A Taste of Blood and Ashes

by Jaden Terrell

  The blond one came in fast with a flurry of punches that made my ears ring. One glanced off the bone beneath my eye. Another caught me in the temple, a sudden slicing pain as his ring split the skin, and I put him down with an elbow to the jaw.

  I shot out a low side kick at comb-over guy, felt a fierce satisfaction as the knee gave way with a snap. He bellowed and toppled onto his side in the dirt, clutching at his knee.

  Where was Smudge?

  No time. The mare’s owner had found his feet and charged, swinging wildly, blinded by rage and humiliation. The rage gave his punches power. A roundhouse punch clipped my ear, followed by a couple of rabbit punches that sent jolts of misery from my kidneys to my knees.

  Enough.

  I clapped a hand to either side of his head, yanked down with my hands and up with my knee. Knee met forehead with a satisfying crack, and he fell backward, eyes glazed, blood gushing from a broken nose.

  As I turned to look for Smudge, a metallic blur whooshed past. Pain exploded in my side. I dropped, setting off another explosion in my ribs, and rolled away half a second before the shovel clanged down where my head had been.

  I came to my feet, my breath ragged and shallow. Little knives shot through my side with every breath.

  Smudge grinned, baring straight yellow teeth beneath his mustache. “Gotcha,” he said, and drew back the shovel for another blow.

  It’s only pain, I told myself.

  He swung the shovel, and I ducked beneath—it’s only pain—and slammed the top of my head into his chin. His head snapped back. His eyes rolled. Then his knees buckled, and he fell straight back into the dirt.

  I looked around again.

  Spectators buzzed with anger and confusion. The crowd had swollen since the fight started, and I glimpsed Rhonda Lister’s blonde hair near the back.

  Eli Barringer, with a reporter’s nose for trouble, had found his way over and was snapping photos with a Nikon camera that probably cost more than a thousand bucks.

  Smudge lay on his back, moaning. A thin red line trickled from the corner of his mouth. The blond man blinked hard and pushed himself to his knees, then toppled backward and sat down hard on his rump. Comb-over man cradled his injured knee, eyes wild, tears streaming.

  The mare’s owner lay motionless in the dust. Blood streamed from his nose and gurgled in his throat. Ignoring the stabbing pain in my side, I grabbed him by the armpits and propped him against the stall door.

  Let him bleed. At least he wouldn’t drown.

  Rhonda pushed her way through the crowd and brushed a thumb lightly beneath my eye. It throbbed at her touch, but there was a pleasant tingle where her skin met mine.

  A line of wetness trickled from my temple. I touched a finger to the place the bull’s ring had skimmed, and when I pulled it away, my fingertip was red.

  “Better get that looked at,” Rhonda said. “I’ll take you to see Doc.”

  13.

  The clinic squatted between the vendor booths and the arena, a small white building with a red plus sign on the door and a pair of wicker chairs on the concrete stoop. Rhonda pointed at the chairs and said, “Sit. I’ll go get Doc.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Humor me.” She pointed again. “Please?”

  It was the please that did it, imbued with just the right touch of helplessness—I know I can’t make you, but I’d feel so much better if you did. She’d somehow managed a blend of sweetness, sincerity, and manipulation that worked even though we both knew exactly what she was doing. With a dutiful nod, I sank into one of the chairs. A dull ache pulsed through my side.

  I ran my fingers over the place where the shovel had hit, pressed gently, and gasped at the sudden sharp pain. Not broken, though, I thought. I’d had broken ribs, and this was a different kind of pain. Less like being stabbed in the side with an ice pick and more like a quick rap with a mallet.

  After a while, the ambulance kicked on its siren. I sat in the wicker chair and sweated, listening to the siren fade and trying to breathe normally. It hurt less than it had in the beginning, which I thought was a good sign. My temple had stopped bleeding and begun to itch.

  Eventually the door to the arena swung open, and Rhonda came out, followed by a tall man with a familiar mustache and a thatch of dark hair, silvering at the temples. I recognized him as one of the inspectors I’d seen in the staging area. As they approached, I pushed myself out of the chair and extended a hand for him to shake. I realized with surprise that my knuckles were scraped raw. Probably raked in the dirt when I dodged the shovel. The rush of adrenaline had blurred the memory.

  Rhonda must have filled him in on what had happened, because as he shook my hand, he gave me a long look and said, “Didn’t anybody teach you not to interfere with another man’s horses?”

  “They tried. I guess it didn’t take.”

  He pulled out a set of keys and unlocked the door. There was a plastic Bugs Bunny on the key chain. He caught me looking at it and said, “A gift from my grandson. Sorry to take so long. I had four other patients to see to. Broken nose, broken knee, probably a couple of concussions. But you’d know all about that. Had to send them over to the county hospital. It’s the closest emergency room.”

  “Am I supposed to apologize?” I said.

  “Only if you feel like it.” He stepped inside, and I gestured for Rhonda to go ahead of me, then followed them both in. She propped herself against the far wall where she’d be out of the way.

  Our host gestured to the stainless steel examining table. “Climb on up there, Mr. . . .”

  “McKean. Jared McKean.”

  “Mr. McKean. Dave Willoughby here. Most folks just call me Doc.”

  “If we’re being informal, most folks just call me Jared. You’re an MD? I thought the inspectors were veterinarians.”

  “We are, but I was an EMT. Then I served as a medic in Iraq and decided I’d rather patch up animals than people. Applied to vet school the day I left the service.”

  “Sorry to break your streak.”

  “Hasn’t been much of a streak,” he said. “Some damn fool is always trying to take some other damn fool’s head off.”

  He pulled on a pair of white latex gloves and took a gauze pad and some peroxide from the first-aid kit. “This is going to sting.”

  It did. I winced as he flushed the wound at my temple with peroxide, wiped it clean with a gauze pad, and pressed another against the wound, which was seeping again. “Here. Hold this. Firm pressure, not too hard. Just enough to stop the bleeding.”

  He shone a light into each eye and rattled off a series of questions—Nausea? Dizziness? Blurry vision? When I’d answered them all to his satisfaction, he said, “You were lucky. No concussion.”

  “It wasn’t much of a punch. If his ring hadn’t grazed me—”

  “Lucky punch, huh? They’re all lucky punches. Nobody ever gets hit by the other kind.” He gave a humorless chuckle, checked the cut again, and replaced the gauze with a butterfly bandage. “That eye’s blacking up pretty good too. You’ll want to ice it. Another lucky punch, I guess. Take off your shirt.”

  I peeled it off slowly and laid it to one side, folding it so the drying blood on the shoulder and collar didn’t smear on the table. Rhonda said, “You’ll want to soak that. Cold water. Heat’ll set it.”

  I told her I knew, and she and Doc exchanged amused glances. She said, “I bet you do.”

  Doc pressed his fingers to the same spot I’d explored earlier. I was ready this time, but a sharp breath still whistled through my teeth.

  “On a scale of one to ten,” he said, “how bad does that hurt?”

  I thought about it. “Six, maybe seven. Bad, but could be a lot worse. Feels better now than it did.”

  He pulled a stethoscope out of a drawer and listened to my chest, then listened again with the scope pressed just beneath each shoulder blade. If he noticed the pistol inside my waistband, he didn’t mention it. Instead he said, “I don’t thi
nk anything’s broken. Bad bruise, probably. Come morning you’re going to wish you’d stayed out of that stall.”

  “If you say so.”

  He gave an exasperated huff. “You think you accomplished something? You didn’t. All you did was put yourself on their radar.” He took two frozen gel packs from the mini freezer and handed them to me. “One for the side, one for the eye. Thirty minutes on, thirty minutes off. You got Tylenol?”

  “In my truck.”

  “Take some. And I’m going to write you a prescription.”

  “Can you do that?”

  He grinned. “Why don’t you let me worry about that?”

  I looked at Rhonda. “Who was the guy with the horse and the Harley bandana?”

  “Mace Ewing.”

  “Big Lick man?”

  She nodded.

  “Got a temper on him,” I said. “Is he likely to burn down my barn?”

  Doc raised an eyebrow. “Why would he do that?”

  “Somebody burned Zane and Carlin Underwood’s. And I just met a reporter who said people have been killing each other over this stuff for the past forty years.”

  “People have been killing each other since Cain and Abel,” Doc said. “Nothing new about that.”

  Rhonda said, “Speaking of Zane, I heard he got back some memories today. That’s good, right? He’s getting better?”

  News spread fast.

  “I wouldn’t read too much into it,” Doc said. “Head injury like that, there’s only so much better it can get. His whole life long, it could play tricks with his memories.” He scribbled something on a prescription tablet and handed it to me. “Here you go. Just might save your life.”

  Rhonda craned her neck to see what it said: A wise man keeps to his own business. I held it up so she could read it, then handed it back to Doc and said, “Sound advice, Doctor, but I’m afraid I can’t follow it.”

  Doc rolled his eyes. Shook his head again. “I figured.”

  Rhonda smiled. “Hard-headed. I like that in a man.”

  14.

  I stopped by the volunteer booth for Khanh. Maggie James and Sue Blankenship stood behind the counter, Sue tallying the money in the cash box, Maggie straightening the merchandise.

  “Your sister’s not here,” Maggie said brightly. “She heard about the fight and went back to the campsite to wait for you.”

  I frowned. “How’d she hear about the fight?”

  Maggie laughed. “Oh, honey. News spreads like wildfire around here. Usually it’s just some old guy with sunstroke or a heart attack. As soon as she heard some cowboy accused Mace Ewing of horse abuse and went all Steven Seagal on him, she knew it was you.”

  Maggie went on. “Once they told her you were okay, she said you’d end up at the campsite sooner or later and went back to wait for you.” She gave me an appraising look. “You’ll want to soak that shirt. Cold, not hot.”

  “I will,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Sue closed the cash box, picked up a cardboard fan on a stick, and waved it in front of her face. “She said you sure knew how to stir a pot.”

  I found Khanh in the trailer with the AC blasting, tapping away at the laptop. She looked up when I came in. Thinned her lips in disapproval. “Only here one day, already you fight?”

  I shrugged. “I was doing all right until one of them hit me with a shovel.”

  “You okay?”

  “Couple of bruised ribs. Everything else looks worse than it is.” I got a clean shirt out of the closet and left the bloody one to soak in the sink. Cold water. “What’re you working on?”

  “I looking up Mace Ewing.” She turned the laptop toward me. Ewing’s website. The home page photo showed him working a spotted horse in a round pen. I leaned in to click a tab labeled Horsemanship Articles, then scrolled through a mix of solid training tips and outdated techniques, a weird blend of force-based training, behavior modification, and natural horsemanship.

  I said, “He’s spouting the rhetoric, but he doesn’t understand the concepts. Either that or he’s just trying to cover up that he’s a jackass.”

  “You think he set fire?”

  “I think he could have. He’s got a bully mentality and a hot head.”

  She shot a pointed look in my direction. “Lot of that going around.”

  “I’m not a bully.” I stopped. Thought about it. “Am I?”

  “No.” She smiled, pointing to the butterfly bandage at my temple. “But you have hot head sometime.”

  It took a long time to feed and water the horses. My ribs sent out little jolts of pain as I put out water buckets and flakes of hay, then gave Crockett a scoop of grain and Tex a mash of timothy pellets, senior feed, and high-fat competition pellets. As I was filling the last water bucket, Eli Barringer strolled over, carrying three bottled beers. He lifted them in greeting when he realized I’d noticed him.

  Crockett poked his nose under the nozzle to suck up the fresh water, then shook his head, spraying himself and me with shimmering droplets.

  “That was brave, standing up to the assholes,” Eli said, blinking his bloodshot eyes. “But you’re tilting at windmills.”

  “I’ve always been told I had a quixotic personality.”

  He cocked his head and gave me an appraising look, like he was surprised I got the reference. In answer to his unspoken question, I said, “Classic Comics.”

  “Right.” He grinned. “I brought you a brew. One for your sister too, but I guess she’s inside.”

  I rubbed Crockett between the ears and turned off the stream. “Thanks. There’s an extra chair in the tack area, if you want to pull it out.”

  While he rummaged for the chair, I rolled up the hose and turned it off at the source, then tapped on the trailer door and told Khanh we had company.

  She peeked out and took the proffered beer, gave Eli a thank-you nod, and disappeared inside. The smell of onions told me she was chopping vegetables, but maybe she was just giving us some space.

  Or maybe she needed some space of her own.

  Eli unfolded the chair and set it beside the fire pit, then dropped into it and uncapped his beer. “I’m writing up a little something on the fight. Thought maybe you could tell me your side of things before I talk to the other guys.”

  I couldn’t see a downside. He was writing about it either way. I ran it down for him, then said, “What did you mean when you said people had been killing each other for forty years?”

  He grimaced. “More than that, probably. But you won’t find them listed that way in the official reports. I did some digging, came up with thirteen that looked suspicious. They all went down as accidental deaths or suicides.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Sylvia Whitehead, age fifty-four, big antisoring activist, helped push through the legislation that made soring illegal back in 1970, then spent the next five years going after trainers who sored. In ’75, she drank herself stupid and drowned in her bathtub. They say she just slipped under, too far gone even to wake up when the water went into her lungs. But her daughter said there were bruises on her shoulders, like someone held her down.”

  “That’s in the medical report?”

  “No, but Trehornes run this county. There hasn’t been a sheriff or a coroner here since the 1930s who hasn’t been related to them, one way or the other. They’ve got the media sewed up too. Only one newspaper in the whole county, and guess who owns it.”

  “A Trehorne?”

  “A Barryman, but he’s Eleanor Underwood’s brother. Which is the next closest thing to a Trehorne. They’ve got an incestuous little group going on down here.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “Daniel Bitmore, forty-two. Went undercover a year ago for an animal rights agency and got some stellar video of a top trainer soring horses. Died in a hunting accident a few weeks later, shot by a buddy of his, who just happened to be a cousin-by-marriage to the Trehornes. You know the guy, actually. Mace Ewing.” He waited a moment for that to sink in, then said, “Some of thos
e Trehornes, it so happens, used the services of said top trainer.”

  “Nobody thought that was suspicious?”

  “His wife screamed bloody murder. But who ever listens to the spouse?”

  “Not the Trehornes, I assume.”

  “She tried to bring a civil suit, but she couldn’t find a lawyer who would touch it. The sheriff and his cronies made her look like a fruitcake. Neighbors would harass her, and when she’d call it in, they’d write it up like she was just some crank, or maybe drinking heavy. They destroyed her credibility.”

  “Was she drinking heavily?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “She’d take a snort every now and then. Doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Moved to California. As far away as she could get, she said. She was afraid they’d get to her too, if she stayed around. Then there was Tommy Cole. Thomas, but everyone called him Tommy. He even signed his newspaper articles that way. Wrote a series of articles back in the sixties and seventies blasting the practice of soring. Lot of folks think they were a big reason why the Horse Protection Act passed in the first place.”

  “Which ran him afoul of the Big Lick bigwigs.”

  “Then he exposed some of the trainers and owners who were soring.” He ran down a list of names. I recognized some of them. Jim Lister. Samuel Trehorne. Dalton Underwood. And David Willoughby—Doc.

  I felt a pang of disappointment. I’d liked Doc, and it bothered me to think he’d sored horses. He’d been young then, brought up in a culture that saw soring as commonplace and even necessary, but it made his decision to become an industry inspector less clean. Seeking redemption, or protecting his cronies?

  I pulled my attention back to Eli’s story.

  In the summer of 1975, they’d found Tommy Cole lying face down in a creek ten miles from home, pants unzipped and a half-empty bottle of whiskey in one hand. “The papers said it looked like he’d stopped to pee, passed out half in and half out of the water, and drowned.” Eli’s cheeks pinked with indignation.