The Scar Rule

by Heidi Vanderbilt

“Shush! Get away from me,” he said. “You’ll really get me killed this time.”

  Wondering what he meant by that, Billie turned back to her feed shed. She pulled the door shut behind her and hit the light switch. Moths collided with each other. She batted them away from her face and started to search. She found nothing on the tabletops, grimy with spilled horse feed and mouse turds. Nothing was out of place on the shelves or the window ledges. She felt around the metal garbage cans that held oats and grains. Nothing. She looked through the wastebasket. Nothing. At last she found it, taped to the underside of the corkboard where she collected receipts from the stores, spearing them with push pins. The red flash drive he had tried to give her before now lay in her palm.

  She tucked it into her bra to look at later, turned off the light, and went back outside. Applause from the spectators rolled over her. She heard Sylvie’s name called. The winner.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHERE TRAILERS HAD been parked around the barnyard the night before, mounds of garbage cans and black trash bags waited in the early morning sunlight to be picked up. Billie’s face was slick with sweat that wasn’t drying. She glanced at the sky and found a single lonely cloud peeking above the mountain. Soon—today or tomorrow most likely—the rains would start. Until then, clouds would form, dissipate, re-form. The temperature would rise and with it humidity until the high Sonoran Desert felt like a Manhattan street in August.

  At the far end of the arena, she saw Richard wipe his face on the back of his forearm. He had driven over before dawn to help her clean up from the show. She’d made iced coffee for them both, and they had started work just as the sun rose.

  She tossed another garbage bag into the bed of the Silverado then started to tie off another one that was still in a garbage can. A couple of syringes like the one she had found in the bedding of Dale’s trailer last night lay in it, near the top. She removed them, wrapped them in her blue bandana, and carried them the length of the arena to Richard. He smiled as she approached, sweet and slow, reminding her of the moment last night with his hand on her waist, his fingers on her leg. The way his arms almost had closed around her.

  She held out the cloth. “What are these?”

  He looked. “Syringes?”

  “What are they for?”

  “Giving shots, Billie. Duh?” He grinned, playing, teasing.

  “Damn it, Richard. I know that. What kind of shots? Why would horses get shots last night?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe they were vaccinations.”

  “Here? At a horse show?”

  “I don’t know what they’re for.” He turned away from her, back to the mountain of black plastic trash bags he had stacked, ready to be picked up. “Let’s just get things cleaned up before it gets any hotter, okay?”

  She carried the syringes to the feed shed, lay them on the table, and got back to work, checking each bag.

  “What are you looking for?” Richard asked when she got close to him.

  “I don’t know. Stuff. More needles. Or…I don’t know…what’s this?” She held a nearly empty jar toward him. “Ginger?”

  His eyes dropped, as if he needed to keep track of his hands. “That helps with tail set.”

  Billie knew exactly what he was talking about. Smearing ginger into and around a horse’s anus burned the tender flesh and made him hold his tail high.

  “It’s illegal to ginger a horse,” she said.

  “Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, Billie.”

  She thought back to when she was a kid running barrels on her pony at local gymkhanas while her parents watched. She thought back to when she had read every novel she could find about kids who loved horses, showed horses, cared for horses, wanted horses, galloped bareback on wild horses across the prairie, and saved horses from abuse. She had read these books while tucked into the forks of tree trunks and in the back seat of her parents’ truck. She had read them under covers, in the bathtub, in class, and in line. The literary world of horses, not far at all from the actual world she really did live in, was about ideals. She had learned right and wrong more thoroughly from the pages of Black Beauty than from watching her father school a horse or from riding that horse herself. She never lost the excitement she had felt when she read those books, never quit being involved in the story and in the lives of the horses, imaginary or not. She admired the heroes and heroines. She wanted to be them. All these years later, she still felt that way. She wondered if Richard’s kids were readers.

  Outside the shed, she dragged a heavy bag to the truck and heaved it in.

  “Hey, Richard, how’s Charley?”

  “He’s okay. I think his asthma’s been bothering him.”

  “I saw him here last night.”

  “Well, he works for Dale and those guys. Want me to ask Sylvie about him? She’d know.” He unholstered his phone and called her. “Syl, did Charley come here to Billie’s with you guys last night?” he asked. “Yeah,” he told Billie. “How’s he doing?” He listened for a moment before thanking her and hanging up. “She says he’s feeling fine now.”

  They worked for another half hour, until the backs of their shirts were drenched. Billie smelled her own sweat and deodorant. Her face and scalp itched with grit, but at last the barnyard looked as if nothing had happened last night—no show, no horses, no trucks and trailers.

  She offered Richard a drink, but he declined in favor of going home to swim with his kids.

  As he backed his truck out, mounded with trash bound for the dump, he leaned out the window. “Dinner again soon?”

  “Sure,” She grinned. “Absolutely.”

  After he drove away, she did a final patrol of the barnyard and arena, scuffing through soft dirt, kicking up dust as she went. She didn’t find much more, just a handful of paper hot dog boats, discarded in a heap beside a garbage can. She dragged the can back to its usual place behind the feed shed and opened a garbage bag to throw in the trash. Inside the can, she found plastic film, the same stuff used to wrap the legs of horses being sored.

  She pulled it out and looked deeper into the bag but didn’t find anything else. She laid it on the table, next to the syringes and needles, and stood staring at it, wondering what those things were really about. The show here had only flat shod horses. No Big Lick horses. No chained legs, no platform shoes, no burning flesh. No sored horses. Richard had promised. Just sound walkers showing their natural gaits.

  Right?

  Gulliver raked the back of her calf with his paw, a rare rudeness, panting. She shouldn’t have kept him out so long in the heat.

  She opened the refrigerator where she stored medicines and bottles of water, and poured one over Gully, making sure she wet under his chin, behind his ears, his armpits and belly. She turned on the table fan and directed it toward him. In a few minutes, he seemed better. Billie reached back into the fridge for more cool water and saw a piece of paper she hadn’t noticed before, folded small and placed beneath some dark brown vials of homeopathic arnica she kept on hand for injuries. After she re-wet Gulliver, she unfolded the paper.

  Fs injet jnts. lk in bag. stand on sore.

  It must be from Charley. She would figure it out later.

  She dropped some ice cubes in Gully’s water bowl and in a glass of water for herself, smoothed the paper on the tabletop, and read it again. And again, struggling with the contracted words, trying to make sense of them.

  At last, she thought she had the first sentence. “Flat shod inject joints.” She said it aloud a couple of times. It made sense with the super small gauge needles she had found. They were the right size for injecting joints. Small as a hair. Almost painless.

  But why would someone inject these horses? Maybe for the same reason other hardworking breeds get joint injections—to ease pain from stress or arthritis or injuries.

  “‘Lk in bag’… Like in bag, Gully? What do you think? Oh, maybe it’s ‘Look in bag.’ Which bag? And what does ‘Stand on sore’ mean?”

  She
rummaged through her grooming bag: brushes, curries, combs, detanglers, and sprays. She checked the old backpack where she kept wraps and bandaging materials. Not there, either. She was about to give up when she decided to look in the yellow rubberized satchel where she stored her tools. In among the wrenches, hammers, WD-40, and duct tape, she found something she had never seen before—a stiff plastic pad shaped like the bottom of a horse’s hoof. At its center, a sharp metal spike stuck out.

  So that’s what stand on sore meant. Nail this to the bottom of the hoof. Hours, days of torment as it dug in. The horse’s feet would be covered in hematomas, punctured. Forced to move, he’d snap them up, try to keep them off the ground. Because it hurt too much to put them down.

  Gulliver whimpered. He looked miserable, lying beside his water bowl, eyes squinted in pain. Billie knelt beside him. “What’s up, boy?”

  When she felt him, his temperature seemed normal. But he lay there, whining. In the seven years he’d been her dog, she had never heard him whine like that. It scared her.

  Doc’s phone rang a long time. When he answered, he was in the middle of a sentence to someone else. Billie heard him say something indistinct and another voice, female, reply.

  At last he said, “Doc here.”

  “It’s Billie. Again.”

  “How’s Hashtag?”

  She had to think for a minute. “Getting better, Doc. The cuts are healing, but it always takes longer than I think it should.”

  “Well, you know what I prescribe, Billie. Essence of patience, tincture of time.”

  “Doc, I’m calling about my little dog Gulliver. There’s something wrong with him. He’s lying here on the floor, crying.”

  She was certain he wouldn’t be able—or maybe willing—to come out for a dog. He was strictly a large animal vet with a practice so busy he had no time left over for sleep, let alone add-on patients. But he would tell her the right thing to do.

  “Well, m’dear, it so happens that I’m not far from you. In fact, I’m just down the road a bit. I have to finish up here then I’ll stop by.”

  Billie hung up, slumped to the floor, and gathered Gulliver onto her lap. “Thank you,” she said to the hot shed walls. “Thank you.”

  Doc still had his arm in a sling, soiled now and with a tear halfway up. It had been scribbled on all over, signed and drawn on. Moons, stars, horse heads in profile, a crude outline of a bull with a cartoon balloon over its head, saying, “I’m sorry, Doc!” He seemed to be moving better and smoothly managed the drop off his truck’s bench seat onto the ground. He slammed the truck door closed with his good shoulder.

  “Be glad when I get this thing off.” He eyed her for a moment, evaluating. “I’ll take care of your dog, Billie. Don’t worry, okay? I know you love him. After I see to him, let’s look at the horse you took such good care of who got caught in the wire.”

  Billie nodded, helplessly close to crying again.

  Inside the feed shed with Doc she was aware that she should have wiped down the counters, swept the floor. But he didn’t seem to notice. He started to bend to pick up Gulliver when Billie realized he couldn’t because of his arm. She pulled a chair out from under the table for him. He sat and she lifted Gulliver into his lap.

  He murmured to him; Billie couldn’t tell if it was words or sounds. He looked into the dog’s eyes, then his mouth and checked his gums. He felt down his neck, his back, his hind legs, his front legs, checked each paw. At his right front—the last paw he looked at—he said, “I’ll be darned.”

  Then he checked all the other paws again.

  “Did you walk him on cement?” he asked. “Maybe in Tucson?”

  Billie shook her head no.

  “His pads are sore on this foot. He’s got blisters.”

  As he spoke, Gulliver tried to lick the paw, stopped, and ran his tongue in and out of his mouth fast. Doc opened his mouth again and gently pried open his teeth. He yelped and struggled to get away. Doc let him jump down.

  “Well, Billie,” he said. “I think your dog here got into something. I thought at first he’d scorched his foot. I see it in the summer all the time. People think their dogs’ feet are made of asbestos, if they think at all. They walk ’em on pavement until they’re blistered. But I’m thinking this little dog got into something caustic, and then when he licked his paw, he burned his tongue and the inside of his mouth.”

  Billie asked the only question she could think of. “Will he be all right? Did he burn his throat?”

  “I don’t think so. This seems pretty localized. I’ll give you some ointment and a little pain medicine for a couple of days. Should be right as rain by then.” Doc rested his good hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Let’s look at the horse,” he said.

  “I wonder,” Billie said after Doc had checked on Hashtag and pronounced her on the way to recovery, “if Gully got into something at the show here last night.”

  “You had a show here?”

  “Walking horses.”

  He stopped and faced her. He didn’t say anything, but in his face she saw the same hard disapproval she had seen in Josie’s.

  “Flat shod only,” she assured him. “No soring. They promised me.”

  He looked past her, toward the mountains. “You don’t know much do you, about people?”

  She kept herself from snapping at him. He didn’t know about her previous life, the people she had interviewed, what she had seen. She probably knew more about people than anyone, she wanted to say. But she didn’t say anything.

  Neither did he.

  She couldn’t stand his disapproval. She imagined arguments she could make to him: they had promised her no hurt horses and she had made money at last. Hell, I made money so I could pay you, Doc, damn it. It was so much fun to have them here, the barnyard full of trucks, trailers, food, horses, dogs, music, kids, and folks enjoying themselves. And there was no soring! Maybe there was a cheater or two. But there are cheaters in every sport, right?

  As if reading her mind he said, “Cheaters are cheaters, Billie. Crooks are crooks. Liars lie. Burners burn.”

  “We don’t know that Gully got hurt at the show.”

  He stepped away from her. “You are defending them. What do these people do to their horses, Billie? They burn them. They are burners, and they burn their horses. At home. At shows. Use your eyes, Billie. And for God’s sake use some common sense. You had a barnyard full of burners, and your dog got burned. Not just his paw but his tongue, from licking his paw. A caustic did that to him. These people use caustics on their horses’ legs, don’t they? No matter what they promised you, they are the same people who were at that show when you called me a while back. The same people who hurt that filly you…bought.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, crevassed and stained. “Horse stealing’s a hanging offense out here, m’dear. I’m glad you…bought…her. You did the right thing, then, by her. But now you’re off that track, and you’re messing up.”

  He climbed cautiously into the truck, protecting his hurt arm. “Your horse’s cuts are healing fine. Your dog will be okay. But you I worry about. Take care, m’dear. Be careful who and what you invite into your life.”

  CHAPTER 16

  BILLIE TURNED ON the laptop and plugged the flash drive she had gotten from Charley into the USB port. The first seconds were disorienting, fuzzy black-and-white footage of movement too blurry to discern. She realized the sound was off on her computer and turned it on. Southern voices. Indistinct words. A yell. A whinny.

  She was looking at the inside of a barn. A man walked in front of the camera, toward a horse, pulled back his arm and punched the animal in the face. Billie flinched and pulled back as if it had happened in front of her. The man turned toward the camera, and Billie recognized Dale. He said something she couldn’t understand, stepped to the next horse, and did it again. And again. Down a long row of horses standing in cross ties, watching him approach, unable to escape. He slugged each in turn, hitting with
detachment and force.

  Billie paused the video. It didn’t make any sense. Why batter these horses, already tied in their stalls, helpless and immobile? She couldn’t watch anymore. Tears ran onto her lips.

  When she worked for Frank, reporting on the horrors of child abuse and rape, she had learned when she got overwhelmed to take a minute to anchor herself. She had done that so often and for so many years, it had become second nature. My laptop, she told herself. These are my notebooks. My hands. My ranch. My home.

  She wiped her face with her palms, rewound and pressed play, her hand hovering over the stop button, poking at it to slow down the action so she could actually see what was happening. She missed it on her first pass, rewound and looked again. This time she saw that a groom knelt beside each horse, palpating its front legs the way an inspector would at a show. The instant a horse flinched, Dale punched it.

  “He’s stewarding the horse, teaching it not to react to the exam,” she whispered.

  The camera aimed at the horses’ legs, following Dale. He bent down, lifted a front hoof, and squirted something from a bottle on its leg. The horse reared back then collapsed to its knees.

  “Get up, you sorry son of a bitch!” Dale kicked it in the gut.

  Billie watched the rest of the footage. Dale poking a horse with an electric cattle prod. Dale standing by while two grooms tried to drag a prostrate horse by its head. Dale burning a horse on the lips with a cigarette. Charley must have been the videographer, she realized. He had told her he was going to turn in more abusers than just Dale for the reward, and there were two grooms in this footage.

  She pressed play again. This time she waited through more snow and smudges until, at last, there were new images, new voices. A woman talking, a man’s mumbled answer. The woman’s voice again. Eudora stepped in front of the camera, walking ahead of Charley down the barn aisle at the farm where Billie had worked. Eudora gave instructions, pointing to stalls and telling him what to do to each horse inside. They stopped, and she pulled open a stall door. A wild-eyed mare tied to the wall at the back of the stall tried to turn toward them.