by Joe Meno
* * *
The horse, stall-bound, unable to move, stamping at the sawdust-lined trailer floor, one front hoof falling like a hammer, over and over, beating out a rhythm, the sound of which went unheard, except for the girl, Rylee, handcuffed to the armrest in the pickup’s front seat, glancing over her shoulder every few minutes to see the obfuscated shape, the helpless pounding clocking there in her brain. At once, she decided she would turn the animal loose the first chance she got.
* * *
A motel room near the interstate was forty dollars for two beds. They stepped from the cab of the pickup, then entered the darkened room suspiciously, the layout green and beige, the fixtures gold, the curtains, bedspreads, and wallpapers not having been replaced since sometime in the late seventies. The grandfather dragged the CB set inside with him, placing it on the nightstand, between the two narrow beds. He searched for an outlet, gave up, then asked for the boy’s help. Quentin found the socket but was unable to plug the device in, then the grandfather fumbled with the plug, both of them leaning over the outlet, finally getting it plugged in, the low, static hum of transcontinental conversations coming and going. The old man, sitting on the bed, picked up the microphone, switching from channel 19 to 10, then back to 17, from north to south, east to west, trying once again.
“Break 17 for a radio check. This is Old Rooster, anyone got their ears on?”
“Ten-four. This is Bluebeard. Over.”
“What’s your twenty?”
“I-40, heading north, driving empty. What’s yours?”
“I-75, near Lexington, over in Kentucky. Anyone get a line on that horse trailer heading south, pulled by a pickup with Texas plates? Still waiting to hear anything. Over.”
“No sir. But keeping my eyes out. Over.”
“Much obliged. Over and out.”
The grandfather set the microphone down and stared at the device for a moment before slipping off his boots. He rolled on his side, the channel buzzing with unfamiliar chatter. The boy, not yet tired or more tired than he’d ever been in his life, paced back and forth about the room, peeking through the curtains, inspecting the gray tile bathroom, opening and closing the bureau drawers, paging through the miniature green-sleeved Gideon’s Bible, searching out the part about the white horse, somehow finding it near the back of the hardbound volume, Revelation 19:11–14:
I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war. His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many crowns; and He has a name written on Him which no one knows except Himself. He is clothed in a garment sprinkled with blood, and His name is called The Word of God.
The boy closed the dusty book and slid it back in the drawer, glancing over to see if his grandfather was already asleep.
“Gramps?”
“—”
“Gramps? Sir?”
“Hm.”
“Do you think we did something?”
“—”
“Do you think we did something wrong?”
“—”
“Did we do something wrong, Grandpa? Should we have not raced her?”
“—”
“Grandpa?”
“—”
“I think that’s why the horse got taken. I think we’re being punished for something. I just don’t know what it is.”
“—”
“Grandpa?”
“—”
“Are you asleep?”
“—”
“Jim?” Quentin turned over, held his breath, and heard the belabored, unsteady respiration of the old man across from him. Then the boy sighed, itched his nose, and climbed from the bed.
He sat down in front of the antique-looking television set and switched it on with the volume low. Like always, there was nothing on, even though there was cable; he lingered for a few moments over the adults-only channel, trying to gauge whether the fuzzed-out limbs on the snowy screen belonged to a man or woman. He flashed past that image, tried once more, decided on some cartoons, then changed his mind, landing on a news update about the O.J. Simpson trial. The LA police detective was once again on the witness stand, and the jury was listening to further excerpts from some audiotapes he had made. There was the smooth white face, blotchy on the old color set, listening to his own words echoing there in the courtroom.
“. . . all these niggers in LA city government, and all of ’em should be lined up against a wall and fuckin’ shot.”
Though the word fuckin’ had been bleeped out for the television audience, it was still fairly obvious what the detective had said. The grandfather was now snoring loudly. Quentin glanced back at him, the fuzzy green bedspread slowly rising and falling, rising and falling, his breaths like the creaking bellows of some ship adrift at sea.
The white face of the police detective floated there on the TV for a moment longer, like a prisoner who had been decapitated, before the boy switched the television off, the room going completely dark. In the shadows, the boy laid on top of the starchy sheets and wondered where the mare was now, what it was feeling, if it had been allowed to run today, or if, like him, it was more afraid of the day lying ahead than any of the others that had passed.
_________________
At midnight the stars assembled in the sky. Edging ever closer to the gleam of Nashville’s skyline, its silver-blue bridges and stunted skyscrapers, these lone shapes twinned in the surface of the Cumberland River. Friday night becoming Saturday morning. Already past Somerset, already past Nancy, past Glasgow, past Bowling Green, past the Tennessee state line, then the town of White House, the horse in its metal stall, eyes blinking rapidly; the road flickering past, the muffled roar of speeding traffic, appearing and then disappearing. The driver of the black pickup, Rick West, marked the hours along I-65 by the infrequency of other towns ahead and behind, yawning, eyes failing, then having failed, jerking themselves open just in time, coming up on I-40 and the town of Goodlettsville, then the familiar northern border of Nashville, its blue-white lights like from a dream—the dream having ended abruptly a good four or five years before. Beside him, the girl snored, face flushed against the passenger-side window, hands folded before her like a cherub. Taking the next exit, the black pickup departed from the expressway, the lumbering trailer echoing loudly as they slowed to a stop in the loose gravel of a motel’s parking lot. Skylight, the sign read, flashing with red and blue light.
Inside, the motel lobby was dark, as bleak as an all-night pawnshop, the overhead fluorescent lights flickering on and off, making Rick squint his way to the counter. A young Pakistani clerk—seventeen or eighteen years old at most—was busy playing an arcade game in the corner of the lobby. He seemed startled by Rick’s appearance. The clerk nodded without a word and then hurried through a wood-paneled door marked Employees Only, reappearing behind a plane of bulletproof plexiglass on the other side of the counter. Behind the glass, he began to mime instructions to Rick. Yawning, Rick signed the register, using the company credit card—which old man Bolan always agreed to pay, though only after a lengthy interrogation. The blue key fob was dropped through the slot in the plastic shield. Rick tipped his hat to the clerk and marched back to the truck, unlocking the silver handcuffs, waking the girl, the girl rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand, cursing him in her sleep. He walked behind her down the outdoor corridor to a wood-paneled room, the girl collapsing onto one of the single beds, which was covered with a wheat-colored floral bedspread. Rick stood there for a moment, eyeing the layout, then ambled into the bathroom to be sure there were no windows, no ways to sneak out, then gestured to the girl, who wordlessly cursed him again, yawned, and then stumbled into the john. The sound of water running, rushing, the girl gargling, the faucet screaming like a murder victim. The girl stumbled back out, face clean, eyes closed, collapsing onto the bed once more. Rick eyed the bed frame, striding over, and slipped the jaw of the cuff through the metal frame, attaching th
e other end as gently as he could to the girl’s left wrist. The girl did not even struggle, did not even make a sound, just pulled the white pillow over her head, kicking off her shoes, each one landing on the beige carpet with a thump. Rick stood there, feeling as if he was still in the cab of the pickup, the road flying before him, the world still moving. He suffered an alarming sense of vertigo as he leaned over to slip off his boots, fighting against the cowhide, losing one sock in the process, falling forward onto his own bed, too tired to move.
The girl was soon snoring, the snore also a kind of condemnation. Lying there, removing his shirt, the cracks in the ceiling branched above him like the blue and red highways he had traveled over the last two days. It was hard not to think of old man Bolan lying in bed, surrounded by nurses, nightstand lined with orange vials and trays of pills, not sleeping, never sleeping, lying in his magnanimous four-poster, perched up by half a dozen pillows, call button in hand, imploring Rick to sneak him a glass of scotch or a piece of “that black girl’s chocolate cake,” summoning him to sit at the bedside simply to avoid having to face those creeping, timeless hours past midnight on his own. Rick stared up at those endless lines and cracks and saw in them the indefatigable features of his bedsick employer and also the fractures of his own future, for when the old man finally did die—turning back to East Texas dust—Rick was certain he’d be cut loose. He was just a glorified ranch hand, and he knew that Bolan’s son Dwight, a fancy entertainment lawyer and Rylee’s father, had no love for him. As soon as the old man kicked and the land went to the heirs, Rick would be set to drifting once again. He closed his eyes but the sound of the highway rumbling nearby rang loud in his ears; suddenly he found he was too restless to sleep.
He pulled on his shirt, stood in the dark to be sure the girl was asleep—leaning over to check the silver handcuffs—then slipped open the motel room door and stumbled outside. He put on his boots in the corridor, straightening his bushy brown hair with his fingers, and brushed his teeth with his finger. He found a payphone at the end of the corridor and deposited a quarter and a dime, punching in a local number he was certain would no longer be in service. When it began to ring, his heart snagged in his chest. The voice answering after five or six rings was softer than it once was, groggy with sleep.
“Yes?” she asked, and even hearing her voice, knowing it was really her, still in the same place, was enough for him. He hung up the phone, stared at it as if it might rear up like a rattlesnake and strike, and then shuffled off. He discovered a crumpled pack of smokes in the back pocket of his jeans, fingered one out, and started down the road, whistling a made-up ditty to himself. He was feeling reckless now; angry; lost.
About a mile and a half from the motel he found a bar, and a girl of age who was willing. The girl was young, no older than twenty-one, and although her chestnut hair and gray eyes were winning, her yellow teeth and dirty fingernails made him loathe her a little. There was a white and pink tattoo on her neck—a unicorn—and beneath its front paws was a pink swastika. She saw him staring at it and said she used to run with a white-power guy who got a job at a plating plant here in town. She looked like a cokehead or crackhead or junkie or some such thing. They did it in an alley, standing up, him turning her away, pants around their ankles. She did not stop talking. The whole time she was telling him about her hometown, Memphis; her caterwauling mother; the concerned stepdad; a job she used to have at a tool and dye plant; her voice bright, unending, a star growing fiercer and fiercer as Rick was trying to concentrate—“So my mom said if I didn’t like it I could leave, and after that I came up here . . . Wow, do you mind . . . my knees kind of hurt that way okay, thanks, and then I . . .”—but he was trying like hell to ignore her, glaring at the back of her shoulder, at the back of her head, the back of her left ear; he was saying something, some woman’s name, then he was slowing down, his thighs tightening against the back of the girl’s legs; then he came, and let go, and she fell on her side, looking up at him. He was digging into his wallet, unfolding bill after bill, and tossing them at her.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, slowly picking up the bills. “I’m a person, you know. I’m a somebody.”
“What’s your name?”
“Wanda.”
“Wanda,” he said seriously, as if he had never heard the name before. “Wanda, do you know anyone around here who moves crystal? I’ve been out of town for a while and I’ve got a package I’d like to get rid of. You know anyone who can help me out with that?”
The girl nodded, shoving the rolled-up dollar bills into the front of her brassiere.
“You got their number?” he asked.
The girl nodded again, reached into her purse, found an uncapped black pen, and wrote the digits on the back of some religious tract. The faded, mimeographed cover was titled The Beast, the font grimly situated over a panel of red and yellow flames.
“Thanks,” Rick said, slipping it into the back of his jeans. “And Wanda?”
“Yeah?” The girl looked up at him, eyes glazed red.
“You oughta call your folks,” he said. “Because this town ain’t no place for a somebody.”
When he got back to the motel room, it was almost two a.m. He stood there smoking a cigarette outside the door, crushed it against the flat of his boot, and snuck back inside, climbing into bed. He lay there for a while, observing the cracks in the ceiling once again, thinking of old man Bolan, of the girl sleeping in the bed across from his, and slipped off to sleep, wondering what the old man could want with another horse.
* * *
Like a thunderhead, the shot rang out, creasing the air with a metallic crack, once again ringing in his ears, the old man startling awake, eyes penetrating the hoary shadows of the motel room, the smell of burned cloth and flesh, of copper, of antimony, of lead, the feeling of the projectile once again riveting his shoulder, knocking him back to the clotted ground, the crack of the bullet lodging itself somewhere along the back porch, metal striking wood, forever burying itself in the hand-painted grain of a colonial post. His heart was pounding so loud that he was sure it must have wakened the boy. He glanced over and saw that he was wrong; his grandson was fast asleep. The old man pushed himself on his side and stared at the clock, a blur of red dots and lines, tilting his head this way and that until he could read its digital face: 3:13.
He held his hand over the spot on his shoulder and was again startled, this time by the shape of the horse standing there, its great and tensed quarters confined by the smallness of the room. He sat up in bed, holding a hand out, the horse’s long eyelashes flickering before him, understanding at once that the horse had been sent here by Deedee, that if he could only put a hand to its mane, if he could only lay his palm against its milky throat, then somehow the horse would carry him to wherever his long-departed wife had been hidden. The bedclothes slid to the floor as he got up on weak, spindly legs, his breath as uncertain as his approach. When he saw the animal shudder, when he realized he was smelling its muddy, intestinal scent, he knew it was no figment, that it had come here to bring Jim Falls beyond the woods and green-capped hills to where his wife’s voice was a chiming wind, a solitary sound, where she was not just a ghost. But he hesitated, pausing there, bare feet on the green carpeted floor, seeing the boy lying there in bed, still asleep—like all sleeping children, looking younger than he really was. The old man worried what would happen to the boy, what kind of life he would live. When, finally, he made up his mind, turning to place his hand on the nape of the mare’s neck, he found it had disappeared.
* * *
Rick pulled himself from the bed, glancing down at his watch, unable to discern which way the two hands were pointing. Something was trying to kill him, something was trotting upon his head. He could hear the loud clang somewhere, echoing within the useless cavity that ran from his left ear to his right; a low, metallic thumping; and just then he was sure the girl had escaped. Shirtless, he crossed the carpet, throwing open the motel room
door, certain he was going to see the dark blond hair disappearing in front of him, but the parking lot was lifeless: there was his truck and the trailer, three semi cabs, and a compact car parked at the other end, but there was no shadow of any kind of movement, no echo of a falling footstep. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the lithe form of the girl still in her bed, coughed a little, checked his watch once more. It was 3:20 a.m. He stumbled back to the uncomfortable bed.
A moment or two later, he heard the wallop once more, the sound ringing out with a distinct clang. This time he sat up in bed, calmly surveying the room, trying to trace the cause of the noise. After hearing it again, Rick stepped out of the motel room altogether, standing shirtless in the doorway, gawking at the invisible shapes of stray clouds hanging on the horizon, the whump coming once more, then again. Rick strode off barefoot across the parking lot, wincing at the sharpness of the gravel, following the sound to the rectangular trailer, standing beside it now, trying to get a glimpse inside, the horse striking its cleats against the floor. What he felt was an embarrassment then, the horse snuffling there, whinnying a little, eye to eye with the stranger gazing at him through the foggy window and ventilation slits, Rick buckling his pants and sliding the trailer bolt open, the bolt missing its lock, the door folding down into a ramp, the horse growing frantic in its movements, tail swinging this way and that, cleating the metal floor over and over, Rick stumbling up the ramp, the ripe putridity of horseshit and piss causing him to gag a little, searching around for a lead, a simple rope for the animal’s neck, bare feet squishing in manure and straw, whistling to the animal a little, placing a steady hand along its shoulder, talking to it, “Come on, now, come on,” the horse edgy at first, its anxiety as palpable as its smell, Rick finding the reins, the horse trying to turn but unable, clumsily knocking its head and forelegs on the side of the trailer. Rick, patient, tugged on the line again, the horse following now, steady, steady, steady, down the ramp, the parking lot reverberating with each step, then down, rearing a little, huffing, taking in the night air, the borderless gravel, the grandeur of the sky.
