Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  In my head, Clay turned to me his boyish face the color of an antacid tablet, of cat tongues, and said, when he entered the kitchen, You look nice. The blouse cool on both arms, against all my skin except where the bra was.

  “Maybe what you need is to oxidize,” she said.

  They went on with Grauballe Man and Elling Woman of the Iron Age, then the Bronze Age Cashel Man of the Irish peat bogs, the oldest fleshed body crouching in the peat longer than anyone.

  “I bet we have our own around here,” Mave said, “pickled in the Caudell bog. We should start foraging for them in the skunk cabbage.”

  “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  She looked at me. Didn’t say anything with her mouth, only her eyes. She looked back at the TV.

  I didn’t picture myself bludgeoned. I pictured my black hair growing long and wrapping around me like a coat so all you could see was my head, my face, but the rest was shrouded and cut off, my limbs tangled. With my arms restrained, I wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone.

  THE PAPERY MOTEL BED SHEETS CRUSHED UP TO MY CHIN, I lay imagining the aerial view of the New Mexico desert, radioactive and bombed out, the mesas blue at sunrise, haggard white by noon. The New Agers would have their open-air market, trading in spiritual goods—come get your new life in the wide rocky spaces, get a Navajo turquoise ring for twenty bucks, and I’d get one for Clarissa’s Tess. Get a buffalo scrotum purse for twenty-five. A purer soul for thirty. But, aside from the racket, there would be the true wilderness of conversion. Be changed, it says. It says: I will not restore you to the same. It says: There is no tourist trinket for what I will do, for what it means to become nothing. I thought of that, Ruth; I thought of the relief.

  I turned to see the vague outline of Nan lying on her stomach, ear down on her pillow, face toward the pastel palm trees on the wall, arms wide out in free fall like a child’s. The hair, tamed wet last night, had sprung back into its wild nest. Ellis had chosen her in the night, a pile tucked to her side. The thick drapes kept me in question about the time, but their rim of bright sun said we were up late.

  Mave was gone.

  I sat up and checked under the mattress for the keys. Still there. I went to the drapes to check the car anyway, looked for a popped trunk, but it was shut. At the foot of the bed, Mave’s suitcase. My gym shorts and tank top clung. I’d let in enough light through the window to wake Nan, who groaned and shoved the mound of dog.

  Out the window, I watched Mave exit the lobby door with two cups. She wore her favorite red flannel shirt. She managed the oxygen in her armpit, like a rolled Tennessean.

  “Am I in Florida yet?” asked Nan, mooning from a spillover of the night’s goodwill.

  Mave crossed the lot to our room, her stiff walk, her unshielded squinting eyes. She saw me spying so I opened the door.

  “Could have left a note,” I said. Daylight pounded in.

  “It’s Sunday. Had to make the call early to catch Miranda.” She gave me a coffee.

  “Where’s mine?” said Nan, sitting up in her silky and pink, strap off the shoulder. The dejected Ellis snuffled for an ear scratch.

  “You called Miranda?” I said. The coffee tasted day-old, I gave it to Nan. “What did you tell her?”

  “I caught her before church, but she’d already been out to the primrose.”

  “What did you say to her?” I felt the headache all at once, long after it had settled. Like somebody throwing elbows in my mind.

  Mave sipped, winced. “The primrose, I mean, imagine. Little gaudy things. Some people pry the day open, that’s Miranda. But with a fingernail file, not a crowbar. Hers is a gentle force, prying with equal measure at all edges, and then she eases the lid off.”

  “Enough circumlocution,” I said.

  “Hey, watch the language for Gypsy—keep the syllables down.”

  “Fuck off,” said Nan. She rolled out of bed languidly and slipped into the bathroom.

  Mave’s face softened and suspended itself elsewhere, and my eyes absorbed the encroaching ache in my head. I breathed in the last of the tar and nicotine from the linens, the walls, the carpets. I asked her if she’d taken her pills. I asked about the primrose.

  “Her women’s group will pray for me in Sunday school as they always do,” Mave said, “as they have since the beginning of time for the cancer people and the lost. They lower their lashes and picture us like shelter puppies in a pen, in amongst our turds.”

  Nan flushed and emerged and brushed her teeth on one stork leg flipping through the motel welcome book, deliberate to be part of the conversation.

  “It’s okay,” Mave said. “Miranda goes out to the primrose already dressed for Sunday, salting the slugs, taking a cutting for the noon table and usually one for me. I can see her stoop down every day I am alive. She hitches her skirt, her nylons are runner- free as they slide into her muddy garden shoes. Her hands are flecked with wet parsley and they smell of whatever they have kneaded and seasoned. There’s a pot roast in a crock pot for the twins and Belinda and Tuffie and Belinda’s brood and Rex’s square head. There’s a loud croak in my heart for Miranda and her concave body. Someone who mothers. I know nothing about that, Frankie. The lived-in world was always real to my sister. I fit into her hunched curve at one time. I see now she chose to let it all be wrung from her. I think it was a free choice. I may have been wrong to try to dissuade her.”

  Mave watched Nan head back to the bathroom sink to spit, grabbing clothes on the way.

  “I told her she has lived a real life.” Mave sipped the bad coffee and winced again. “I wanted to tell her that before I die.”

  “I know what you’re planning to do,” I said. “And I won’t let you. We’re going to see the desert and O’Keeffe’s roofless room, and we’ll get some souvenirs, then we’ll go home and you’ll do treatment again.” My eyes watered out the ache.

  “Some turquoise,” she said. Mave so tired and pasty, breathing there, her lungs mostly on the outside, wearing that shirt I’d seen every other day of my life though it looked clean this time, sleeves rolled to the elbow. She sat.

  Out of the bathroom, Nan said, “I want to see the Grand Ole Opry,” dressed now. “The motel book says we’re only a half hour from Nashville.”

  “Me too, Nannette,” said Mave. “Let’s get on the road.”

  WE PILED OUR MEAGER LUGGAGE IN THE TRUNK atop the hard lump of mute gun. Nan seemed to have come to terms with her backseat status and was the first to climb in, rubbing sleep crusts from Ellis’s eyes. It was such a tender gesture, gentle with the pad of her forefinger, somehow keeping the red-painted nail from interfering, he held still for it, and afterward licked her wrist, bedded his head into the lap of dollar-store striped dress. In those four seconds, like a barely redirected spring, my thought shifted to touch. I pulled into the same Denny’s for breakfast sandwiches to go, then we left White House, Tennessee, behind.

  Mave stayed quiet, removed the cotton balls from above her ears, detached the tank’s network of tubes to rub where the plastic hose weighed on the cartilage. I thought of Clay’s touch, as if I’d walked into low-hanging crabapple branches, then backed away. He would pull down my T-shirt nightdress with decorum after, cover me up, his eyes set close together but a face not unhandsome, only uncertain.

  Then I was out there, a sack of organs in the world, sense organs, set of orifices—all of myself hungering now—barreling southbound in that beat-up blue Oldsmobile Royale on Interstate 65 with two other disparate bodies, one with a lovely face unpurpling, the other with a face drying out as if already accustomed to sand and scrub. In the desert perhaps our dead babies would come back, to haunt us more substantially. We should have named them.

  One of hers had been Dillon’s. He’d worn a leather bracelet as a boy, I remembered, imprinted with the name Augustus, for his grandfather he said, and someone had stamped it by hand with metal letters and a mallet, and then he had met Nan when she’d been hawking leather bracelets. One of the children would ha
ve been named that, Augustus, Gus, Auggie—Come eat, Gus, come comb your hair.

  Mave’s cotton balls were yellowed. She held them out to Nan between our seats. “Here, have my ear protectors.” I saw Nan wrinkle her face in the rearview and laugh.

  “Who do you love?” asked Mave. “You never did answer me, Gypsy.” She replaced the cotton, hooked the tubing over her ears, into her nostrils. “Come on, this car is sacrosanct. This metal box is a place to let it fly.”

  Maybe, Ruth, we were looking for a land that suggested the heart opens out, under the bare chalk-tick of a white sickle morning moon and unto flat craggy ground. Because it’s thirst that’s expansive. It’s thirst that lets everything touch you at once, even parts of you never touched before.

  Nan said, “You wanna know? I love sex in general.” Mave raised her eyebrows and nodded. “And funnel cake,” Nan said. She laughed, and Mave beckoned with her hand to say that’s fine, keep going, what else.

  “Okay. I also love to paint. But not just the dirty pictures in aerosol. I do scenes. I actually make the paints myself sometimes, from stuff around the house. Like berries or mustard.”

  Once, I had seen Nan’s work, wall-size, still wet. I had not yet asked her about it. No sound inside her pause but the engine and the rhythmic seams in the pavement. Then: “Sometimes when I paint,” she said, “I forget where my body ends. Like I don’t have edges. Do you know what I mean, Crazy? I bet you do. I bet you know things like that.”

  “People will miscalculate you, Nannette,” said Mave. “People always miscalculate. You bear some resemblance to O’Keeffe, you know, in calculations. Her lover made a mint photographing her nude—did you know? Everyone fascinated by her sex, by the generous give they could feel in her fleshy canyons in black and white. He groomed her like a horse. Like her dark rippling hide belonged only to him within the frame. I don’t give a shit really—give me her own stuff, her reds and rocks, her many skies. What she made with her hands. Give me her color, all untuned. And the bones and buttes. Nobody could give out her body except her.”

  I stayed quiet. They did not ask me what or whom I loved and I was not sure how I would have answered since I was not sure I was capable of love. I was sure only of thirst. I was sure that I always reached for the notepad and for the pens that engrave more than write, their cheap ink drying up. Maybe I was sure then, behind the wheel of the blue Olds, that I would eventually write all this to you who would never read it and, in that act, is there possibly some form of love?

  Nan said, “I do like to draw sexy pictures too.” Big smile and a purse of lips.

  “I know you do, Little Gypsy,” said Mave. She consulted the atlas for which exit to take off I-65 for the Opry, but the signs on the roadside took over the job.

  “It won’t be open,” I said. “It’s Sunday morning.”

  “I just want to feel Saturday night’s leftovers.” Mave rolled her window down all the way and the wind roared. “Catch a few of Patsy’s refrains.”

  The lot was huge and built for buses, and the building imposing. This wasn’t the old downtown Ryman Auditorium I knew from posters. We could see the unlit horrible chandeliers through the full front windows, the unlit sign. Gaudy in the daylight, but I could imagine the excitement that took over at night, how things would be transformed. I stayed in the car, they got out, and Ellis took his opportunity to sniff and piss on a paper cup. Nan and Mave stood side by side, with this new flow between them, and I felt my separateness in relief.

  “We better move on,” I said from the car. I was crisp.

  “It looks like a casino,” said Nan.

  “But you can hear some clips, can’t you? Sing it, Patsy. Hank Senior, Ernest Tubb. There’s the Texan drawl.”

  Nan nodded. “Sure can, Crazy.”

  WE TRIED TO FIND NASHVILLE’S BROADWAY where the honkytonks were, and the places to buy boots, though we knew they’d be closed too. The streets almost vacant, the shutters locked down over windows from which, on other days, crooning would pour out to the street. I wished for more for Mave, real music, some life in the city. Someone walked his dog and Ellis put paws to the car window and whined. I took rights and lefts following the will of the one-ways.

  “Better look for interstate signs,” I finally said. “Time to get moving.”

  Mave’s window was still down, and I heard singing then. It was a hymn, gospel. The next right I took put us in front of a Holiday Inn with a lot so I parked and said, “Turn to the Nashville insert in the atlas.” But Mave’s nose went out the window. The singing swelled, coming from the hotel. Or from just outside it. The hymn I’d heard faintly now grew louder and soon bowled into the car, many voices like one big voice with spokes or avenues—Let the redeemed, let the redeemed, let the redeemed of the Lord say so. The three of us gazed at the hotel pool with its low white fence perimeter, at the crowd singing and becoming one body of sound. Maybe thirty people, many dark-skinned people, several white faces, many were children, some of the women wore white dresses, gloves, some wore jeans. A small boy stood separate in a white undershirt and white flood pants, his thin dark brown legs and arms jittery, as if he had to pee. A tall man in a white button-up shirt stood in the pool, the shallow end, and the pool water deepened the gray of his trousers. He raised a large inviting hand to the boy in the white tee at the edge of the pool, and the boy settled and looked up and took the man’s hand.

  The voices softened though still sang. The poolside hotel bar was closed and a row of young boys and one girl climbed up on the bar, jockeying to see. Two other kids stood beside the boy holding the man’s hand, and a woman in a formal blue dress printed with white lilies gave a towel to each kid, and each held the towel like a ring bearer his pillow, with both arms out, as if the Holiday Inn towels were sacred.

  The man spoke but I couldn’t hear him. I turned off the idling engine; still he was too gentle to hear. He spoke to the boy whose hand he held, and the kid nodded, then opened his mouth to speak when the lily-dress woman, I assumed his mother, touched his shoulder as if to say, Don’t just nod now, speak it out loud. The kaleidoscope of faces was still but in motion at the same time, eyes on the boy. I noticed his chest was so tiny, his hand like a brown moth in the man’s huge darker hand, and the boy put his other hand on the railing and started down the underwater steps that were there to ease in his body. His eyes widened and teeth clenched, so cold, but he moved steadily down into the pool toward the man, close enough for embrace, face to torso.

  “Father, Son, Holy Spirit,” whispered Nan from the back seat.

  The man palmed the boy’s back and leaned him down into the blue water, as if giving him a swimming lesson, teaching him the back float, except the boy held his nose and disappeared for two seconds, except there was a mist of voices that began to intensify again, blooming out into the chlorinated air. When the boy burst up, the woman in lilies wept. He smiled and wiped his eyes and jumped a little, put his arms out to his sides, ready to play Marco Polo or dive for coins with his friends whom he looked at now, their arms bearing towels. He climbed the steps, almost princely, and the two were shy for this split second after the rite. He was cold—he took one of the cheap little hotel towels that hardly wrap once around a body, but it was big enough for his small self. He dried his face, his eyes, his neck. His two friends remained tentative. He was different now.

  The mother grabbed him in a quick hug that broke the spell, and he squirmed to get out of it. He broke free, flung the towel around his back and held the corners under his chin, took off running, the towel his Superman cape, and the other two followed, running, since he was again the boy they knew, and no one scolded. The kids on the bar hopped down and gave chase, the singing pronged out, the tall man still in the pool upraised his arms in a formal benediction while the soul saved and sanctified took the corner and kept flying, toward us, cracking up. The girl in the bunch waved at us as they raced by and then turned to head back to the congregation now talking and visiting. Someone brought tow
els to the preacher rising from the pool. I watched his large hands take a towel, shake another hand, rub his own head of close-cropped black hair, reach into his pocket to pull out something he’d forgotten to remove, now wet through, and he laughed.

  We stayed quiet, we three fugitives. The pool water tremored. Mave soon flipped through the atlas to find our coordinates in the city, suggested a direction, and I started the car.

  “I loved that,” said Nan softly.

  Mave said we’d see signs for 40 West once we crossed the Cumberland River. I just drove. My arms felt wobbly, as if energy had surged through them and then nothing.

  “I loved it,” Nan said again.

  I kept picturing the gentle touch, man’s hand on boy’s slim back, his barely back, just a slip of person. I watched Mave’s hands acutely, bitten nails and bony fingers, watched her trace the turnoffs on the page over the tiny string of blue that meant river. How rarely we touched, she and I.

  “Take Jefferson,” Mave said quietly. None of us wanted to speak loudly or stir the air very much. Mave said then, “Give him a page in your book, that kid. Give him a whole chapter.” She watched the storefronts pass, the signs and awnings. “Write a chapter on a boy dunked in a hotel pool and wrapped in skinny towels.”

  “You don’t believe in the Father, Son, Holy Ghost,” I said.

  “I believe in that boy’s cape.”

  “I don’t know,” said Nan, “I just loved it. I’d like to paint a boy getting baptized then flying.”

  The traffic had picked up. I swelled with a sense of things blurring by too fast out the windows. I switched the blinker on, but I wanted stillness somehow. Maybe it was the boy running and the look of Mave watching. I wanted to freeze it. Indeed, paint it. I wanted more time. I thought about her earlier farewell call to Miranda, and I thought about the gun, and I wanted Mave to live. Maybe she would live. I turned us onto a bridge and the sign for 40 instructed me into the right lane. There was a shoulder, narrow but big enough for the car, I put the hazards on and pulled off.