She crossed the floor to look at the table beside the stocks. It was laid out with surgical implements—latex gloves, cotton balls, gauze pads, Betadine, bandages, and scalpels. Quickly, she took a picture with her cell phone.
Sweat ran off the mare, and when Billie touched her the horse trembled, her heart slamming against her chest. Billie didn’t know what was going to happen in there, but she was almost as scared as the horse. If she got caught… The whole setup gave her the creeps.
As she wondered if she could lead the horse out, the door to the room opened.
“What are you doing in here?” Eudora asked, her tone guarded.
“Just looking around.”
“Not in here you don’t.”
“I wanted to familiarize myself with—”
“Private. Get back to work.” She stood with her back to the door, holding it open for Billie to leave.
With a firm click, Eudora shut the door as Billie pushed her way back through the curtains, fighting a moment of claustrophobic panic.
Billie grabbed the muck cart handle and a manure fork and headed for the next stall. To calm herself as she worked, she hummed a song she sang to her own horses when she cleaned their stalls.
“Tom Paxton?”
She spun around.
Richard Collier stood in the middle of the aisle, grinning. “I saw your truck outside. Eudora says you’re working here?”
“As of about an hour ago. Mucking.”
“That’s honest work.”
Billie wondered what he would think if he knew her motive for getting this job.
I have got to get myself to quit grinning, she thought. Pleasure had erased her fear, and Richard was grinning back at her, making her grin more. He had nice teeth, she noticed, even and not too white.
“My kids take lessons here,” he said.
Billie tried to stop smiling, but the effort made her blush. He held her eyes as she colored. I might as well take off my clothes and lie on my back right here, she thought. That thought gave the blush an extra dimension. She ripped her gaze away from his face, but she glanced at his belt buckle, at the way his shirt tucked into the tops of his pants.
“How about dinner?” he asked.
“Now?”
“I think it’s a little early, don’t you?”
Oh, God, she thought, just kill me dead.
“How about tomorrow evening? Around seven at my place, after we get the horses fed?”
She nodded. “I’ll need directions though.”
Richard pulled a pad from his hip pocket and propped it against the lid of a wooden grooming box. Using a pencil pulled from the same pocket, he leaned forward to write. The muscles along his outer thigh tensed. When he handed the paper to her, he caught her looking and grinned. “See you at seven then.”
He walked past her, headed toward the office. Billie pushed the almost full cart down the aisle, out the door, and bounced it over to the manure pile where she dumped it. When she returned, she spotted him standing beside the office door, talking on his cell phone.
She was humming the Tom Paxton song when she heard the heavy thud of hooves approaching.
Through the far arch, Eudora’s husband Dale led a blue roan stallion that towered over him. White lather coated the horse’s neck. Foam sprayed from the corners of his mouth, dripped down the long shanks of a wicked-looking bit, and dotted his chest. Each foreleg was circled in chains, and he wore stacks on his hooves like the ones she had seen at the show. With each stride, he placed one hind foot directly in front of the other, as if walking a tight rope.
Dale saw her and stopped. The horse tucked his hind feet tightly under his belly and rocked back on his haunches.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I just started work here,” Billie said.
Dale glanced past her toward the office, as if hoping Eudora would appear to explain why she had been hired.
“What’s wrong with your horse?” she asked him.
“I take it you don’t know anything about these animals. Dom!” he called.
A groom appeared from the barn opposite the one Billie had been mucking, rags stuffed in his pockets. Dale handed him the reins. Dom pulled. The horse lifted one massive, burdened hoof, swung it outward, dropped it to the ground with a shudder that ran all the way up his shoulder, and then lifted the other leg.
“More juice,” Dale Thornton said. “Comprende?”
“Sure, Boss.”
Dale stepped toward Billie, forcing her to step backward. Heat from the wall burned through her shirt. She smelled cigarettes, cologne, and sweat. “Get back to work,” he said.
He followed the groom and horse into the opposite barn.
Billie leaned against the hot wall, her heart as jittery as a trapped lizard. From the driveway she heard truck and car doors, people laughing and calling to each other. She licked her dust-coated lips, waited. Her T-shirt chafed her neck. Her scalp felt singed. She pushed off from the wall and followed him.
The barn she entered was darker than the one she had been cleaning. The windows to the outside were closed, like the ones she’d seen at the show. Two commercial floor fans roared at either end of the aisle, moving the air. She paused to let her eyes adjust. Movement at the far end drew her attention, and she walked toward it, squelching the inner voice that ordered her to turn around and get out of there fast.
Stalls gave way to open areas where horses stood tied from either side in cross ties so they couldn’t move. Dom bent forward, using an eyedropper to drizzle something on the stallion’s lower legs. Then he wrapped plastic around and around in quick expert gestures before adding fleece wraps on top of that. The horse tried to rear but the cross ties held him in place. He sank onto his haunches as far as he could, lifting one front foot then the other, then the first again.
Billie backed away, bumped into the wall. She wanted to stop what she was seeing, to scream, accuse, demand, and run.
Through the wall behind her, Billie felt a thump, then another. Dom, absorbed with his dropper and the horse tied beside the stallion, maybe deafened by the fans’ roaring, didn’t react. Billie turned to look into the stall behind her where the noise came from. Blood ran from a horse’s nose. Dale raised a baseball bat, aiming.
“What are you doing?” she yelled. “STOP!”
Billie lunged forward and grabbed his wrist across the stall divider. He wrenched away and wheeled around to see who he was fighting.
“You are fired!”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Defending myself. That horse is vicious.”
Billie looked past him to the horse. Her eyes traveled down from its bleeding nostrils to its bandaged legs.
“Get out of here!” Dale ordered. “Don’t come back!”
She left the muck cart where it was and bolted out of her stall and down the barn aisle, dodging piles of manure awaiting removal. Blinded by the sunlight outdoors, she tripped over a pitchfork and fell hard onto her hands, scrambled back to her feet, and ran across the lawn to her truck.
CHAPTER 9
DRIVING HOME, BILLIE was tormented by images of Dale and Eudora’s farm, the sored horse he led, the strange room with its medical instruments. When she got out of the truck, her legs felt spongy. She remembered fear like this from her childhood, helpless terror. She made it into the feed shed, slumped to the floor and closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe deeply and slowly, to count back from three hundred by sevens, to steady herself until her heart slowed and she felt stronger.
She still had a lot to do to bed down the horses, but it would stay light until 8:30, so there was time to head up into the mountains, change the scenery, get away from the ranch. Get away from everything.
She checked on Hope in her stall inside the hay barn. The filly looked miserable but was standing in the shade where she would be okay until Billie returned. She had hay in her feeder and bales and bales within reach, if she wanted to stretch out h
er neck beyond the corral panels. The stacked bales threw a little more shade onto her, blocking the late afternoon sun.
Billie silenced her phone before tucking it into her pocket. Only a few years ago, phones were in living rooms. Everywhere else, you were on your own. That’s what Billie needed now, to be on her own.
She caught Starship and, with only the halter he wore on his head—no bridle or bit—his lead rope for a rein, she got on him bareback. Then she leaned down and slipped off her shoes, tied the laces together, and hung them around her neck. She could put them on if she absolutely had to, if she fell off.
Gulliver trotted at Starship’s heels, down the road and out across the parched mesa. Sere grasses tickled the bottoms of Billie’s bare feet. She tried to catch the stalks between her toes as Starship walked.
When she came to a barbed wire fence, she turned north along the dirt two-track utility access road and climbed a series of lumpy hills until, at the highest one, she pulled up to enjoy the view. The mesa stretched south. She could just barely make out trucks and cars traveling along the interstate. Beyond it, the Whetstone Mountains jutted up into an almost white, parched sky.
They walked on, Gulliver panting as he trotted. Billie was relieved when they finally descended into a narrow canyon that led to a big metal stock tank filled with water for the cattle. The water was greenish, thick with a sort of wide-leafed desert seaweed and algae, but it was cool and wet.
She dismounted, landing barefoot in soft sand, picked up her dog, and set him into the drinker. As he paddled, she splashed water over his head until she knew he had cooled off. In the deep sand beside the trough, Starship lowered himself to his knees then his side. Grunting, he flipped to his back. From one side to the other he rolled, scratching. When he was satisfied, he rolled onto his belly, stretched his forelegs in front of himself, and lurched to his feet. With her hand, Billie brushed him to get off some of the sand. She tossed her tied sneakers over his neck and hopped up so her belly lay across his back. For a moment, she lay there, feet hanging off one side, head and arms dangling off the other, feeling her back muscles stretch. For just this moment, she was not Billie Snow, owner of a struggling horse ranch, a failure at that as well as so much else. Hanging in this perilous position across this horse she had saved from slaughter and nursed to health, she was exactly who she should be and where she should be. Then she swung her leg over Starship’s back and sat up.
Through low-hanging branches they climbed, through patches of shade populated with cattle that didn’t bother to move at their approach, continuing to lay peacefully while flies swarmed over them. They wore the brand of the rancher who leased this land from the state: a mountain circled by a crescent moon, old brands burned deeply into their skin, long ago healed.
Starship’s hair prickled against her bare legs. She felt free and happy to be out in the countryside with her horse and dog, wearing whatever she pleased, shoeless in cactus country, riding.
A couple of miles farther on, at an old campsite—its fire ring trashed with shot-up beer cans and broken glass—she turned Starship toward a mountain that rose forbiddingly before them, onto a nearly invisible trail. Wrapping her hands into his mane, she asked him to climb.
It had taken her two years of exploring to find the start of this trail then to follow it through undergrowth so densely woven that she had had to return with loppers to trim it, hiding her work in case someone else discovered it. This was her favorite spot on earth, where she was always, truly alone.
Starship lunged through the trees, bounding up and up. Billie gripped his sides with her calves and clung to his mane. Branches lashed her face while her knees and shins cracked against jutting rocks. When a huge boulder blocked their path, Starship stopped abruptly. She nearly flew over his head but wound up sitting on his neck. She wriggled back until she was once again where she should be then they started up again.
The trail ended in a cliff at the edge of a canyon. A series of thin waterfalls dribbled down the mountain face opposite, hidden to anyone not standing exactly where Billie stood. Waterfalls she hadn’t known existed until she had found them one day last summer. They fed a deep pool beaten out of the rock face, smooth-sided from eons of watery concussion. The waterfall was intermittent, running hard and fast during the monsoon and the winter storms, and the rest of the year, like now, barely trickling.
She got off, dropped the cotton lead rope she had been using as a rein, and let Starship find his own way down to the small pebbly beach. He pawed the water then lumbered in for a swim. Gulliver bounded after him.
After a quick glance around to reassure herself she truly was alone, Billie stripped off her shorts and top, considered leaving on her underwear, then pulled off her panties and bra, wrapped her phone in her shirt, and eased herself into the water. With her horse and dog, she swam, cooling off, sloughing bit by bit the jagged fear of her day at the walking horse stable.
Sitting wet and naked on a rock with Gulliver flopped beside her while Starship grazed the sparse gray grasses, Doc’s warning played over and over in her head…be careful…don’t… She thought of the way her horse had rolled earlier in the sand. The way, before rising, he had turned onto his stomach, front legs extended. It was the most natural pose for him, one she had seen thousands of times. But now it was superimposed on the memory of the horses she had seen at the show and at the farm.
She looked at Starship’s lower legs, his pasterns, trying to imagine pouring acid on them, tying him so he couldn’t move, muzzling him so he couldn’t tear off the wraps, couldn’t help himself, ignoring his anguish, leaving him to writhe.
She sank deeper into her own body. The sound of the waterfall, bird calls…
She dozed. Just for a minute, at least that’s what it felt like. She opened her eyes, listening. A faint rustling had disturbed her sleep, a sound like wind through dry grass, crumbling leaves, like air leaving a punctured tire. When she didn’t hear it again, she sat up, looked around. The rattle grew louder. Adrenaline froze her. Only her eyes moved, looking into the brush, trying to see the snake. She looked left then right. Nothing. The sound faded, but whenever she moved, it grew louder. She knew the snake could see her, but she couldn’t see it even though it was close enough that her every movement alarmed it. She tried not even to breathe.
Gulliver stood up from his nap and stretched. The rattling exploded from a clump of grass about five feet away. Startled, the little dog looked into the brush. Billie still couldn’t see the snake, but it had to be where Gulliver was looking, probably too far for it to strike her. She inched away, sharp pebbles digging into her palms, and got to her feet.
Since moving back to Arizona, she had expected fangs to sink into her, to pump their venom. She expected one day to become a statistic: “This year seventeen people were bitten by rattlesnakes,” Channel Five on Your Side would summarize. Channel 13-Live Local Late-breaking would photograph the damage, the necrotic tissue, the sloughing, her eventual survival. Today could be the day that she would finally get snakebit. While naked. Her leg would swell grotesquely. She would have to ride for help swollen and bare-assed, and she would pass out in front of astonished cowboys.
Gulliver looked again into the brush then trotted away. Knowing that he’d found a safe way out, Billie followed him. She quickly dressed and cautiously retraced her steps to the pool to get Starship.
They wound their way back through the dense mesquite bosque, dodging prickly pear, and cholla that grew between the trees, and came out the other side into a darkness so intense that, for a moment, Billie thought that night had fallen, that she had stayed too long dozing and awakened at dusk. She felt a raindrop, then another and suddenly more. In seconds, she was shivering. Starship snorted and pawed, getting ready to lie down and roll to dry himself. As suddenly as it started, the rain stopped. Clouds skimmed from west to east and, in the distance, Billie saw a single, jagged lightning bolt.
She used a rock to stand on and climbed onto Starship’s ba
ck. When she snapped her fingers to invite Gulliver aboard, the terrier jumped up in front of her, his butt against her stomach, paws straddling the gray horse’s withers and neck. They started on the long ride home. Billie wondered if she had dawdled too long, if she would get back before it was dark or if she would have to feed and water the horses under the night sky using her cell phone as a flashlight.
At the crest of a hill, she reined in and sat. Legs dangling, she ran her toes over Starship’s elbows and watched the sky, fascinated by the first summer clouds. Not yet formed into monsoon’s anvil-shaped thunderheads, these were high, dense, flat, and blackened. They covered the mesa and the valley between the mountain ranges. Syncopated lightning bolts shot from them, and horizontal bolts leapt from cloud to cloud.
At her urging, Starship skittered down the side of the hill, his hooves sliding on scree. They turned into the sandy wash that led to the ranch. The air smelled of ozone and creosote, that special desert rain smell Billie loved, which had been released by even the few drops that fell. Gulliver lifted his muzzle and sniffed. Billie breathed deeply, sampling the air. She smelled Starship’s sweat rising from his body beneath her. Gulliver sniffed again, then Billie smelled it too.
Something burning. Something on fire. One of the lightning strikes must have caught a dry burro weed bush or a parched mesquite tree. She looked for smoke but couldn’t see any.
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