Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  “You mind if we use your truck?” Clay asked me. “I usually borrow.”

  I turned off the burner, left the cooked-down squash lidded on the stove. I lay a towel over the roasted seeds after offering a handful to Stew while Clay sought out Lottie’s small, feathery self in the front room. Stew chewed the seeds slowly, in meditation of the trucks or something out beyond the screen door. I admired his profile, features both smooth and angular at once, an artful face and neck thinner than most men’s. I asked how he was.

  “Business is a little slow,” he said, fed himself a few more salted seeds. “Been working on your cousin’s Jeep, that CJ-7 he’s fixing up. Ron.”

  “Miranda says the Jeep’s been good for him. And the flagger job with the State. His stammer’s not as extreme.”

  “Nothing wrong with a stammer. It’s hard to talk.” Stew turned from the door to study the wallpaper trim of bonneted girls and flushed slightly with relief when Clay returned. There was some reconfiguring of vehicles because the driveway was narrow, single-file—Clay pulled his Bronco off to the side in the grass, and Stew gingerly backed out to the road and let me pull out so he could park in my place, then he disembarked and waited by his cab, as if on guard.

  A new bite in the air, so I pulled back on my two flannel shirts. Stew needed a coat, wore only a white undershirt. His truck was spotless and waxed. The racing stripes up the side weren’t new, but the flames were, up the hood—they shot out of the radiator, orange and yellow with blue highlights, licking at the windshield with mean tips. We of course could have loaded the wood into his truck, but it was off limits. Couldn’t risk a scratch. Clay retrieved the chainsaw from the shed, and my body surged with its own ungivingness. I stood there and smoked alone, looking at my pickup that had taken a beating but had no rust. The surge traveled up my inner pole to my sternum, to my throat, and I felt a little peeled when Clay turned up beside me with the saw in hand and a fistful of work gloves.

  “You want a pair? These are Mom’s old ones.” Leather palm blackened by use.

  “No,” I said, but I took them to hold and gave him the keys. I climbed to the middle of the bench seat and straddled the floor gear shift, feeling for Stew sideways, invisibly, as if in the dark. Clay’s hand fell on my knee after he shifted. I held Lottie’s gloves in my right hand and settled my other atop his. I wanted the splinter, I wanted the hotspot preceding the full blister at the base of my ring finger wearing its new thin band.

  I knew and understood myself in work; I could still smell the pungent squash vine from the morning hour. I was eager to handle bark and brush and, in that eagerness, the air grew familiar and good in the cab. We didn’t need to agree on rolling down the windows, despite the chill, we let the September wind wrap us, and the core pole in me that carried the surge up and down—to chest and neck—heated like a coil, like the engine as Clay shifted into fourth headed east on Hollow Road toward the edge of Rex and Miranda’s farm, where the good locust trees had fallen in a storm, the hard wood that burned almost as hot as coal, Clay said. Heat gathered in Clay’s hand upon my leg. Stew watched the world pass.

  I felt stripped down to that radiating coil once we pulled in the tram road cockeyed and parked and spilled out to start the work. I left the gloves I had refused balled up on the vinyl seat, tied back my thick hair, shed the flannels, pushed up the sleeves of the long underwear shirt to carry the firewood bare-armed. I worked with speed and hum, each bending of my body alert to the scent of the saw’s two- cycle oil, the burn in the sawdust, the men’s awareness of me. Stew acquiesced to smoke silently with me as Clay cut, and when the saw shut off we all picked up and stacked the full cord in the bed. If the pieces were small, I took them in twos, and the knocking together of the locust sounded musical, like thick wind chimes, a deep tone in all that dense grain. My biceps tensed—I knew they watched—my forearms went taut, dust caught in the arm hair, and the surge centered and swelled in my abdomen, pelvis, upper thighs, a capacity opened up. My groin heated as I squatted in the duff for another piece.

  We worked until the evening dew started to fall and we could feel it on our faces. I tasted cigarettes and the salted roasted seed bits working free from in between my teeth. When it was time, I said I’d drive. Clay took middle and I drove too fast, given the weight in the pickup’s bed, but Clay said nothing. At the house, I lumbered the truck a little off the road since Stew’s red pickup barred the way to the woodshed. He offered to move it and then help unload and stack.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “Clay and I can manage it tomorrow.” No one got out, and there was the lingering question of supper and whether we should ask Stew to stay and not leave in his blazing beautiful truck, and I knew Lottie would have soupy meat ready for which my cooked-down squash would be a side, and she was surely adding a plate for him right at that moment, right before spooning a bit of broth over the dog’s dry food, which would melt Ellis to ecstasy. I blamed the sudden ringing in my head on the residual song of wood striking wood and I felt them looking leftward at my face’s profile in the cab, in the dying evening sun and the grim porch light. It was up to me, it was my call. My mouth felt wet and forceful.

  “Good night, Stew,” I said, “we thank you.” And that was it.

  Stew backed out his red truck with care, switched on his headlights, and took off. Clay and I walked toward the porch and I grabbed his wrist. “Not that way,” I said, “this way,” and tugged him toward the side door that led more directly to the dark stairwell, bypassed the kitchen golden with light and pot roast and starch and carrots. He stayed silent, simply followed, a mild large body, but I still turned and said, “Clay, shh,” finger to my lips. The wooden stairs barely groaned.

  You might consider my force a subsided sea, Ruth, and my beckoning cruel, given my singularity and my obstinate apartness. Given that I did not love him and he knew it. But it seems important to me now to speak to this, too, this day with him that was not nothing. I untied my black hair so it hung like drapery and I did not bother to pull the comforter down to the stiff sheets. I lay back. He said something about a shower, he smelled of One Shot chainsaw oil, I said no, it was okay. He said, “Now? I mean—” and I palmed the skin of his back beneath his shirt and felt it contract at my touch then sigh down like a released breath, or pant, his skin panting, his strong living back. He said again he should clean up first, but I helped him find my ragged shirt hem, my stomach, my bra wet with sweat. I pictured the woods and the stand of alder and locust flaring, I let myself picture Stew, even Dillon, for only a moment, all eyes squinting to see me. Clay hesitated and hovered. My inner surge soaked a cavern in me that wanted rough entrance, that wanted everything. Always everything, I could hear myself almost hollering for it. I said, “Just undo my belt.”

  THE WHITE OF NAN’S EYE WITHIN THE PURPLE BRUISE, THAT CENTER of midnight poppy, began to hurt me every time I looked at her. Her body took on meaning. Part of that meaning was her witness to what my Dillon had become; the dark clouds I’d seen gathering before he left me behind unleashed their full fury of storm upon this, her body. Her twenty-some years of life seemed to swell.

  Now, with your presence in the air of the car, Ruth, the girl went thoughtful, mulling things over. She regarded Mave with sorrow and intrigue, and with me she was careful but somehow pleading when she’d catch my gaze in the mirror, since I’d shown her that my body, too, had some give to it, and a tenuous bridge had appeared between us. I knew she was in the blue Olds with us for reasons beyond her fear of a beating. Mave feigned obliviousness to the small shift in our triangulation of feeling. She studied the atlas.

  What is the body, black and blue and straining to breathe? Angular, furred, beautiful. What did your face look like, this face she found beautiful?

  I remembered Mave telling me, “There is no soul, but you can have one if you want one. It’s a free country.” We’d looked at the skinless man in the science textbook I kept after dropping out of school—digestive system, respiratory and circ
ulatory systems.

  “The body diagrammed like a cross-section of an engine,” she’d said. “Breathe.”

  I’d breathed.

  “That corporeality, the sensate—it yields up everything in bottomless creative action. Breathe and feel it.” She’d left my kitchen table brusquely then, out the scraping screen door, to pass through the break in the fence and retrieve your books. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl who said the earth is our original ark and our senses everything. I watched her return, her godless, stony face godly to me, and my breath, where I’d sat at the rough-lumber table, extending to fingertip and toe and almost visible.

  In the car, about the atlas, Mave said, “You know this was printed in 1984. These roads might not exist. The one we’re on could be erased.”

  “Then we’ll drive off into the Kentucky horse fields,” I said.

  “In six years anything can happen. I-64 probably got rerouted, like a river.” Mave flipped to New Mexico and lifted her glasses to read the tiny names of desert towns and landmarks and reservoirs. I’d studied that page.

  “I want to see one of the Great Lakes,” Nan said into the car’s new and generous wind. “What do you say? I hear they’re so big, they’re like the ocean. Let’s hit one on the way. We’ll all need to buy bikinis.” She was now banking on an increase of friendliness.

  “Thank you for your contribution, Nannette.” Mave took out a pen and circled something in New Mexico.

  “How about it, Frankie?” said Nan. “Go for a swim? I bet you tan good.”

  “Geography’s not Little Gypsy’s strong suit,” Mave said.

  “Oh, fuck off.” Nan laughed and Mave turned and smiled with an ease that pricked my jealousy though there was a bit of fresh hurt in Nan’s laugh. Then, “Could I at least get some clothes? I left with nothing. And smell like wet dog.” I heard a reshuffling, Ellis’s heft being shoved off, a flopping of ears and a huff.

  Mave told me she was circling all the monument names where white people tried to make it up to the Indians, we should see those. “Important for your book,” she said.

  “Okay, Nan.” I watched her confused face in the mirror, considered her body in its apricot dress, a collection of veins and organs and bones not skinned visible like the science textbook man, all bodies really only glimpsed. “We’re coming up on Elizabethtown,” I said. “We pick up the interchange for I-65 there. Should be a mall or something.”

  “If I-65 hasn’t been rerouted,” said Mave.

  I PULLED INTO A SMALL PLAZA. Dismal-looking, but there was a Family Dollar next to Double Dragon Chinese takeout. “This okay?” I asked.

  Nan didn’t answer but lit out toward the automatic doors.

  “I’ll get some eggrolls for me and the wet dog.” Mave doodled now in the thin margins of New Mexico. “Make it quick.”

  “You want anything?”

  “Polka dot bikini.”

  I followed Nan. The late afternoon sky fell on the bald plaza, on the shopping carts gone wayward in the parking lot. The sales in Family Dollar were announced in marker on neon-pink poster board. Toddler clothing 20% off, it said. Hot dogs and buns for your Labor Day cookout, a month-old sign. My body felt emptied from the drive, weak against the store’s air-conditioned gust, as if I lacked substance, as if this trip were without a purpose and it were true all the roads might disappear. My throat closed a little as I watched Nan hold up a dress to appraise. Maybe the trip was indeed aimless, or maybe I was afraid of its unspoken aim. The unspoken gun.

  The normalcy of Mave’s cancer ebbed away into the camouflage- print onesies and left behind the disease’s acute strangeness—sudden sting. Nan waved at me, as if we were friends. I felt as though I’d walked through a spider web and caught a struggling fly, and she couldn’t see that it buzzed loud and hopeless against my brain.

  I pulled out one of the onesies that said Born a Rebel. Another one, plain white, said Cuddlebug. Another, splattered with colorful decals of food stain: Good Thing I’m Cute. I wandered toward the little girl aisle, the lace-trim toddler dresses perhaps still 20% off, the purple rompers. Unwise, given my floaty body and unmoored head, given the indelible mental imprint of the little girl I have not yet mentioned to you, Ruth, because I mention her to no one. I got out of the aisle before I would have to ask the bored clerk for a paper bag to breathe in.

  “You like the stripeys?” Nan asked like a child from outside the fitting room. In her twenties, still nubile, in a dress from the Junior section.

  “Sure,” I said. It hugged her and hit her mid-thigh. My jeans sagged on my nearly middle-aged hips, I fingered my leather belt. Sexy as a feed sack. “Just hurry up.” Maternal and warm as a thing of bronze. “Hurry,” I said again, and Nan registered a wound. Offense throbbed in the black eye.

  Over by the cheap jewelry was a mirror at face height. I loosened my ponytail and let my black hair soften down onto my shoulders and back. Only a few grays and still thick. I wished for a brush. When had my skin settled into lines?

  The clerk was a teen with big black-framed glasses and a full figure. She cut eyes at Nan while she rang up the dresses, underwear, some T-shirts, a black bikini. Nan threw in a bag of barbecue pork rinds last minute.

  “Thirty-six seventy-five,” the girl said, defeated, pushed up her glasses.

  Nan looked in her red wallet, looked at me. “Frankie, seems like I’m out of cash.”

  “What do you mean you’re out of cash?”

  “I guess I spent my last on lunch.”

  “You guess.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. I promise.” Imp. Trickster. Little crushable pretty hand.

  We just stood there. The clerk bagged up the slinky stuff.

  “Wait,” I told her.

  “I will,” Nan insisted. She could rot in that apricot dress. She could starve. Throw her to the hyenas, Mave would say. But Nan knew I’d buy. She knew we were already bound in ways we couldn’t yet understand.

  I snatched the pork rinds from the plastic bag. “I’m not paying for these.”

  THE 1-65 INTERCHANGE WAS HAIRY, CONGESTED. We didn’t talk. I narrowly dodged some shredded tire. As soon as we were sailing on, I tried to keep focused on the road, hands at ten and two, extra mindful of the bikers on old Harleys, the speed limit, the brake lights of others slowing me down. I wanted it quiet but, inevitably:

  “So what did we decide on the Great Lakes? I think we could use a dip.”

  “Nah,” said Mave. “I’ll spit in the desert dirt and make some mud and you can roll around in it.”

  “You said this was a truth-telling trip, Crazy, so why do you want to see the desert? O’Keeffe lived there, okay, so what? If you ask me, her big flower paintings are the best. All that color. I want life to get big and colorful, not shrivel up, and we’re going a long way to a dried-up nowhere.”

  “You might tell the truth about how much cash you’ve got on you.” I avoided her midnight poppy in the rearview.

  “I said I’d pay you back, Frankie. I needed that stuff. I left everything in that house in the goddamn swamp.”

  “Caudell is rightly a boreal bog,” said Mave.

  I read the license plates. Old Bush-Quayle stickers.

  “The ancient glaciers left their mark,” Mave went on. “You could feel them sludging back toward us at home, couldn’t you? The glacial shadow creeping up on the sedges and the black spruce. It was best to blow town. We were to the point that the shallow pools would never dry up, like a weepy cut in dog days.”

  “The hell you talking about?” Nan’s voice scratchy.

  “I don’t think anybody noticed the wreckage coming but us, Nannette.”

  I read on a Ford Escort My Other Car Is a Piece of Shit Too.

  Why the desert, Ruth? For Mave, it was of course because you loved the Sinai. And the open plains would give us space, let one word find form and purchase and time, let it spread out its ample limbs. No longer stifled by the losses junking
up our lives like the TVs and rotted things subsuming Mave’s porch. The trip was not supposed to end everything, but begin it instead.

  I focused, the road beckoning. I focused hard to guide the heavy blue car. We’d come from the swamps, we were bog people. Thick, we wanted to slim down, empty out, bottom out, crush into campfire smoke. There was a long history of this, of course. I’d read in your desert-fathers wisdom books that the stick-people leaned into the wind, the fourth-century hermits who’d fled the city for the Persian desert, as you did as a younger woman, before you crushed your leg, before you met Mave, and you must have never fully left there. Your books, your hieroglyphs, your photos of the three-toned dunes, the sand I imagined always in your long gray hair.

  “You might watch out for that, Frankie,” said Mave.

  “For what?” But I hit it. I ran right over the large deer carcass before I could swerve, a huge rolling thump. “Shit.” The car fishtailed and I struggled to regain control. I pulled off to the shoulder without signaling, my hands shook. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t see that. How did I not see that?”

  Mave got out to inspect the tires. So did Nan and I. Rust flaked under the black stripe up the side of the car, like a bed’s dust ruffle. But the tires looked okay. We forgot Ellis and he plodded off to poop in the grass, and I saw it was a little runny. “Sorry,” I said again. “I need to focus.”

  Portable tank in hand, Mave walked back several feet toward the mangled heap of deer. Nan followed. I hooked Ellis’s leash, and he was shaking like me. I told him I’m sorry, I’ll focus, I’ll be careful. It’s okay, Flop, we’re okay.

  Cars zipped past, all with sense enough to change to the left lane. The two women, one aged and sick, one hungry and small, gazed steadily at the head of the deer pointing toward them. I installed the hound back into the Olds and joined them to study the doe’s head with most of its skull showing. Its eyes no longer there. Its body a pile of bloody ribbons. It was impossible to tell what part of the damage we had done. Nobody said anything else. Eventually we piled back in and I slowly edged us back onto the highway.