The Scar Rule

by Heidi Vanderbilt

  She filled the horses’ water buckets and checked that the door to the feed shed was closed and latched. None of the horses would try to escape, but Hashtag unlatched the gate to her corral any chance she got and headed over to the feed shed to try to jimmy that door open. Once, she broke into the shed and devoured so much grain Billie had had to call Doc out to treat the mare before she foundered or colicked. Since then, Billie double-checked the chain on Hashtag’s gate every night.

  She climbed the hill to her casita on foot. The driveway was a tenth of a mile long and so steep that, when driving, she would put the truck into four-wheel drive. She paused to catch her breath where the driveway leveled before reaching the casita. No amount of climbing that hill seemed to make her fit enough to do it without gasping. The tiny adobe building had been built over a hundred years ago by her great grandfather for his hired hands. It was the only surviving structure on this old cattle ranch that had passed from generation to generation of Snows, ignored until Billie told her grandmother that she wanted it. When her grandparents died, she inherited it. She made a mental note to paint the front door—blue or red?—opened the door and stepped into the homey smell of hot, dry adobe.

  She fed Gulliver in the kitchen then they settled onto the futon in the casita’s one room. As Billie ran her fingertips up the little dog’s muzzle, between his eyes, and down his neck, Gully sighed and rested his black chin on her thigh.

  Eventually he hopped off the futon. Billie headed back to the kitchen and searched through the refrigerator. She found half of a veggie burrito that she had bought at a taco shop in Tucson a couple of days ago. It was wrapped in greasy paper and cradled in a white cardboard container. Nuked, it would do fine. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the darkened kitchen window, lit by the bathroom lights. Her hair, dark brown, almost black, was rough cut above her ears, styled by herself with the horse clippers. Her latest buzz had taken it down to her scalp, but it had grown and was about two inches long all over now. She liked it.

  She poured a water glass full of white wine and made her way back to the futon. On the end table nearby the answering machine light flashed. She ignored it, leaned against the futon pillows, swallowed a gulp of wine, shuddered, and downed most of the rest fast. Images from the day floated in front of everything she did. The groom. The filly. Her terror.

  Billie rose and carried the almost empty wine glass into the bathroom and set it beside the sink.

  She ran hot water into the claw-footed tub that had been her grandmother’s, then her mother’s. When it filled, she padded back to the fridge for the wine bottle then kicked off her jeans and dropped her T-shirt on the floor beside the tub. Grateful for this end to her day, she climbed into the tub and leaned back.

  A horse whinnied in the barnyard—one sharp call. She recognized Starship’s voice, higher than the other horses’, as if he were still a foal and not a middle-aged gelding. When his horse friends left him behind in his corral and climbed the hill of their pasture without him, he objected with a series of plaintive don’t-leave-me whinnies. But this one was different.

  From the tub, Billie listened for what would come next so she’d know what he was talking about. He had a special call if he’d hurt himself and wanted her, another if Hashtag opened the gate and wandered away. When she didn’t hear anything else from him, she poured more wine. She avoided the mirror, didn’t want to be faced with the parallel scars on her upper thighs and the insides of her arms.

  Something rattled in the barnyard. She grabbed her towel, looked out the bathroom window, and saw red taillights heading away from her place, down the road, toward the distant highway. That could be Sam and Josie Wilde, her neighbors up the valley, heading to the highway for an evening at DT’s Bar and Grill, or their son Ty on his way home after visiting them.

  Gulliver was asleep, not barking at the disturbance, but Billie felt uneasy. She set the bottle and glass down, pulled on her soiled jeans and T-shirt, and wiggled her feet into her boots. Alerted to an outing, Gulliver raced to the door.

  Using her cell phone’s flashlight, she scuffed down the hill to check, slipping on loose gravel, watching as best she could for rattlers. Gulliver trotted beside her, wary of something. Near the bottom of the hill, staring into the dark, he growled, ears pricked. It could have been anything—a coyote, a white-tailed deer, a herd of javelinas, a cactus—anything at all.

  They walked from corral to corral, checking on the horses. They all seemed fine, ghostly in the starlight, whuffling to her, hoping for a slice of apple or a carrot. Billie stopped in front of Starship’s gate and whistled for him. Almost invisible in the dark, the gray horse moved in next to her. She scratched his withers, pressed her cheek against his, breathed into his breath.

  How could anyone deliberately hurt these sweet, gentle creatures? She didn’t mean the question literally. She knew better than most that people would do anything they wanted. She could consult any part of her being for reminders of that. But standing with her horse’s head against hers, their breaths mingled, she asked it as an expression of outrage. Not “how could” but “how dare.”

  Without wanting or even meaning to, she started thinking about an article, using the same techniques she used for exposés for Frank. She asked the five W questions and how: Who was doing this? What was being done? Where was it happening—at the horse show here, but where else? When did it start, and why do it? And lastly how far did the problem reach? As she climbed back up the hill to her casita, the questions flopped around in her head.

  Back in her kitchen, she rescued a moth from her wine and poured herself a little more. The tub had drained itself halfway while she was out, so she turned on the tap and added hot water. This time she tossed her clothes into the wicker basket she used as a hamper, and without thinking, stepped into the tub. Too hot. Much too hot. The burn started in her instep and spread up her leg. She pulled back out as fast as she could and turned on the cold water, but after a month of hundred-degree days, there wasn’t any cold water in the pipes. She sat on the toilet to wait, looking at her reddened ankles and feet that still burned. Once, in some awful tabloid she had picked up at a supermarket, she’d read a story about two men captured by savages who boiled them alive. The description of their agonies had horrified her, but she couldn’t stop reading. Now, a decade later, the story came surging back.

  What if she couldn’t have stepped out of the tub? What if her legs were being smeared with chemicals, wrapped to make the pain worse, to force the burn deeper? What if she then was tied to a wall and left to suffer?

  She flicked the inside of her arm with her fingernail, hard, harder until the small sharp stings pulled her back from her imagining. Stay present, she ordered herself with each little flick. Stay right here. Between the nails of her thumb and index finger, she pinched soft skin then twisted.

  Her wine glass sat on the floor beside the tub, just within her reach. She wanted to let go of the day, drink it away, until the sight of the tortured horse, the feel of Charley grabbing her shoulder, floated away. She wanted to take a pill, sleep a dozen hours, wake rested and solvent and sure that what she had seen today wasn’t real. But her horses might need her tonight; she couldn’t just let go. At least not all the way. She slid into the bathwater, tolerable now, until it lapped at the nape of her neck. Then she closed her eyes and relaxed.

  After the bath, Billie played the messages on the answering machine: Bank of America, the insurance company, and a hang-up. She checked the caller ID and recognized her ex-husband Frank’s number. Billie ran her tongue around the lip of the wine glass.

  She chose old cotton pajama bottoms and a loose tank top from one of the baskets where she kept her clothes. She lay down on the futon and pulled a thin sheet over herself. Gulliver hopped onto the bed and nosed underneath the sheet to curl against her belly.

  The phone wakened her. Two rings, a pause, three rings, a pause. She picked up on the next ring.

  “It’s late,” she said.
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  “Not really.” Frank’s voice sounded lively, energetic. “Not even one yet here.”

  That made it almost ten Billie’s time. “I thought it was later. I was asleep.”

  Gulliver had shoved deeper under the sheet, his chin now resting on her foot.

  “What are you wearing, sweetheart?”

  What was she wearing? She glanced down at her tank top and pajama bottoms. “Clothes.”

  “You went to bed in your clothes?”

  “Frank,” she sighed, “why are you calling?”

  “I’m coming to Tucson for an editors’ conference. I’d love to see you, Billie.”

  She felt the pull back toward him, his voice so familiar. She heard the way he used to talk to her when they made love, felt the way he had held her.

  “Not a good idea,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything. Her eyes closed and she listened to him breathe. They used to talk like this every night when they were married if either of them was away from home. After the divorce, they had hardly spoken at all, but then they had drifted back into the habit. He would call. If she were alone, she’d answer. Old friends, she told herself. Good old friends.

  “Come back to work for me, sweetheart. You’re the best writer I ever had. No one could go after the ugly stuff better than you. You won’t spook again. You’re tough as they come. And I’ve got this great lead…”

  The tug she felt turned into a tidal wave of longing for her career, the thrill of getting a new assignment and starting to dig into the worst forms of cruelty—hours that turned to days and weeks when she would explore lives gone horribly wrong, would listen to stories told a myriad of ways to justify atrocities. With that longing came fury. Frank McMannis, her husband, editor, and boss, had pushed her deeper and deeper until, finally…

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it, think about it, remember any of it. No.” She listened to the silence that followed, then to a subtle shift in his breathing. She still knew him so well that she knew what this meant. He was finished with her. For now…

  “Good night, Billie.” He hung up.

  She replaced the receiver, turned on her side, and slipped her hand under the elastic waistband of her pajamas.

  She woke in the morning to the taste of Frank. Not the taste of his body, although that remained as vivid today as when she’d left him. She had tried to erase it with other men in the same way she had cleansed the casita when she’d moved here, blasting it with air fresheners and scrubs, scented candles and incense, and burning cedar, sage, and sweetgrass. Despite her efforts, the little building kept its own flavor, especially pungent during monsoon season when every year the late summer rains freed the scents of those who had lived there before her: migrants and outlaws, ranch hands and fugitives. But summer had barely started. The rains wouldn’t come for weeks.

  The taste in her mouth was of her work back in New York, the career she’d once had, the metallic rain, the stench of gasoline on pavement, the scream of sirens.

  She stretched, realized she’d been waiting for the screech owl who lived in the juniper outside her window and woke her each morning before dawn. She hadn’t heard it this morning, or maybe she’d slept through it. She lay under the sheet, watched the sky turn opalescent then pink, felt the air in the room heat up, listened for something she couldn’t hear.

  She got up and, chilly in the thin pajamas, walked down the snaking driveway to the barnyard. Gulliver skittered around her, just beyond her footfall, almost tripping her then bounding away. She could feel Frank still with her, as though he’d preceded her down the hill, as if, when she reached the bottom, he’d be there, his iPad in one hand, cell phone pressed to his ear, telling her where to go, what to do, what to write about. “By Tuesday, by God!” he’d shout, and she would have her assignment and her deadline.

  The horses nickered as she approached. She fed them thick flakes of alfalfa, all except Starship. He got a scoop of pellets—a quick nourishing meal. Billie leaned against the gate to his corral as he ate. Tire marks in the dirt—not hers—caught her eye, and she followed them a few steps. Someone had driven in, followed the fence line past the corrals, circled the barn, and then left. Those must have been the lights she’d seen from the casita. Sam and Josie or Ty might have driven in to check on something. UPS and FedEx left parcels for her neighbors in Billie’s feed shed rather than drive the rutted mile to their place. But when that happened, Billie would call to alert them of a delivery, or if they checked first, they would call to let her know. People didn’t just stop by out here. If her neighbors had driven into her barnyard, they would have told her.

  She slipped a halter onto Starship’s head, climbed the fence, and from there slid onto his smooth back. In no way did he resemble the starved creature he was that day she had seen him in a herd at the local auction, bones all of them, being whipped into the van of the kill buyer who had bought them to sell to slaughter in Mexico.

  “How much?” Billie had asked him. The price he quoted her was for the horse by weight, as meat. “How much for the others too?” she had asked.

  He had laughed at her, refused her check, and only when she paid with cash, plus extra for delivery, had he agreed to unload the eight breathing skeletons at her ranch. That had been three years ago. She’d planned to find homes for them all, but they were still with her, still eating her hay.

  Starship carried her out the gate and down the road for a half mile while she followed the tire marks until they disappeared in a deep sand wash crisscrossed by the wheels of every rancher out here.

  Feeling the soft morning air, breathing Starship’s warm scent, Billie wanted to ride all day with no destination, safe from bills and money worries, her cell phone turned off. She wanted to ride until she was exhausted and hot and dying to go home, but she couldn’t. Images of the horse show intruded along with the taillights she’d seen last night, the tire marks, and the filly’s scream. She needed to figure out who had trespassed into her barnyard in the dark. Was it someone from the show? Charley, the man who threatened her? She turned Starship around, dread in her gut, and headed back home along the dirt road.

  A faded blue pickup raced toward them, braked and skidded. Billie hadn’t noticed it approach. Startled, she saw Sam and Josie gaping at her through their filthy windshield. Both had cigarettes between their lips and wore bandanas around their turkey necks. As the truck fishtailed, Starship spooked sideways and Billie fell, landing in a mound of dirt and sand. The reins pulled out of her hand, and her horse sidestepped away from her.

  “Sorry!” Sam leapt out and stood over her, his hand stretched down, and pulled her to her feet. “Didn’t see you.”

  “No problem, Sam. I didn’t see you either.”

  She reached for Starship’s reins, but he realized he was on his own, flagged his tail over his back, and snorted. He galloped, farting, for home and the hay pile. Gulliver chased him, yipping.

  “Never thought much of a horse that wouldn’t wait for its fallen rider,” Josie said. She leaned her elbows on the open window and gnawed her home-rolled. More than once she had told Billie that she and Sam had run a pack outfit years ago and took high-paying dudes into the mountains for a week. “Where Wilde Meets Wild” had been their slogan, Wilde being their last names. To this day, they had a lot of opinions about things Billie did wrong. They enjoyed not mentioning them to her, which Billie appreciated, but she could tell when they were not saying something.

  Billie’s right forearm felt raw, so she knew she’d pulled the skin off it again. She had broken so many falls by putting out that arm that the skin there was puckered and white, and with each new injury, it got lumpier and whiter when it healed.

  “You’re bleeding,” Sam said.

  “Bit your lip,” Josie added. She gave Billie the bandana from around her neck.

  Billie pressed it to her mouth, feeling to see if she had knocked out a tooth. Everything seemed to be in place. But the reek of cigarette smoke on th
e fabric made her hand the bandana back.

  “We’re late for work,” Sam said. They owned an equipment rental place several exits to the west on the highway. “You plannin’ on livin’ or you want I should get a backhoe and bury you?”

  “I’ll be fine.” Billie ran her tongue over the swelling on her lip.

  “You want a lift to your house?” Josie asked.

  That sounded good, but Billie didn’t want to admit it, or to crowd onto the bench seat of their truck, her knees crammed against the overflowing ashtray, to listen to a lecture on their glory days as horsemen up in the Grand Tetons. She shook her head no.

  “Guess I’ll go catch my pony.”

  Sam climbed back into the pickup, leaned across the seat, and rolled down the crank window. “Out here,” he said, “most of us wear denim and leather when we ride.”

  They drove off before Billie realized he was referring to her pajamas. Then she noticed the bottoms had ripped open from knee to hip, showing a lot of scraped leg.

  She hobbled after Starship. Whenever she got close to catching him, he trotted off until he was out of reach then dropped his head to lip up whatever bits of weeds he found. Her leg was throbbing before he quit playing games and let her catch him and return him to his corral. When she climbed up the hill to the casita, every step hurt. In the kitchen, she sadly ripped what was left of her favorite pajamas into rags and jammed them under the sink.

  The shower stung her scrapes. But when she looked in the bathroom mirror, she didn’t think she had added any new scars to the old ones. Today’s dings would heal up and not leave any stories behind. She pulled on shorts—careful not to rub the scrapes on her leg—and a lilac sleeveless top that showed off her bruised and ropy arms. After slapping a Band-Aid on her peeled elbow, she grabbed the baseball cap with her ranch logo on it—a silhouette of Gulliver leading Starship, reins in his mouth. Very cute.