Rodeo
The other mothers covered their children’s eyes. April covered her son’s ears. She might have expected the horse to cry or to struggle, gasp for breath. She had never seen a horse lie down before; this one had fallen flat on its side.
Douglas shook his head free from his mother’s hands. “Are they going to stop the show?” he asked.
The horse didn’t move.
April noticed that the other mothers had started to pack up and guide their children down the bleachers. The horse needed his rest, a big Band-Aid. There were offers of cartoons before bedtime. April wondered why she had not considered leaving.
“Keep that horse down, boys!” the announcer shouted over the loudspeaker as three men in cowboy hats ran in from the gates. The men dashed to the lifeless animal and sat on the body, as if to keep it from flailing. A man on the horse’s rump waved to the crowd in what was most likely an attempt to say, Everything’s all right, folks!
“We can go home if you’d like,” April said, keeping her eyes on the arena. There was a cowboy at the horse’s head, stroking its cheek. The man’s lips were moving.
“I think its neck broked,” said Douglas.
April could only nod. The horse had thrown its rider with a vertical twisting motion, flashing the undersides of its hooves, then took off at a gallop across the open arena, still slick from the morning’s rain. Right before it reached the fence, it had lost its footing and landed on its head, balancing for a moment, it seemed, on the white star between its eyes. All this happened quickly and clumsily, which was to be expected of an animal of that size, but also, April thought, far too easily, like a child falling down.
A tractor pulling a horse trailer roared through the gate.
“Now we can get this ol’ boy the help he needs,” said the announcer, slow and soothing. “Yes, folks, we’re gonna be all right here.”
“How do you help a broked neck?” Douglas asked quietly. April saw that he was looking down at his hands. She wondered if the damage was already done, if Douglas would grow up with some kind of weird phobia. She had not brought her son to the only rodeo in Vermont to pick up more worries.
There was something wrong with April’s husband, or at the very least, something about him was different. Paul was mild-mannered and somewhat old-fashioned in his habits. When he returned home from work, he changed from his shirt and tie into his “house” clothes—a new button-up and a pair of slacks that did not look to April to be any more comfortable—and then, at bedtime, into his pajamas, which sometimes he ironed. He was never outspoken, but April knew that he carried within him a long list of opinions that he would not like to be challenged, by her, or by anyone. He was like a well-made box: sturdy, uncomplicated, and with a clearly defined purpose—on the outside, at least.
April would sometimes have a reoccurring dream. In the dream, the hospital called to tell her that Paul had been crippled in a motorcycle accident—a motorcycle that she had not known about. She was obliged to give him sponge baths and little bites of baby food. The dream always ended with her looking for vegetables to mash for his dinner.
They both laughed whenever she had the dream, as if the motorcycle—his big secret—was a mark of their own lack of imagination, their old couple’s humdrum.
“A motorcycle?” Paul kidded her. “That was the best you could come up with?”
Paul had never touched a motorcycle. Paul rode a bicycle. He rode it to his office, a slate-roofed building with a row of decapitated hedges along the walkway. Once there, he would go into the bathroom to pat his hair down with water and reapply his deodorant stick, just in case the short, downhill commute had caused him to break a sweat.
“Check his desk for a flask,” April’s friend Roxanne had said in the early days of their relationship. “All lawyers are depressed. They have to be.”
Roxanne had been a prosecutor, turned public defender, and then gave up law altogether to be a middle-school woodshop teacher.
“A classroom of tweens with table saws?” she loved to say. “Try dealing with a judge for a day.”
At the beginning of every school year, Roxanne would hold up her right hand and wait for the hush to fall over the classroom, as her students, one by one, noticed the red jagged line, the mangled stump of pinkie, like a fleshy chess pawn.
“Be alert,” she’d tell them, “and you won’t have to find out how this happened.” She had been ten years old when her uncle’s pet iguana, Lizzy, bit off her finger, but her woodshop class didn’t have to know that.
April had found no flask in Paul’s office, just a number of cryptic—although mundane—handwritten sticky notes. “File the straw.” “Half-wit prairie dog.” “Rock-a-bye Paper Plane.” A bit jarred, but not wanting to seem meddling, she had tried her best to forget them.
“Broken,” said April.
Douglas peered at her. “What?”
“Broken, not broked. The neck is broken,” she said, as if from a grammar text.
“Well, how do you fix it?”
It took six men to haul the horse into the back of the trailer. It happened quickly, as if they had all done it before. April watched the tractor speed out the gate, its tires flinging mud onto the first row of onlookers. She was wondering how to answer Douglas’s question. When he was born, April had resolved to always tell her son the truth, no matter how difficult the subject. Once the boy was old enough to ask questions, however, she had been shocked by her urge to lie and to lie extravagantly. It had come as strongly as her need to slice his grapes in half so he would not choke on them, to kiss his knees when he fell.
“You don’t,” she said.
April taught middle-school English, a thankless task, far from her dreams of well-loved copies of The Catcher in the Rye and perfectly sharpened pencils. Instead, her desk drawers buzzed with confiscated cell phones and her hands were always parched with chalk. Year after year, her students stared from their seats, like frogs blinking in the water. The only students that liked her were boring, desperate for an A because it was all that they could comprehend.
Sometimes April thought that Roxanne was cheating, with that finger of hers. Roxanne’s students offered up birdhouses, jewelry boxes, and little wooden letter Rs, rapt at her every word, as if it might earn them a bit of her magic.
“And now the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” The announcer roared on through his script. Barrels were rolled through the dirt; the gusto of the crowd was up. Anyone too upset to keep watching had gone.
The gates were opened and a pony scrambled through, as if it had been running like that for miles. The young rider had her hands all the way up by its ears, gripping the reins, pumping the air. They took the first barrel at such a tilt that the girl’s toe made a line in the dirt. April felt a twist of apprehension. What if another horse goes down? She wondered if it would make things worse, or rather, if the two instances, by the laws of absurdity, would nullify each other.
That morning, Roxanne and April had gone shopping together, an outing that had more to do with giant lattes and little cakes than anything else.
“You deserve this,” Roxanne said as she drove them downtown. Her hand on the steering wheel reminded April of a half-mangled starfish, clinging to a rock. She had heard somewhere that starfish could grow back lost limbs, but she didn’t dare confirm the theory with Roxanne, who would expose her train of thought in an instant. Instead, April found herself putting words behind something that she hadn’t wanted to express to anyone.
“There’s something wrong with Paul,” she said, “but don’t ask me what. I don’t know.”
Roxanne’s expression remained placid, as if she had been expecting this. She glanced over her shoulder to change lanes and April stole another peek at the stunted pinkie, stretching taut the red, scarred skin.
“Tell me this, then.” Roxanne was almost monotone. It meant that she wasn’t planning for them to become too engrossed in the subject. “How do you know?”
&nbs
p; “He said something.” What April wanted to say was that he’d said something that she hadn’t expected, but she worried that it would sound unimaginative, or rigid.
The first time April had tried to tell Roxanne about the motorcycle dream, her friend had waved her hands around her ears.
“Don’t even bother,” she had said. “I can never pay attention. And besides, all dreams are about impotence. Especially dreams about impotence.”
They stopped at a strip mall, in a random bracket of the nearly deserted parking lot, where the rain was starting to pool oily and black. It was always in parking lots that April forgot everything that she had intended to buy, where the practice of moving goods from one location to the next suddenly lost its charm. In the end, it was the fear of not wanting anything, the empty-handed finality of it, that kept her from turning around and going home.
When they pulled up in front of April’s house, Paul was ready with an umbrella.
“She’s all yours,” Roxanne said, handing him the last of April’s shopping bags.
“And what if I don’t know what to do with her?” he asked. He had probably expected an appreciative snort from April’s friend, at the very least, but Roxanne had already turned around and was standing on the front porch, tucking waves of dark hair under her hood, about to step into the rain. She pointed her key and followed it to the door of her car, leaving the couple alone with Paul’s question, like a pair of teenagers forced into a closet at a party, devastatingly aware of each other.
Douglas needed to use the bathroom, but the line wasn’t moving. From where they stood, on a path of crushed straw and hardened mud, April could still see the glowing white numbers of the mounted digital timer. The man on the horse had only lasted two seconds before he was thrown. April wondered if it was the lack of buildup, of gladiatorial narrative, that had made the whole scene so pathetic. Death was fussy and then it was over. It didn’t make for a very good show.
“Number one or number two?” A man in muddied chaps and a cowboy hat was sitting on his heels in front of Douglas. April recognized him as the man who had been stroking the fallen horse’s cheek.
“I mean,” he leaned in for a loud whisper, “do you need to go number one or number two?” Douglas looked at his mother and lifted one sheepish finger. The man stood, this time addressing April.
“I can guarantee that my horse’s stall is a hundred times cleaner than that sludge heap.” He indicated the dented porta-potty at the head of the line. “I’d be happy to show you,” he said. Then, perhaps realizing how his offer must sound, he added, “That is, if y’all are comfortable with that.”
April and Douglas followed the man into a long barn with two facing rows of iron-barred stalls. Yellow light-bulbs, stuck sideways from posts, lit their way, while around them horses nudged their long faces into feed bags, crunching. The barn brought a welcomed hush after the roar of the stadium, and April could feel the hollow of nostalgia start to open within her chest. She’d grown up with two goldfish and a classroom hermit crab, nothing like these gassy, grumbling beasts. And yet there she was, stirred by the promise of something familiar.
The man led a clean, chestnut-colored horse from one of the stalls by a halter, tied loosely over its flaring muzzle. It stood patiently, blowing dust, while Douglas shuffled into the stall. April could see that the man had been right; the horse’s space was kept impeccably clean, with heaping mounds of fresh wood shavings, smelling of pine. Still, she knew it put Douglas in an awful spot, forced to choose the humiliation of peeing in the presence of a stranger over the humiliation of wetting himself.
“Quite a night for the little guy,” the man said, dropping his head toward the now-closed stall door. April felt a small shock of guilt; they could have easily taken the first exit to a rest stop or grocery store, she knew, but she had been following her own selfish curiosity.
It had happened in the middle of the night: a strange whimpering that shook April from her sleep. She thought at first that Douglas had come into their bedroom, frightened by a dream, but she had opened her eyes to a closed door, an empty bedside. It came again, this time punctuated by short gasps, like the metal wheezing of an old mattress. When Paul sat up beside her, April assumed that he had heard it too, but he didn’t speak. The strange wheezing was his laughter.
The bedroom was tinted blue from the moon-shaped nightlight in the baseboard outlet. Now, to April, the color looked cold, falling over Paul’s features, making his skin appear thin, the grooves of his ear unfamiliar—absurd—like a word said aloud too many times. April did not want to see him like this, like the Paul that she had known, that she had been married to for all these years, was breaking open.
When he spoke, the inside of his mouth was dark.
“I dreamed I was real,” he said, studying his palms. He flipped them over. His eyes widened. “I was real.” April got out of bed and walked down the hallway to the kitchen, where she filled a tall glass with water from the tap. She brought the glass back to the bedroom and handed it to Paul. She often did the same for Douglas, when he woke from a bad dream and needed comforting. But Paul just gazed at the glass in his hand, as if he had never seen anything like it, then slowly dipped his finger into the water. April did not know what else to do.
“That horse,” April began. She needed to know what the man in the cowboy hat had said to it, while he stroked its cheek under the stadium lights.
The man shook his head. “A real shame,” he said. “That horse’s owner was planning on retiring him next week.”
Douglas pushed open the stall door and stepped back into the warm glow of the aisle, his ears rimmed red with embarrassment. Of course they should leave, thought April. They should have been home an hour ago, wrapped in a quilt, drowning the events of the night with ice cream and excessive television.
“I know,” said April, leaning down toward her son. “How about some Frosty the Snowman when we get home?”
Something dropped inside her son; the weight of shame upon shame. He looked at the cowboy, then at the floor. She wished that she could undo it all.
They could still hear the voice of the announcer, overlapped in echo, as they walked through the roped-off field to the car. April decided that the man in the cowboy hat must have been singing to the horse. She decided that whatever he had been singing had probably been sacred in the moment but meaningless overall, like the last song he had heard on the radio, or a school anthem. As she and Douglas were leaving the barn, the man had taken a mint from his pocket and fed it to his horse, holding his hand flat beneath the animal’s smacking lips to catch the pieces that fell and offer them up again. Douglas, allowed the front seat, frowned under his seatbelt. It’ll be all right, thought April. She would ask Roxanne to come over in the morning. Roxanne enchanted Douglas. She’d bring him out to brunch, pressure him into drinking some of her coffee, then buy him something flimsy at the toy store. April disapproved, which was why it was the only remedy.
As she drove away, she watched the dome of light from the rodeo flicker behind the noise of trees and houses until it disappeared. She forced herself to imagine the horse going down, how its back legs had touched the ground by its ears, how it flipped again and then landed, hard. How the man’s lips had moved, soft pink, surrounded in stubble. Tender, like a little lie. She was relieved when Douglas dozed, bouncing his cheek against his shoulder. When they reached home, she would carry him inside, take off his sneakers, let him sleep in his jeans. She would find Paul, reading in bed, watch him tuck the jacket of his book into the pages to save his place, and then put the book on the nightstand to show that she had his full attention.
“How was the rodeo?” he would ask, smiling, and April would have no idea how to answer.
Trespassers
The woman on the swing wore an orange plastic sun visor and a pair of flamingo clip-ons, which pinched her earlobes to a similar, if more painful, shade of pink. Her jumper was corduroy, embroidered with a moose on the front pocket, an
d it reminded the girls of something their second-grade teacher might have worn. The teacher had loved moose and wore moose sweaters and jewelry and had a moose sticker on the back of her car but seemed to have no knowledge of the species beyond its decorative functions. She had laughed at a boy who asked whether the moose on her tote bag was a cow or a bull. For this, the girls had never forgiven her, nor had they forgiven themselves for laughing along. It had been their first lesson in the scarcity of atonement, how it did not fly about like geese searching for water, how their shame would lie, for weeks, open-face to the sky.
The woman in the swing had a voice like a parrot. The strap of her swing was buckled tightly, somewhere between a thick stomach roll and a lower bulge that they had no language to describe. Her toenails were long, and black from skimming the dirt. “Boss, where’d you get to?” she said. “Boss?”
The girls refused to be shocked in each other’s company. They came out of the woods lashed by thorns and splotched red from exertion, and they stopped short in front of the chain-link fence, which separated them from the woman in the swing. Catherine carried a sword, which she handled with boredom, as if to say, Don’t ask. Emi was attempting, awkwardly, to scratch a mosquito bite on her left shin with the toe of her right sandal, but at last she gave up and stood still, her feet splayed out. The sudden and not-quite-perceived arrival of hips was to blame for this stance, as well as an oafish self-consciousness brought on by the propositions of too many older men who confused the rich color of her skin for sexual maturity. If they couldn’t place her, it seemed, then she must be old enough. Her name, which throughout her childhood had been a friendly tapering of letters—E-M-I, three blueberries in a pail—had lately proved insufficient, its brevity too accessible. The way some people said it was like they had permission.
Prepare Her Page 5
