Prepare Her

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Prepare Her Page 10

by Genevieve Plunkett


  I like this, she had wanted to say. But the composer seemed ashamed.

  I have a lot on my mind, he told her and picked up her clothes from around the room.

  They had moved into the kitchen. The girl in the winter hat had made herself comfortable, sitting at the table across from Petra and lighting a cigarette. In front of her was a clutter of bottles, paper plates, various greasy tools that did not seem to belong. From beneath the mess, she unearthed a fashion magazine and began to read it, turning the pages with the hand that held the cigarette, decadently, completely at ease. The man with the long beard stood beside Petra’s chair. He had said nothing of the gun and Petra was beginning to wonder if she had been mistaken. Maybe her eyes had deceived her and she had been following his orders for nothing.

  I love my mother, the man said to her. Something bulged in his jaw.

  Petra felt sympathy for the man and so did not know what led her to say what she said next. She leaned back in her chair.

  I was told there would be cat feces, she said.

  The man looked at her. His beard, Petra noticed, was graying near his mouth and chin, but down at the bottom, where it was sparser, she could see the bright orange hairs, glowing in the sun.

  She clasped her hands together. Cat excrement, she said.

  The man grew rigid, looked at the girl in the winter hat, who lowered her eyes and flipped her magazine, suggesting that she did not intend to hear any of this.

  He turned back to Petra.

  What? he asked her. What did you say?

  Your house, she said, louder this time. It’s not as filthy as I expected.

  Sometimes Petra dreamed of the composer. She dreamed of his lips pressed all over her, his hands grabbing. There was something about her that he could not figure out, and he would become more and more enraged, moving her around the room, forcing her against the wall until the plaster cracked. And sometimes, because it was a dream, it became her skin that was cracked and then her whole body, under the force of him. Parts of her came right off, like bits of glass, and, in the midst of her arousal, which was strongest in this dream, there would be a small voice crying out, as if to a child. Stay off the floor! You’ll cut your feet!

  The man leaned in. His beard intersected a ray of sunlight from the window, which, catching the lighter strands, illuminated the whole, ragged length of it. Something near his waist clunked against the edge of the table.

  Who called you? he asked. He seemed rejuvenated by this new, palpable offense. Petra could smell his breath. It smelled like a hole, like wet tobacco, like menthol.

  I have no idea, she said.

  Roland, said the girl in the hat. Roland, she said again in a scolding voice that was older and huskier than Petra would have expected. But he paid no attention and reached again for his belt.

  Petra wondered if the man would really keep a loaded gun pointing down his pants, if he would wave it around, like a lunatic in a movie, or aim it straight. She wondered why she had not tried to run, or why she even bothered carrying the pepper spray. You have to hold down the button, she thought. It doesn’t come out like you think.

  Roland, said Petra, just as the girl had. What a big name to have, she thought, way up here on this mountain. She looked at him and found that she was laughing. She said his name again—Roland!—laughing harder still, just to see what he would do.

  Sometimes, Petra passed cows standing coolly on the wrong side of the fence. Roadkill that had been rained on and was hard to identify. A raccoon, circling in a daze under the midday sun. Her husband liked raccoons, because they washed their food.

  They also eat trash, she explained.

  Her son worried that raccoons might not recognize their own reflections. Because of their masks.

  Last summer, a rabbit had darted in front of Petra’s car. It would have been killed by the pickup truck in the oncoming lane had the truck not stopped abruptly as well. There was a man behind the wheel of the truck. He had a pipe in his mouth. The rabbit cowered in the space just in front of the truck’s tire and Petra met the man’s eye. She shook her head, as if to say, Don’t go. He held onto the pipe and nodded and they both waited. At some point, the rabbit had hopped back toward Petra’s car and disappeared from view. The man in the truck shrugged: the rabbit could be anywhere. So they waited some more.

  Go, Mommy, Petra’s son had said from the car seat. He wanted to know about ghosts. He wanted to know where green olives came from.

  Petra’s husband often wanted to know how long she spent in the shower after work. Did she remember to wash her hands when she was in there? And her feet? Letting the water run over them was not the same as washing. Getting dirty was not proof that she was helping anybody.

  Go, Mommy, said the boy. Petra had looked once more at the man in the truck and then stepped on the gas, leaving the rabbit—dead or alive—behind.

  What if a house painter paints all the doors shut? her son had asked.

  Petra had driven on.

  What about pitchforks? Bathtub drains? Do storks ever forget how to walk? They passed a cornfield, a country store. Someone was hammering a PICK YOUR OWN BLUEBERRIES sign onto a post. Petra pulled the car over and turned off the engine.

  Look, she said, turning to the boy. One day I will die and a bunch of men that you don’t know will dig a deep hole. They will put me in the hole and I will stay there until I am a pile of bones. Any questions?

  The boy stared at her and shook his head. He looked out the window at the person hammering the sign: a woman wearing an apron over a long patterned dress. He was silent as his mother started the car and turned back onto the road. It seemed to him that they drove for a long time, until the passing telephone wires created a sort of wave, a pulsing nothingness in his head. And when they reached home, he saw that his house was standing where they had left it, that it had not floated away. He saw his father’s face in the window, exhausted from holding it down.

  Farmer, Angel

  If Angel heard about what Beth did to the horses, she would nod her head, as if she had always expected it to happen and here it was. She believed everything, mutely, with the callous faith of the chronically exhausted. She would chalk it up to the horses’ good temperament. Had she told Beth about the time Big Red got himself tangled in a bunch of fence ribbon? He had been only a colt and he’d had the good sense to stand there without moving until someone came to his rescue.

  “Standing there, wrapped in twenty feet of fence up to his hocks,” she’d beamed. “The best and the brightest.”

  Beth had woken early that morning in her cabin below the barn. The sun had not yet risen, but there was a silver infiltration of light coming in from the window, making the interior of the cabin seem strangely uniform, like opening your eyes underwater. It was a single rectangular room with a door at one end and a miniature woodstove at the other. There were no shelves. No table. Beth’s folded laundry, her toiletries, and books were lined up against the wall, leaving only a thin strip of floor between her belongings and the bunk. Her bra hung from a hook by the window. All she had to do was reach for it and she could get dressed right there in bed.

  Outside, the mist had not risen and everything beyond it—the pastures, the mountains—appeared gray and purple. The cats were sitting in front of the farmhouse door, tongues smoothing lines across their fur, the pink pads of their feet skyward. Beth clucked at them and they paused, their green eyes brightening. She began up the hill, passing the water pump, the stack of plastic buckets waiting to be scrubbed. Birds swooped down from under the eaves of the barn and spider webs spanned new lengths across the farm equipment.

  Inside the barn the odor of the horses was strong. They kicked their stalls and grunted. The mares stretched their long back legs and lifted their tails, urinating a hole in their bedding. Beth walked up the long aisle between the stalls to the feed room. She scooped grain and poured it into the horses’ feed buckets, tutting at them to be patient, to keep their big heads out of her way.
While they ate, she sat on a hay bale, resting on her elbows, and watched the sparrows in the rafters fly back and forth. They settled, softening their feathers, then jumped up, as if they were always sitting on pins. Beth followed them with her eyes at first, until something seemed to shift. It was as if, instead of moving of their own volition, the birds were now being pulled across the air by her gaze. She looked right, the birds traveled right. She looked left, they picked up and flew back to where they had begun. It was a strange, childlike notion.

  It gave her an idea.

  Beth walked up the center aisle of the barn and unlatched the chains to each stall door. She walked slowly, with her head down, focusing on the toes of her English riding boots. When she got to the far end of the barn, she turned around and saw that the aisle was filled with horses. They made wide, milling circles. They backed into each other, jumping and clattering their hooves against the floor. Eyes flashed in alarm, ears flattened, and teeth were bared. Then, without a sound or signal, they stopped. They stopped moving altogether, like the participants of some kind of party game. Beth saw them standing there, stiff and exquisite, with only their nostrils moving, and knew that she had done this thing—this impossible thing—with her mind.

  Breakfast was at eight. Angel came limping out of the house with the tray in her hands. It held a stack of white toast and a mound of eggs, which quivered when she set it down on the picnic table. There was a pitcher of ice tea, made from powder, and half a sheet of a paper towel to use as a napkin. When the weather was nice, Beth ate in the backyard. This was mostly to escape the heat and oppression of Angel’s kitchen, which besides being overcrowded was decorated with a menacing wall of cast-iron trivets. Angel sat down at the picnic table and piled her dish with cold eggs. She always carried a large checkered thermos of sweet tea, which she shook while she spoke, knocking the ice around. She limped badly and was due for a knee replacement, she said. During the day, she drove her truck to garage sales, junk shops, and auctions, looking for old bridles and saddles, or mismatched pieces of driving equipment that none of the horses were trained to use. By the time she got home, Beth was in the barn, watering the horses, and she’d hear that scraping limp come up the aisle.

  “I got a new one here,” Angel liked to shout over the running hose. “This one only needs a few repairs.” Then she would hold up an armful of leather and rusted buckles for Beth’s perusal. The problem was that neither of them knew how to fix any of it, so it all ended up in a dusty trunk behind the hay.

  “You’ve got a group of five coming at ten,” Angel said through her eggs. “Don’t use Penny. Her cough is worse today. King’s lame, but he can take a child. But not a fat child.” She shook her tea.

  When Beth took the job as a trail guide, she knew almost nothing about horses. Her feet were trampled daily, her toes always purple and fat inside her narrow black boots. She had her arms bitten, leaving red ovals across her skin. And more often than not, she found herself pinned against a wall by a willfully ignorant behind. All of this went unnoticed by her boss, who sang her praises to the customers. “You’ll be in good hands with this one,” she’d say. “A real natural.” Then she’d limp back into the farmhouse.

  Beth gradually began to learn how to control the horses. In a cluttered upstairs room in the house, she’d found a book called How Your Horse Wants You to Ride and she had smuggled it back to her cabin, hidden it under her bunk. She had taken it out every night to study the diagrams, the dotted figure eights, the pear-shaped aerial view of the horse’s back. None of it made any sense to her. It was like reading about how to climb the face of a cliff and then being expected to do it without falling to your death. Beth fell a lot. The horses spooked easily, often sending her sliding off the saddle, into shallow ditches or patches of brambles. Once she landed on her feet, only to discover that she’d somehow threaded a maple sapling through her T-shirt, up through the bottom and out through her armhole. Then, after getting her foot caught in the stirrup and bouncing her head against a tree stump, she had stopped riding with a saddle. This earned her more respect from the tourists, who saw this as evidence of tremendous skill. She led them up the mountain trail, twisting around on her horse’s back to see behind her, and shouting at them to keep their shoulders back, to lean forward when climbing a hill. Great, that’s great! she shouted to them, whether they’d done it or not. The tourists looked blandly ahead, gripping their saddle horns. Sometimes they dropped their reins altogether to flip open a cell phone, or to take a photograph. They have no idea, thought Beth. All it would take was a clap of thunder, a bee sting, a turkey vulture to land in their path and these horses would be gone, galloping back down the mountain. They were practically feral. The evidence was marked up and down her arms; she felt it cold in her stomach every time her horse stumbled over a rock or danced sideways at a gust of wind.

  “Dumb old herd mentality,” Angel had once admitted to her. “It’s the only thing keeping them from going rogue.”

  The family of five walked into the barn, children first, as if they were being prodded from behind. The mother was a slim woman with a pair of sunglasses on top of her head. She looked exhausted but had a resolute expression, as if to say, I said we’d come and here we are. The father was a large man wearing a T-shirt that was wet in the front in a strange pattern, like he had dried his hands on it. The three boys wore baseball caps, all the brims pointed to the floor. Beth greeted them and gave the mother the release form to sign.

  The family had not brought their own helmets, so they had to be fitted with extras from the big trunk in the tack room. Trouble surfaced when the two older boys realized that one of them would have to wear a girl’s pink bicycle helmet. They fought over the remaining helmet until the father ambled over like he was going to box someone on the ears and jammed it onto the older boy’s head. The middle boy whined and swung his arms and was further humiliated when, in addition to the girly helmet, he was made to ride a small white pony named Princess.

  They rode up the trail in single file, Beth heading the line on a dark bay thoroughbred. It was ten o’clock and the day was already hot. The sun made wet ripples of light on the darker horses’ hides. Tall weeds, hissing with insects, brushed the riders’ toes. Beth held her reins tightly and felt her hips loosen with the broad movements of her horse as it climbed. She had put the youngest boy behind her so that she could keep an eye on him. Every time she looked back, he was staring ahead. His eyes were dark and wide and afraid.

  “That’s good,” she encouraged him, but she believed that he was right to be scared. Deer sometimes jumped across the path and frightened the horses. Jets flew too low, plowing open the sky. They entered the forest and the trail straightened. Beth turned again to look at the line of horses behind her. The father had his feet hanging out of the stirrups, and one of his shoulders hung as if it were injured. The two older boys rode side by side, their ponies jerking their heads around to get a nip at each other. The mother rode behind them all, erect and unemotional, as if she were taking the experience very seriously and nothing had better ruin it.

  Beth took them on a detour through the neighbor’s cornfield. Coming out of the tree line, Beth could feel the heat, like two sharp points, boring into her bare shoulders. In the corn, it was even hotter, as the stalks blocked any hint of a breeze. The boys began to shriek.

  “Corn!” they cried. “There’s corn stuck on that plant! Dad, look.”

  “Where did you think corn came from?” the mother asked. Her horse dropped its head, blowing air. The boys continued to shout. They leaned sideways in their saddles, lunging at the stalks. Beth placed her hand on her horse’s rump and twisted around, about to raise her voice, to tell the boys that this was not a carnival ride. It had begun to annoy her, lately, how people were inclined to feel so invincible, especially when thrown into a setting that they knew nothing about. But it was only the two older boys that were causing the fuss. The youngest boy, she saw now, was clutching his saddle horn, weeping int
o his pony’s mane.

  The day before, Beth had had only one customer. A man showed up during Beth’s lunch break and asked to go up the mountain. He was middle-aged and white with sunscreen. Over his shirt, he wore an orange reflective vest, which he said was to alert the hunters, although it was not the season.

  They had ridden in silence. At the top of the mountain, the man pulled out a disposable camera and pointed it at the view. He rolled the film and then hesitated.

  “It’s no use taking pictures of views,” he said. He shook his head and then opened his eyes wide, like the thought had just come to him.

  “You wouldn’t mind standing there on your horse, would you? A picture’s not worth anything without somebody in it.”

  Beth had urged her horse toward the edge of the cliff. She could see State Line Road from up there, the glints of passing cars. “You can see three states from up here,” she said under her breath. “Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts.” The tourists always laughed when she said this, expecting there to be a joke hidden in there somewhere. But it was true: you really could see three states from up there.

  The man dropped his reins and snapped two pictures in a row. Then he tucked the camera back under his vest and snatched up his reins, as if he were in danger of losing control of the horse. He shrugged, and they made their way back down.

  “Lean back in your saddle,” Beth had said when his horse stumbled. “That’s great,” she said. “You’re doing great.” When they were back at the hitching post, the man handed her a twenty-dollar bill for a tip.

 

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