The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Rose and Aggy stared at one another for a few moments, and then Aggy shrugged.

  “Come on” said Rose, suddenly striding over to Aggy, who was riding Oh Gosh! that day. “Down with you,” Rose said. “Time for a demonstration.” And now Rose gently knocked one of Aggy’s feet from the stirrups. “C’mon,” Rose said again. “I’m going to show everyone how.”

  This was a rare event, an illustration during a lesson. For Rose, riding seemed to be an essentially private activity, mostly between her and her beloved Mr. K. It seemed to be like praying, her church the mowed fields behind our bunk, where the spools of hay were.

  Aggy dismounted, went to sit on a nearby rock, while in a seemingly effortless little leap Rose cleared the back of the fifteen-hand gelding and settled herself into the saddle like it was an easy chair, getting deep down in it, angling back, then stretching her hands high, high towards the sky, fingers interlaced, the clear cracking sound of knuckles and neck. “Feels good up here,” Rose said and smiled at us. That was the first I noticed it, something off, or wrong about her smile, something slightly tilted, like a bike when it begins to wobble.

  Now, Rose patted Oh Gosh’s neck, then picked up the reins. “It’s been a long time since riding you, buddy,” Rose said to the horse. The horse seemed unsure of what to think. His ears went forward, then back. Rose poked them with her crop. “Don’t pull an attitude on me, my man,” Rose said. At that, Oh Gosh’s ears shot forward and the horse—you could practically see the ripple of transformation, his slack muscles tensing, his head lifting, his eyes filling up with fear and focus both. His tail, swishing back and forth. Back and forth.

  We moved our horses off to the side. Rose picked up the reins. “Now,” she said, “you can always fall off a horse.” She smiled, looked at me. “That’s what makes it fun, right?”

  I smiled, nodded yes, felt no. Something had shifted the moment Rose got on that horse, but what or why I couldn’t say. My lips were cracked and dry.

  “It’s possible to fall when you’re at a walk,” Rose continued, now walking a highly alert, energized, anxious Oh Gosh! in circles. “It’s not likely,” she continued, “but the horse might stumble and you might—” and then, with a whoosh, Rose slipped from the saddle and landed, feet first, on the ground—“… fall,” Rose said, ending her sentence on two feet. “If you fall at a walk, you’ve got time to go feet first, or what I like to call birth backwards.” She smiled.

  She climbed back on Oh Gosh! “I was born backwards,” Rose said. “I came into this world and landed right on my feet. Almost killed my ma,” she said and laughed a harsh, brief laugh, and then stopped, suddenly. “All right girls,” she said, “enough about that. It’s the trotting, cantering, or galloping falls that really matter. Fact is,” Rose said, “the human head is a highly important piece of the machinery, so you gotta protect it. If you land on your head and don’t kill yourself, you could wind up no better than a string bean. Hats are good,” Rose said, “but not enough when you’re coming off an animal going up to forty miles per hour.

  “Unless you like string beans, of course,” Rose said, and then laughed again, looked up, her mouth slightly open, as though swallowing some sun.

  We were all listening, looking, lined up, quiet on our mounts. “Falls never happen in a snap,” Rose said. “They’re a process. Do you understand? A process. First, your feet come out of the stirrups. Or maybe you lose one stirrup, and then the other. This isn’t like falling from a tree, or a building. A fall from a horse is unique because you have prior clues, and so you always have the chance to plan it.”

  All the time Rose was talking she was walking Oh Gosh! in fast circles before us. She seemed to be talking half to us, half to herself. She was grinning, enjoying her lecture, almost tickled, you got the feeling. “How lucky is that?” said Rose, turning her head towards us. “How often do you get to plan your own downfall, huh?”

  Now, Rose moved Oh Gosh! into a slow, tight trot, working her reins on him, drawing his whole body up and inwards, insisting on both intense energy and its fierce control. The horse was starting to sweat, high stepping, Rose sitting deep down in the saddle, keeping contact, conversation through her slow seat and intricate rein work. “And because you can plan your fall,” Rose said, her voice trotting right along with her body, “you’ve got time to remember to put your arm out to the side of your head, like you’re sleeping on it, so when you hit the ground, you break your funny bone but not your brain.” She pulled Oh Gosh! to an abrupt stop. “Got that?” she said, eyeing us one by one down the line. “Is this making sense to you?”

  We all nodded. Yes. It was.

  “Let me tell you a little story,” said Rose. “Horses are in my blood. My family’s been riding all the way back to my great-great-great-granddaddy Lindquist, a German.

  “A German,” Rose repeated, as though this had some special significance. My great–great-great-granddaddy Lindquist had a terrible temper, so I’ve heard, and wound up an old man screaming at invisible elves. But he was supposedly one heck of a rider when he was still a gentleman, and that talent got passed on down and down until it was Alice’s turn to take it on. Bet you didn’t know that. My mama, Alice, was nearly Olympic,” Rose said. She was talking, and then she urged her horse forward again with a velvety cluck, a quick tight trot, Rose looking at us as she circled, checking our faces, seeing we were rapt.

  “Nearly,” said Rose, huffing a little now. “As it turns out, nearly is as far on the map from is as North to South. So when I was born, and I got the gift, Alice wanted me to take her nearly North life and find my way South, to the is-land of the Olympics,” said Rose. “And I got the gift.”

  Then Rose paused for a long time in her tale, kept riding the horse round and round, posting up and down, her jaw working, tense. “Thing is, girls,” Rose finally shouted as she went round, “thing is, you can have the gift, but that’s got not a lot to do with the prize. Prizes and gifts, they’re different things. Alice trained me from my first cry to go Olympic, but I got tired of the training, got tired of the winning, because you know what’s on the other side of winning?” Rose asked, and then, before we could answer she yelled, “Losing. I got high up there, got a lot of ribbons, all blues, mostly. I even went to England, but I was going gold,” said Rose. Her voice kept rising with every slow circle she trotted. “Going gold, like Midas himself, ever heard of that story? I couldn’t see my life. I wanted a life, you know, college, clothes. Of course, a horse, too. But just for me and … my kids,” Rose said. “Horses are huge, but riders, they come in different sizes. I didn’t want to be huge. But I didn’t want to let Alice down either,” Rose said. “She’s makes damn good biscuits, but she’s a bitch to disappoint, let me tell you, girls. You don’t cross Alice; you don’t mess with her doilies. So, know what I did? I learned how to fall off a horse going fast, so I had a guaranteed goof at the Olympic tryouts. And it worked. It worked!” She laughed in a choppy, all-wrong way.

  And then, she pulled Oh Gosh! in, squared him to another tense stop. “It worked,” she said again, softly. “I’m living proof.”

  “Wow,” said Jenny.

  Rose bent into a small bow atop Oh Gosh! “Good story, huh?” she said.

  “Great story,” said Jenny. “The is-land.”

  “You like?” said Rose. “I’ve been told I have a way with words.”

  We all nodded then, fast and hard.

  “South, North, nearly, the story, the symbols … they’re kind of clever,” Rose said. “I sometimes think I should write about my life. She turned to me. “What do you think, Slater?” she said. She’d seen me scribbling in my notebooks.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. “So,” I finally said, “so you were gonna go Olympic?”

  “Is that what I said?” Rose asked, narrowing her eyes on me.

  “Yes,” I said, my heart skittering around. “You could have gone Olympic.” And then, suddenly, I found what words I wanted. “You could have, Ro
se,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t want to, but you could have. I can see that. I can tell; you’re that good. I bet you always have been.”

  Suddenly, something swerved in Rose’s face, a subcutaneous shadow. “Is that what you see?” she said softly. She touched her face then, pressed the bone beneath the eye, as though trying to sense something about herself. Then she gestured widely. “Girls,” she announced, “don’t believe a word I say.”

  We heard her say that. We heard the wind teasing the trees, the squirrels bothering the bark, their nails tap tapping the thick skin of the oaks as they scampered.

  “Come on,” said Jenny. “No fair.”

  “I’m not here to be fair,” said Rose. “I’m here to teach.”

  “Teachers tell the truth,” said Em, who, at eleven and three-quarters, was the youngest in our group.

  “That’s right, Emily,” Rose said, gently now. “They do. So let’s get back on track. Let’s stop with the stories. Cleverness is a distraction.”

  And then, Rose pushed with her seat and Oh Gosh! began his high, hard walking again.

  “Back to falling,” Rose said. “Here’s how it happens.”

  Theresa raised her hand.

  “Yes, ma’am?” said Rose.

  “So, you’re going to show us how … right now?” said Theresa.

  “How what?” said Rose.

  “How to fall,” said Theresa.

  “Right now,” said Rose

  And then Rose pushed Oh Gosh! back into a slow trot. “But as long as I’m demonstrating this for you,” said Rose as she posted past us, her voice rising and falling with her body, “I’m gonna go full force. Because I’m only gonna show this once. This isn’t the sort of thing you do every day,” she said, and now she had Oh Gosh! extended into a canter, so in order to speak to us she had to shout as she streaked by, and still, her voice seemed like glass, smooth and unbroken, her sound and her skin separate, one on the run, one standing, terribly tethered. And as the horse kept cantering, she reached up with one hand, unsnapped her hat, and tossed it to us like we were bridesmaids catching a bouquet.

  Except we weren’t. And the hat, it sailed well over our heads. We heard it thunk down somewhere deep in the distance of the field behind us.

  “That’s against the rules,” yelled Aggy.

  “You’re right,” Rose yelled back, because she was clear across the field now. “But I’m at a point in my life where I make the rules, so I can break them.”

  Rose slowed Oh Gosh! down now, brought him back to where we were, still mounted on our horses in a line, Oh Gosh! trotting a tight tiny circle in front of us. “I’m doing this just to show you how possible it is to be totally head-safe on a horse, if you’ve got your technique correct. The hat’s gravy,” Rose said, squeezing with her legs so Oh Gosh! cracked into a canter again, and she streamed, yelling backwards, “What’s essential is your know-how.”

  I heard her cluck, then, and Oh Gosh! stretched into a still faster canter, and then, somehow, at some point hard to define, he crossed the line into a full-fledged gallop, the pounding sound, the blur of her body passing, faster and faster they went, circling, Rose urging him on, high up on his neck like a jockey, flicking her whip just enough to tease him into terror, he flew, that horse, and we sat there, stone silent, overtaken, our own fear rising now, because she was going to do this, somehow, without a hat. She’d said she would but when? When? When? They kept circling, and just when it seemed there could be no more speed they acquired yet one more measure of it, the gelding’s legs almost entirely off the ground, and then she did it, pitched off, curled up, arm out, she didn’t fall first; she flew first, pushing herself off the horse so she soared for some number of feet, she was flying, I swear, I saw a person fly without wings, and then she went down, landing without a sound in the plushest part of the grass fifty, one hundred feet from where we were, Rose going down in the deepest blades and bachelors buttons at the other end of the meadow, in a field so thick with growth we couldn’t see her, and Oh Gosh! raced on until he realized he’d lost her, and then he slowed, slowed, slowly stopped, stood still, his head cocked, confused.

  “Rose,” Emily called.

  No answer. “Rose!” she called again, louder now.

  Again, no answer.

  “Holy shit,” said Jenny.

  We kept staring at the place we’d seen her fall, who knew how many yards from us, from where we were, in that high meadow grass. We kept waiting, like when you see a person go under water, waiting for them to come up, and if they don’t, and if you love them, you also don’t come up, for a long, long time.

  Without speaking, almost as if driven by a singular force, we each and every one of us dismounted. We knew, knew, a person doesn’t fall off a galloping horse, no hard hat even, and be okay. Be even alive. And as one, a single line of girls, we left our horses standing still, reins slack, stirrups down, we left our horses standing there and moved across the meadow to where we’d seen her soar and then sink, and then we were there, in those high green and golden grasses, which we parted—no Rose—and then again—no Rose—and then again, increasingly frantic, parting the grasses over and over to finally find, down at the cooler base of the blades, not Rose, but just one lone black boot.

  Now, this was starting to seem … what? Without talking, again, as one mind, we moved forward, parting the waist-high water of meadow again, only no Rose, no Rose, no Rose, and it wasn’t until we started making sound, real sound, screaming “Rose! Rose! Rose!” that we heard her relaxed, velvety chuckle, and we whipped our heads around. “Rose? Rose?”

  Again, that chuckle. Jenny was holding the single black boot by its rim. Rose was sitting on a rotting log at the edge of the field, eating an apple. At first, all I could think was, “Where did she get that apple?” And then she stood up and stretched in a casual way and said, “See how fine I am? Where’s Oh Gosh!?” At which point Jenny hurled the black boot at her and Rose caught it, expertly. “Don’t be crabby,” Rose said.

  “You scared the fuck out of us,” said Jenny, her voice low and serious in a way I didn’t know she could sound.

  Scared. Scared the fuck. The fuck. Scared. And finally the extraneous curse word dropped away and the core word remained, repeating in my head: scared. I kept saying that word to myself and at the same time hearing it was already in the past tense. The ed of its ending was a footfall, an underline. The past tense. And it was at that moment I realized I hadn’t really felt afraid, until now. My fear was in the present tense, even as for the other girls it moved into the background as Rose explained her trick, explained it was a well-practiced move, aiming herself for the softest spot in a field she knew as well as the palm of her hand, having lived by it all her life, protecting her head with the bushels of hay she’d laid down, and her own arm, of course. As for the boot, well, she’d slid it off and crept to the log, under the cover of the tall grasses, her form diminished by distance.

  The girls began to laugh. Far, far away from us, we saw all our abandoned horses, still in tack, lazily munching the meadow. Rose had made her point. You could survive almost any speed, almost any situation, with enough practice and finesse.

  We brought our horses back to the barn, untacked, ate lunch, lay down in our bunks to rest. “Oh my god,” the girls kept saying. They whispered words like “talent,” “incredible,” “outstanding.” Jenny, leaning over her top bunk and talking to Theresa on the bottom, was explaining that great riding was like any great art, which was frequently accomplished through superior insanity, Van Gogh’s severed ear a case in point. Aggy, more cynical, said, “I think she’d bite off a horse’s ear before she’d whack off her own, if she went totally crazy,” and Theresa said, “Kids, she already is totally crazy, which contributes to her genius.” For the first time, I felt separated from those girls. I wasn’t impressed. I may have been enraged. In my head, I got the point. But in my heart, I kept seeing that single black boot, the shock of her absence, how the space where she shoul
d have been seemed to pulse, even ooze, with sunlight. I kept hearing her throaty, undulating chuckle, the rich, velvet creep of it on me. In me. I kept seeing how she popped up where she should not have been, at the edge of a field, on a soft rotting log, and that’s what kept going through my mind, this phrase: Where she should not have been. Where she should not have been.

  I knew what was coming next. Next, we’d all have to learn to fall, at the speed appropriate for our skill level. And all the girls would learn to do it, because that’s the way they were. Except for me. I knew I’d flat-out refuse, in flat-out fear, but also because of other things. Stubbornness. Anger, maybe. Maybe even rage. All mixed up with wanting.

  I was right. The next day, and the day after that too, the girls minus me, going after genius, or simply trying to please, the girls went down to the ground, stood, shook, the dust flying from their clothes, their hats, their hair. A giddiness rippled through the camp. At night, in the cabin, the horse stories changed. They were no longer about death, but about situations survived. For the first time in a long time I thought of the Callahans’ fire, two, three years behind me now, something not survived. The sound of the sirens at night. The smell of char. Six children clawing at the windows. Six children and their father falling deeply into death. Every once in a while, after all their deaths, I’d caught sight of Mrs. Callahan walking through town, totally alone now, her coat blowing open, her devastated face drained. Over the years, the mother of those six seemed to grow paler in skin while her hair turned preternaturally dark, her lips more vivid. Eventually, we stopped seeing her. She must have moved, maybe to Florida, my mother had said. Or to Texas.

  “What’s up, Lauren,” Aggy finally said to me one night, late.

  “Yeah,” said the others. “What’s wrong? You used to always talk.” I could hear them rustling up on their elbows, looking towards me in the dark.