Funerals for Horses (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Unfortunately, I was not making this up.

  “Well, think reverent thoughts,” he would say, seeming not to notice that we stuffed ourselves with pancakes on the holy fast day of the Jewish religion.

  If the days were good, the nights brought the bill.

  I tried to avoid liquids after six, I tried to cross my legs and will it away, but the only solution was to cut me loose to sprint to the bathroom one floor down.

  Simon found the answer to this most immediately distressing problem, and it came in the form of a well-devised rope ladder hooked to two heavy eye bolts in the floor of our attic bedroom, under the window.

  If we remembered to unlock the window underneath us before bed, the ladder released me off the side of the roof into the dangerous second-floor night.

  I had to remember not to flush.

  The first few times Simon came along as a sort of bodyguard, assuming the jungle of the hall would be thick with danger, but it invariably proved empty. The sounds came from the living room. The activity, so real beneath us, had actually been two floors down all the time, disguising its voice to imitate a dark creature breathing a heartbeat away.

  In time I was allowed to go alone, and I must say I felt nothing shameful at first in the fact that I was drawn to look. The second-floor landing loomed and invited. It served as a duck blind, its thick, close-set railing posts obscuring my presence, its darkness a contrast to the harsh lights on the downstairs stage.

  The first time, I stared so long that Simon launched a search party. He found me crouched, remorseless, full of words and questions, but afraid to break the sheltering silence.

  Then Simon had to stare awhile, too.

  My father sat sprawled on the couch, naked, a huge, unfathomable appendage leaning tautly against his belly.

  This is not to say that I had no understanding of the concept of a penis, but this one surely pushed the concept to remarkable dimensions.

  Two other strange naked figures knelt on the floor beneath him, faced away from us, their mouths wetly attached to separate portions of this gigantic member. When tired of marveling at the amazing thing itself, I watched my father’s eyes, rolled back in his head, showing the whites of surrender, and listened to the unearthly rumble of his wordless commentary.

  I drew from him the sense of a power he held at no other time, a mastery of moments that would cause grown people to follow him home, this stranger, this normally bland and ineffectual everyman.

  Simon took a proprietary hold on my arm and ushered me up the side of the house for the night.

  He couldn’t usher away my questions.

  “Have you ever seen one that big, Simon? I mean, is that normal?”

  Simon offered no opinions, careful to stress no real basis for comparison, other than himself, or other boys his age he might be forced to shower beside.

  “Do you think that’s why he wants everyone to see it, Simon?”

  Simon couldn’t imagine why he’d want that. Simon had reached the modest phase, closing himself into the closet to change into his pajamas in our room at night. He could find no explanation for a grown man, for any man, to intentionally bare himself to a stranger.

  “Were those both girls down there, Simon? One of them was awfully hairy.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, folding his pillow around his head. “I don’t want to know. I wish you would go to sleep.”

  I stopped asking questions, but I did not go to sleep.

  In fact, I tossed out Simon’s carefully knotted skeleton key and released myself back into the jungle, where I crouched, wide-eyed, long into the night.

  I watched my father lie across the prone back of one figure, the one I became increasingly convinced was no woman, and saw, as if by cheap sleight of hand, my father’s great appendage disappear, though I could not imagine where it might have gone. Well, no, I could imagine, but that was all I could do. I could not confirm my own unlikely conjectures.

  Meanwhile the female body coiled behind them, her head pressed into that confusing juncture, finding some contact, some purpose, I assumed, that I was simply too naive or too far away to understand.

  I knelt before the show again the following night, and the night after that, feeling a mental and physical tingle which I liked and hated, sensing a lesson in progress that I must study, that I would later need. Just as I forced a first-grader to teach me the alphabet before my promotion from kindergarten, I assumed that the information would prove requisite without notice, that the test might precede the lesson.

  By the second time Simon came down to catch me, I felt ready to practice on my own.

  “Look, Simon,” I said, the faintest of whispers into his soft, pale ear, “look what she’s doing.” I referred to a woman, so far as I could tell, one of four in attendance, who forced a meager portion of my father’s penis into her mouth in strange, heated rhythms. “You want to try that?”

  My eagerness sounded childish, beneath even my ten years of experience, unguarded.

  I leaned into him so hard that I toppled him, and myself across him, onto the worn carpet of the landing.

  Simon sat up, pushed me off him, wrestled me around to the banister again, clutching me so tight around the waist that I could hardly pull a full breath.

  “Is that what you want to be, Ella?” he hissed in my ear, venomous as I never thought Simon would or could be. “You want to grow up to be one of those? An animal?”

  On the word animal, his angry tone rang out sharp and strong, our father’s eyes shot up to the landing, and he flew to his feet, pulling Grandma Ginsberg’s hand-crocheted afghan off the back of the sofa to cover himself. Loosely woven and full of round, patterned openings, it proved a singularly unfortunate choice.

  By the time he got upstairs, we’d climbed back to the attic. I don’t believe he ever witnessed our means of escape. He did not come in after us, though we could hear him usher all guests out the door.

  We spent days, weeks, waiting for the long talk from our father, which never came. He simply learned to father us loosely, distantly, without benefit of eye contact.

  The house fell quiet, the nights uneventful. If visitors came by night, they came too quietly to wake us.

  Sleep became an easy and natural way to spend the dark hours.

  A near year passed in this no man’s land of trouble, not joyous by any means, but lacking immediate, pressing pain.

  Then some evidence of activity recurred, though it recurred quietly. If not for the click of the front door latch, we might have suspected nothing at all. Simon found a big kitchen pot to keep under my bed, and commandeered a roll of toilet paper, to help me through the long nights.

  I would not have gone downstairs even if I had dared, owing to my decision, with the youthful finality of a floodgate snapping shut against pressure, that I would not grow up to be an animal.

  This was my brother Simon’s doing, and none of my own.

  About this time DeeDee began to give advice.

  Just go, she would say. Just get out.

  But Simon, now seventeen, and I, just eleven, could not imagine it. We would never question DeeDee’s wisdom, but, go where? Eat what? Stay safe how?

  No, surely that was easy for DeeDee to say.

  And it was funny, about the things DeeDee would say. I never heard them, at least, not in these early years. No voices talked in my ears. Simon and I never compared notes as to what thoughts we would credit to her presence.

  We simply talked out our reactions to her suggestions, never worrying that our perceptions might differ, never questioning their source.

  I started to talk about going to see Grandma Sterling, maybe living with her. Simon would shake his head with sad resignation.

  “You heard what Dad said. She says she doesn’t even have a daughter. So how could she have grandchildren?”

  “But, with us right on her doorstep and all. How could she not have grandchildren?”

  I thought she’d be forced to admit o
ur existence almost by default, but DeeDee said fat chance.

  For over a year we talked, planned, just the three of us, arrived at no conclusions, took no steps toward leaving.

  Then one night our father failed to come home and lock us in at all.

  Simon and I sat on the roof most of the night, thinking it a safe vantage point from which to watch him arrive, which he did not. When I got so sleepy that Simon worried I’d tumble off, we climbed back inside to sleep.

  Our father phoned the following morning, a little before six. He’d been arrested, he said, and since he had only this one phone call, it was important that Simon contact Sol, our father’s lawyer, as soon as he hung up the phone.

  This part Simon told me later.

  At the time I heard only Simon’s end of the exchange.

  “Well, when are you coming home, then... ? You have to come home sometime... But you never go to jail... Oh. Well, how long could they keep you... ? Oh. Can we come visit you... ? With strangers, though? Will they let us stay together?”

  My stomach clenched in acidic knots and DeeDee reminded me that I couldn’t say she hadn’t warned us. We should have just gotten out, worried later about the where and how.

  Simon hung up the phone, his face slack and bloodless.

  “He’s going to have the prison people call the child welfare department. We’ll have to go live somewhere else.”

  “Together?”

  “If they can. If somebody’ll take us both.”

  Simon looked at me, I looked at Simon, and nothing more was said, or needed to be.

  We began our packing, knowing without discussion the importance of traveling light.

  WALKING THROUGH WALLS

  The first fifteen miles are the hardest, because I think I can’t walk this far. My feet blister, but I keep walking. The blisters break and drain into my socks, but I walk. Every step brings pain, so I force myself to remember the time when I loved pain, followed it, thought it would cleanse me, right my wrongs. Only half sure that my brother Simon is still with us, it isn’t hard to project back to that time.

  At about fifteen miles, and of course I am guessing, I hit a wall. I can’t go another step. I walk through it, and the fact that I can go no further becomes irrelevant.

  I welcome the pain like my own flesh and blood. Brain disengaged, legs working like pistons, I walk at least another five.

  Then I notice it’s getting dark, which seems unreasonable. Looking up across the sky, I think I hear the hawk scream, but I can’t see him. I see the sun, high overhead, and then I know. This darkness doesn’t belong to the night. It belongs to me.

  DeeDee says she doesn’t know why I should be surprised. Without Simon I never would have pulled out of the tunnel to begin with.

  However, I am not surprised, nor can I push myself to feel great concern. If Simon were here, right here, I’d mind the tunnel a lot more, because Simon wants me to be sane, and he worked so hard for it. If he’s gone forever it hardly matters. If he’s gone for now I have time to work it out.

  I stop and look around. Everywhere I look I see only what’s in front of me. I’m losing my periphery. I see no town, no signs of life. Just a mountain, then another. I wonder how much longer I’ll walk before finding a town. Fifty miles? A hundred? I drop into a sit.

  I pull off my shoes and socks, my first amateur’s mistake, and the breeze stings my hot, open blisters. I prop my feet up on my rolled sleeping bag and lie on my back staring at the sky, which is moving away from me, fading to a dullness like the world through night vision glasses.

  I could die out here, and worse yet, it doesn’t matter.

  I realize I am nowhere, near nothing, in touch with nothing. I don’t even know which part of nowhere I’ve located. I think of my days on the road with Simon, and I know I should have felt the same thing. Both then and now I’ve succeeded in placing my body where my head is, performing a literal version of my own emotional state. Except then I had Simon, and it was fine.

  Simon! I shout in the enforced quiet of my brain. I want him to see me, so I can see. Only Simon really sees me when I’m invisible. Simon and maybe for a minute Mrs. Hurley, but she’s long gone.

  Then again, I think, so is DeeDee.

  On that note DeeDee sticks in her two cents’ worth. You haven’t asked me my opinion about all this.

  “No, that’s right,” I say out loud. “I haven’t. What do you think I should do, DeeDee?”

  Keep walking.

  “Do you think Simon’s alive?”

  I figure she of all people should know. But suddenly she has nothing to say, which is unlike DeeDee.

  I try to put my shoes back on, but my feet have swelled to new limits in their sudden freedom, and the shoes no longer fit.

  Simon didn’t have shoes, DeeDee says. He walked in his bare feet.

  So I do that, leaving shoes and socks behind to mark the spot where I gave up the game again.

  I am filled with a new sense of hope, the thought that I will find my way now, because the soles of my feet will know things about where I must go. I decide that walking in shoes was like walking blindfolded, and if there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s additional limits on my vision.

  The sky is out of range, but I don’t mind.

  THEN:

  Three weeks before Simon’s seventeenth birthday our mother’s old brown Studebaker had disappeared from its new resting place in front of the square of black concrete, where, by our father’s arrangement, the garage rubble had been suitably razed and cleared.

  On Simon’s birthday the car had reappeared, its engine freshly overhauled, its sun-bleached surface waxed to a questionable sheen, its registration redone in Simon’s name, all part of a long campaign to ace fatherhood, to repurchase our approval. Simon said Dad was a model of patience during the driving lessons. If so, he must have pasted it on.

  On the day my father was arrested, we packed the trunk full of carefully weeded necessities, eyeing its leftover space on every load, to judge what percentage of two lives it might accommodate. As if by prearrangement, we packed nothing into the back seat other than pillows and blankets. We would need that space. Because without hitchhikers, our gasoline fund would die young.

  Simon rummaged through the house, through drawers, through my father’s pockets, the various petty cash funds in crocks on the kitchen counter, gathering forty-two dollars and twenty cents.

  He made sure I brought towels, soap and toothpaste, none of which had crossed my mind at any time. He brought Grandma Sterling’s address.

  “Just in case,” he said. “Who knows? We might just drop in and say hello.”

  As he pulled the car smoothly onto the highway I asked when he’d last seen Grandma Sterling.

  “I never saw her.”

  “Ever?”

  “DeeDee and I wrote her a letter one time, but it came back unopened.”

  “Didn’t that make you feel terrible, Simon?”

  “Well, not too bad. Mom wrote her, back when Mom had that cancer surgery. You probably don’t remember that. You were just a baby. And Grandma Sterling never wrote back. To her own daughter. When she was afraid she might die. So I figure, I’m a stranger, why should I feel bad?”

  I nursed a little pocket of queasiness thinking we might actually go there and see her face to face. But then I looked down the endless stretch of highway and decided not to borrow trouble from too far down the road. Just getting from California to Pennsylvania presented problems to keep us busy for now.

  The first hitchhiker we picked up was Earl. We stopped for him at night, on a stretch of California desert. Earl wore pants a few inches too short, and a three- or four-day growth of beard. The whole car smelled like him immediately. He said he was going as close to Las Vegas as we cared to take him.

  He asked if we had any money, in a way that made Simon uncomfortable. I could tell.

  “We know as much about bad luck as you do, Earl. With what we just spent on gas, our life savi
ngs amounts to a little over thirty-six dollars.”

  “Hand it over then,” Earl said.

  Simon handed a five dollar bill over the seat. “Here’s five to ease your situation, Earl. But if I give you all of it, we’re as good as dead out here. Try to understand. We’ll drive you all the way to Las Vegas, because we may as well go that way as any other, but we need gas money to do that, Earl.”

  “Look, I’ve got a knife.” He pulled it from his pocket as he said this, but Simon, with his eyes on the road, didn’t see. Earl never opened out the blade.

  DeeDee cut in right about then.

  Tell him he wont hurt us. That’s what I heard DeeDee say. So I said, “I know you’re not going to hurt us, Earl.” Because just hearing it from DeeDee would not likely be good enough for Earl.

  “Oh yeah? Why the hell shouldn’t I? What are you to me?”

  “Why?” I heard Simon ask. I wondered if he was thinking out loud or questioning DeeDee.

  Because he's too decent a man, DeeDee said.

  “Because you’re a decent man, Earl,” I said, in case Simon hadn’t heard. “Just down on your luck is all. And because you know we’d never hurt you.”

  Simon waved the five dollar bill to call attention to his offering.

  I watched Earl’s eyes, illuminated in the lights of westbound traffic, thinking of the spark wheels we used to play with in our genuine youth. I’d like to say I was afraid, but I wasn’t, not really, because Earl was obviously just a scared child, like any other desperate man.

  Earl cried. He took the five dollars out of my brother’s hand and threw the knife onto the front seat.

  “Here, this is worth five dollars.”

  Simon thanked him and gave the knife to me as a gift.

  “That’s good,” Earl said. “She should have that. Not safe to be a young girl anymore. Not like it used to be. You can just pull over anywhere and drop me.”

  “Don’t you want to ride on to Las Vegas?”

  The sparks had gone from Earl’s eyes, and he averted them as if we’d somehow become his superiors, as if he felt unworthy.