When he laughs he sounds like a horse, or maybe it’s the way I hear him with these ears. And though he laughs once in a while, it doesn’t make my life easier, because of my condition. I mean I think, Here I am in this horse. This is my theory though I have my doubts. Otherwise, Goldberg is a small stocky figure with a thick neck, heavy black brows, each like a small mustache, and big feet that swell in his shapeless boots. He washes his feet in the kitchen sink and hangs up his yellowed socks to dry on the whitewashed walls of my stall. Phoo.
He likes to do card tricks.
In winter they live in the South in a small, messy, one-floor house with a horse’s stall attached that Goldberg can approach, down a few steps, from the kitchen of the house. To get Abramowitz into the stall he is led up a plank from the outside and the door shuts on his rear end. To keep him from wandering all over the house there’s a slatted gate to just under his head. Furthermore, the stall is next to the toilet and the broken water closet runs all night. It’s a boring life with a deaf-mute except when Goldberg changes the act a little. Abramowitz enjoys it when they rehearse a new routine, although Goldberg hardly ever alters the lines, only the order of answer and question. That’s better than nothing. Sometimes when Abramowitz gets tired of talking to himself, asking unanswered questions, he complains, shouts, calls the owner dirty names. He snorts, brays, whinnies shrilly. In his frustration he rears, rocks, gallops in his stall; but what good is a gallop if there’s no place to go and Goldberg can’t, or won’t, hear complaints, pleas, protest?
Q. “Answer me this: If it’s a sentence I’m serving, how long?”
A.
Once in a while Goldberg seems to sense somebody else’s needs and is momentarily considerate of Abramowitz—combs and curries him, even rubs his bushy head against the horse’s. He also shows interest in his diet and whether his bowel movements are regular and sufficient; but if Abramowitz gets sentimentally careless when the owner is close by and forms a question he can see on his lips, Goldberg punches him on the nose. Or threatens to. It doesn’t hurt any the less.
All I know is he’s a former vaudeville comic and acrobat. He did a solo act telling jokes with the help of a blind assistant before he went sad. That’s about all he’s ever tapped to me about himself. When I forgot myself and asked what happened then, he punched me in the nose.
Only once, when he was half drunk and giving me my bucket of water, I sneaked in a fast one which he answered before he knew it.
“Where did you get me, master? Did you buy me from somebody else? Maybe in some kind of auction?”
I FOUND YOU IN A CABBAGE PATCH.
Once he tapped my skull: “In the beginning was the word.”
“Which word was that?”
Bong on the nose.
NO MORE QUESTIONS.
“Watch out for the wound on my head or whatever it is.”
“Keep your trap shut or you’ll lose your teeth.”
Goldberg should read that story I once heard on his transistor radio, I thought to myself. It’s about a poor cabdriver driving his sledge in the Russian snow. His son, a fine promising lad, got sick with pneumonia and soon died, and the poor cabby can’t find anybody to talk to so as to relieve his grief. Nobody wants to listen to his troubles, because that’s the way it is in the world. When he opens his mouth to say a word, the customers insult him. So he finally tells the story to his bony nag in the stable, and the horse, munching oats, listens as the weeping old man tells him about his boy that he has just buried.
Something like that could happen to you, Goldberg, and you’d be a lot kinder to whoever I am.
“Will you ever free me out of here, master?”
I’LL FLAY YOU ALIVE, YOU BASTARD HORSE.
We have this act we do together. Goldberg calls it “Ask Me Another,” an ironic title where I am concerned.
In the sideshow days people used to stand among the bearded ladies, the blobby fat men, Joey the snake boy, and other freaks, laughing beyond belief at Abramowitz talking. He remembers one man staring into his mouth to see who’s hiding there. Homunculus? Others suggested it was a ventriloquist’s act even though the horse told them Goldberg was a deaf-mute. But in the main tent the act got thunderous storms of applause. Reporters pleaded for permission to interview Abramowitz and he had plans to spill all, but Goldberg wouldn’t allow it. “His head will swell up too big,” Abramowitz said for him. “He will never be able to wear the same size hat he wore last summer.”
For the performance the owner dresses up in a balloony red-and-white polka-dot clown’s suit with a pointed clown’s cap and has borrowed a ringmaster’s snaky whip, an item Abramowitz is skittish of though Goldberg says it’s nothing to worry about, little more than decoration in a circus act. No animal act is without one. People like to hear the snap. He also ties an upside-down feather duster on Abramowitz’s head that makes him look like a wilted unicorn. The five-piece circus band ends its brassy “Overture to William Tell”; there’s a flourish of trumpets, and Goldberg cracks the whip as Abramowitz, with his loose-feathered, upside-down duster, trots once around the spotlit ring and stops at attention, facing clown-Goldberg, his left foreleg pawing the sawdust-covered earth. They then begin the act; Goldberg’s ruddy face, as he opens his painted mouth to express himself, flushes dark red, and his melancholy eyes under black brows protrude as he painfully squeezes out the abominable sounds, his only eloquence:
“Geee gooo gaaa gaaw?”
Abramowitz’s resonant, beautifully timed response is:
A. “To get to the other side.”
There’s a gasp from the spectators, a murmur, perhaps of puzzlement, and a moment of intense expectant silence. Then at a roll of the drums Goldberg snaps his long whip and Abramowitz translates the owner’s idiocy into something that makes sense and somehow fulfills expectations; though in truth it’s no more than a question following a response already given.
Q. “Why does a chicken cross the road?”
Then they laugh. And do they laugh! They pound each other in merriment. You’d think this trite riddle, this sad excuse for a joke, was the first they had heard in their lives. And they’re laughing at the translated question, of course, not at the answer, which is the way Goldberg has set it up. That’s his nature for you. It’s the only way he works.
Abramowitz used to sink into the dumps after that, knowing what really amuses everybody is not the old-fashioned tired conundrum but the fact it’s put to them by a talking horse. That’s what splits the gut.
“It’s a stupid little question.”
“There are no better,” Goldberg said.
“You could try letting me ask one or two of my own.”
YOU KNOW WHAT A GELDING IS?
I gave him no reply. Two can play at that game.
After the first applause both performers take a low bow. Abramowitz trots around the ring, his head with panache held high. And when Goldberg again cracks the pudgy whip, he moves nervously to the center of the ring and they go through the routine of the other infantile answers and questions in the same silly ass-backwards order. After each question Abramowitz runs around the ring as the spectators cheer.
A. “To hold up his pants.”
Q. “Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?”
A. “Columbus.”
Q. “What was the first bus to cross the Atlantic?”
A. “A newspaper.”
Q. “What’s black and white and red all over?”
We did a dozen like that, and when we finished up, Goldberg cracked the foolish whip, I galloped a couple more times around the ring, then we took our last bows.
Goldberg pats my steaming flank and in the ocean-roar of everyone in the tent applauding and shouting bravo, we leave the ring, running down the ramp to our quarters, Goldberg’s personal wagon van and attached stall; after that we’re private parties till tomorrow’s show. Many customers used to come night after night to watch the performance, and they laughed at the riddles though th
ey had known them from childhood. That’s how the season goes, and nothing much has changed one way or the other except that recently Goldberg added a couple of silly elephant riddles to modernize the act.
A. “From playing marbles.”
Q. “Why do elephants have wrinkled knees?”
A. “To pack their dirty laundry in.”
Q. “Why do elephants have long trunks?”
Neither Goldberg nor I think much of the new jokes but they’re the latest style. I reflect that we could do the act without jokes. All you need is a free talking horse.
One day Abramowitz thought he would make up a questionresponse of his own—it’s not that hard to do. So that night after they had finished the routine, he slipped in his new riddle.
A. “To greet his friend the chicken.”
Q. “Why does a yellow duck cross the road?”
After a moment of confused silence everybody cracked up; they beat themselves silly with their fists—broken straw boaters flew all over the place; but Goldberg in unbelieving astonishment glowered murderously at the horse. His ruddy face turned purple. When he cracked the whip it sounded like a river of ice breaking. Realizing in fright that he had gone too far, Abramowitz, baring his big teeth, reared up on his hind legs and took several steps forward against his will. But the spectators, thinking this was an extra flourish at the end of the act, applauded wildly. Goldberg’s anger eased, and lowering his whip, he pretended to chuckle. Amid continuing applause he beamed at Abramowitz as if he were his only child and could do no wrong, though Abramowitz, in his heart of hearts, knew the owner was furious.
“Don’t forget WHO’S WHO, you insane horse,” Goldberg, his back to the audience, tapped out on Abramowitz’s nose.
He made him gallop once more around the ring, mounted him in an acrobatic leap onto his bare back, and drove him madly to the exit.
Afterwards he Morse-coded with his hard knuckle on the horse’s bony head that if he pulled anything like that again he would personally deliver him to the glue factory.
WHERE THEY WILL MELT YOU DOWN TO SIZE. “What’s left over goes into dog food.”
“It was just a joke, master,” Abramowitz explained.
“To say the answer was okay, but not to ask the question by yourself.”
Out of stored-up bitterness the talking horse replied, “I did it on account of it made me feel free.”
At that Goldberg whacked him hard across the neck with his murderous cane. Abramowitz, choking, staggered but did not bleed.
“Don’t, master,” he gasped, “not on my old wound.”
Goldberg went into slow motion, still waving the cane.
“Try it again, you tub of guts, and I’ll be wearing a horsehide coat with fur collar, gool, goon, geek, gonk.” Spit crackled in the corners of his mouth.
Understood.
Sometimes I think of myself as an idea, yet here I stand in this filthy stall, my hooves sunk in my yellow balls of dreck. I feel old, disgusted with myself, smelling the odor of my bad breath as my teeth in the feedbag grind the hard oats into a foaming lump, while Goldberg smokes his panatela as he watches TV. He feeds me well enough, if oats are your dish, but hasn’t had my stall cleaned for a week. It’s easy to get even on a horse if that’s the type you are.
So the act goes on every matinee and night, keeping Goldberg in good spirits and thousands in stitches, but Abramowitz had dreams of being in the open. They were strange dreams—if dreams; he isn’t sure what they are or come from—hidden thoughts, maybe, of freedom, or some sort of self-mockery? You let yourself conceive what can’t be? Anyhow, whoever heard of a talking horse’s dreams? Goldberg hasn’t said he knows what’s going on but Abramowitz suspects he understands more than he seems to, because when the horse, lying in his dung and soiled straw, awakens from a dangerous reverie, he hears the owner muttering in his sleep in deaf-mute talk.
Abramowitz dreams, or something of the sort, of other lives he might live, let’s say of a horse that can’t talk, couldn’t conceive the idea; is perfectly content to be simply a horse without speech. He sees himself, for instance, pulling a wagonload of yellow apples along a rural road. There are leafy beech trees on both sides and beyond them broad green fields full of wild flowers. If he were that kind of horse, maybe he might retire to graze in such fields. More adventurously, he sees himself a racehorse in goggles, thundering down the last stretch of muddy track, slicing through a wedge of other galloping horses to win by a nose at the finish; and the jockey is definitely not Goldberg. There is no jockey; he fell off.
Or if not a racehorse, if he has to be practical about it, Abramowitz continues on as a talking horse but not in circus work any longer; and every night on the stage he recites poetry. The theater is packed and people cry out oooh and aaah, what beautiful things that horse is saying.
Sometimes he thinks of himself as altogether a free “man,” someone of indeterminate appearance and characteristics, who is maybe a doctor or lawyer helping poor people. Not a bad idea for a useful life.
But even if I am dreaming or whatever it is, I hear Goldberg talking in my sleep. He talks something like me:
As for number one, you are first and last a talking horse, not any nag that can’t talk; and believe me I have got nothing against you that you can talk, Abramowitz, but on account of what you say when you open your mouth and break the rules.
As for a racehorse, if you take a good look at the broken-down type you are—overweight, with big sagging belly and a thick uneven dark coat that won’t shine up no matter how much I comb or brush you, and four hairy, thick, bent legs, plus a pair of slight cross-eyes, you would give up that foolish idea you can be a racehorse before you do something very ridiculous.
As for reciting poetry, who wants to hear a horse recite poetry? That’s for the birds.
As for the last dream, or whatever it is that’s bothering you, that you can be a doctor or lawyer, you better forget it, it’s not that kind of a world. A horse is a horse even if he’s a talking horse; don’t mix yourself up with human beings if you know what I mean. If you’re a talking horse that’s your fate. I warn you, don’t try to be a wise guy, Abramowitz. Don’t try to know everything, you might go mad. Nobody can know everything; it’s not that kind of world. Follow the rules of the game. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t try to make a monkey out of me; I know more than you. It’s my nature. We have to be who we are, although this is rough on both of us. But that’s the logic of the situation. It goes by certain laws even though that’s a hard proposition for some to understand. The law is the law, you can’t change the order. That’s the way things stay put together. We are mutually related, Abramowitz, and that’s all there is to it. If it makes you feel any better, I will admit to you I can’t live without you, and I won’t let you live without me. I have my living to make and you are my talking horse I use in my act to earn my living, plus so I can take care of your needs. The true freedom, like I have always told you, though you never want to believe me, is to understand that and don’t waste your energy resisting the rules; if so you waste your life. All you are is a horse who talks, and believe me, there are very few horses that can do that; so if you are smart, Abramowitz, it should make you happy instead of always and continually dissatisfied. Don’t break up the act if you know what’s good for you.
As for those yellow balls of your dreck, if you will behave yourself like a gentleman and watch out what you say, tomorrow the shovelers will come and after I will hose you down personally with warm water. Believe me, there’s nothing like cleanliness.
Thus he mocks me in my sleep though I have my doubts that I sleep much nowadays.
In short hops between towns and small cities the circus moves in wagon vans. The other horses pull them, but Goldberg won’t let me, which again wakes disturbing ideas in my head. For longer hauls, from one big city to another, we ride in red-and-white-striped circus trains. I have a stall in a freight car with some non-talking horses with fancy braided manes and sculpture
d tails from the bareback rider’s act. None of us are much interested in each other. If they think at all they think a talking horse is a show-off. All they do is eat and drink, piss and crap. Not a single word goes back or forth among them. Nobody has a good or bad idea.
The long train rides generally give us a day off without a show, and Goldberg gets depressed and surly when we’re not working the matinee or evening performance. Early in the morning of a long-trainride day he starts loving his bottle and Morse-coding me nasty remarks and threats.
“Abramowitz, you think too much, why do you bother? In the first place your thoughts come out of you and you don’t know that much, so your thoughts don’t either. In other words don’t get too ambitious. For instance, what’s on your mind right now, tell me?”
“Answers and questions, master—some new ones to modernize the act.”
“Feh, we don’t need any new ones, the act is already too long.”
He should know the questions I am really asking myself, though better not.
Once you start asking questions one leads to the next and in the end it’s endless. And what if it turns out I’m always asking myself the same question in different words? I keep on wanting to know why I can’t ask this coarse lout a simple question about anything. By now I have it figured out Goldberg is afraid of questions because a question could show he’s afraid people will find out who he is. Somebody who all he does is repeat his fate. Anyway, Goldberg has some kind of past he is afraid to tell me about, though sometimes he hints. And when I mention my own past he says forget it. Concentrate on the future. What future? On the other hand, what does he think he can hide from Abramowitz, a student by nature, who spends most of his time asking himself questions Goldberg won’t permit him to ask, putting one and one together, and finally making up his mind—miraculous thought—that he knows more than a horse should, even a talking horse, so therefore, given all the built-up evidence, he is positively not a horse. Not in origin anyway.
The Complete Stories Page 64
