by Maggie Estep
Had I known precisely how many ways she had in mind, I might have simply helped her muck that blue paint off the linoleum and called it a day. Instead, I got her phone number. Right there at the geriatric home where she worked as a nurse’s aide.
On the night of our first date, I went to pick Ava up at her basement apartment on Hilda Street. She opened the door, grabbed my arm, and pulled me inside. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. This wasn’t commonplace comportment for first dates in Grinderville, where there hadn’t been a town nympho since Nellie’s notoriety had gone up in a haze of age and kleptomania. Ava stood, absorbing her effect on me for a while before turning to her stereo system and putting on an album of strange folk music. She started dancing around, with her narrow but lovely ass moving beautifully. She had a small patch of light brown pubic hair and her breasts were good, not too big but very clearly there. She started touching herself.
“You stand there and watch,” she ordered as she shimmied.
I did as I was told. For a little while. Then I moved close to her, put my hand on her cheek, and stared at her. This seemed to disorient her. I kissed her. Head to toe. She started trembling. Her whole body gasping and coiling. I made certain she was very worked up and then I walked out.
That got her nose open.
Eight months later I married her.
There was a little chapel on Crookshank Road.
My mother was dead and my father was a drunk, but Ava’s parents came. They were stiff people who didn’t seem to take to me. But that didn’t matter.
That night, for our honeymoon, we drove to the ocean and stayed in a rundown seaside motel. Ava was on top of me and underneath me and sometimes behind me. Her body was thin. When we stopped making love long enough to go outside, we walked to the water. One of her now-familiar crazy looks overtook her face and she said, “I always wanted to be a welder.”
“A what?” I said.
“A welder. Especially underwater. In the sea. A deep-sea welder.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said, gripping my hand and pulling me into the ocean.
A few months after this blessed event, Ava had grown fat. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I didn’t mind. She kept me interested with her physical and mental transformations. When she was pregnant with Grace she became even more eccentric than usual. She read constantly. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would get up and go outside wearing her long white nightgown. She would pace in the backyard as she chain-smoked. Occasionally, her absence in the bed would wake me and I’d look out the window to see a pregnant, smoking apparition.
A few months after Grace was born, Ava got depressed and stopped eating. For the most part, I was left to take care of our daughter. Ava didn’t want Grace sucking on her breasts after the first weeks. I got Grace formula and fed her and changed her.
Ava went on lithium and got fat again. Grace turned one. Then two and three and so forth.
Through all of Grace’s and Ava’s transformations, I essentially remained the same. Physically at least. Every six months I changed jobs, from carpenter to working in a factory to landscaping to working on a dairy farm. Which is where I got on the first horse I’d been on since I was a little kid. The farmer had a couple of draft horses which his teenaged daughter rode. One day, the daughter asked if I wanted to get up on one of the horses. The moment she asked, I realized that I did want to. She led the horse over to a bale of hay. I stood on this and hoisted myself up onto the big gelding’s back. At first, the girl led the horse but, after a while, seeing that I was comfortable up there, she told me how to hold the reins and she let go of the horse’s head. The big animal walked ahead slowly. I could feel every nuance of him shooting through my own body and, most remarkably, I felt like I was inside his head, like I could feel his thoughts. It was the most amazing sensation I’d ever had in my life. I stayed up there for quite a long time until finally the girl had to beg me to get down. I guess I knew right then that eventually I’d make a living with horses. I was twenty-four. I knew that it was unheard of to decide on a life of riding at such a late age, but I didn’t care. I had something. An unusual level of communication with horses. An ability to feel them.
It took me years to become an apprentice rider. I started off at the unregulated bush tracks, riding quarter horses and Arabians and anything anyone would let me ride. I got laughed at a lot. I was old. I was on the tall side. But I won races, even won them honestly in an environment where every other rider was carrying an illegal buzzer or was up to something that would never fly at a regulated track. I rode mostly on weekends and had various day jobs to pay the rent. But the only time I was truly alive was on a horse’s back. I won a lot of shitty little races and eventually I met Henry Meyer, a New York trainer who said he’d help me get an apprentice license in New York. This was the toughest circuit to break into but they said if you cut your teeth in New York you were guaranteed a career.
Soon Ava and Grace and I moved up to Queens. At first Ava hated it. Then her medication was changed and she loved it. Sometimes she’d go off her meds and disappear for days at a time. Henry Meyer’s wife, an Englishwoman named Violet, would help me by looking after Grace. Three months ago, it got to the point where I’d really had enough. Ava was sleeping around. She was drinking and taking strange drugs. Most of all, she was breaking my heart again and again.
I still loved her. But I couldn’t abide her madness anymore.
And now, I’d met someone else. Someone I could sit with in silence. Someone I could make love to repeatedly. Someone who seemed to understand.
I didn’t know what to do with any of these thoughts so I just sat there, listening to Ruby play wondering what Ava wanted from me. Knowing it was probably just her radar picking up on the fact that I was interested in someone else.
That someone else finally stopped playing piano, turned around on her bench, and looked at me.
“Hey you,” she said, as if we were greeting each other after a long absence.
I got up and walked over to her. I pulled her to her feet, held her, and found myself hoping I wouldn’t be killed anytime soon.
BEN NESTER
6.
Innocent Beasts
When my dog Dingo died, I started feeling very lowly. I’d had Dingo for ten years, since my mother’s death when I was fourteen. I loved that dog a lot and his absence made everything seem raw and worthless.
I wasn’t working much, just a few odd jobs doing carpentry but that was about it. One day, I had some work out at old Mrs. Simmons’s house on Little Egypt Road. Mrs. Simmons was a tiny brittle woman whose mind had gone soft. She often forgot to zip her slacks or button all the buttons of her blouse and her shoes seldom matched. Mrs. Simmons had dozens of chickens and apparently they were a particularly violent breed of poultry because, from what she told me, they were endlessly tearing down their coops. She’d hired me to do some patch-up work and before I was an hour into the job I had chicken shit all over me. By the end of the day, I really stank and I never wanted to see another chicken in my life. I turned down the lemonade old Mrs. Simmons offered, pocketed the forty bucks she owed me and got in my car.
I was coming around the bend on Little Egypt Road when I saw it. A beautiful fenced-in field and, off in the distance, a dozen or so horses. It’s not like I’d never seen a field of horses before. Oklahoma was full of horses. But something about this field seemed magical. I wanted to go in.
I pulled the car up to the gate, got out, opened the gate, and drove on in. The horses were quite a ways off. I drove slowly so as not to alarm them. I reached a grouping of huge gnarled trees and turned the engine off. I just sat there, staring ahead at that bunch of horses. After a few minutes, one of the horses, a big white one, walked over toward my car. I was slightly worried, like maybe I was offending the big beast. I stared out my window. The horse came closer and closer until finally he had his face pressed against the car window. I didn’t know how well he cou
ld see me, what with his eyes on the side of his head like that, but I could sure see him. As I sat admiring the horse’s big white face, he started leaning his massive chest into the car. The horse had to be a thousand pounds and I could feel the car rocking.
I was worried the horse was gonna get mad and really ram the car so I slowly rolled my car window down and tentatively patted his long white nose. This calmed him down some.
Eventually, I opened the car door and the horse backed away, letting me out. I patted him all over his body. He didn’t seem to mind. I felt more peaceful than I had since losing Dingo.
PRETTY SOON I found myself going out to the horse pasture every day to spend time with that little gang of half-wild horses. I was working less and less. I wasn’t even eating or sleeping much. Just kept going to that pasture. One day, I was out there, sitting by the gnarled trees and watching the horses when this guy came up to me out of nowhere. He was an older guy wearing coveralls and his skin and hair were so yellow he seemed to match the yellow pasture he’d sprung from like some magical creature.
“You got business here, son?” he asked me, walking slowly around me.
“No, sir, just enjoying the horses,” I said.
The yellow-looking man grunted.
“I could use you,” he said then, after eyeing me from head to toe.
“Oh?” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of this.
“I seen you out here, talking to my horses day in day out. I got twenty more of ’em back about three miles down Little Egypt Road. You come with me I’ll show you what’s what with the equine arts.”
I didn’t know what to think. It was the strangest offer I’d ever gotten.
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Come on, son, get up off your moneymaker,” the old guy said. He was smiling at me, showing pointy teeth. His yellow eyes seemed to twinkle, which was odd because I’d never thought of yellow as the kind of color that could twinkle.
“That’s nice of you, sir,” I said.
“Don’t thank me yet,” the guy said, bursting into a laugh that sounded like chain saws on dead trees.
“That there’s yours, right?” He motioned at the Chevy.
“Yes, sir.”
“You been driving into my pasture for three months. I seen ya,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Let’s go. You drive us back over to my barn.”
It was a little worrisome to think the guy had been watching me all this time and I wondered how he’d gotten over here in the first place if his barn was miles away. Plus, I’d never heard of any guy having twenty horses down on Little Egypt Road, so it all seemed a little strange. It’s not like I had anything better to do than see what would happen though.
We got into the Chevy and he was quiet now as I pulled out of the pasture and back onto the road, going where he told me.
A few miles down, we came to a dirt road with a gate and the guy got out and opened it. I drove in, waited for him to get back in, and then drove ahead.
The road was pitted and muddy and badly in need of work, but flanking it were beautiful pastures full of horses. Eventually, we came to a big red barn. The guy looked proud as we got out of the Chevy. He made a sweeping arm gesture, showing me what was his. The sky was a tender blue as it swept down over the strange man’s land.
We went into the barn that reeked of horse sweat and manure and creosote. It smelled like heaven. There were horses standing in big wooden stalls. Some had their long noses poking out, others had their butts to us and didn’t look up from their hay.
“So,” the yellow guy said, pausing in front of one of the stalls, “I had a fella quit just yesterday and I need you.”
“Yeah?” I said, staring past him at the red horse in the stall nearest us.
“You start off mucking out stalls and we’ll take it from there. You can call me Sandman, by the way.”
“I’m Ben.”
“You got a last name, Ben?”
“Nester,” I said.
“I got a horse named Nester,” Sandman said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yup,” the guy said.
And that was it. He put me to work. Showed me how to muck the stalls out. Some of them, I had to change all the bedding, take out all the straw, and then put down a layer of lime and fresh straw. It took forever. I did about fifteen stalls and my back started aching but I didn’t mind. It was good pain.
Sandman had gone off somewhere and it was just me and the horses and the barn with all those good smells in it. It was a little eerie how there was no one around. I had no idea what Sandman did with all these horses or how many other people he had working for him but I didn’t see anyone else all day long.
Once it started getting dark out, Sandman came back and told me I was going to help him bring some of the horses in from outside. I’d never actually had much to do with horses other than hanging out and talking to the ones in the pasture but I wanted to learn. Out in the field, Sandman showed me how to stand at the horse’s left side, get the horse to put his nose through the halter, and then slip it over the ears, fasten it, and lead the horse forward. I had trouble with one little horse, a baby, only a year old. I’d get close to him and he’d prick his ears forward and his eyes would get bright but then, the moment I tried slipping the halter on, he’d bolt and throw a little buck and make a squealing sound. Eventually, Sandman helped me by getting on the other side of the yearling so we had him boxed in, and I finally got a halter on him. As I led him though, he kept trying to take a nip at my arm.
“That one’s gonna race,” Sandman told me once we were back inside the barn.
“Oh yeah?” I’d put the little guy in his stall and he’d immediately relieved himself all over his clean straw.
“Yup. I got a couple trainers coming by tomorrow have a look at him. Kind of spirit he’s got, I bet he makes it. Might even make it to one of the big tracks, win some real money. His mama won a stakes race at Aqueduct in New York once,” Sandman said, looking thoughtful.
I didn’t really know what he was talking about that day but I learned pretty quickly.
Sandman had two other people working for him. A guy named James who was around forty and hunched over and kind of yellow, too, and a girl, Kathy Kitterman, a small but muscular girl, who was in her early twenties like me. Between those two and Sandman, I had a whole new world of knowledge within a week. I knew all about the different kinds of brushes and leg bandages and liniments. I knew how to muck out a stall and clean out feed tubs and I was beginning to understand about equine nutrition. I started getting a good feeling. I could sense that my mother was looking down from the ether and approving of what I was doing. I thought of my mother a lot on the day when one of Sandman’s mares got sold and put on a van headed to Versailles, Kentucky. My mother had been born in Versailles. I’d never been there and I felt like I should go because I know, in her last days, she was missing it badly and I was part of why she never made it back. My mother had been a quiet girl till she hit seventeen and went a little wild. She got pregnant by a guy who took off. Her parents kicked her out and she hitchhiked around for a while and ended up in Oklahoma. Her older brother, Edgar, eventually came and lived with her and helped her out, putting food on the table when she got so pregnant she couldn’t waitress anymore. Then she had me. When I was fourteen, she got cancer and started wasting away. As she lay dying, she kept insisting that I had to make sure to get to Versailles one day. I told her I’d do my best. In turn, she hung on as long as she could. The pain from the cancer made her eyes huge and black. When she died, I thought I would die too. I felt so lost. After a few days though, I toughened up. I didn’t let anything get inside me. I just moved forward. Until now. With these horses, I finally felt like I’d found something and I was pretty sure my mother would be pleased for me.
ABOUT TEN DAYS into working for Sandman, Kathy got sick and couldn’t come in. Sandman said it was time I got on a horse, he needed a bunch ridden and James couldn’t do it all and Sandman didn�
�t ride anymore, his bones were too brittle.
They started me off on Bethany, an old chestnut quarter horse mare that Sandman had bought cheap somewhere and hoped to sell as a starter horse to someone just learning to ride. Bethany was big and gentle and lazy and didn’t care at all that I didn’t know what I was doing up there. No matter what kind of signals I attempted to give her, all she did was walk around slowly, with her head down low. Once in a while, she’d stop and graze a little before eventually deigning to move forward again. I talked to her some while I was up there and she flicked her ears around a little, listening to the sound of my voice, deciding what she thought of me. I guess the verdict was good. She took care of me and made me feel safe. Within a few weeks, I was riding a lot. I fell off every other day and got knocked unconscious once but I didn’t mind. When I wasn’t riding I was busy mucking out stalls as well as feeding and grooming. I started feeling at ease. A lot of things that had bothered me for years started slipping away. All I cared about were those horses. I thought less and less about my mother. For a long time, I had carried her with me every day. I guess I felt like not having her in my head would be killing her all over again. Now though, with all the horses to think about, my mother went somewhere else.
I’d developed a strong bond with Darwin, the yearling, the one Sandman had been trying to sell off to some racing people. No one had bought him because he was still too wild, and by that age, if a horse was going to race, he needed to know how to get tacked up and handled a lot. And Darwin was a demonseed. Sandman put me in charge of him. I had to get him manageable and then Kathy would start riding him.
I spent hours each day teaching the little guy basics like how to pick his feet up so I could get in there and clean them out—and eventually the farrier could put shoes on him—and pretty soon I got him to take a bit and to stand somewhat still as I put a little saddle on him and tightened the girth.
