this riding?’”

  Davey does not know how to respond to this somewhat theatrical presentation, but nods in agreement. Shy continues:

  “Yeh, I did, I asked ’em and no two ways about it,” he pronounces, taking out a bag of shag tobacco and some rolling papers. “Mind if I smoke some out here in the wide open?”

  “Feel free,” says Davey, enjoying the turn of phrase. Feel free. He himself is feeling a bit freer already.

  “But son, then I realized that this here place was another thing altogether. It’s not about being a ranch with dust and ropes and ridin’. These horses are all old and most kindly. They been thrown away like rubbish. They did their service somewhere, and now they’re here. The last stop.”

  “That’s sad,” says Davey, listening intently.

  “No, it’s not. This is where the story gets good, and it’s true, which is more’n you can say for most stories.”

  Shy pauses to pile a pinch of tobacco on a rolling paper. Then he continues: “These fellas don’t need to be broken no more, son!”

  Shy says this intently, as though Davey were the one who had insisted that they all be “broken.”

  “No, I never—”

  “—all they want is a scratch between the ears, a nibble of sugar, a nice curry brush along the flanks. I’ve learned to relax here, for the first time in my life,” Shy concludes, flourishing a tightly rolled cigarette, and then lighting it.

  “That’s what I’d like to learn, I guess,” says Davey. “To—to really relax. Sometimes I get so tense, and it’s hard to breathe, and—”

  “Don’t I know it. I been there. What’s your name, son?”

  Shy exhales smoke to the side, swiveling his eyes to look at the boy. His face looks utterly familiar, the features resembling someone he once knew, someone who had made his heart soar and then yanked it back down to earth.

  “Davey. I mean it’s really David.”

  “David. The name of a King,” says Shy. “A Jewish King, if I know my Bible, and indeed I do.”

  “I guess,” says Davey, who doesn’t really know his Bible. “It was my mother’s grandpa’s name.”

  “Is that so,” says Shy, philosophically. “In the family tradition, you could say. That’s real nice.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Shy.”

  “That’s what I thought I heard. ‘Shy.’ I thought they—I thought they were talking about me!”

  “Huh! That’s funny. You’re shy?”

  “You mean you can’t tell?”

  “Not a’tall!”

  “Oh my God, I wish you could say that to my mother!”

  “Mebbe one day I will. Say that to your mother. Could happen,” he says, with a handsome wink. Davey winks back, surprising himself, and they both laugh.

  “So Shy—that’s really your actual name? Is it short for something?”

  Shy ponders the query, smoking.

  “Cheyenne, I reckon.”

  “Are you part Indian?” Davey marvels. He is already starting to loosen the shackles of the old world and enter the new. Shy could be his guide.

  “Some say one-eighth, and I don’t say no.”

  “It’s a place in Wyoming, too, right?”

  “What is?”

  “Cheyenne?”

  “Sure it is, sure it is,” Shy stutters, trying to keep up. He had not done too well in school geography. “See, son, I been all over. Been to Texas, Wyoming, the Blue Mountain Ozarks, you know, all of this great land of ours.”

  “Well, it’s something I’ve been called all my life.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Shy. I’ve been called that a lot. Especially lately. It’s driving my mother crazy, and it’s why I’m here.”

  “You don’t seem that way to me, pardner. You’ll do just fine. Know what? I guess you could give Lula jest one li’l sugar cube. But hold your hand flat, very flat. The secret’s in the open palm, just give.”

  Treats

  A week or so later, a truck rolls up to the farm.
If a truck could be elegant, this one is, pale green with a magenta script logo on the side: “The Art of Food” (big letters) “by Heidi Dorcas Kunst” (smaller letters in darker magenta). Heidi jumps out, looking crisp in a double-breasted baker’s jacket and pants. Three men follow her, carrying boxes up the stairs of the main building. They wear pale-green jackets, with the magenta script logo on the back.

  Inside the boxes are treats Heidi has created for the horses of the Angel-Fire Farm. Why should animals eat no better than humans? Especially these animals, who do so much good for the children. Heidi herself knows several of these children, not only Jude’s unfortunate David, who suffers from social retardation (Heidi personally feels it is Asperger’s, with a touch of antisocial personality thrown in), but also many younger boys and girls who have everything from epilepsy to Down’s syndrome.

  Heidi knows them from knowing their mothers, who, along with their regular orders of food, also talk openly to her about their personal woes. As is the case with Jude, Heidi is only too happy to assist them, if only from the culinary standpoint.

  Does she have anything that is good for hyperactivity?

  Of course she does. Asparagus soup. It turns the urine green, which might unsettle younger children. The mother can then attribute this change to the child’s being as wild as an ogre. Stop acting crazy, she can say, and you won’t pee green anymore.

  Suzy Shelton’s ten-year-old daughter has violent tantrums.

  For her, there are chamomile cookies, to which Heidi sometimes secretly adds a touch of valerian. Only one a day, she prescribes—but they are large.

  For the mothers themselves she makes frothy shakes, which contain more than a soupçon of tequila. A touch of blue food coloring makes the drinks fanciful, if not exotic. “Blue Ladies,” she calls them, and the uses of this frozen tonic are legend, even beyond the pale of parenthood. The secret ingredient is actually not the tequila but heaps of plain white table sugar, which the women have long forbidden themselves to enjoy in any recognizable form.

  The new horse treats come on lollipop-like sticks, so there is no risk of anyone accidentally being bitten. Heidi has been testing them for weeks, and now they are the perfect size, shape, and flavor for the avid equine mouth.

  These creations are actually Heidi’s chef d’oeuvre, and she eats them herself. When the feeling that her life is not perfect overwhelms her, when she sees her husband’s queue or hears her daughter slam her door so hard it shudders, she takes a nibble of “Ponipop” and is becalmed. There are secrets in the kitchen, ingredients and combinations that make life better, and Heidi is grateful she knows so many, and can always discover or invent more.

  Shy loves Ponipops, too. Since their first appearance at the farm, he’s secretly grabbed handfuls and stashed them here and there, eating them when needed to quell the voices in his head. He has lived long enough to suffer a series of bad scenes that can always be provoked in the present moment. The Pops put a stop to that.

  There is a spicy taste in them like cannabis, he thinks, or resinous black hash. Shy, being of the land, knows a lot about the things of nature, its herbs and its seeds and the sap of its trees. He also senses not only the tender seed of the pine, but Omega-3 from walnuts, grown from soil that is moist and fertile with duck dung. There is also, Shy suspects, a calming heap of treacle in the Pops, what folks around here might call molasses.

  Daily, he offers some of his private stash of Pops to David, his young protégé. They alter him in a most pleasing way, adding to the therapeutic powers of the horses and the people who work with them. The poor boy is no longer nervous at all, ever.

  Indeed, after one nibble of the magical confection, Davey feels as though he can open his very soul up to the world as an offering. After finishing off two each, he and Shy gently giggle together at all their perceived troubles, which have now vanished like bubbles. At the end of the day, they wander the ranch, talking to the ponies and horses who rest and graze in their paddocks.

  Oftentimes, the two men—boy and cowboy—sprawl out in the field with the grazing animals. They graze, too, munching peaceably on their good spheres of sticky, dark grain. Shy loves this ranch and these treats so much. He loves each and every horse he has met, not only Butternut, Ajax, and Clemmie, but Donut, Stewball, Tommy, and Hank. He even loves Darla, the old dappled gray who no longer likes to be ridden by anyone who weighs more than a hundred pounds. He is tired, too; he knows how Darla feels. Enough is enough.

  Shy loves the people here, too. David, especially, is a wonderful person, one of the best souls he’s ever met in his life. Maybe there is no need to be so angry all the time. Maybe people whose minds are forever at war with invisible foes are wrong. Maybe people can be forgiven for things they have done. Maybe he himself can be forgiven for all the things he has done wrong, whether knowingly or unknowingly, and all the things he has yet to do wrong, things he can’t help. He has hurt his father, hurt Gingerean, hurt his own kids. Now he is hurting poor old Sydney in the wallet, and he will probably hurt many more people before he is done with this life.

  But now he and this boy lie on their backs in the fields, looking at the clear, blue sky and talking quietly.

  “What’s your daddy like, son?”

  “My dad? He’s OK, I guess. He travels a lot, he’s athletic. Kind of your standard alpha male. Why?”

  “Oh, just asking.”

  “How about yours?”

  Davey is really progressing. Before the ranch, he would never have opened up beyond the short answer (“He’s OK”). Now, he is curious about Shy’s life—and brave enough to ask him about it. It doesn’t even feel brave. Bonding is as natural as breathing. In and also out. For me and also for you. His world is slowly expanding beyond his tightly gripped solitude.

  He feels the grass around him, long and lush. He tears a clump out and lets it fall over him, sifting through his open fingers. He inhales the scent of the animals, the grass juice released by the tearing, the dark soil that sticks to the loosened blades. He smells his biscuit and tastes one bite fully. Grain by grain dissolving in his mouth. Even his skin feels good, the acne no problem as the accepting warmth of the sun caresses and offers healing to it.

  “You really want to know about my dad?” says Shy, with a tiny touch of menace as he says the word.

  “Of course I do. Anyway, I just told you about mine.”

  “You didn’t tell me much. I don’t even know his last name, or yours, for that matter.”

  Davey is slightly taken aback. “You could have looked me up on a list anytime. There’s a list.”

  “I tried, actually. You’re not on the regular list. You signed up a good week after all the others. Anyway, I’m not allowed into administration.”

  Davey wonders why Shy seems so agitated suddenly. But he himself gets that way, too. At least, he used to get that way,

  “OK, well, my last name is Ewington,” he answers simply.

  “Hmmm. Very posh.”

  “Really? Never thought about it.”

  “That your dad’s name?”

  “Yeah, what else would it be?”

  “I mean, is it your mom’s, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She didn’t keep her own name, huh?”

  “Well, not everyone does, I mean some women do—”

  “No, I can see she can’t think for herself, does what she’s told, I mean she took his name and that’s what was expected, I can see that clear as day. Very, very convenient, too. Women can just hide behind new names every day, like they disappeared off the earth or something, like they’re not accountable for their words and deeds of the past. Like their come-ons don’t mean squat.”

  “Is something wrong, Shy?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Is your dad English?”

  “No, why?”

  “The name sounds English. I hate them, they’re snobs. I’m glad you’re not a Pommy bastard.”

  “What kind of expression is that? I never heard it before.
”

  “Um—it’s kind of a ranch expression,” says Shy, recovering from his burst of curiosity. He takes control of himself. “Don’t you go using it, now—you’re too young to cuss.” He winks, as he often does, but this time Davey does not return the gesture.

  “Well, anyway,” says the boy after moment, “my dad’s just a regular old American. Nothing fancy.”

  “WASP?”

  “Huh?”

  “White. Anglo. Saxon. Protestant?”

  “Not really. He’s not anything that specific. Actually, his mom was from a Jewish family, but Dad is your typical all-American guy. Kind of a can-do guy. You might even call him a little bit macho.”

  “A dad like that can’t be easy for a boy like you.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I had my own alpha male for a dad. He, too, was ‘kind of macho.’ Does yours ever beat you?”

  “What? No!”

  Silence.

  “What? Yours does?”

  “Did,” says Shy. “Oh, he surely, surely did. But I’m past all that now. In fact, I never really bother to think about it.”

  Then why did you bring it up, thinks Davey, troubled.

  “You mean like, a tap on the hand?” he persists.

  “No, not a tap on the hand.”

  “A smack on the butt?”

  “I said a beating, boy, and I meant a beating. Full force, fists and blood. I’d drop to the floor but he’d keep right on going.”

  “Wow. What about your mother?”

  “She didn’t do that. She cooked and cleaned and raised us up just the way her hubby wanted her to.”

  “So—she just, like, let him get away with it?”

  “Oh, yes. Seems like she didn’t want to get in trouble. The funny thing was, I trusted her. I really did. I used to think she couldn’t do anything about it. But she could have. She could have tried just that little bit harder. Stood between him and me. Taken a few.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “No, it’s not.” Shy has come to the end of his Ponipop, leaving only the long, white stick. He snaps the stick with a crack, then snaps it again and flings out the pieces.

  “Because as I’ve lived and grown, son, I’ve come to the rather ugly conclusion that most women are cunning bitches. Not all, mind you. Most of ’em, though. Trust me on that one.”