“Well,” I said, because I couldn’t deny it, “it’s worked for me so far.”
West End traffic was already heavy, and I-440 all but a parking lot. I brought Khanh up to speed on the case while we inched along. Then we hit I-24, going against the stream, and things opened up. I kept it under the speed limit, careful not to unbalance the horses in back, but we made it to Murfreesboro in less than an hour and stopped to stock the fridge.
All the staples. Eggs, milk, cheese. Beer. Potatoes for hash browns, flour for biscuits, sausage for gravy. Rack of ribs, bacon, a couple of steaks, some chicken breasts . . .
With my vegetarian housemate an ocean away and the prospect of grilling over an open flame on the horizon, my inner carnivore was asserting itself.
“We need vegetable,” Khanh said, holding up a head of broccoli and a root that looked like it had come from the rear end of a goat.
“I don’t even want to know what that is.”
“You not needing to know. Just need to eat. Make you strong for when people try kill you.”
“Usually when people try to kill me, there are firearms involved. Maybe I should eat something that’ll make me fast.”
“You need something make you lucky,” she said. “But this not help you there.”
Once past the college town, traffic grew sparse. I took the ramp toward Bell Buckle, home of the RC and Moon Pie Festival. Then the road narrowed and the landscape changed from fast-food restaurants to small neat houses to farmland. We turned off the main road and wound our way past half a dozen small towns marked only by a tighter clustering of shotgun houses and the city-limits signs.
The sign for Hidden Hollow had Old English lettering and a barren tree motif echoed by a handful of businesses on the square. In front of the stone courthouse, a boy in a Titans baseball cap straddled a Civil War-era cannon, licking a Popsicle shaped like a rocket.
Khanh gave the Popsicle a longing look and fanned herself until I dialed up the air conditioner.
We passed an old-fashioned diner, two antique shops, a hair salon, a grocery store, and then a series of tack shops and horse-themed gift shops interspersed among the houses and mom-and-pop stores like mushrooms dotting a field. No hotels, just a log-cabin steakhouse, a cowboy bar with a neon sign that said Jake’s Place, and a stream of bed-and-breakfasts, each with a sign extolling its claim to fame—Momma’s Special Homemade Pecan Pie, Fluffiest Biscuits You’ll Ever Taste, Custom Quilts and World’s Best Redeye Gravy.
The turnoff to the showground was marked by a strand of plastic flags and a series of handmade signs. We followed the red Sharpie arrows until a security guard in a Day-Glo lime-green vest waved us through the gate. A few yards farther on, the road pitchforked—campground to the left, stables to the right, a state-of-the-art indoor arena in the center. Concentric rows of freestanding vendor booths spread from the front of the arena like peasant huts surrounding a medieval castle. It would have been more efficient to put the stables next to the campground, but that would have spoiled the effect.
A teenager in another Day-Glo vest waved us toward the camping area, where trailers, trucks, and campers converged into a metal and canvas village. Some sites were already decked out with awnings, grills, and folding director’s chairs, and many had portable corrals like the one I had in the back of the Silverado. Some of the awnings were stamped with the names of the owners’ stables: Rosewind, Willow Creek, Copper Springs.
A Day-Glo girl with braces on her teeth pointed us toward site fifteen, and we pulled in between a rig twice the size of mine and a bubble-shaped aluminum camper that looked like something out of Lost in Space. A Dodge D-Series pickup sat beside the bubble, the trailer connector unhooked. The scalloped hood and pocketed taillights marked the pickup as a model from the early seventies.
When I opened my door, a rush of heat rolled in. By the time I’d helped Khanh out of the truck, my armpits were moist, and sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I unhitched the trailer and set up the portable corral while Khanh set up the campsite, pausing every few minutes to fan herself with her hand. As I unloaded the horses and loosed them in the corral, the man in the silver Lost in Space camper sauntered over and watched with blinking, bloodshot eyes the color of cola in sunlight. Contacts, I guessed, and probably new, from the telltale gouges on the bridge of his nose.
He was a young guy, maybe twenty-three, with ginger hair, pale freckled skin, and oversized ears that looked like they belonged on the cover of Mad magazine. His jeans were crisp, his snakeskin boots shiny, the silver band on his wide-brimmed cowboy hat polished to a sheen. The buttons on his denim shirt were mother-of-pearl. In his breast pocket were a small steno tablet and a pen.
He watched me dump two bales in the corral, one at each end and another in the middle, so Tex could guard two while Crockett ate at the third. When I’d filled their water buckets, the red-haired man put his hands in his pockets and said, “You’re not showing these.”
“No, I’m good, but not good enough to pass off a quarter horse as a Walker.”
“That would be a challenge.” He gave me a friendly grin. “You might slide the black one in though.”
“Couldn’t get him past the inspectors.” Crockett had visible scars on both pasterns.
He nodded. “The scar rule is pretty nebulous, but I don’t think even a blind judge could pass this one through. Whoever fixed him didn’t do a very good job.”
“I wouldn’t call it fixing,” I said. Fixing was a euphemism for soring.
He smiled as if I’d passed some kind of test. “I won’t disagree with you on that. I assume it wasn’t you?”
“You assume right.” I nodded toward his truck. “Nice ride. What year is it?”
“Seventy-two. It was my grandfather’s.”
“You keep it running yourself?”
His grin was half-proud, half-embarrassed. “YouTube tutorials. You’d be amazed at the things you can find on the Internet.”
I introduced myself and Khanh, and he said, “I’m Eli Barringer, reporter for the Sextant. Call me Eli.”
“The Nashville Sextant? Or is this something local?” We hadn’t had a competitor for the Tennessean in a lot of years, not since the Banner went under, but the Sextant was trying its best, a small dog with its eye on a big bone. I’d have had higher hopes for it if the name didn’t evoke snickers from a third of the population and puritanical outrage from another third. The third who understood the name probably got its news elsewhere.
“Nashville Sextant,” he said. “Sports reporter. Human interest. You name it, I’ll write about it. Most of the other guys only want hard news.”
“You got something against hard news?”
“Oh, it’s not that I don’t want it. But look at me.” He circled a hand around his boyish face. “I’m low man on the totem pole.”
“The new guy, huh?”
“So new the ink on my diploma’s still wet. But I’m okay with that. You never know where hard news might turn up.”
“The soring controversy.”
He winked and fired his index fingers at me like a pair of revolvers. “Got it in one. You get this kind of power, money, and tradition all in one place, and then somebody threatens it? It’s a powder keg. Had an arson a few nights ago, and odds are good they’ll never find who did it.”
“How’d you know it was arson?”
“I may be young, but I have sources.” He rocked back on his heels and squinted into the distance. “Besides, an Underwood’s barn burns down, you’ve got to figure someone had a hand in it. These people have been killing each other over soring for the past forty years.”
I lifted an eyebrow.
Khanh said, “Forty year long time. Nobody stop them?”
A quick lift of his shoulders dismissed her question as naive. “Most of them are accidents and suicides, according to the story books. Excuse me, I mean the medical examiner’s reports.”
I said, “Forty years of accidents and suicides? That�
�s a hell of a conspiracy.”
“Look at the names on those medical reports. Then look at the names of the investigating officers, and tell me there’s not one.” A burst of trumpet music came from the arena, followed by a discordant jumble of sax and cello and the trill of a clarinet. The musicians, warming up. Just-Call-Me-Eli touched his fingertips to the brim of his hat. “I gotta run. Sounds like the show’s about to start, and I want to be there for the fireworks.”
7.
There were no fireworks, at least not then, except perhaps in a metaphorical sense. It was too early in the day. While Eli Barringer, cub reporter, wandered off in search of social pyrotechnics, Khanh and I finished setting up camp.
“We go seeing horse show now?” Khanh asked. “Or go stir pot?”
“Could be both,” I said. “Let’s head that way and see what happens.”
The campground smelled of pine trees, hay, and diesel fuel. As we neared the vendor booths, those scents were lost beneath the sweet-and-savory carnival smell of burgers and funnel cakes. Khanh cooed over jewelry, leather goods, airbrushed T-shirts, handcrafted toys, and plastic souvenirs made in China. I paused to admire a tooled leather saddle with silver inlay. Too fancy for me, but a fine-looking saddle nonetheless.
We made our way to the arena and bought a pair of four-day tickets and two pocket program books. I handed one of each to Khanh and flipped through my book, looking for the names Carlin had given me. According to the schedule, Jim Lister was about to show a horse called Troubadour in a flat-shod class.
I showed the page to Khanh.
“This say flat,” she said. “Mrs. Carlin say Mr. Lister a Big Lick man.”
“That’s right. I didn’t expect this. But you know what they say.”
Her lips quirked upward in a smile. “Man who plant wind, harvest storm?”
“Adapt or die. I guess Mr. Lister is adapting.”
It was cooler inside, but not by much. An industrial fan at each end moved lukewarm air through the building, while below, six horses cantered around an oval-shaped arena. Their riders, four men and two women, wore old-fashioned suits with derbies. The men rode with an odd, hunched-over posture some called the “gangster gait.” It looked crabbed and awkward to me, but maybe that was my own bias.
In the center of the arena was a white wooden structure with a sound system, a microphone for the announcer, and a row of chairs for the judges to sit on between classes. Three tiers of theater seats stretched up around three sides of the oval. The fourth side had a gate below, where the horses entered, and restrooms and a concession booth above, where a trio of teenage girls in short shorts and cowboy boots clustered around the condiment aisle, sipping on giant colas and piling jalapeños onto a mountain of nachos.
The section closest to the announcer’s stand consisted of individual boxes, each with a row of cushioned chairs and a small table, presumably for refreshments. A sign on the back of each box said Reserved, V.I.P.
It was midday on a weekday, and most of the seats were empty. A gate steward stood near the entrance to the arena, the participants for the next class lined up to one side to allow room for the current class to exit the ring. Jim Lister, looking a few years older than he did on his driver’s license, was fifth in line, riding a good-looking black horse with two white socks and a white star. The horse was better looking than the man, who had basset hound eyes and a face like a wrinkled bed sheet.
His wife, Rhonda—wife number three, according to the background check—stood with her forearms on the railing. She looked better in real life than in her DMV photo, which had looked pretty damn good. Just shy of thirty, she was forty years Lister’s junior, with intelligent blue eyes, a flawless complexion, and hair of that pale clear gold that rarely occurs naturally in anyone over thirteen. She wore it well, though, along with the tight jeans and the powder pink shirt knotted under her breasts.
The ring on her left hand was the size of a quail egg, a ring of sapphires around a diamond so large it should have come with its own curse. Her necklace and earrings matched it.
Khanh rolled her eyes. “Uh oh. This one very dangerous.”
“She doesn’t look dangerous,” I said.
“Never know. Just as easy for woman start fire as man.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Glad you using mind. See how you look at her, think maybe other parts get in way.”
“I’m gonna go talk to her. I’ll try to keep control of all my parts.”
She settled onto the bench. “I stay here. Not want to cramp you style.”
I stood up as the judges started handing out the ribbons. A chestnut with a white blaze took first, followed by a couple of blacks and a bay. The class filed out, those with the top ribbons smiling broadly, the rest looking either stalwart or glum. The steward waved in Lister’s group. I rolled up my program booklet and tucked it into my back pocket, then walked down to stand by Rhonda Lister and crossed my forearms on the rail beside hers.
She glanced up, gave me an appraising look and a smile. “Tourist?”
“Just a guy from the quarter horse side of the tracks. Decided I’d come on up and see what all the fuss was about.”
“And have you?”
“Not yet.”
In the ring, the announcer called for a flat walk, and the riders fell into a relaxed, counterclockwise circle around the ring. The horses’ heads nodded in time to the four-beat gait, each foot striking the ground at separate times, rear feet overstriding to the forward edge of the track left by the front feet. The head-nod and overstride are unique to the breed.
A champagne horse flung up his head and shied, nearly unseating his rider, a young man who looked barely old enough to shave. Rhonda Lister shook her head and nodded toward the ring. “That boy’s overhorsed. You got somebody showing out here, or are you just checking things out?”
“Just checking things out. You?”
“That one’s mine,” she said. “Number 33.”
“He your trainer or your father?”
“My husband.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
She cocked her head. “This is the part where you’re too polite to call me a gold digger.”
“This is the part where I say he’s a lucky guy.”
A smile tugged at her lips. “Smooth talker. Are you thinking of getting into the business?”
The announcer called out, “Reverse, flat walk,” and the riders turned their mounts in the opposite direction. The champagne horse danced sideways before his owner managed to turn him. The horse lurched forward a few steps and finally fell back into the rhythm of the walk.
“He’s hopeless,” Rhonda said. “The rider, not the horse.”
“Well, he’s young,” I said. “Maybe he’ll learn.”
She lifted the hair off the back of her neck and smiled as the fans blew across her damp skin.
“Canter,” the announcer said, and Lister, nearest the wall, nudged his horse into a perfect rocking-chair canter. A guy in a blue suit and matching derby passed Lister on the left, his bay’s haunches brushing the shoulder of Lister’s black. With no place to go, Lister tightened slightly on the rein, and for a moment, the black seemed suspended in air. It was an illusion, a brief hesitation no longer than a breath, but when it was over, the black fell back and was clear of the bay. Lister moved it toward the outside and away from the man in blue.
“Your husband’s good,” I said. “The black didn’t even blink when the other horse bumped him. But why the gangster slouch?”
“Frees up the horse’s front end, lets them lift their legs higher.”
“Looks funny though.”
“Depends what you’re used to. But Jim doesn’t care how it looks. He says it’s not about him. It’s about getting the most out of the horse.”
“He’s in the Big Lick classes too, isn’t he?”
“They save those for later in the evening so more people can come. Those are the most popular class
es.”
“Still?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, God. You drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you?”
“I see what I see. What’s wrong with this gait? It looks just fine, if you ask me.”
“But no one’s asking you.” She gave her head a rueful shake. “And we were getting along so well, too. Look, the problem is, this is media fodder. Everybody wants to gnash their teeth and wail about the poor abused horses. But we’ve done everything they’ve asked of us and more. Thirty years ago, sure, this industry was a cesspool, but they’ve cleaned up their act.”
“They? Or we?”
She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Okay, you caught me. I’m not exactly an insider. I’d never even been on a horse before I met Jim.”
“And now?”
“They’re beautiful animals, amazing athletes. But I’d just as soon drive a Ferrari.”
We talked about cars for a few minutes. Her dad had been a Busch league stock car driver, and she’d learned to change the oil in a car before she was seven. Back then she was proud of the grease beneath her fingernails.
“We had a 1963 Mustang convertible we were restoring,” she said. “My mom used to complain that the only time she saw me was when she had to wrestle me into a dress for church.”
There was a note of sorrow beneath the nostalgia in her voice. I said, “What happened to him?”
She lowered her gaze, rubbing her fingertips lightly on the rail. “Story for another time. You wanted to know why Jim was showing flat shod.”
“Just curious. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“The Big Lick is coming back. For the first time in years, there’s been an uptick in the number of horses sold and the prices they went for. And then the Texas Supreme Court found the scar rule unconstitutional. Since no one knows how to interpret it, there’s no way to administer it fairly. Finally, someone’s admitting there’s a flaw in the system. So we’re turning a corner.”
“But Jim’s showing flat shod anyway.”
“The anti-Big Lick groups, they’re really vocal, and they have a lot of political clout. So he’s covering his bases. Laying a foundation so no matter what happens, which way the chips fall, he’ll land on his feet. That’s what he does.”
A Taste of Blood and Ashes Page 4
