Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  She said sure. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the Georgia O’Keeffe I still had, after all this time, the page folded in fourths, the ram skull with morning glory torn from your book and handed to me in condolence, the way someone would tear from a loaf of bread and give it out.

  Nan looked at it awhile. It was tattered from riding so long in a back pocket. “O’Keeffe,” she said. “So horrifying and beautiful at the same time.”

  I told her how O’Keeffe came to love the desert, how she met it first in the panhandle of Texas when she would hop a hay wagon to get to Palo Duro Canyon and paint the light on the red rocks, or paint the feeling the light pulled out of her chest. My voice sounded like Mave’s.

  “Where is that canyon?” Nan asked. “We go through the top bit of Texas, I think.” She flipped the road atlas pages.

  “Near Amarillo.”

  She found it with the index. “Yeah, we go through Amarillo on the way to New Mexico. Forty runs right through it. We should go there, to Palo Duro.”

  “Mave probably can’t.”

  “Mave would want to.” She leaned up closer to my seat, propping her head on the back of the empty passenger side. Looking at me as if to say, You’re going to have to be honest with yourself about what Mave wants.

  “It feels strange, doesn’t it?” I said. “Just driving west.”

  “But it feels good.” She smiled. Her lovely young face. Her bared woundedness.

  When Mave had talked about heading to the desert, after the first and last round of chemo, she’d said we would make mats and baskets from bear grass, or stick dolls from cholla cactus, and sell them for food. I’d said we’d visit the chapel at Chimayó where there’s a hole of healing dirt. We could reach into the hole where the reputed crucifix had been found in the desert sand. I’d heard there was a whole room of canes abandoned by the healed. She said, “Sure—mix it as a mud salve on my chest like Vicks VapoRub. Voilà.”

  I told Nan, there in the Shell parking lot, “It feels like we’re fugitives running from our own lives.”

  “She would like Palo Duro,” Nan said.

  I’d wanted to bring the dying Mave out to the desert, but then what, Ruth? On the paths studded with claret cup cactus, the prickly pear the bears can eat with their tough tongues and rough mouths, what then?

  I did want to take her to the canyon. But we were in Memphis. Or just east of it.

  Mave headed back toward us carrying a large obnoxious soda and more pork rinds, mini powdered donuts already snowing up her mouth.

  IN LATE AFTERNOON ON SUNDAY, the famous Beale Street was of course dead, signs gaudy and blank. Not much traffic, no one walking around. The building fçpades were sad.

  “I’ve been looking forward to Memphis,” was all Mave said.

  We found the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry, saw the white wreath on the door of the room where Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot by a sniper from a window across the street. A new Civil Rights Museum had just broken ground and the sign said it would open next year, so we sat mournful in the car, gazing up at the closed pale green door. Then we looked for Sun Studio but couldn’t find it. Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Rosco Gordon, all the people Sam Phillips pioneered. Records she’d pulled out at home even though she had no record player and had, I guess, decided not to take the one from Aldrich Street on which she’d played Sarah Vaughan and danced with you as you were disappearing.

  “We can stay till something opens,” I said.

  “Doesn’t matter, it’s a tourist attraction now anyway. Shadow of its heyday.” Mave took a long suck of cola. “Let’s go. I’m done with Tennessee. What I want is the wide plains and the New Mexico sky.”

  Maybe it was never Memphis but the Mississippi River that we’d wanted to mark. Before we crossed the Mississippi, I pulled over and we got out to look at it. None of us had ever crossed it, had ever gone this far west. It would be new territory hereafter. We carelessly left Ellis off leash, but he sat somber, gnawing a secret piece of trash. I poured some water into his Country Crock water bowl.

  “God, it looks like the ocean,” Nan whispered.

  “Not really,” said Mave. She watched a barge a long way out, scanned the vast river up and down. “But jump in, you’ll end up in the bayou.”

  “Bye-you. I like that word.” Nan kept at a reverent whisper.

  So now? Now we would head to points further west, into Arkansas, into Oklahoma. We could have turned back. This could have been far enough.

  Mave sat down cross-legged on the grass, as if to say, Yeah, far enough. Unwound her tubing and looked at the great river barefaced. A few trucks passed on the freeway and blew our hair around. I sat too, couldn’t help but breathe deeply when I heard her shallow breaths. It was a reflex I felt guilty for. I hugged my knees and tried to constrict my airways. I knew the asthmatic constriction well, but I tried to feel her brand of it. I tightened my chest. She would think this stupid. She had said razors scraped within her chest, she had said it was like tar spreading, she had said lungs could turn hateful.

  I let out a gasp and inhaled after several long seconds.

  “Jump in, you can feel everybody’s pain,” said Mave. “People throw it in there with their old boots and rubbers.” As if she knew I was outside her pain trying to get in. And as if she knew pain was the old story and everybody would get their chapter, some long, some short. Nan was over there thinking of her crackpot father, her dead babies, her mother with the split side, her Dillon gone bad, her faceless paintings seeking a face. The wide river bore its mud along and I conjured my own mother’s dying, my father’s, my and Clay’s child all tissue and cells, my version of Dillon on the night he left—a version I knew was long gone, replaced by a man I did not long for.

  Once, Mave had said she understood what it felt like, when Dillon left. She had lost you, Ruth—she drew on the loss of you. Stood in the doorway aloof but near, trying her best, shifting her gaze around.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It feels like when Rex is having a lambing.”

  “Feels like that on the inside,” I said.

  “Positioned backwards with the legs all tucked.” She stayed in the doorway, obligated. “That’s how they come out breech. Hurts like hell.”

  THE URGENT IDEA OF STEEL WOOL got me out of bed at four a.m. Tank top, underwear, the house a dark meat locker. This was a few mornings after Nan had crashed the September co-op and had pulled me back underground. I took steel wool to all Lottie’s copper-bottom pots and pans. It was cool but I didn’t fully dress. Clay still slept. He slept in on Saturdays. A lingering scent of skunk infused the dew. Out the kitchen window, I knew the poplar leaves were starting to yellow, and I imagined shivering birds in need of stouter plumage for the coming months. I scrubbed my hands into a heat.

  It must have been around seven when my cousin Tuffie knocked on the kitchen’s screen door frame and stared at me.

  “You forget to get dressed? It’s chilly, you know. It’s like autumn.”

  “Are you strung out, Tuff?”

  “A little. I’m on an errand for Mom. She sent me with a half bushel of Romney peaches and some wine saps for you to can.”

  “You look like death with that eyeliner.”

  “You look like hell too. Mom’s got her hands full with Belinda.”

  “What’s wrong with Belinda?”

  “She says Dillon’s new wife was flirting with Jack at the Shop ’n Save yesterday.”

  “Nan? Does Dillon know?”

  “How should I know? But I’m guessing it’s not the first time. Come help me carry.”

  I entered Lottie’s old room, where the clothes hamper overflowed. The metal rail on the bed useless and bright. I pulled dirty jeans from the hamper and a so-so long john shirt. I walked with Tuffie to her landfill car. I carried the crate of peaches and Tuffie hefted the apples on her bony hip. She was eight years younger than I, still no chest at twenty-eight, a filthy mouth, black lipstick, black clothes,
stringy hair dyed black, always on some kind of drug now. I itched everywhere, did not scratch. Something in my head muted sound. Her gossip had planted in me the sudden desire to stop hiding and just go see Dillon.

  But when Tuffie left, I lingered in the familiar grooves of work. I scalded the peels off the peaches, and the kitchen walls began to sweat. I halved them and lay the halves down into Ball jars, cupping them tightly to each other, like spooning lovers, and I poured in the hot syrup. I lowered each jar into the boil bath canner and flushed at the steam, pushed up my long john sleeves. The rolling boil cast a gentle sound, steaming the room looser with the scent of hot furless peach.

  I showered and put on the mint dress I’d worn to Darrell’s wake, then changed into jeans and a red blouse. Afterward, I pulled out the warm jars, halfmoons in syrup floating upward to each lid. Late morning. I would take a quart to Dillon, wait at his grandmother’s until he landed his pesticide plane. I didn’t know what I’d do or say if Nan was there. I wrapped the hot jar in a towel so I could set it on the truck’s bench seat, but the phone rang just before I pushed out the screen door.

  “You ever have an ache that calls for its phantom limb?” asked Mave.

  “No,” I said. “Where have you been?” I hadn’t followed up after the co-op and felt the guilt sting.

  “I think you should come over,” she said.

  “I’m busy. And it’s early for a drink, isn’t it?”

  “Just come.”

  So I took the hot jar of peaches and drove to Mave’s, and decided I would seek Dillon after.

  The hydrangea off the left side of her junked-up porch still had one blossom. The near-noon light struck it, like a bell, and so the living room was more noticeably dark and dismal when I entered. No Mave, only your storehouse of books, Ruth, with their grayed tongues sticking out, places she’d marked for passages that had spoken her life into being. She had bedded me down in that living room once, on couch cushions on the floor, when she’d first moved back—remarkably, it had been the cleanest room in the house. I lay that night wrapped in a wool blanket pulled from a chest of camphor blankets and afghans, a kid in a cocoon, papers scattered under the cushions—Leave them, it’s okay, she’d said. There were places in the books that would utter me, too, though I hadn’t known that then. But lying in my cocoon, I’d heard the books’ murmur and had scratched my ears for the tickle. I’d heard the chaos and the anthem.

  Jar of peaches in hand, I smelled an odor like diesel. The same old circulars and plastics and wilting philodendrons lay scattered around my feet, TV guides and a Matlick Feed ball cap and empty pretzel bags.

  “I have an ache that calls for its phantom limb,” she said from the kitchen. I followed her voice.

  “Brought you some peaches,” I said.

  “A drink?”

  “Is that why you called me?” Having worked myself up to finally see Dillon, I couldn’t mask my irritation.

  She wore her ratty robe, her gray hair a spritz around her head. Nothing underneath the robe, it seemed. Some cleavage, no compression, some softness. I looked away by reflex. She picked at the lid rim on the unringed jar I’d set before her. One robe sleeve was pushed up. I saw she wore an X of white tape at her inner elbow, a cotton ball. As if blood had been drawn.

  “My pipes are no good,” Mave said.

  “Rex will look at them. Probably a dead squirrel in the line again. I told you to put that screen on the intake at the spring.”

  “These pipes.” She patted her chest. She put her hand out to say sit. I sat.

  Ruth—what parts would you want to know? Those that are unreal because too real? Those you’d prefer without detail? Without diagnosis?

  “I had a peculiar pain,” she said, “so I got it checked out.”

  “Who took you?” I swiped at a moth stuck in liquid on the table.

  “AWOL took me.”

  “Ron?”

  “During his lunch. He’s back working for the State now.”

  “Yeah, Clay told me.”

  “Highway flagger again. Slow, Stop, Slow, Stop. He won’t tell Miranda on me.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “Otherwise I’d be lambasted for waiting too long.”

  “Tell Miranda what?”

  “That I have stage four lung cancer.”

  In my skull a great sudden pressure, like a tamping down. I said nothing. She studied the peaches. I felt as though the pressure would spill me out at my edges, so I rubbed my arms, containing myself. Strangely, I could not feel her near, though she was right there across the table. Her robe fell a bit more open to almost bare her abused left breast.

  She said, “I love words with two contexts that metaphorically mirror. Think about trough—a trough of a wave that follows the crest, and a trough for slopping hogs. You work those toward sameness.” With a spoon, she gently popped the newly sealed lid from the quart jar and scooped out peach halves onto two soiled plates. I put my head down on my forearm on the table. I felt her sweep pieces of my clean hair away from my plate.

  Once, Ruth, as a teen, I’d told her I found my life disappointing.

  “Your life?” she’d said. “What’s yours about it? The ham hock legs sticking out of your shorts?” I asked her whose it was then, but she never said.

  DID YOU EVER WANT TO EMPTY YOURSELF LIKE A BOOT with small rocks in it—shake it out and start over? Did you ever want a new name? Hydrangea. Hibiscus. Horse. Horsehair. Did you ever want to be less alone and more like the Ellafritz girls who nurse each other’s sons? Well, you never knew the Ellafritz girls, so probably not. I want aloneness and also to be less alone—that fat, divergent greed. When you traversed the Sinai, did the desert scrub take away the confused wanting, or intensify it? Where the stars are clarified and the water more secret. The air unhumid and undense and unswampy, breath coming in like wind through a screenless window, carrying neither wasp nor fruit fly.

  We didn’t leave Interstate 40 through Arkansas, as though the state’s territory was somehow off-limits. It was hairy around Little Rock, but the rest was a mindless four hours. The trees did finally thin. This was the first time we’d really driven as though we had only our destination in mind and the blue Olds was nothing but a means to an end. Let’s just get there already, said our slouching bodies, said Mave’s covert surveillance of her tank’s oxygen gauge, said Nan’s periodic sniffing of nail polish remover to drown out the dog stench, said the dog’s low whine.

  At one point Mave confirmed the sensibility, said, “I’m ready to see the roofless room and see the rocks immortal, the New Mexico daylight.” She coughed lightly. “Get our turquoise rings in Abiquiú. Did you know about O’Keeffe’s macular degeneration, Nannette? Did you know she went blind holding her palette knives, calling up color from memory in her studio along the Rio Chama where the cotton of the cottonwoods snowed down—like radioactive fallout—upon the adobe ruins?” She coughed again. Nan uncapped the polish remover and sniffed.

  “You can quote me on that in the book. That’s quotable.” Mave surreptitiously fished out a codeine from her brown sack in the door pocket. She took it skillfully without a drink, after surveying the empty cups crushed at her feet and in the console holes. She winced. I said I thought it was time we stop for the night.

  It was late when we got to Fort Smith, which, Nan reported from her study of the atlas, was all the way on the western edge of the state, “like smack dab on the line of Oklahoma.” I pulled into the Super 8 lot where a street lamp dropped a wall-less wardrobe of blank light upon us.

  “I don’t want to sleep,” said Mave.

  “You’re tired,” I said. “We’re all tired. We’re sleeping.”

  “Can you really ask about a pool this time?” said Nan. “I’m throwing Stinko in.” Stinko stirred to life, aspiring to a long pee or a snack.

  “I’m not sleeping. I refuse.” The slur of the pill. “I’m ready for that red Oklahoma dirt.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m sleeping an
d I’m taking these keys.”

  Mave squinted at me, or at the light too bright. “I don’t want to miss this. Shh. Listen.” She pointed out her still-rolled-down window. The freeway was close, we heard only the revving whomp of semis.

  “Your codeine is speaking to you,” I said.

  “If we have to stop then fuck the Super 8,” Mave said. “Let’s camp out in the dry scrub. Let’s get a whiff of the Ozarks that lie to the north.”

  “Unh-unh, I don’t camp,” said Nan.

  “Sleep in the car then, Gypsy. Which are you afraid of? The rattlers and coyotes? Or the women that turned into hairy spiders?”

  “I’m afraid of you, wacko.”

  Mave cracked up.

  “I’ll get us a room.”

  I was weary and heavy-footed crossing the lot. I heard Mave say to Nan, “Lay me with the multi-eyed tarantulas. They jump, you know, they jumped when they were women. They’ll take me bite by bite and scurry up my legs, a furry foot where this tube runs right here to my nose holes. Then feed the rest of me to javelinas.” The car door opened. Ellis trailed me, lifted his leg on the lamppost.

  “Pool,” yelled Nan.

  A hollyhock lived, stick-straight in a half barrel of dark dirt outside the lobby door, surprising in its beauty. Smoking or non-smoking: smoking. The man demanded a pet fee since Ellis followed all the way to the glass door and smooshed his nose on it, waiting to be let in.

  I pulled around to Room 131, popped the trunk as if it were routine.

  “Seems like we ought to put one foot in Oklahoma, at least.” Mave pointed out my window. “I can see it over there. Traversed by Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne. We’re close to Comanche territory.”

  We loaded into the room. I filled Ellis’s Country Crock water bowl and he was wild with thirst. “Sorry, Flop,” I said. His kibble was dwindling more than it should have been, so I gave him a few of the lingering pork rinds.

  Mave started stripping the comforter from one of the beds, tank armpit-tucked. Threw the blanket on the floor and ripped off the top sheet in one impressively forceful motion.