The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo

by Ian Stansel

  Over the next three hours he ascended the eastern mountain ridges, occasionally happening upon something like a trail, but mostly making his own, weaving through the trees and skirting the denser thicket. Silas dismounted for the steeper inclines and pulled Disco by the reins. His leg muscles throbbed, shaking from effort and the extended dose of adrenaline. He could hear the sirens now only when he tried. On a stretch of flat he stopped, drank from one of the two bottles of water he had. It wasn’t enough, not for himself, let alone the horse. He poured the rest into Disco’s outstretched lips and the horse lapped it with a desperation that sent a quake of shame through Silas.

  They came upon a gravel forest highway, a wide winding road meandering up toward the peaks of the ridge. They’d be more exposed here, but the riding would be far easier. The horse couldn’t keep going on that ragged land much longer. Already, each step was an effort. On one side of the road the mountain rose, the specifics of it being lost to a sea of indistinct trees. The other side, where they’d come from, dropped away to the valley. Silas’s entire view was of green and brown. No towns, no roads to be seen from his vantage, though he knew the roads were there. The question he faced was whether to continue up the forest highway, away from the cops, or down toward somewhere he might be able to find some provisions. He took stock of what he had: two cans of soup, a bottle of water, a knuckle of bread and an apple from Henry, half a thermos of two-day-old coffee, two bottles of wine. He gave the apple to Disco and drank the old coffee himself.

  He had just grasped the saddle to lift himself up when he heard a sound. A buzzing in the distance growing into a small thundering. He cast his eyes upon the valley and for nearly a minute saw nothing. Then, there to the southeast, he spied the helicopter. He took up the reins again and rushed Disco to the far side of the road. Man and horse scrambled over the embankment and into the dark of the woods, up the hill, aiming for whatever patch of trees seemed the densest. Disco struggled and tripped in holes and over roots and fallen branches, and Silas stumbled alongside, but still he pulled the bay onward.

  The noise of the helicopter faded, then returned louder, then faded again. It was circling, Silas understood. For minutes it would disappear behind some peak or another, only to reappear closer than it had been before. He had the forest to blanket them. He kept on until, finally, exhausted, he stopped in a particularly dark grove and collapsed to the ground. The horse snorted loudly with each breath, her coat now glistening with sweat.

  They stayed there the rest of the day. Silas listened to the helicopter circle and circle again. It didn’t get to where they hid, and just before dusk its sound faded for good, but he knew it would be back at dawn and that eventually it would hover over them. In the diminishing light of dusk, he took Disco out into a nearby meadow for grazing, keeping his horse near the edge of the field and keeping his own eyes on the darkening sky. Back beneath the forest canopy, Disco protested against the developing cold, stomping in place, shudders overtaking her withers. Silas fished out one of the T-shirts that Henry had washed and rubbed the horse’s back where the saddle had been, trying to soak up some of the sweat. Still the horse snorted. “I know,” Silas muttered, wriggling into his coat and hunkering down against a fallen pine, closing his eyes. “I know, goddamn it.”

  ⟱

  Within a week of the fox hunt Silas was teaching at the outfit in Nicasio. He’d heard about Ace’s cracked hoof and the rumor that he’d somehow had something to do with it. To Silas the notion that he would hurt a horse, especially one he felt a kinship to, was absurd. Not so to others, apparently. Students would shyly pass along the latest talk: He’d snuck back to the old barn in the night and did the job there and then. “What did I use, a hammer and chisel?” he would ask, feigning disinterest, busying his eyes and hands with grooming or a piece of tack. The students would not answer. He’d had nothing to do with it, though he knew that Frank believed otherwise.

  Most of Silas’s students came over from the old barn, and he gained a few more without trying hard at all. He brought with him a considerable reputation. It might have been that some trainers coming to a new barn would have told these curious young riders to stick with their teacher. Professional etiquette. Some might have lied, said they had a full schedule, so as not to disturb the delicately balanced environment they’d just entered. This never occurred to Silas. He couldn’t have cared less about the other trainers, even the ones he knew. He approached riders in the barn aisles or perched on the arena fence. Told them he’d been watching them ride (which was often, though not always, the truth) and he could see potential. “Good natural form,” he’d say. Or “You’ve got instincts, no doubt about that.” He commended them on possessing the things that could not be taught while remaining conspicuously silent on the training they’d received for the things that could. These riders would then, often after extensive self-admonishment, sheepishly explain to their old trainers that they were interested in trying Silas out. They’d heard such things about him. They owed it to themselves to be open. And that would be that. He even got a few of Frank’s old disciples, which pleased him more than anything else could.

  He bought an Airstream and paid the barn’s owner a fee to park the thing on an unused bit of dirt a hundred or so yards off the stable, the ground beneath his tubular home hard and cracked as a shattered windshield. Nights, he would sit in a low-slung camp chair, drink the wine he was developing a taste for, and watch the shadows of horses and humans move across the barn windows. The hills all around appeared like men hunched in prayer.

  Within a few months Silas was the primary draw for the stable. Most of the other trainers had left for other barns or simply resigned themselves to taking on the kids and older folks. Silas got the good ones, the late-teens and twentysomethings, the ones with the potential. He worked them hard, often yelling, sometimes storming out and declaring the lesson a waste of his time. And that was it; this was his time. Students were lucky to be sharing in it. He was a tyrant, sure, but an effective one. His students rode better, partly out of fear of incurring his wrath. And as a result, they went to shows and won blue time and time again.

  It didn’t take long before the owner of the barn approached Silas about buying the place, a proposition Silas deliberated on only in order to drive the price down. It was a sprawling outfit, with open, rolling land for miles on all sides. He wanted it. He knew Frank was a better businessman, but Silas was a better trainer. He was a better rider. And now that they were apart, the distinction would become apparent. Of course, Frank had Lena, whom Silas knew to be a hell of a rider and a hell of a teacher. But Silas counted on Frank fucking that up. She was better than Frank, too, and this Frank would not allow himself to admit. More than anything else, Silas wished his father and mother were still around so that they could see what was about to happen, see Silas prove the lot of them wrong.

  He took over the stable and brought in a few young trainers to work under him. He expanded the primary barn and built a secondary one for show housing, but soon that too filled with regular boarders. He dug out the old outdoor arena and laid down a new ring with fresh fencing and a new footing mixture that was both more cushioned and firmer than any surface he’d ever ridden on. He rebuilt the paddocks, widening the area of each, adding a dozen more, and installing automatic watering troughs.

  He also introduced dressage to his teaching repertoire. This was something Frank had talked about doing, but he’d never taken the plunge. Silas figured that despite his habit of putting business first, second, and last, his brother still had a fear of this sort of riding. Though it likely would have been profitable, it was a bit too removed from the old saddle-handle-and-braided-bridle ways they’d grown up with, and so the talk remained just that for all those years. But not for Silas, not anymore. This was not to say that he entered into the endeavor with confidence and gusto. On the contrary, he was scared shitless. Posting and jumping were all well and good, but the movements a horse was asked to make in dressage were a wh
ole other undertaking. He’d trained horses to change leads back in his reining days, sure, but that was just the start in dressage. Extensions, counter canters, and half halts. Those things the untrained eye barely registered but that could make or break a ride in a show. And then there were the fireworks, all those piaffe and passage gaits with the horses dancing damn near in place. The things even dopes like Silas could see. He was determined to learn them all, the invisible and the visible. Spent his nights staying up late drinking and reading about the various techniques, then shook off his hangovers at first light before any boarders arrived and took a beautiful palomino called Donovan out to the arena. Donovan had done some of this with a previous owner and reluctantly recalled the movements under Silas’s clumsy guidance. He felt like a fool learning to ride once again, but this here was what old Frank would have called “rebranding.” Silas would beat the fucker at his own game.

  At the end of his first year he was broke and dependent on every dime of board coming in to cover his bills and loans. But, he thought each evening as he sat outside the Airstream, even if he had no cash, he had the best barn in Marin. He knew it. And, more important, he knew Frank knew it.

  This, he supposed, was the reason he was certain it was Frank—probably drunk out of his gourd—who smashed the windows of the Airstream one night. Silas came home from a tasting to find nuggets of glass everywhere. That was how the war was begun in earnest. A childish first strike. And Silas responded soon in kind, sneaking back to the old stable and slicing the tires of Frank’s truck and trailer, leaving them both ovaling their rims. Even then Silas knew this was a stupid thing to do. But what else to do? What else when he was bored and lonely and resentful and working his way through a second bottle of cabernet? They went on like this for nearly three years, Silas and his brother trading petty blows aimed at each other’s property. A keyed car door. The burgling of a home. More smashed-in windows. Repeat.

  Then the gossip and rumors and lies began. It started with the resurfacing of that bullshit about Ace’s cracked hoof. People were talking about Silas’s treatment of the animals in his care, even though Ace hadn’t been in his damn care at that point. Didn’t matter. Silas countered with questions about just how effective a trainer Frank was, how much he’d depended on his younger brother. Then came talk of Silas’s relationships with his students—some of whom had indeed retired with him to the Airstream on occasion. They stole students and boarders. And rumors spread of Frank’s use of tranks at shows. Silas imagined that might have lost his brother a student or two, maybe more, which was just the point.

  Colic ran through Silas’s place one especially chilly March morning. It had started simply enough, a couple horses stubbornly refusing to exit their stalls, the owners pulling on their halters, grunting and laughing.

  “Something in the air this morning,” one said.

  “Come on, lazybones,” said the other.

  Silas was roosted atop his barstool at the door of the barn, going over his bills for the month—he was a shit bookkeeper and in a near-constant simmering panic about forgotten numbers and missed payments—and not really listening to the conversation. It was the background noise of the place: people trying to coax horses from there to here, dancing between loving coos and halfhearted reprimands. It was only when a student of Silas’s—a young woman he’d slept with back in the Airstream a handful of times—came into the barn and said, “Something’s wrong,” that he knew this morning was different. Fear alit on that freckled face he’d come to enjoy so. He followed her to the paddock where her Paint mare was on the ground, breathing heavily. “She won’t get up,” the woman said. She put a hand on Silas’s arm. Then again: “Something’s wrong.”

  “Goddamn,” he breathed. Opened the gate and strode to the woman’s horse, knelt down and stroked the mare’s neck. Her wide, panicked eyes rolled to watch him. He set his ear to her ribs and listened to the heightened rolling of her heart. He scanned the paddock and went to a pile of manure. The lumps were old and dry and crumbled in his hand. Nothing fresh. He stood and hopped onto the second railing of the fence and perused the grounds, took in the scene with new eyes. A dun gelding was down three pens over, as was a filly he’d brought in just days before. He found one of his own horses rolling in distress. “Get the feed out of all these pens,” he told the woman. “Dump the water. Get her up and walking.”

  A hundred yards away one of his men was pushing grain to the far paddocks. “¡Oye, Manuel!” he called. He got the man’s attention, pointed at the wheelbarrow, and cut fingers across his throat. “¡No mas!” Across the grounds another worker was divvying up flakes of alfalfa. “Felipe,” Silas yelled, running to him, “no mas alfalfa.”

  “¿Por qué?”

  “No good,” he said. “I don’t know. Get it all back out, then help walk the horses. Tell Manuel too.”

  The boarders there were already in their stalls scooping grain out of their horses’ buckets and pulling flakes of alfalfa and hay. Then they went in to other stalls to carefully retrieve the feed from horses that weren’t theirs, all the while saying “Sorry” and “I know” in sweet tones. Silas called his vet and his feed man. He explained what he was seeing and repeated the symptoms the horses were exhibiting. Vet got there within an hour—good woman, that one—and took vitals on all the horses showing signs of colic. Nine in all. She listened to their bellies.

  “Doesn’t seem like twisted gut,” she said. “But I guess we knew that by the epidemic here.” All across the stable grounds, as people were leading horses aimlessly back and forth, they kept an eye on the vet and Silas. The vet performed rectal exams and gave the affected horses analgesics for pain and laxatives to help move their digestive tracts. It took the whole of the morning and into the afternoon. “Keep ’em walking,” she said. “And pray for poop.”

  Silas went to the feed barn and climbed into the loft and snipped the baling wires and ripped through the alfalfa. Soon he found the dark, compacted matter at the center of a bale.

  The feed rep showed up midafternoon, stepped out of his truck, and adjusted his company hat. “What have we got?” he asked as Silas approached.

  “I’ll show you what we got,” Silas shouted. He took the rep to where he’d tossed the contaminated bales from the loft. “We got a problem is what we got. We got nearly a dozen horses with their guts full of goddamn mold.”

  “Now let me see here,” the rep said. “Just settle down.” He knelt and inspected the alfalfa. “Well, hell,” he muttered.

  “Mold,” Silas said again.

  “Yeah,” the rep said nearly to himself. “Boy, that’s what it looks like, huh.”

  “What it is.”

  “How many bales?”

  Silas pointed to the three he’d tossed. “These so far. You’re about to check the rest of the fifty.”

  “Use your phone? I got to call my guy. If the issue’s back at storage, I need them to know.”

  “The problem ain’t here, bub,” Silas said. “We haven’t seen a drop of rain since this last delivery. And I had this roof redone half a year ago anyway. This loft ain’t the problem.”

  “Well,” the rep said.

  “Yeah,” Silas said. “Well.”

  “I’ll call my guy.”

  Silas brought the cordless and the rep called, started explaining the issue to the man on the other end. Then, as he was repeating the details of the situation—a simple situation, as Silas saw it, clear as day—for what seemed like the third time, the rep stopped and said, “Wait a minute here.” He was kneeling down in the busted bales, covered in dust and husks head to toe. He pulled the baling wire from under the alfalfa. He pulled out another and another. “Hang on,” he said, not quite to Silas, not quite into the phone. Then he said straight to Silas, “This isn’t our wire.”

  Silas looked at him.

  “We use the regular galvanized type,” the rep said, “not this black.” Silas didn’t respond, didn’t blink. The rep set the phone down and Silas hear
d the muffled voice in the receiver say, “Mark?” The rep bounded up the ladder to the loft. “See,” he said, then: “Watch out, now,” and he pushed a bale over the side. “See, that wire? That’s ours. Silver. These ones you pulled out have this black annealed kind. It’s better wire, to be honest, but it isn’t what we use.”

  “So someone used a different wire,” Silas said.

  “I’ve never seen anyone use this at our company.”

  The rep came down again. Silas tried to steady his heaving breath, said, “What are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting that these bales of moldy feed didn’t come from us.”

  By then a handful of Silas’s boarders were gathered at the mouth of the feed barn, and they saw Silas curl in his fingers and set that fist hard into the rep’s jaw. They saw the rep hit the ground. They heard Silas yell, “Don’t you try to fuck me, you shit.”

  Two boarders stepped up quickly and flanked Silas and cautiously set their trembling hands on his chest. “Silas, don’t,” one said. The one he’d been sleeping with, the one whose horse first went down, the one whose face he liked so very much, stayed behind, her hand set over her gaping mouth, watching.

  By the time the police came, Silas knew it had been Frank. The understanding came like a leavening. One moment Silas raged against the feed rep and the next he felt a curious calm, the sort of calm that comes when the world, at least for a quick moment, makes sense. Son of a bitch poisoned his horses. How he’d done it—how Frank had gotten those moldy bales up in the loft—Silas didn’t know, but there was no doubt it was him. Silas almost laughed.