An Inconvenient Elephant

by Judy Reene Singer

But sometimes, if you try hard enough, move fast enough, engage in a quick sleight of hand, you can convince fate to change its mind and turn everything around.

  I was lucky that fate was giving me another chance. I was lucky, too, that the horse world is small but very public and very willing to help one another. The really nice man, traced quickly through Marielle’s description of his truck and trailer, coupled with Richie’s diligence, was definitely a buyer for the slaughter sales. His name was Lou Dickerson, and that’s what he did for a living. He ran a kill pen. He posed as a nice man, promised he would take your free horse home to his children, promised that your horse would have a forever home, and resold it almost immediately to a slaughterhouse in Canada that was near the New York border. He wasn’t really a nice man at all.

  “Oh God, no,” I gasped, when Richie gave me the news. “I have to go right away.”

  “Be careful” was all Richie could say. “And be prepared for the worst. Your horse may already be gone.”

  We ate dinner in silence that night. Diamond had made stew by mixing several cans of soup together, cutting up a few potatoes, then heating it all in one big pot. The blending of colors and ingredients looked odd, but I didn’t have much of an appetite anyway.

  “We’re going first thing tomorrow,” I said to Diamond, “since we won’t be able to see horses in the dark. We’ll leave before the sun comes up.”

  “Where are we going?” Diamond asked, ladling more stew into her bowl. The potatoes hadn’t really cooked through, but Diamond said a good stew should have a little crunch to it.

  “Lou Dickerson’s stable is about two hours from here,” I replied. “And he has a horrible reputation.” I gulped back tears. “I never thought Mousi—” I couldn’t finish my sentence. I put my head down on the table in my arms and wept.

  Diamond rose from her chair to put her arms around my shoulders. “Here’s one thing I learned a long time ago,” she whispered. “Don’t cry tomorrow’s tears.”

  There are places on earth that are so wretched, that you would wonder why Providence had turned its back on them. When I helped rescue Margo, I saw poverty in Zimbabwe that shook me to my core—starving children, starving animals, people broken from desperation. When I returned to the States the first time, it was with a certain complacent belief that my own country was above such agony. I was wrong.

  Anadilla Horse Sales was a two-hour drive from the sanctuary. Diamond and I made the sanctuary our first stop so that we could borrow Mrs. Wycliff’s horse trailer. It was a roomy trailer with four large stalls and a dressing room in front, which meant we also needed to borrow Mrs. W.’s truck to pull it.

  I grabbed my checkbook, though my own savings were rapidly shrinking, thinking I would offer everything I had to buy Mousi back, while Diamond, apparently not believing in the easy availability of fast food, filled her rucksack with peanut butter sandwiches, our passports, and a week’s supply of cheroots, in case we had to chase Mousi over the Canadian border. Also tucked away in the bottom were her entire life savings from the last twenty years in Kenya. We had no idea how much Mousi’s freedom would cost, and she wanted to make sure we had enough.

  “I can’t believe you’d do this for me,” I said, weeping. “But if he costs a lot, I will pay you back. No matter what it takes.”

  “I’m not worried,” Diamond said. “I know you’d do it for me.”

  She drove as I stared stonily out the window, unable to hold any kind of comprehensible conversation. All the mental images of Mousi that I had forced myself to repress over the past two weeks flooded into my mind. I was picturing the worst beyond the worst.

  Diamond was smoking the cheroot clamped between her teeth and ripping along the highway at top speed, though she didn’t have a valid New York license.

  “You have such great roads here,” she enthused. “I bet I could hit a hundred without a problem.”

  There was no sign outside the place. Just a rutted muddy driveway that wound off the main road and threaded its way through gnarled trees and thick, impenetrable groves of sharp-needled thornbushes.

  “Ugly,” I spat out.

  “They’re planted on purpose.” Diamond pointed. “See how straight the lines are? They’re to keep animals from escaping. They do that in Kenya, too. Almost the same kind of bushes. Only to keep the wild animals from raiding the farms.”

  One more turn and we found the pens. They were large, three of them, bordered by broken post-and-rail fences strung together with barbed wire and rotted rope. Several broken trucks chocked up on cement blocks littered the landscape, while broken horses stood quietly in the pens, waiting for their last trip. They stood without shelter or food or water or hope.

  “It’s a holding pen,” said Diamond.

  “I’m afraid to look around,” I gasped. “What if I don’t see him?”

  “Toughen up,” she commanded. “We’re on a mission.”

  We slipped through the broken wire and wandered through reeking pens filled with horses and donkeys, one after the other, standing knee deep in piles of manure. I tried to scan each pen carefully, glad for once that Mousi’s white coat, normally a nuisance to keep clean, would stand out against the dark, muddy coats of the other horses. Diamond and I walked through the pens together, gently pushing aside blind horses, injured horses, frightened and trembling animals, their starvation-rough coats plastered against prominent ribs and sharp bony hips. Pushing past horses with deep ragged wounds, horses down, horses nickering to us, begging for a last morsel of food or a sip of water.

  “Bollocks! How does he get away with this?” Diamond demanded, gesturing to a small white shack that stood way off in the back of the property and apparently functioned as the office.

  “He’s been reported dozens of time,” I said, “but the authorities don’t care. Come on—we need to hurry.”

  “You’re right.” Diamond shook her head with disgust. “Let’s just find your horse and get out of here. And then we can report him.”

  We combed through all three pens, but Mousi was not in any. There was another pen on the far side that held a few foals, but he wasn’t there either.

  “There’s nothing else around,” I said, sick with disappointment. “Maybe we can drive up to the border and ask if one of his trucks went through recently. Or maybe we can find the slaughterhouse and ask—”

  “Shh.” Diamond put a finger to her lips. “Listen.”

  I tilted my head and strained my ears. There was a muffled sound, a low, defeated whinny, but I couldn’t place it. “Where is it coming from?”

  Diamond climbed through a fence and stood for a moment to look around before walking to a clearing behind the pens where a large rusted truck stood. A horse nickered softly from inside. I helped Diamond quietly lower the back ramp.

  “Stay here,” she cautioned me as she climbed up and peered in. “It may be something you don’t need to see.” She disappeared into its dark interior. “Looks like they were going to take this shipment pretty soon,” she called down to me. “Bollocks, it’s dark in here. Hey! Here’s a white horse.” She was quiet for a moment. “Bollocks!” she exclaimed again. “It doesn’t look like the horse I saw at your brother’s.”

  “Oh God,” I said, holding my stomach. “I have to see for myself.” I started up the ramp.

  Diamond reappeared at the top. “Know what? I think it might be him. Just don’t get upset at the way he looks.”

  I was up the ramp in a flash, my heart pounding, then taking tenuous steps inside until my eyes adjusted.

  “If it’s him, you’d better get him off straightaway,” she said, throwing me an old frayed rope that she had pulled from somewhere inside the truck. She walked the rest of the way inside with me, then helped me drop a long metal bar that blocked our path to the back of the truck. The floors were slick with manure, and the ammonia smell burned my eyes as I tried to scan through the darkness for a white horse.

  “First stall all the way in the back, on the left,”
Diamond whispered to me.

  It was Mousi. He nickered when he saw me, and it was all I could do to keep from screaming out his name.

  He had lost a lot of weight, he was filthy, and his mane was matted, but at least he was still alive. He was wedged in between two foals. I slid the rope around his neck and quickly took him from the stall, and walked him down the ramp while Diamond held the foals back.

  I led him to the waiting trailer, but Diamond remained behind.

  “Oh, Mousi,” I whispered to him as I tied him inside, then gave him a long hug. “Mousi!”

  I looked over my shoulder for Diamond, but she hadn’t followed me. I retraced my steps—she was still in the big truck.

  “Let’s just pay for Mousi and get out of here,” I urged her.

  “We can’t leave them here,” Diamond said, pointing to the foals staring at us with large, frightened eyes. “Get some ropes,” she said. “They’re coming, too. And so are the others.”

  I looked back at Mrs. Wycliff’s trailer. “How many are there?” I asked.

  “It’s too dark to count them,” she replied, “so let’s just unload them. We can’t leave them.”

  Diamond was right. In my impatience to get Mousi home I had forgotten my own heart. We couldn’t leave the others to be taken to slaughter. “How many do you think we can squeeze on the trailer?” I asked. “It only has four stalls.”

  Diamond squinted her eyes and calculated. “They’re awfully thin, so I’m figuring two to a stall, Mousi in the aisle stall, and maybe one or two of these foals in the dressing room.”

  “That makes eleven,” I said.

  “Eleven sounds about right,” Diamond said. “That’s always been my lucky number.”

  There was a thin chestnut mare ready to foal, who had a sweet face and a huge open gash across her neck and chest; a skeletal brown-and-white pinto gelding, obviously sick, judging by the amount of mucus pouring from his nose; an emaciated black-and-white pinto mare that was trembling violently in a corner—nine in all, not counting the foals.

  A dark bay mare hobbled painfully over to the fence as we passed with the last horse and nickered to us before leaning her body against the precarious fencing for support. Diamond looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

  “She’ll make twelve,” I said to Diamond.

  “Twelve’s always been my lucky number,” she said.

  We stuffed the mare in the middle next to Mousi and put the foals, who were huddling together and shaking with fear, into the dressing room and locked them in.

  We had loaded them as fast as they could walk up the ramp—the pregnant mare, the babies, the geldings—before finally slamming the tailgate shut. Suddenly a loud shout echoed across the pen.

  “What the hell you doing out there?” A rough-looking man in a yellow slicker slogged through the mud and manure toward us. He stopped and rapped his knuckles against the trailer. It must be Dickerson, I thought. He stuck his face right into mine, and I tried not to inhale his acrid cigar breath.

  “I asked you a question,” he snarled.

  Diamond dug into her pocket and casually lit a cheroot. The smell resembled the paddocks we had just walked through. “I’m the one you need to be talking to,” she said, taking a long drawn-out puff and casually directing it into Dickerson’s face. It didn’t faze him in the least.

  “All right, then, I’ll talk to you.” He jerked his head toward the trailer. “What you got in there?”

  “Twelve horses,” I answered him in her place, trying to keep my voice from shaking. It was possible that Dickerson wouldn’t even want to sell any. “How much for them?”

  He stretched up to peer over the back gate. “Why, they’re nothing but skinners,” he sneered. “Look how you got them packed in there! Like sardines. Slaughterhouse won’t take them in that condition.”

  Diamond was impatient to leave. “How much for all of them?” she asked, blowing an especially large puff of cheroot smoke in Dickerson’s direction. It smelled particularly acrid.

  “Are you kidding me?” He took a step back to avoid the smoke. “I can’t be bothered. Biggest bunch of miserable shit I ever saw.”

  “Spare us the lectures,” Diamond snapped. “Just give us a price so we can get out of here.”

  Dickerson flapped a hand at us, his face filled with a well-practiced disgust. “I won’t buy a one,” he said. “I wouldn’t get a penny for any of them at the knacker’s. Get them the hell out of here. Get them the hell off my property.”

  I looked at Diamond. A lightbulb sparked over her head. We were thinking the same thing. Diamond drew another long breath from her cheroot and blew it casually into Dickerson’s face. Now he waved it away and gave a little cough.

  Diamond gave me a defeated shrug. “You heard what the man said.”

  “I did,” I replied.

  “So, we’d better comply.”

  “We should.”

  We slammed the trailer doors shut and hurried into the truck.

  “That’s right,” Dickerson called over his shoulder. “You just get them the hell out of here. Take them back home. I won’t spend my good money on shit like that.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” Diamond yelled from the window, and gunned the engine. The truck groaned under the weight, and the front wheels spun as they tried to gain purchase against the mud. Diamond backed up slightly, then touched the gas again. The wheels grabbed and slowly rolled us forward rut by rut, slick mud to hard dirt, and back to slick mud. Diamond pressed the pedal for more gas, the truck heaved, and for one horrible moment, I thought we would get stuck. Finally we were moving from the driveway onto the solid asphalt of the highway.

  Two miles away, I started breathing again. I turned to Diamond and gave her a sardonic grin. “I guess this makes us bona fide horse thieves.”

  Diamond hooted loudly. “Wouldn’t be my first time,” she said. “Now let’s get your boy home.”

  Chapter 28

  SHE HAD A TATTOO, THE DARK BAY MARE, WHICH meant she was a thoroughbred, an ex-race horse, bred to run, bred for better things, but there was nothing sleek or shiny about her now. We had saved her life, though there wasn’t much of it left. She had to come off the trailer first, because she had been the last to load, and it took four of us—Diamond, me, Ignacio, and Richie—to help walk her down the ramp. She had tufts of dull brown hair that grew between the open sores of her skin. Thickened white scaly patches made an unsightly mosaic across her skeletal frame. One front leg angled sideways, obviously broken; her head hung low; and her sunken, dispirited eyes spoke of unremitting agony. I had never seen a horse look that bad, and I thought I was going to vomit.

  “How is she even standing?” I said, and turned my face away. Diamond gave me a sharp jab of elbow.

  “That won’t help her,” she said brusquely. “Let’s get her into the barn.”

  We inched the horse along, encouraging each shaky step with gentle praise. She shuffled past Mrs. Wycliff, who had put on her pith helmet and come from the house to watch. “Get her settled in the isolation barn,” she called to us, pointing to a small five-stall barn behind the main house. “Margo”—Mrs. Wycliff nodded her head at me—“get a hot bran mash going. And, Harry,” she called over to Richie, “blanket her right away.”

  “There’s a kitchen in the barn,” I said to Diamond as we helped the horse into a stall. “It has a microwave and medications and an overnight cot and everything else we’ll need.”

  “I’ll call Dr. Harry,” Mrs. Wycliff yelled after us. “He’s a new vet, but he’s good with these rescues. And, Jackie,” she called after Diamond, “put extra shavings in the stall. I want it bedded deeply. Have Margo help you.”

  I was relieved when Mrs. W. mentioned a new vet. Her old vet had been my ex-husband, Matt, and he was the last man in the world I wanted to see.

  “Poor Mrs. Wycliff,” Diamond muttered as she filled a bucket of water for the horse. “We’ve all turned into Jackies and Harrys.”

 
“Except for me,” I corrected her. “I seem to have become an elephant.”

  The choreography of chores had everyone working. We got the rest of the horses off the trailer and into the barn, where they were put two to a stall, except for Mousi, who was given the foals for companions. Ignacio had unlocked the dressing room to the trailer and was almost knocked over by the foals, eager for freedom. Volunteers brought buckets of water, hay was thrown, and Mrs. Wycliff called the vet.

  I was mixing buckets of warm bran mash for our new guests when the vet arrived. He was an intense, wiry man with dark hair and darker eyes set in a keen face with a thin, high-bridged nose that gave him the look of a raptor.

  “This is Dr. Harry.” Mrs. Wycliff introduced everyone as he entered the barn. She summoned Diamond-Rose for a handshake. “Harry meet Jackie.” Diamond smiled as they shook hands, and he smiled back, his angular face relieved by a pleasant grin.

  “And this—” Mrs. Wycliff pointed to me, then grew flustered. “And this is—well, now, you can’t both be Jackie, can you?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m Nee—”

  “Oh, I remember!” Mrs. Wycliff interrupted. “You’re Margo Sterling.”

  “Margo’s the elephant,” I said. “I’m—”

  But Mrs. Wycliff was impatient. “Oh, you all know who you are, so just sort it out among yourselves.” She toddled off toward the entrance to the barn. “I’m going up to the house for my special medicine,” she said. “I’ll have those horses cured in no time.”

  Dr. Harry decided that the bay mare was the worst off and immediately began treating her. We helped him sling her up to take the weight off her leg before he could examine her. Everyone stood in a little group outside her stall as he lifted her lip to expose anemic white gums, listened to her heaving chest, examined her eyes and ears, and took a skin scraping. Within minutes, he had drawn several vials of blood, administered antibiotics, and hooked her up to an IV for her severe dehydration. Then he kneeled down and began gently palpating her twisted front leg.