The Scar Rule

by Heidi Vanderbilt

  The wash wound between deep cliffs pocked with tiny caves. A white owl flew from one of the holes, swooping in front of them before soaring into the treetops. Starship froze and started to spook, but Billie kicked his sides with her bare heels, and he leapt forward to pick up an exquisitely soft trot, perfect for bareback rides. He moved beneath her with a fluid rhythm, no jarring, so smooth that she didn’t even tighten her legs to grip. She rode loosely balanced, perfectly comfortable.

  Deer and javelina had made a thread-thin trail out of the wash, up between the cliffs. She grabbed Starship’s mane in one hand and wrapped her other around Gulliver to hold him to her. With a dozen scrabbling strides, Starship bounded up the cliff’s edge to the flat mesa floor and gave a little buck to celebrate. Billie nearly came off, nearly dropped Gulliver, and as she struggled to regain her balance, she dug her heels into Starship’s sides causing him to break into a canter. She struggled to keep hold of her dog, regain her balance on the horse’s sweat-slick back, and eventually to slow him.

  Finally, they stopped atop a small rise, horse and human panting. As she sat trying to catch her breath, she saw smoke coming from somewhere near her ranch. She wondered if the fire would block her way home. She couldn’t tell if it was big or small.

  As they got closer, it seemed to shift position. One minute it appeared to be coming from Sam and Josie’s place, so Billie wondered if their tool shed was burning, or—far worse—their house. But as she trotted around a big barrel cactus, the smoke seemed to come from the hill between Sam and Josie’s ranch and Billie’s. Brushfire flames could shoot across the countryside in seconds, leaping from bush to tree to grass where they could fan out into unstoppable walls of flame. But this was a steady plume, bending like a thick snake in the hot evening wind.

  The wash dipped through a stand of huge cottonwood trees then opened onto the dirt road that first passed Sam and Josie’s house then continued on to Billie’s barnyard. And there she saw that the fire was in her barnyard. Hugging Gulliver tight to her stomach she squeezed Starship’s sides. He immediately broke into a fast canter that shifted up to a gallop in a single stride. In minutes they were racing down the driveway toward the barn, toward the fire truck. Her ranch sign lay in the dirt, clipped by the truck’s ladder as it drove underneath. It must have made a hideous metal-on-metal shriek when it hit and could have severed an arm or even killed someone when it fell. Four men and a woman sprayed her hay with high-pressure water. The barn was still standing. She thought of the horses, all of them luckily turned out in corrals and pastures, away from the fire. She vaulted off, landed running, dropped Gulliver to the ground, and spotted Sam’s pickup parked on the far side of the barnyard from the fire. Sam stood beside it, waving her over.

  She raced to him. “What happened?”

  “Your hay caught fire. Lucky there wasn’t more or it’d burn for days. It’s mostly out by now. But the hay you had is all gone.”

  What would it cost to replace? Maybe Ty would give her credit. She saw embers under the metal roof, glowing between the metal poles.

  She couldn’t take it all in. Something felt wrong, but she didn’t know what. Everything, she realized. Everything was wrong.

  “What about the horses, Billie?” Sam asked.

  “They’re turned out. They aren’t here in the barnyard,” she said.

  Then she remembered Hope in her stall, surrounded by the hay bales that were shading her.

  “Oh my God,” she said it so softly she hardly heard it herself. “There’s a horse in there!”

  She spoke in a soft, flat voice, unable to scream. Powerless. Helpless, she made herself move, made herself run toward the embers.

  “Don’t touch anything!” Sam yelled. “It’s hot!”

  It gave off a terrible heat, and when Billie got close, an even more terrible smell.

  “I’ve got to get her out!”

  Sam grabbed her arm. She twisted away. He grabbed her around the waist, held her, his arms strong and old, sharp and thin as wires that seem to cut her as she fought him.

  “You can’t do anything, Billie,” Ty shouted at her. She wondered what he was doing here then remembered he volunteered as fire marshal. “That horse is dead.”

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the stall. Couldn’t stop seeing it burn when she wasn’t here to help, Hope trapped where she had left her.

  “Did the lightning cause it?” Billie asked.

  “We’ll check with the weather service if there were any strikes here. They keep a record. I doubt it though. Dad and Mom didn’t notice anything.” He waved a hand toward the stall. “It doesn’t look to me like an accelerant was used.”

  “My horse died in there!” Tears streaked her face. “She tried to escape, Ty. She died trying to escape.” Her voice rose to a wail.

  Ty walked to the stall and looked in. “Nah,” he said.

  “LOOK AT HER!” Billie knew she was hysterical, out of control.

  “It’s got nothing to do with her running. It’s the fire makes them look like that. It dries the water from their muscles, pulls them short, makes ’em look like they ran. Same with people who die in fires. We’ll check her throat and nostrils to be sure, but smoke’s what probably killed her,” he said. “You can take comfort in that.”

  When Ty and the rest of the fire crew left, Billie dragged herself to the casita, Gulliver trudging beside her. She wanted a drink. Several.

  Images of the fire swarmed over her like hornets. She paced the tiny casita. Gulliver watched her from the futon, his chin on his paws. She opened the door, stuck her head out into a swarm of moths and bugs, beetles, and gnats. She slammed it shut, pulled her cell phone from her hip pocket, and just stared at it. She stood at the table in front of her computer and let her fingers jitter across the keyboard. She looked out the window, checking for flames.

  She perched on the edge of the futon and set her laptop on her knees. When the Google page loaded, she typed in soring, waited a few seconds, watching her hand tremble, as the little blue circle spun on the screen, searching.

  The page loaded with a string of small photos. She clicked on each in succession, opening views of horses’ scarred legs; huge shoes weighted with dozens of nails; champions staggering around the arena at some show in Tennessee, blue ribbons in their bridles. The same things she had seen at the show down the road at Rio del Oro.

  Beneath the photographs were dozens of pages of articles and posts on this topic. How, if soring was so well-known and well-documented, could it even exist? Why wasn’t it being prevented?

  Billie glanced at the by-line on the first article and saw it was by a former senator. He wrote about introducing the Horse Protection Act in 1970 to stop soring and lamented that, decades later, owners and trainers continued the despicable practice. He ended by calling on citizens to stop going to walking horse shows and to boycott the companies that support them.

  Beneath the article, she read comments from people who agreed with the senator, and others who defended the rights of individuals to treat their animals any way they wanted, damn the government and animal rights meddlers.

  Billie shut the laptop, and sat staring at the window frame, its old wood rotten in places, nailed up decades ago. Dust furred the upper strip. The butted joints were pocked by termite-chewed areas, miniature battlefields. She needed an exterminator.

  The sill, worn clean of paint, was littered with pens, ChapStick, pennies, a pottery shard she had found in the barnyard when she was moving in, and a rusted shoeing nail. She sighed. Anything for a diversion.

  Soring. The word was a euphemism for torture. It conjured aching muscles, bruises, even anger—I’m sore at you. The word must have been chosen to hide the practice rather than revealing or defining it.

  She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the world these horses and owners lived in, beyond the world of barns and shows to the community that supported them, flouting the laws that prohibited their every action.

  Only one trainer
had ever gone to jail—not for long, but that first jail sentence indicated that the world of unparalleled and unquestioned freedom could be shrinking. Whistle-blowers who once complained ineffectually now had some clout. Things would feel tighter, Billie imagined, claustrophobic.

  Who were the people being squeezed by this?

  She made herself a cup of coffee and turned back to the Mac. She loved research, following a twig that turned into a branch, a limb, a tree, a forest. When she straightened her back, it was two hours later. Gulliver scratched at the door, wanting to go out. She was late feeding the horses.

  She didn’t know the name of the forest, but she had identified some of the trees. Dale. Eudora. Richard? Maybe Richard.

  Finding his name on a list of trainers and owners who had been cited for soring violations, she felt sick with disappointment and anger. How could she have found him attractive? How could she have flirted with a man who would do something like this? Even though she hadn’t known, shouldn’t she have sensed something?

  She shut the computer. She was finished with him. Done. Luckily things hadn’t gone any further than just a little flirting.

  She hiked down the hill in the dark to feed and check on the horses. It was hours since Ty had buried Hope but the smell lingered in the stagnant night air. He must have brought Billie some hay from the Depot because she found a dozen bales of alfalfa under a tarp beside the feed shed. She should call and thank him, but she needed to get away. She couldn’t stay on the ranch another second. She climbed into the truck, Gulliver jumped into her lap, and they headed out. Her truck tires chattered over the washboard road, their rhythm accented by some loose metal banging beneath the motor.

  As she drove, she worried. If she locked the casita door, anyone who wanted to get in could open a window. She hadn’t closed them so that air from the swamp cooler could circulate and cool the space. And if she had closed them, they had no locks anyway. If she had shut and latched the gate to the barnyard, anyone who wanted to get in could just go around it. The fence on either side was a drift fence that petered out in a few yards. Living so far out in the country, she never thought of intruders, at least, not until this week. People rarely came down the road to visit, and most of them were her sparse clients wanting to visit their boarded horses. They called ahead. Solitude was its own protection.

  She wondered who had been there. What sick son of a bitch had set the fire? And had he, or she, known the filly would die in it?

  CHAPTER 10

  IT LOOKED LIKE a big night at DT’s Bar and Grill. The parking lot—a desert field flattened by decades of trucks and trailers—was full of randomly parked vehicles. She opened the glove box and got a rawhide bone for Gulliver, poured him a bowl of water, and set them on the passenger side floor. She cracked the windows and turned off the engine, got out, decided it was too hot to leave Gully in the truck, got back in, and turned on the air conditioner. She left the truck running and nearly ran to the bar.

  When she pulled open the heavy Mexican door, she was clobbered with noise: laughter, shouting, glasses set down hard, and the Gipsy Kings playing too loudly through the speakers. She smelled booze and sweat, perfume, cheese pizza, vomit, disinfectant, and sawdust. People were nearby. Lots and lots of them around her. Close.

  A ripple of silence spread when she entered, as if she were a pebble thrown into the sea of chatter. Heads came up, faces turned to her, staring. It immobilized her.

  From behind, she felt arms tighten around her, Josie embracing her. Sam stood beside his wife, his arms outstretched to gather Billie in as soon as Josie let go.

  “Tough luck, kid,” he said.

  “We’re all scared of fire out here,” Josie added. “Every damn one of us. Every damn year I hold my breath in case it’s us. We all do.”

  As Josie talked, they led Billie to their table, tucked in the far corner. As they sat, Billie noticed that the room had again filled with talk and the faces had turned away from her. She sat on an overturned barrel with a chair back added to it, and DT himself—all three hundred and fifty pounds of his bearded, bug-eyed self—appeared beside her to take her order.

  “On us,” Sam told her.

  Billie thanked him. “White wine.”

  Josie pointed to the empty glass in front of her. “Me too. Fill me up.”

  DT finished scribbling and thumped Billie’s upper arm with a huge, rubbery fist. “Hear you had a close call, pardner.”

  “I lost a horse.” Tears flooded her eyes, but she refused to let herself blink so they wouldn’t fall.

  “But you didn’t lose your herd, kid. Didn’t lose your house. Not,” he gestured to Josie and Sam, “their house.”

  Sam bolted the rest of his drink. “Didn’t lose the valley,” he added. “Gin ’n lime, DT. Okay?”

  “Or the mountain,” Josie added.

  “Or the mesa grasslands and the cattle grazing there,” said DT. “Back a dozen years ago, fire took out the whole east face of that range down south.” He grabbed a glass of wine from the tray of a passing waiter dressed like a prospector. “This gal needs it first,” he told the startled man. “Fire up at her place today.”

  Billie said thank you a few more times then downed the wine in a couple of gulps, as if it were water and she was shipwrecked.

  Another glass appeared in DT’s paw, and he set it in front of her. From the corner of her eye, she noticed a thin body dragging up a chair toward their table, and Ty sat down with them. “Hey, Mom, Dad.” He turned to Billie, pointed at her glass. “You might want to sip this one.”

  Billie glared at him and bolted the first half, then eased up. The wine, she noticed happily, had got hold of her joints. Her elbows felt relaxed. Her ankles, knees, even the nape of her neck felt juicy and limber.

  “I sure appreciate you coming out with the backhoe,” she said, careful to enunciate.

  Ty cocked back his chair, sitting slantwise with one lengthy ankle hooked around the lowest rung. The other foot pushed back, piston-like, so he could rock. We could be sitting on a Southern porch, Billie thought. Not hunching over cable spool tables in an ocean of sawdust.

  She raised her hand to ask for another glass before she had finished this one. Among the weathered faces of cowmen and repairmen drinking, talking, playing cards, and shooting pool at the tables along the far wall, she spotted Richard, clean as stainless steel, perched on a stool at the bar. Loose from booze, she waved to him. He cocked his head at her, half smiled and stood.

  In one of those weird conversational lulls all bars are given to, she heard the wind shriek through the loosed window frames. She glanced outside and saw branches blown horizontal. Dirt pinged against the door and windows, and each new person who arrived was more disheveled than the last.

  “Join you?” Richard stood between Josie and Ty, across the table from Billie. The question was directed at Ty, not her.

  “Sure,” Josie scooted her chair over.

  Richard caught Billie’s eye as he sat. He smiled without moving his lips, just a tightening at the corner of his eyes, unnoticeable to anyone but her. He leaned forward, reached across the table and shook her hand.

  “I heard about your fire,” Richard said. “Anything I can do to help—”

  “We already helped her,” Ty said.

  Richard nodded. “Well, maybe down the road, then.” He caught DT’s attention with a wave and pointed a circle around the table. “Another round.”

  DT disappeared behind the bar for the drinks. Billie’s palms were numb, her hips liquid, verging on molten. She wondered if anyone could tell.

  “I’m thinking we should take you home,” Josie whispered in her ear. “You’re on your way to being drunk.”

  Nope, Billie thought. Not going home now, not ever. Not drunk, either. This seemed witty enough to say aloud. Then she realized just how much she didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to pass the barn, the burned hay, the trailer with its memories of the filly. She didn’t want to crawl into bed with that
fresh in her mind.

  DT set down their glasses. Billie grabbed at hers with both hands, circled its base, rested her chin on its lip.

  “You’re pretty bombed, honey,” Josie said.

  “I don’t think so.” Billie spoke on an exhale, heard herself slur. “Oops. Gulliver will have to drive me home.” She turned to Richard. “My dog is a designated driver.”

  Josie exchanged a look with Sam. Billie lifted her chin from her glass and wiggled back into her chair. She straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath, ready to pick a fight.

  She leaned across the table toward Richard, a slight wave of vertigo putting a sharp edge on her anger. “Would you like to know about the horse who burned to death at my place?” she asked him.

  The table fell totally quiet. Billie heard voices from other tables, laughter, calls for the waiter. But their table was hushed. She watched Richard register what she had said. His eyes flicked side to side, as if checking for ways out. She felt a regrettable pang of attraction to his stocky body, curly hair, a tug of sympathy and recognition that he felt trapped because he wanted her.

  “Okay, tell me,” he said, wary, resigned, unsure why she had focused on him.

  Well, Billie thought, he’s going to find out.

  Images from her Google search rose before her. Images of Hope in her stall the night Billie first saw her, images from the show.

  “Billie,” Josie laid a warning hand on her forearm.

  Billie pulled away, balled her hand into a fist. “She was a walking horse filly,” she said to Richard. “Just a baby. A yearling. I got her at your show.”

  “I don’t have a show,” he sounded defensive to her, relieved.

  “The walking horse show,” she clarified. “Last weekend. At the showgrounds. That show that you were at.” She was aware that her grammar was flawed and her s’s sounded extra sibilant.

  “Okay? So?”

  “Okay?” she asked. “‘Okay’? You know what that means.”

  “I’m sure I don’t.” His voice was low, clear, and angry.