Wild Horses of the Summer Sun

by Tory Bilski

  “Okay, nevermind,” Eve says, and quickly drives away. “That was not funny.”

  “That was not funny.”

  “That was disgusting.”

  “I know they eat horsemeat in Iceland, but he didn’t have to put it like that.”

  “Can we just forget he said that? It’s making me sick,” Margot says.

  “How do we get out of here?”

  “There’s a road sign up ahead that looks like a campground symbol. That would be a likely place for a horse show.”

  One or two of these signs pop up along the way so we know we’re on the right route. We’re rolling along, looking carefully at every sign, when I realize there are only four of us in the car.

  “We forgot Viv.”

  With a deep intake of air, Sylvie says, “Don’t tell her.”

  Viv is on a corner waiting for us on the same street we left her on. “You forgot me, didn’t you?”

  “No, no, we didn’t.”

  Raptured

  The horse show arena is set deep in a green valley ringed by snow-topped mountains. Like Holar, it is another Shangri-La place, conveying peace, serenity, enchantment. We arrive at eight at night. It’s bright and sunny with a cold, brisk wind that rattles the car. It’s colder than usual this June. An Arctic air inversion, we’ve been told. We wear parkas, hats, and gloves, and decide to watch the competition from our car.

  Eve backs into a parking space and, being a cautious driver, looks over her left shoulder. And, because we are participatory passengers, we all look over our left shoulders, too, which is how we all notice him at the same time. In a group of men, he stands out because he is darker than the usual Icelander.

  “That guy is handsome.”

  “The dark-haired guy?”

  “Yeah. With the gray in his beard.”

  “Yeah. I thought so, too.”

  “Margot, there’s your guy.”

  “Your fortune cookie guy.”

  “It wasn’t a fortune cookie; it was her horoscope,” Sylvie says.

  “That’s better, that’s more accurate,” I offer.

  “Oh, look, Margot. He’s so handsome!” Eve says, as if it’s a done deal. “Lucky you.”

  Margot’s got her hood up, but makes a weak effort to peak out and get a look at Handsome. “I’m in no shape to meet anyone. I’m coming down with a cold, my stomach hurts. I can’t take all this conflict with Pippa; it has weakened my immune system.” She sniffles and retreats back into her hood, taking out her Kindle to read Game of Thrones.

  As we watch the horse show, we mindlessly pass around chocolate McVitie’s and pretzels that were left in the car. Viv takes out some seed and nut concoction from her backpack and says, “These are full of protein.” Except for Margot, we all partake in these nuggets as if we have been starved of protein less than an hour after finishing our fish dinner.

  Every time Frieda and Helga have their turn in the show, we pop out of the car. We listen to what the judge says about them in Icelandic, clap our mittened hands together every time their names are mentioned, understanding nothing in the language but their names. Then we rush back to the car, turn it on, turn the heat on, and watch all the riders we don’t know. We take particular notice of one rider dressed all in black on a big dark bay.

  Sylvie recognizes him first: “Hey, that’s him, with the beard.”

  And there he is—Handsome—putting a black beauty of a horse through tölt, trot, and canter. “Wow, he rides, too.” Margot looks up from her reading briefly, momentarily impressed, sniffles, and goes back to the world of Westeros.

  The night goes on like this, watching the riders, getting in and out of the car to cheer along Frieda and Helga. The sky is tumultuous with swirly clouds as if it’s trying to send forth a message. It’s the perfect setting for, oh, I don’t know, the Rapture?

  When it comes time for us to leave, Eve turns the key and the car just makes a weak click-click-click sound. “The car’s dead,” she says. We’re a garrulous group, but we turn mute at this news. We can’t bother Frieda during competition and Helga left for home a while ago. But Eve sums up the situation and quickly takes charge. She digs up the car rental number, calls up the guy in Reykjavík (a seven-hour drive away) and explains the situation.

  “We’re in Soda cracker,” she says. “No, so-da crack-er,” she says slowly, as if she’s the native explaining how the word should be said.

  I interrupt her, “I think its pronounced soda croak-er.”

  She says in the phone, “Soda crock-er.”

  I pipe up from the back seat again, “No, soda croak-er.”

  She says in the phone, “Soda-crack-er.” She holds the phone away from her face, “He doesn’t understand; he’s going to put his wife on.”

  Eve goes through the “Soda cracker, Soda crock-er, croak-er” thing again with the wife, and then says, “It’s near Holar.” Pause. “No, we’re not in Holar, we’re near Holar, in Soda cracker. Okay, I’ll find someone here who speaks Icelandic.”

  Viv is out of the car in a flash, asking a group of men on the hill. “Does anyone speak English? Our car seems to have died.”

  From a distance, no one looks eager to help us. But finally, one guy stands up and comes down the hill with Viv. Eve holds the phone out to him. “Can you talk to this person and explain where we are?”

  I knock Margot’s knee. “It’s him! Handsome! Margot, this is meant to be. Get out of the car!” I’m thinking destiny, but she isn’t feeling it.

  “I can’t just go out there and talk him up. I’m not like that.”

  But I convince her to get out of the car and hover around him. While he is on the phone explaining our situation in Icelandic to the other end, Eve turns the key on and off and says, “Hear the click-click-click?”

  As if I am the only mechanic in this helpless gaggle, I point to the hood. “It’s the battery, the battery is dead.”

  “But the horn works, see?” Eve toots the horn.

  “Maybe it’s the alternator,” Viv says.

  He nods politely to us as he tries to continue his conversation on the phone. We’ve exhausted our car knowledge and we’ve left Margot outside beside him, politely crossing and uncrossing her arms and legs, looking longingly at her Kindle in the car.

  Finally, he gets off the phone and tells us, “I have a friend in town I’ll call. He has cables. He’ll get here faster.”

  We thank him profusely. He goes back to his friends on the hill and we sit in the car and wait. And wait. Though the competition is still going on, the place begins to empty out, and without being able to turn the heat on the car is cold. Sylvie asks, somewhat irritated, “Where is he?”

  Margot is getting paler and sniffling louder, sinking deeper into the hood of her jacket. “Guys, I’m really not feeling well. It’s freezing, too.”

  Viv jumps out of the car to look for Handsome. She’s quickly back with the news. “Can’t find Handsome. And Frieda has left. But Pippa and her friends are here, down at the other end.”

  “Did you tell them our car is broken? Can she take a couple of us in her car so we’re not all stuck here?” Eve asks.

  Viv hesitates. I know she doesn’t want to talk to Pippa.

  Eve presses. “Just say we need her help. She can’t say no.”

  Viv, against her better judgment, scampers away to find Pippa. She has taken up the role of scurrying messenger seriously, leaving the rest of us to issue orders from our cold car. She returns from Pippa’s car with the news, “She can take one person in her car, she says. She’s leaving soon.”

  “Margot, you have to go with them. You’re chilled and not feeling well.” We are sending her into the belly of the beast, with the people who caused the stress that caused her illness.

  Viv sprints back and delivers the message and soon Pippa pulls up, driving super-fast for a parking lot and stopping so abruptly next to us that her wheels spit up gravel and dirt. Once again, she expresses her emotions with aggressive driving
.

  It’s as if we’re passing Margot off to the other side of the Berlin Wall as we watch her get into Pippa’s car and drive off. But within a few minutes, we see Margot, walking back to us, hunched over and looking sicker.

  “What happened?”

  “She kicked me out of her car. She asked me how did we choose who got to go with her? I said, everyone decided I should go because I wasn’t feeling well. And that did it. She jerked the car around and said, ‘You’re sick? Get out!’”

  “She kicked you out in the cold for being sick?”

  “Oh, they’re mean. When I first got in, they asked what we were doing about the car. So I told them about Handsome and how we were fussing about how good-looking he was, and you know what Karen says? She’s says, ‘Why would a guy like that be interested in a bunch of women your age? He’d be more interested in Madison here, she’s young and beautiful.’”

  This gets us going again. We are aghast, apoplectic about their meanness. Insult upon insult. To say nothing about inappropriateness. “She’s bragging a 45-year-old guy would be interested in her 15-year-old daughter,” Viv says. “What does that say?”

  Margot keeps repeating: “I couldn’t believe she said ‘get out’ like that. Just ‘get out’!”

  We rehash this until we’re tired of it. Twenty minutes pass and we’re back to “Where is he? Where is Handsome?” And Viv is out of the car before we ask her, looking for him. We marvel about how tireless she is. “Look at her go,” Eve says.

  Eve says to me, “Why don’t you go out there, put the hood up so we look distressed and get some attention.” But before I can even get out of the car, a pickup truck pulls up and Handsome comes down the hill to meet it, as if he had been keeping an eye on us the whole time up there on the hill. He and his friend attach the jumper cables and the battery starts recharging.

  Eve revs the engine, Margot reads in the back seat, Sylvie intermittently groans out her angst, and Viv has disappeared down the road. Since everyone else is preoccupied, I feel the need to be friendly with Handsome, so I get out of the car.

  “Did you ride in the competition?” I ask, even though I know he did. Yes, he says.

  “Do you have a horse farm?” This is not an unusual question, giving where we are. And yes, he does. “A few miles away,” he says, and points to the mountains and tells me the name of the town.

  I try to keep up the patter of conversation, which isn’t difficult. He seems willing to talk, even friendly, and I realize that he is more than handsome—he is kind, with kind eyes. And he is a horseman with a horse farm. I am stalling for Margot, who is hiding out in the car and not accepting that this is meant to be. My attention is drawn up to the hill and his friends are watching us and laughing. “Your friends up there are laughing at us.” He looks amused, waves at them, shakes his head, and reassures me, “It’s nothing.”

  Viv is walking back to the car and I summon her over. She immediately asks his name. “Baltasar,” he says, which doesn’t sound Icelandic to me. I can tell this occurs to Viv, too, so she asks his last name. He hesitantly says something that sounds like Cormico. I think, that doesn’t sound Icelandic. But what I think, Viv says—“That doesn’t sound Icelandic. It doesn’t end in ‘son.’” He tells us his mother is Icelandic, his father is Spanish.

  Soon the car battery is charged. Eve tries to tip Baltasar, and leans out the window holding a couple thousand kronur (about $20). “Please, please, take this for all your trouble. You saved us. We would have been stuck here all night.” He looks embarrassed and refuses. She holds it out again, “For your friend in the truck then?” He refuses for his friend in the truck. And there we are at the awkward tipping standoff: Eve holding the cash out the window with it flapping in the wind and him backing away from it.

  So we thank him profusely and theatrically. Viv does a deep salaam-style bow and Eve does a yogi-style bow from the driver’s seat. “Namaste,” she says. And we’re off.

  Back in the car, Viv and I relay all the information on Handsome, the most relevant first. “He has a horse farm around here.”

  Sylvie shakes her head. “Margot, that was it. You missed your chance. A handsome Icelandic man with a horse farm.”

  “There’s nothing better than that in the whole world.”

  “He wasn’t interested in me. Karen is right, I’m too old.”

  “I bet you’re the same age.”

  Viv tells everyone that he’s half-Spanish and half-Icelandic and that his name is Baltasar. When Eve hears that she screams, “I know his father! He’s a famous artist in Iceland. His name is Baltasar, too. I have his painting in my living room. Jack and I went to his house in Reykjavík to buy it. Years ago. He was such a lovely man, and his wife put out strawberries and Champagne for us. It’s got to be his son. It’s the law of attraction! We have to find him.”

  Suddenly, we are charged with this mission. We must find him! Why? Ostensibly, to tell him Eve knows his parents and had Champagne and strawberries with them.

  Baltasar. His name suddenly means everything to us: handsome, gallant, rescuer, equestrian, car charger. It’s as if a collective hormonal rush comes over us and we are all atwitter, squealing like lovelorn thirteen-year-old girls. Who knew we had that much estrogen left in us?

  “Where is he? Baltasar. We have to find him.” We can’t seem to find our way out of the parking lot, let alone locate him. “Wait, where’s the road?” Eve asks.

  We’re giving Eve directions all at once. “Here. No here. Turn around. Try that lane. Down there.”

  We back up, turn around, the tires squeal. Eve jumps a curb that bounces us high in the air, alarming people nearby. Then she has to back up over the curb again, which requires gunning it in reverse. A horse going into a trailer skitters and neighs. We get dirty stares from the horse handlers.

  In the end, we can’t find Baltasar, and it is nearly midnight as we drive away, antics over, emotionally depleted. Margot sleeps. The rest of us stay up to keep Eve company as she drives. We lose the sun on the horizon for a brief moment and then it’s back up again.

  It’s one in the morning when we get back to the farm. Helga is up and we tell her our story all at once—we’re jumping all over each other about Handsome rescuing us and Eve’s connection to him.

  Helga knows him. “Ah, yes,” she says, “that’s Baltasar Kormákur. He is the son of the painter. But he is also a very well-known actor and director in Iceland. He has an American movie coming out, an action movie.” She is matter-of-fact about this because Icelanders aren’t impressed with fame. It is, refreshingly, not a celebrity culture.

  We explain between yelps and sighs how we were trying to set Margot up with him.

  “Oh, no, no, he is married to a beautiful Icelandic woman. She is one of the richest women in Iceland.”

  “Rich and beautiful, what did you guys put me up against?” Margot jokes, color back in her face, pressure off, sniffles gone.

  But the new information about Baltasar sets us reeling again. “He’s a movie star and director!” We can’t help it, he’s like the George Clooney of Iceland. We Google his name and his work and his new movie, 2 Guns, that is coming out. We’re sitting in the big bunk room, each on our own bunk bed. We’re probably waking Pippa and company up, but they are insignificant to us now. There is no place for petty meanness anymore.

  We recap the night and it gets more and more ridiculous in the retelling, with each of our roles in the plot producing bellyaching laughter. It’s like we are back in college dorm rooms, debriefing with roommates after a night out. It’s like all those youthful nights that were made thrilling with romantic possibility, the more far-fetched the better. We’re so wired we will never sleep. Any chance of us simmering down is dashed when Eve gets out between gasps, “And . . . I tried . . . to . . . tip him!”

  That does us in. We burst out in a delirium, it rumbles forth from our gut, registering audibly in the stratosphere. It’s no longer about Baltasar; it’s about us, our l
aughter that we can’t seem to stop. It’s so intense our bodies shake like jackhammers; our voices caterwaul out to the sunlit night, in release and relief. It sweeps us up with such force that we are temporarily lifted up and out of this world. We are raptured.

  BOOK V

  THE PACE (SKEIÐ)

  The “fifth gear” in Icelandic horses, also known as the Flying Pace (Flugskeið). It is a lateral two-beat gait, during which both legs on one side of the horse simultaneously touch the ground, but also at one interval all four hooves are suspended off the ground, thus giving it the feeling of flying.

  2014

  The Road to Thingeyrar

  It’s our eleventh year in Iceland. “Eleven,” Eve declares, “is a magical number.”

  Margot is back this year, along with the regulars: Eve, Sylvie, Viv, Allie, me. Pippa did email Sylvie asking if she could “reserve” a bedroom for the trip this year; Sylvie ignored the question and Pippa never pursued it.

  I have not seen Viv since March when I met her in a New York and we went to an exhibit at the Native American Museum on “The Horse.” I have not been up to the Berkshires to visit Margot and Sylvie since the winter. And I have not seen Eve since last year at a fund-raiser. We have a lot to catch up on. As soon as we get in the car, there is the immediate, almost ceremonial, unwrapping and passing of cookies, pretzels, licorice.

  There is a discussion about the Martha Beck workshop Margot and Sylvie attended, and what she means when she used the Chinese term “soul sister.”

  There is new life to talk about: Viv had a grandson in April. “Now I really worry,” she says. “I worry about having boys these days. I think this world doesn’t favor little boys with ADD who can’t sit in a classroom. I think they have it harder than girls.” She has told me this before, and I don’t disagree. “Girls rule these days.”

  And there is continuing life. “How are your kids?” Eve asks me.