A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  “When you say Mafia,” I said, “are you talking about actual organized crime? Graft and blackmail and murder?”

  She gave a surprised little laugh and said, “Not unless by blackmail you mean the do-what-we-want-or-we-make-your-life-hell type. This is rural Tennessee, for Pete’s sake. Not exactly Godfather country.”

  I said, “You’d be surprised what sprouts up when there’s big money on the table. No threats about concrete overshoes and sleeping with the fishes? You told me you got death threats.”

  “Hundreds. Mostly e-mails, all from strangers pissed off about my interference in their abuse of horses. I hope you get raped a thousand times and die a slow and painful death, or if I ever see you in person, bitch, I’ll ram my hunting rifle up your female parts and pull the trigger. Crazy ugly stuff.”

  “They said female parts?”

  Her cheeks went pink. “Well, no, not in quite those words. But you get the gist.”

  “And none of these are from Junior?”

  “Junior isn’t that imaginative, thank God. He’s more like, everybody hates you, you’re going to be ruined, you’ll be sorry when you’ve destroyed this whole breed, there’s a special place in hell for people like you. That sort of thing.”

  Somehow I didn’t think the Underwoods were the ones driving a stake through the industry’s heart. “You think he’d hurt you?”

  She frowned. “I’m not afraid of him, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Maybe you should be.”

  Zane moaned and blinked. The seed of a smile froze on his face as he looked past Carlin to where Junior in his derby and Eli in his Stetson stood silhouetted by the sun.

  “Oh-weh? Oh-weh?” Zane blinked. Frowned. He squeezed his eyes shut, every muscle in his face tightening. “Owennnnnnnn.”

  Carlin stroked his forehead. “He isn’t here, baby. He moved on around this time last year. Right after . . .”

  She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to. Around this time last year, Zane had stepped into a stall with a friendly young stallion and never walked again. As if to dislodge the memory, she gave her head a small shake and said, “Can you help me get him back to the trailer? The seizures wear him out. He’s going to need to rest.”

  And a change of clothes, but neither of us said so.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Señora.” Gerardo’s voice was brittle. “You don’t need this man. I can help you with Señor Zane.”

  She laid her hand on his forearm. “I know you can. But you’re still hurt. And I need you to take care of things here. No one else would even know where to start.”

  He looked at me with sullen eyes. “As you say, Señora.”

  A thread of drool trickled from the corner of Zane’s mouth. Carlin slipped the shirt from beneath his head and used it to wipe his lips. Then we lifted him into the chair and strapped him in.

  When she’d swung the DynaVox into place, he reached unsteadily for the screen. As her fingers touched the chair’s control lever, he typed, “I CAN.”

  “Baby—”

  “I CAN.”

  She sighed and raised her hands. “Fine.”

  The chair made its ponderous way across the showground, Carlin on one side, tight-lipped and anxious, me on the other. Occasionally it veered in one direction or the other, and Zane would nudge the lever to correct its trajectory. The constant corrections made our path slow and serpentine, as if we were dodging bullets in slow motion.

  “Who’s Owen?” I said.

  Carlin kept her gaze straight ahead. “Just some stable hand.”

  The chair came to a stop. “NO,” said Zane, via his machine.

  “Some stable hand,” she repeated. “He worked for Zane’s family. Zane’s known him since he—Zane, not Owen—was a kid. He and Owen used to go out for a few beers at least once during every show they both went to. Just catching up. Zane’s family disowned him when he married me. I think it meant a lot to him that Owen never cut the ties.”

  “WHERE IS OWEN?”

  “He left, baby.”

  “I’M NOT A BABY.”

  “Okay, okay, ba-” She stopped, blinked hard. “Okay, Zane. He left after your accident. I don’t know where he is.”

  His eyes welled, and I thought of all he had lost and all he had yet to lose. “I WANT TO HAVE A BEER WITH MY FRIEND,” he typed.

  She gave a little hitching breath, but when she spoke, her voice was steady. “He’s probably just getting his head together somewhere. Coming to grips with what happened. I’m sure we’ll hear from him soon.”

  I said, “He didn’t say good-bye? Didn’t come to see Zane in the hospital?”

  “No, he just took off.”

  “Seems odd after they’d been friends for so long.”

  “Not that odd. He and Zane had been drinking the night it happened. I think he felt guilty, like if Zane hadn’t been drunk he wouldn’t have—”

  “NO.” The robotic voice sounded like it always had, but my mind heard a strident tone. “NO NO NO NO NO.”

  “You don’t know,” she said. “You might not have been thinking straight. You might have been distracted. You might have just been slower than usual.”

  “NO.”

  “You don’t remember!”

  “I HAD A FEW BEERS WITH OWEN I WAS NOT DRUNK.”

  “You remember that?” she said. “Since when?”

  “JUST NOW WHEN I SAW HIM AND JUNIOR IN THE SUN.”

  “That wasn’t him,” I said. “The guy you just saw beside Junior was a reporter. Eli Barringer. What else do you remember?”

  “NOTHING.” His chin trembled. He pushed the lever, and the chair hummed forward and resumed its slow serpentine.

  Their trailer had been adapted with a double-wide door and a wheelchair lift. She rode up on the lift with him, and I took the steps into a living area with hardwood floors, maple cabinets, a breakfast nook with leather love seats, and a hospital bed where the sofa would normally be, across from the flat screen TV and the electric fireplace. Swanky digs. You could have fit two of my trailer in theirs, but the hospital bed and the oxygen tank beside it were reminders that swank could be an empty pleasure.

  Carlin saw me looking at the heavy silver tank and said, “The seizures deplete the oxygen levels in his blood. Sometimes if the seizure goes on a long time and he’s really groggy afterward, the oxygen helps.” She pushed the DynaVox aside and knelt to take off Zane’s shoes. With an angry moan, he shoved her away.

  “Zane—” She rocked back on her heels and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them and spoke again, she’d erased the note of annoyance from her voice. “Honey, I need to get you cleaned up.”

  His chest hitched, and he looked away, his hand moving to cover his crotch. I tried not to see the humiliation in his eyes as I helped his wife lift him out of the chair and into bed.

  She forced a smile. “I can take it from here. Plenty of practice.”

  I stepped outside while she undressed him and tucked him into bed. As I closed the door, I heard his muffled sob.

  Carlin came out twenty minutes later. She blinked in the bright August sunlight. “I get why he’s so angry. Really, I do. But . . .” She made a helpless gesture.

  “But it’s wearing,” I said.

  She nodded. “I get so tired sometimes. Sometimes I think, if I could just talk to Zane about all this . . . But the one person I’d want to talk to most about it is the one I can’t talk about it with.”

  “Why can’t you talk to him about it?”

  “Are you serious? He’s going through enough. He doesn’t need to listen to me whine. And . . .” She looked down, picked at a fingernail. “It’s like he’s two different people. The old Zane, and . . . someone else.”

  “The head injury. It happens.”

  “That’s what the doctors say. That makes it easier to understand, but not much better to live with.” She ran her fingers through her short spikes. “Thank God it’s not worse than it is. They said
he might get verbally abusive or violent. Or suicidal. I don’t know. Maybe he is. Suicidal, I mean. If he was, he’d never let me know it. I try to take precautions, but . . .” She spread her fingers, an I-don’t-know gesture.

  Head injuries were tricky that way. I’d once worked a case where, after a brain injury at a construction site, a guy who hadn’t thrown a punch since kindergarten bludgeoned his wife to death with a hammer. That kind of extreme shift was rare, but there was almost always some degree of change.

  Sometimes it was hard to distinguish changes caused by brain injury from the normal grieving process. Zane had lost more than mobility and the power of speech. He’d lost his sense of self. The words he’d once used to define himself—athletic, agile, charming—no longer applied, and while he’d one day find his way to a new self, it could be a long time coming.

  Carlin hugged herself and changed the subject. “You going to tell your company to honor our claim?”

  “I’m working on that.”

  She tilted her head back, looked up at the cobalt sky. “Without that insurance, we go under. I don’t know if I can handle that.”

  “You can,” I said, “but I don’t think you’ll have to.”

  She reached out, touched the back of my hand with her fingertips. “Thank you.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Why do I get the feeling there’s always one more thing?”

  “Gerardo. What’s his story?”

  “Gerardo isn’t part of this,” she said. “And his story isn’t mine to tell.”

  Her tone said the subject was closed. Maybe she’d tell me in time, but that time was not today. “He’s got a past,” I said. “It might be relevant.”

  “Everybody has a past.”

  She took a step toward me and slipped her arms around my waist. There was nothing sexual about it. She needed comfort, the warmth of another body, a heartbeat against her ear. I held her for a long time.

  Then she pulled away and straightened her shoulders. Gave me a peck on the chin. “I have a class in about twenty minutes. Better go get ready.”

  “No rest for the weary,” I said.

  She gave me a watery smile. “You can say that again.”

  By the time I got back, Maggie James was emptying a fresh bag of ice into the spilled cooler, while Khanh sorted pamphlets and Sue handed out promotional buttons: Walk On—Naturally, Don’t be a Sore-Head, I’m for Sound Winners and Sore Losers.

  No sign of Gerardo.

  “Everybody okay?” I said.

  Maggie chirped, “Oh, we’re fine. I’ve known Junior all his life. He growls a lot, but he’s just a big old bear.”

  “He young bear,” Khanh said. “And he very afraid. That when a bear most dangerous.”

  10.

  With the booth in good hands, I looked at the schedule and said to Khanh, “There’s a trail class in fifteen minutes. Trudy Valentine and Carlin are both in it.”

  “What is trail class?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Maggie said, “Oh, you’ll love it. It’s my favorite class. I hope Carlin makes it in time. She just called to let us know how Zane is and get Gerardo to have Tesora ready for her at the gate. Poor girl. And poor, poor Zane. My heart just goes out to those two. But she told me how Zane suddenly remembered having drinks with Owen Bodeen. Wasn’t that exciting?”

  Her chatter made me smile. “It was.”

  “You going to watch her ride?”

  “If you guys think you’ll be okay here by yourselves.”

  “Oh, we’ll be fine.” She made a shooing motion with her hands. “You two go on and enjoy the show.”

  We settled onto the bleachers as a bronze-skinned man rode a tractor in to rake the track. While the riders lined up outside the ring, two pairs of ring workers carried out the obstacles for the trail class. It was a complicated course, with a bridge, a gate, a mailbox, three barrels, a series of orange traffic cones, and ground poles placed in a variety of configurations: parallel rows, a box, an L-shaped corridor, and a spoked shape, like a starburst or wagon wheel.

  Khanh perked up. “Finally. This look interesting.”

  I nodded. It was my kind of class, the horses in western tack and simple snaffle bits.

  With the course set up, the workers left the arena. The steward opened the gate for the first rider, watched him pass through, and closed it behind him just as Carlin, flushed and breathless, rode up and took her place in front of Trudy Valentine. They were at the end of the lineup, a lucky draw, since it meant they could watch the other riders and strategize accordingly.

  Gerardo went to stand beside the railing, arms resting on the bar where Rhonda Lister had stood.

  There were six riders in front of Carlin. None rode clean. The first lost his grip on the gate and had to take three passes at it. The second horse panicked at the sight of the mailbox and later balked at the bridge. The third knocked a ground pole out of place in the “L” and another in the spokes. The fourth horse, a black-and-white spotted gelding, bumped several poles lightly but gave an otherwise fine performance, while the fifth made notable errors at almost every obstacle—a displaced ground pole, a missed cone, an overturned barrel, an awkward turn. The sixth did the box before the barrels and was disqualified for taking an obstacle out of order.

  “This hard?” asked Khanh. “Look hard.”

  “I used to do this with Tex,” I said. “Takes work.”

  The sixth rider left the ring, shoulders rounded in a dejected slump. Carlin rode in wearing a white hat with a gold band and a white vest trimmed in gold. Her ice-blue shirt and chaps, both edged in pale blue rhinestones, matched Tesora’s saddle blanket. The pearl horse gleamed in the light.

  “Oh,” Khanh said, a wistful note in her voice. “So beautiful.”

  I’d never asked Khanh how much her scars bothered her. For the most part, she seemed to have made peace with the accident that had taken her arm and left the right half of her face like a melted candle, but there must have been times when another woman’s flawless cheek reminded her of what she’d lost. She’d been a beautiful child, with good bone structure and well-proportioned features. The unmarred side of her face was beautiful still, but I didn’t say so. She would have found no comfort in it.

  In the ring, Carlin lined the mare up parallel to the gate, bent to unlatch it, then swung it open. Keeping her hand on the top rail, she rode through and turned the horse to face the gate. She nudged the mare a few steps forward so she could close and latch the gate behind them, then turned to the next obstacle, a series of parallel ground poles. She guided the mare cleanly across them and then turned the horse to straddle a lone pole placed at a ninety-degree angle. She took her time. Front feet on one side of the pole, rear feet on the other. A deep breath and a subtle pressure of her right calf, and Tesora side passed slowly but cleanly along the length of the pole.

  I stole a glance at Gerardo. He was watching Carlin intently, brow furrowed in concentration, nodding as she paused at the mailbox. Tesora stood on a loose rein while Carlin opened the box, removed the envelope inside, and waved it at the judge. He gave her a curt nod. Too curt, I thought, but maybe I was reading too much into it.

  After placing the envelope back in the box, Carlin flipped up the flag and gave the mare an affectionate scratch on the withers. Then on to the barrels. She backed the mare through in a serpentine pattern and turned her again to weave through the cones. Trudy Valentine watched with narrowed eyes.

  Tesora stepped into the square. The mare did a 360-degree turn to the left, then another complete turn to the right. One hoof thumped against a pole, which jumped a fraction of an inch. Carlin grimaced and urged the mare out of the box and into a canter toward the starburst. She cantered over the spokes in both directions, then pulled the mare into a halt.

  Almost home free. She lined the mare’s backside up against the entrance to the “L” and backed through. One to go.

  Carlin turned Tesora toward the bridge. The littl
e mare paused, lowering her nose to smell the planks. Then, at a squeeze of Carlin’s legs, she walked across. There were a few boos and a smattering of applause as Carlin left the ring.

  Trudy Valentine swept past her without a glance. Trudy rode a mouse-gray gelding named Sultan, who wore a black saddle trimmed with silver and a Navajo blanket with lots of red. Trudy wore black jeans and show chaps fringed with silver conchos, a blood-red shirt with a lot of bling, and a black suede cowboy hat with a red rhinestone band. When the light hit her, she flashed like a mirror ball.

  Her horse was tall and she fit him well, lean and lanky, with an olive complexion and dark hair pulled into a silvery net. Strong features, maybe Greek, maybe Italian. Something Mediterranean.

  Sultan was sleek and sure-footed, with an eagerness that said he knew his job and liked it. They breezed cleanly through the gate and the round poles, then came to the mailbox. He stood still as stone while Trudy pulled out the envelope, showed it to the judge, and replaced it with a flourish. The other riders had raised the flag themselves, but Trudy gave the judge a mischievous grin and turned Sultan toward the mailbox.

  “Up,” she said, dropping the reins. With a self-satisfied whicker, the gelding nudged the flag up with his nose.

  While the crowd, sparse as it was, hooted and cheered, Sultan tossed his head and whinnied, clearly pleased with his own performance. Trudy gave his neck a quick pat. They finished the course without a misstep.

  I glanced at Carlin, who stroked Tesora’s neck, a frozen smile on her face. The judge announced the winners—first place to Trudy, second to the guy on the spotted horse, and third to the rider who had knocked down two poles. Carlin, with her nearly flawless performance, came in dead last. The steward swung the gate open for the winners to pick up their ribbons and make their victory laps.

  With a forced smile, Carlin leaned in and said something to Trudy. Trudy didn’t answer, just pushed Sultan into a running walk and went to pick up her blue ribbon.