The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  What I saw: The sky was almost pure pearl, with the occasional black gap called night. And the moon was so flat but bright; in its light I could see tiny toads hopping on the ground and the dark, huge puddles and the barn roof, still soaked and sterling, all agleam, but peaceful now.

  The sudden storm, its sudden stop, surprised us all, and for a little while—how long? Six minutes? Six hours?—silence settled over the campground. The main house, too, was silent. We were in our bunks, maybe 9 p.m., peeking out the small screened windows because a sudden silence like that commands your attention and draws out the details you might otherwise miss, so we could hear the peeps of little creatures in the grass, the rustle of the treetops, the bang of a feed bucket in one of the horse’s stalls; he was probably searching for food. We heard the whip sound of wings above us and the clank of the corral gate, and in between these sounds was the silence, dense and real and deep, just as in between stars was the night, dense and real and deep, and in between us, Lauren and Aggy, Rose and Alice, Al and Alice—in between all people, every pair—there was a space, dense and real and deep, and I felt that space as a serious problem, a reason to cling to your life. A reason to make a raft, even as you knew it would fail. A sadness, or maybe better described—a raw hurting—came up over me, as sudden as the storm and its stopping.

  But before I could give this hurt a name, or draw out its details: BANG! BANG! BANG! The sound of gunshot in the main house. We leapt up, all twelve of us, someone screaming, Rose screaming? And then a second-story window flung open, and in the bright night we saw what we saw, Alice’s hands, Alice’s arms lathered with moonlight, stunningly bright, heaped with Rose’s clothes. Rose’s voice, her rude, vituperative tone: “Don’t you fucking dare! Mom! I said M-o-m!” Alice dared. We saw Rose’s clothes sail out the window, arms and legs and torsos made of silk and cotton swishing in the bright night, dancing their way down, now shorts, now boots, now scarves and hats, now skirts, it just kept coming until it didn’t. At some point Rose stopped screaming in protest. Alice didn’t stop though. With the window open, she tossed her daughter’s garments—the ones we’d seen and the ones we’d never seen—out by the armful, did it through screaming and silence, until there were no more. Then, she snapped the window shut; we heard the lock click, saw the shade drawn, and it was done.

  We looked at each other. “Holy shit,” said Aggy.

  “Should we go out and help pick up?” said Theresa.

  The yard, after all, was covered with the contents of a closet, the clothes heaped, sprawled, and soaked on the lawn.

  “We could,” I said. “But then Alice and Hank will think we’re siding with Rose.”

  Before we could decide, out came Rose. We peeked through the windows. She had a laundry basket with her, one of those plain plastic ones with webbed sides. She picked up her possessions. There were so many, she had to squash them in so they fit. I was surprised she had so many clothes and such fancy ones, too, because all I’d ever seen her in were jeans, jodhpurs, spaghetti-strap tanks, and that huge cowboy hat when she was breaking-to bridle. I saw her pick up long skirts, silk scarves, six-inch high heels. Then she went and sat on the glider on the porch, in her old jeans, frayed holes at the knees, her bare feet, tanned toes, up on the railing. She pulled a cigarette from her pocket, lit the match, drew in deeply. She leaned her head way back, then stretched her neck left, right. She tapped ash into her hand, blew on her hand, scattered the ash. A long time went by. She smoked a second cigarette, then a third.

  I felt myself grow sleepy, watching as I was, as we were, twelve chins propped up on the cabin’s moist sills, looking out. The night air smelled delicious. My eyes grew heavy. I’m not sure if what I heard next came from dream or life: her voice. “You’ve seen enough,” Rose said, speaking from the shadows, straight into the darkness. “Go to bed now girls,” someone said. Rose said. The last thing I heard—her voice.

  “Sweet dreams.”

  When we woke up in the morning, the clothes were gone and so was Alice. Sometime during the night the storm had passed, but everything was dripping. The wind was still whipping. Hank served us our breakfast, looking gaunt. “We got some high-pressure systems coming in across these mountains,” he said, peering not at us but out the window, where we could see the weedy space in the driveway where Alice’s old station wagon usually sat. Gone. “Too many mountains around here,” Hank said, staring at the space his wife had left behind. I didn’t know what he meant. There were no mountains around here. But there were gusts. And hills.

  We found Rose where she usually was, down at the stable, where huge puddles had seeped straight up through the cracks in the concrete floor. Rose seemed extremely busy. “No lessons today girls,” she said, doing this and that, rushing here and there. And she wouldn’t face us, instead kept going in and out of stalls, carrying brushes and buckets. She reminded me of my aunt who, one Rosh Hashanah dinner, had lost her crown so she didn’t want to smile and kept her mouth shut tight. But you can hide a missing tooth much easier than you can hide a found face.

  We milled about, unsure of what to do. We should have left the barn. Had we left, this story could have ended here, not an ideal space for stopping, but maybe good enough.

  Instead we stayed. It was clear Rose did not want us there. We must have wanted to be there, perhaps for the horses, perhaps for her hurt, perhaps because we were plain bored of our bunks. I don’t know. Even today, so much older, when I’m in a fight with the man I’ve married, I cannot walk away. I will stay and stay and stay, insist insist insist, long past the point of productivity, unable to cut off the connection, no matter how gnarled, because what could be worse than nothing?

  So I stayed. So we all stayed. Without plan or discussion, each of us started in on chores: Sweeping, brushing. We slipped inside stalls, going to groom. The whisk of currying combs. The clink of picks. Silence.

  And then, finally, Rose spoke. She spoke from deep inside Oh Gosh’s stall, where it sounded like she was bent way over, maybe cleaning his hooves. I don’t know which stalls all the other girls were in, but I think we all could hear her, clear and true. “Girls,” Rose said, her voice coming out of that black box of a stall like some Oz who’s already had it happen, the curtain. “Girls,” Rose said. “Today I’m tired.”

  Her voice, perhaps in part amplified by the damp stall, and perhaps in part for all these other reasons, sounded different. It was so much smaller, yet deeper too. It was, in its own way, very hard to hear.

  “Would you mind,” Rose said, and then she cleared her throat, seemed to swallow something down, as though trying hard to keep her own rain in. “Would you mind, girls, maybe skipping lessons for the next few days? We have some serious drying out to do.”

  No, no no, not at all, of course not; let’s skip today, tomorrow, the next day, because it’s too wet, it’s all way way way too wet anyway. And everyone needs a break. An ending.

  “Thank you,” Rose said, from inside her stall. Pause. “You are all,” she said, “good girls.”

  I was combing my pony, Tanya. I ran my fingers through her honey-colored mane, rested my face against the thick ledge of her neck. I smelled her pony smell, so solid. So strong. I thought thank you. I thought, please.

  And so we all kept doing what it was we were doing, helping I suppose, together in the barn in a weird, quiet way, and this was maybe the closest we came, that summer, a stall separating each one of us.

  A few more minutes passed like this, just brushing or mucking or standing still. Just being. With.

  And then Rose spoke again. “Girls,” she said, and again, I could hear how we all, in our separate stalls, stopped, our brushes, our grooming gear held aloft; we listened closely. Her words were oddly formal.

  “You know what I think I need to do?” Rose said.

  No one said what? It was implied.

  “I think I need to ride my Mr. K today. I know it’s very wet,” Rose said, “but sometimes you need a ride same as a shower or s
omething. It’s just what you need. It’s the right thing.”

  “Totally,” said Theresa, from wherever she was, in some stall to my right.

  “I have watched you ride Mr. K almost every morning,” I said from my stall. “It’s one of my favorite parts of the day.”

  “Thanks,” Rose said. “I think I’ll just throw a saddle on K and take him for a quick run up the hill and back. I’m sure he’s bored and would appreciate the chance to stretch.”

  “They’re all bored,” said Aggy. “Rain can get very boring.”

  “You bet,” said Rose.

  I heard Rose come out of Oh Gosh’s stall. One by one then, every girl followed, stepping from her stall, holding some piece of grooming equipment. We stood there, still, in the long barn hallway, stalls on either side. We stood there.

  Rose went into the tack room, came back with Mr. K’s saddle, his name gold-plated on the back, inscribed in cursive. She had his bridle slung over her shoulder, her hard hat on. She still wouldn’t look at us directly. She seemed to be hiding behind her hair, which had been most days done in two childlike braids or a single thick weaving slung over her shoulder. But today her hair was down, mussed, some kind of snarled but pretty curtain hanging halfway over her.

  Rose went to Mr. K’s stall, slid open the door. From where I stood I couldn’t see the horse, just her, paused on this threshold she’d crossed so many times, the line between the human and the horse world. Step into a stall and you’ve stepped into smells that are pungent; the flies buzz and dive; manure is ripe and rich. But mostly, you are stepping into size, into something so much bigger, and yet smaller (her cupped hands once described for me the size of a horse brain: “No bigger than a golf ball,” Rose had once explained, dismissively) than we are. And as I saw Rose pause, as I saw her hesitate for a second on the ledge of her horse’s home, it occurred to me that she and I shared some fears. We both knew the risk in every equine encounter.

  And, seeing that, getting that, I for the first time observed how she did not simply step forward into the stall; she had to push herself forward—an act of will and faith and, who knows, maybe even hope. I saw Rose pause and then cross over, disappearing into darkness. From inside the stall I heard her talking to Mr. K: Hey there; sweet boy how ya doin’not so good? Tell me ’bout it; wanna go? That’s right. I heard the sound of her currying comb getting the grit out, and I pictured Mr. K loving this, like many horses do, especially at the perpetually itchy, nerve-filled neck. When you brush there, the horse leans way into it, the tines of the tool gathering all the grime and coming clean. If you scritch a horse’s neck, the horse will learn to love you. The horse will give you his muzzle, maybe the best part of the body, somehow softer from the threat of teeth mere membranes away.

  And then the sound of jangling, huffing, there there boy, and Mr. K began to emerge rump first from his stall, Rose invisible, pushing him gently from inside.

  Now this horse, Mr. K, he was enormous, over seventeen hands. He was uncommonly large, yet still sleek, sired by the best, born for the track except his heart had derailed him. “Thank god for that,” Rose would always say to us whenever the subject of Mr. K’s minor birth defect came up. “Had his heart been totally A-plus normal, my baby would’ve spent his life with no-good gamblers.”

  Instead, though, the Flat Rock Farm family had not sold the newborn off, as was the plan. Instead they kept the colt for themselves. So what if somewhere in his DNA there was a tiny chip in the china? This horse was a beautiful being, the color of fresh sap, so sunlight didn’t bounce off the barrel of his body but rather got absorbed into it; he radiated.

  And what a fine horse he had been, right from the start, healthy and huge, the heart defect only so slight. Twice the first summer I was there Dr. Fascal had come out to do her customary pump check, once just by herself, the second time with three other men in the van. The second time they attached suckers to Mr. K’s mighty chest and made a picture of his heart in jags and dips. “Same old same old,” Dr. Fascal had said, handing Rose the scroll. Rose had studied it. “There it is,” Dr. Fascal had said, pointing with her finger to some spot in the squiggles. “See this, girls?” Rose had said, holding up K’s EKG, indicating with her thumb. “That’s the valve not closing.”

  And we had clustered around to see such a sight, a horse’s heart sketched on a skinny strip of paper. What a disappointment. A bunch of toddler lines. “In a perfectly normal heart,” Dr. Fascal had explained to us, “the valve closes all the way, like a door.”

  “But in Mr. K’s heart,” Rose had continued, “the valve doesn’t quite completely seal, so his door is always open. And that’s why he’s my sweetheart.”

  Then Rose and Dr. Fascal, plus the men who had come with her, all laughed, and Dr. Fascal had patted K on his big brunette rump, which was, right this minute, weeks and weeks after Dr. Fascal’s last visit, getting ever larger as Rose guided him butt first from the stall he’d been cooped up in for days.

  Horses were not made for stalls or boxes of any sort. Some animals, like dogs, are. Their human-made crates mimic their natural inclination for enclosed dens, but horses have not the slightest desire for any sort of shelter, except that which is provided by their coats, their fur layered and waxy so weather slips off them. Some horses, when kept too long in stalls, develop what’s called “stall fever.” They start to gnaw at the wood, or themselves. Mr. K had plenty of pasture time, so he’d never had stall fever, as far as we knew, except maybe now, after four rained-out days.

  As K cleared the stall’s door and Rose emerged, pushing on his chest, I turned to view the pasture, those fields, the meadow where she’d done her diving trick. The barn doors were open wide so I could see the sky, too blue, the clouds a mix of stain and sun. The trees swelled and settled. Far up, at the farmhouse, I saw a figure—Hank?—pacing back and forth before the third-floor window. Where oh where was Alice? In the barn, Rose hitched her horse to two lines, one on each wall, so he’d stay still as she tacked him up.

  “Look at you,” Rose said to Mr. K. She leaned in close, nose to muzzle. We were out of her world now, entirely. She reached up and fluffed Mr. K’s mane of bangs, the thatch of hair that grows between the ears and brushes across the wide eyes.

  “Getting long,” Rose said. She stepped back, as though to better appraise her horse’s hair. “Can you even see?” she asked Mr. K.

  I swear the horse nodded no.

  “Neither could I,” said Rose, “if I had bangs that low.” She fluffed her own hair now. “We both need new do’s.”

  It was charming, watching Rose talk to her horse like this, and yet, I was not charmed. I still had the weather in me, the rain, the sudden sunlight, the splashy drops that kept falling, and then stopping. The weather was unsettled. So was Mr. K. Now that she had her horse, Rose seemed to quiet, but Mr. K, well, he might have had stall fever, because he was pawing at the concrete floor, dancing back and forth on his cross ties, like a child waiting for recess.

  From far out across the soaking fields, almost an acre away, I heard the rattle of car coming fast down the dirt road, the sound of its splash and squeal. Mr. K’s ears popped forward, his head cocked in question.

  “I’m gonna give you a trim,” said Rose, “before we go.”

  A horn sounded then, in the worst way. It was not one long solid sound but rather a series of brief screeching blasts, the kind that could get under anyone’s skin. Rose seemed not to hear, or care. The horn kept up. It had no rhythm or reason. It would go blat blat blat in a series of rapid, unpredictable exclamations, and then fall into silence, and then start up again, blat blat. Long pause. Now over. No. Blat. Blat blat blat blat. We all turned towards it. High up at the house I saw a tired old Hank open the porch door, lean into the crazy day of clouds and clearing, and look out, craning, his hand a visor. No car visible. But the horn kept coming. When I turned back, all the horses in all their stalls were now starting to pace and paw, and Mr. K, cross-tied tight, well, I swear I co
uld almost see his whole coat bristle up, billions of tiny tacks.

  Rose always kept a pair of shears hanging from a huge hook screwed in one of the barn beams. They were old electric shears, the kind where the cloth cord has long since frayed, exposing the charged veins inside.

  Now, Rose reached for the shears, popped the plug into its socket. She depressed the big red button and held up the clippers as they chattered. “Will you look at these?” Rose said, but to whom was she speaking? To Mr. K? No. He was obviously distracted, if not worried, his eyes darting here and there.

  Blat. To us? No. She had ceased to register our presence at all, to the point that had we all simultaneously burst into a Latin chant, I doubt she’d have even noticed.

  “Will you look at these goddamn clippers,” Rose said as they gnashed and clattered. “How many times have I suggested we buy new ones? How many times? Penny pinching, pound foolish,” Rose said.

  “But you know what, K?” Rose continued. “You know what? Me and you, we can’t let old patterns preclude new adventures. We can’t continue on as we have. We’ve gotten stagnant, old K Man,” Rose said. “And that’s not what we’re about.”