by Tim Johnston
foreign room.
WHEN THEY GAINED THE tree line she took the lead and they rode single file up the trail, the boy’s mount passively following hers so that he had little to do but watch the rainfall of broken light through which she and her horse passed. The air full of the smell of pine pitch and no sounds but horse sounds: the creaking saddles, the stepping hooves, the champing and blowing.
He held the reins loosely and followed as he had followed another girl long ago, up and up, and for an unfocusing moment he saw her again, moving up the blacktop pale and lean and light, the pink alternating flash of sneaker tread—until the trail crested onto level ground and he rocked back in the saddle and they stopped.
Before them lay a broad glade of aspens, white and spare; the pinewood rising beyond, and in the far distance above the highest pines stood the snowy crags of the Rockies, fantastic in scale and burning in the light of their own immensity. He sat the horse, his gloved hands on the saddle horn. The cowboy at rest, he thought. The Marlboro man himself. He was reaching for his cigarettes when the other horse stepped on, and his horse did the same; side by side into the glade, punching their hooves into the plate of snow where smaller, lighter creatures had recently tread.
The horses diverged as the trees demanded, and they’d not gone far into the glade when, angling back toward Carmen, the boy’s mare abruptly balked, tossing her head and whinnying. He gave her rein to step around the trouble and looked down on it as they passed—the welter of bloody paw prints and the torn bag of hide and bone which no longer resembled any animal he knew.
He saw the cabin through the last of the aspens: a solid and unnatural dark geometry ahead, unexpected and improbable. For a troubling instant he thought he knew it—all of it, all that they would find inside. But this was not that place, this was not that place, he understood that as they crossed the small clearing where the trees had long ago been axed to build the cabin itself and where nothing had grown up in their place.
The horses halted perhaps twenty yards from the cabin.
“Is it Emmet’s?” he said.
“No. This isn’t his land.”
The cabin’s doorjamb looked built for a smaller race of human. There was no longer a door in the jamb and nothing but darkness visible within. The roof was a caved rib cage of lodgepoles, clinging at their high point to the stone chimney.
“The horses don’t like to get too close,” Carmen said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
They sat the horses, watching the cabin.
“What’s inside?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never looked.”
THEY LEFT THE HORSES and walked to the cabin. The boy’s knee had gone rigid in the stirrup and each step was like a sprung trap seizing on the bones. Carmen saw his face set blankly against it, and walked on. She passed under the lintel and the boy, stooping, followed. A window had been cut into the far wall and as they stepped into the room an animal went scrabbling out, long-bodied and black.
They stood looking around, like potential renters. There was just the one room, and they found in it no identifiable trace of former occupancy, not even the expected litter of beer cans left by passing hunters or teens hunting for privacy. On the stone floor of the firebox, nothing but soot and the same gray coat of grit that lay over the dirt floor, the floor itself hard as stone and bowled smoothly toward its center as though by some tireless human milling. They each moved unknowingly to this depression and stood back to back, their breaths coming thick and white.
“Someone once lived here,” she said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Might’ve just been for hunting.”
She shivered and crossed her arms. “I think somebody lived here.” She looked around and sniffed the air. Then she turned toward the boy, and in the bleak light he looked less like the boy she remembered from school and more like some older, rougher brother, and her heart dipped strangely, and she turned away and stepped back outside.
He did not follow but stood there alone, trying to imagine a man building the cabin. Swinging the ax to clear the land tree by tree. Peeling and mortising the logs and mating them at the corners and carving out the openings. Long nights rocking in his chair before the flames, smoking his pipe while the wind howled. Did he dream of company? Did he dream of women?
Outside, Carmen had found a stump and cleared away its mushroom cap of snow and sat with her legs straight before her. He stepped from the cabin and she swept the snow from a second stump and he sat down. The mares raised their heads to look at them.
“I never touched a horse until these ones here,” he said.
“You could’ve picked worse ones,” she said. “Emmet told me one time that when he bought these mares the man wanted to sell him just one of them and one other horse. He said it wasn’t good to have two sisters together. Said they never learned any sense of independence or were hard to train or something. But Emmet saw how these two moved, how they stayed close to each other, and he said that was all he needed to see. He said that if one just stuck with the other, then he wouldn’t ever have to worry about the other running off wild with his wife on its back when they went out riding.”
She stopped and found the boy looking at her.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said. He got out his cigarettes and lit one.
She watched him and he said, holding up the cigarette, “Does it bother you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t like it but I like the smell of it.” Her nostrils widened very slightly and she turned to watch the horses. “My father was a smoker, maybe that’s why. I haven’t seen him since I was seven,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t care to see him again?”
“Why would I want to see a man who doesn’t want to see me?”
He tipped the ash from his cigarette. He said that he hadn’t seen his mother in over a year and he knew exactly where she was.
“Why haven’t you?”
He shrugged. He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them the other way and the movement set off the pain in his knee again—wires of outrage from the deep nerveball where bone met bone.
After a while Carmen stood and went to the mares. “Know what I saw, one time?”
“What.”
“I saw that dog, Lola, walk under these horses and just stand there, for the shade.”
She turned and stared at him, waiting for him to understand what she was saying. Which was that she knew it wasn’t one of the mares that had cracked the old dog’s ribs.
THEY RODE BACK NOT as they’d come but along what remained of a backwoods road in a deep seam of pines where the boughs forced the mares to walk with their hindquarters bumping, the stirrups clacking together, his left and her right. The sun was well into the west and they rode slowly where there were no tracks other than those of mule deer and the snowed-in hooftracks of the horses themselves from the last time she’d ridden here. They rode and she talked about the colleges she’d applied to, speaking soberly of their virtues and shortcomings, of what she reasonably expected to hear from them, but also of what she hoped to hear. They’d ridden perhaps a mile along the path when the mare the boy rode snorted and began to step more briskly. He attempted to rein her back but she only slung her head petulantly and trekked on. The other mare sped up and when the animals were abreast again the boy said, “She’s just plain ignoring me.”
“Smell of the barn.”
“What?”
“She’s drunk on the smell of the barn. Don’t take it personally.”
“Don’t take it personally she says,” he said to the horse. “After all the apples you’ve eaten right out of this hand.”
“If you turned her around she’d behave herself again. Of course you’d have to get her turned around.”
“I might do that.”
“Show her who’s boss?”
“That’s right.”
“Let’s see it, cowboy.”
The boy glanced about him. “This is no place to turn a horse around.”
“You ever been to the rodeo?”
“No. Why?”
“A horse can wrap around a barrel like a snake.”
“Some other horse. Not this horse.”
“It’s a poor carpenter blames his tools.”
He looked at her. “Where’d you hear that?”
“I heard a man say it once.”
“What man?”
“What man?” She pushed out her lower lip. “A man going by the name of Grant Courtland.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“You know him?”
“I’ve heard of him. And guess what?”
“What?”
“He doesn’t know shit about horses.”
She tossed back her head and laughed.
They were coming to a bend in the road and well before they reached it both mares trimmed their ears and began snorting, swinging their heads into each other’s neck and careening bodily together, pinning the riders’ legs between them. Carmen worked her reins and said Whoa, whoa and the boy merely held on. Then they heard what the horses had already heard—the high, thin warbling of electric guitar, the deep air-throb of bass. The sound grew, and the animals pressed on, at war with themselves and with their riders until at last they all came around the bend and saw the car, and the mares drew up snorting.
He’d pulled onto the old road from the county blacktop, and he’d pulled in just far enough to make going around him difficult. Nor could they detour through the woods for the density of the trees. He’d left the car running and the window down, and leaning against the forward black fender in his black leather jacket he appeared a dark extension of the car itself, just as inanimate but for the motion of his thumb over the keypad of his phone.
Carmen looked at the boy, and then she sat forward in her saddle and said, “Hey,” and then louder, “Hey,” until without taking his eyes from the phone Billy raised his free hand in a silent appeal for patience. At last he lowered the phone and pocketed it and faced them benignly, ready now to learn what he might do for them.
Beneath the scales and bassbeats of the music was the low throb of the idling engine.
“We can’t get by,” said Carmen.
Billy cupped a hand to his ear and she repeated herself and he raised one finger and reached into the window and the music stopped, the engine stopped, and all was silent again but for the snorting of the horses and the restless stepping of their hooves.
“Afternoon,” Billy said. He smiled at them and the smile was friendly. “You two look like a postcard sitting on those horses.”
“We can’t get by,” said Carmen.
He glanced behind him and turned back to her and said, “Sure you can. There’s just room on this side here.”
“The horses won’t go around the car.”
“What do you mean they won’t go around the car?”
“I mean they won’t go around the car.”
“They’re horses, darlin. They do what you tell them to do.” He smiled at her and he looked at the boy who had so far said nothing. “It sure is nice to see everybody getting along so well, I have to say. Everybody so friendly. Know what I heard the other day?”
They said nothing. The horses tossed their heads.
“Heard that old man of mine humming a tune.” He shook his head. “Can you beat that?”
Carmen smiled thinly. She looked at the boy. Turned to Billy again.
“Are you going to back up and let us go by?” she said.
Billy held her eyes. Smiling still, but the smile nowhere now but in his lips. “Where you all been to, anyway?” He squinted at them. “You been up to that cabin, haven’t you. Old man Santiago’s cabin?” Mirth and lewdness playing in his face. “I knew this old boy one time went to the doc with a load of number five birdshot in his ass cheeks. Doc takes one look at the boy’s jeans all blood-soaked but not a hole in them and says, Damn, I thought old man Santiago passed on years ago.”
To the boy he said: “The way you sit that horse, I’d say maybe that old cuss has done kicked off after all.”
The boy said nothing.
Carmen said, “Are you going to move that car or not?”
Billy studied her. He tested the little patch of hair under his lip with the tip of his tongue and smiled again. “Why you gotta take that tone with me? Isn’t that my horse you’re sitting on?”
“It’s Emmet’s horse.”
“Wrong. That’s my horse between your legs, darlin.” He stepped toward them and the mares shied and stamped and he stopped. “Not that I’m proud of owning such a pair of contrarian nags.”
Carmen reined the horse and said, “Okay, this has been fun. Really. But I’m turning around and going back.”
“Going back?” said Billy. “With him?”
She was trying to back-step the horse so she could get it turned around but the horse only squatted and tossed its head and would not back-step.
Billy shook his head. “Pitiful.”
At last she curbed the horse violently and it reared and slammed against its sister and came down on its forehooves facing the way they’d come and she reined it to a standstill and looked at the boy and said, “Are you coming? She’ll turn around now.”
The boy sat watching Billy.
“Sean,” she said.
He slipped his off-boot from the stirrup and swung his leg over and stood down into the snow and looped the reins over the mare’s neck and held her by the cheek strap as she shook her head. When she was calm, he walked away from her toward Billy.
Billy waited with his arms loose at his sides, smiling placidly until the boy stopped and stood facing him.
“Well?” said Billy.
“Are you going to move that car?”
“Sure I am.”
The boy waited.
“You mean now? This second? No, I don’t believe I can do that.”
The boy walked on toward the car.
“Where you going?” said Billy, following.
The boy stepped to the driver’s side and reached for the handle.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
He lifted the handle and opened the door, and Billy stepped up and kicked the door with the heel of his boot, wrenching the door from the boy’s
grip and slamming it shut again. The sound echoed down the canyon of pines, and both horses reared and Carmen held on and said Easy, easy. She watched and the mares watched wild-eyed as Billy took the boy by his jacket and spun him around and pinned him against the fender and brought his face close to the boy’s and said, “Like father like son. What is it with you people? Don’t you know any better than to touch another man’s vehicle?”
The boy had not resisted being spun around and pinned to the car. Now with Billy’s face in his face and the feel of his spittle landing on his skin, he reached up and filled his hands with the leather lapels and shoved off against the car and spun around and pinned Billy, in turn, to the car.
“Stop it,” called Carmen. “Sean, stop it.”
“Best listen to her,” Billy said. “How you gonna tap that little brown ass if you can’t even walk?”
The boy let go of one lapel and swung but Billy turned his head and the blow only grazed his chin, and before the boy could swing again Billy pulled him close and fitted his head alongside the boy’s head jaw to jaw as if he wished to say something into his ear, and the boy tried to separate but Billy held him and said into his ear: “Too bad you weren’t so tough when you lost your sister.” And he drew back and head-butted the boy’s nose. There was a brittle sound and the boy felt the blood flow hot over his lips and Billy slipped away and stepped around him and punched him once, deeply, in the back, and of some command not his own the boy dropped to his knees in the snow.
Carmen tried to turn the horse again but it would not turn, and at last
she dug in her heels and
the horse burst forward at a gallop and she looked back once to see that the other mare followed, and then she released the horse to its own desperate heart and it fled up the narrow way, the huge body rocking under her and her hat whipped from her head in the wind and lost behind her.
Watching her go, Billy did not see the boy get to his feet, or the swing that caught him in the temple and sent him stilt-legged toward the trees. He planted one hand in the snow, saving himself in this tripod fashion from a knockdown, and when the boy stepped forward to kick, Billy caught his swinging boot and held on to it and the boy went down and Billy let go and stepped away with a hand to his head. The boy scrabbled to his feet and turned to him again, came forward swinging poorly with his left. Billy sidestepped and shoved him away and said, “You dumb fuck, you broke your wrist on my head.”
The boy turned and came back, the left fist raised.
“Quit now.”
He swung and Billy deflected the swing and shoved him to the car facefirst, held him there squirming and spitting blood on the windshield.
“I said quit now, for fuck’s sake. She’s gone.”
The boy tried to pivot and Billy seized the injured hand in some extraordinary way and the boy pitched forward again, his lips peeled in a red grin of pain.
“I mean it,” Billy said.
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? Really?” He torqued the boy’s wrist. “You gonna quit?”
The boy turned his face and shaped his lips and sent a mouthful of blood spraying over the windshield, and without another word Billy wrenched on the hand and he felt the bones give way like twigs and they each heard the snapping of the bones.
The boy relaxed and Billy let go and stepped away. The boy turned and slid slowly to his haunches, then sat hard on the snow, holding his right hand in his left.
Billy stood over him, panting. He spat into the snow and wiped his mouth. He looked up the path where the girl had gone and there was no sign of her or the horses other than the fresh hoofprints and the dark shape of hat in the snow.
He looked back to the county road and he looked at the boy again heaped against his car, blood running from his nose in a dark ooze.
