Everyday Psychokillers (12 page)

One day, I went to the stable and the chestnut horse wasn't in his little cottage, and he wasn't in his scruffy run. I looked all around the stables in the paddocks and in each of the stalls to see if he'd been moved. No one was riding him around the farm. I circled the pond and crossed through the field that wasn't fenced and followed the inlet to where it bumped into the fence marking the farm next door. If he'd broken out, he was gone.

Then I went back to the tackroom and I had to stand at the edge of the circle of old men on buckets, looking at Joe where he sat, holding court on his overturned manure tub. I had to stand there, bracing myself for a hole in their blithering, waiting my turn to speak. For a while, it was as if I weren't there, and this is what happened in the circle as I watched:

In the center of the circle was a blond-haired girl about six years old. She wore overalls with an appliqué bucking bronco on the chest. She sat on the cement in the circle of men, arranging an assortment of sticks and pebbles into pretend drawings. She'd scoop the sticks and pebbles into a pile and then dole them out into an arrangement, then scoop them into a pile again and start over.

A man wearing spectacles stood across from me in the circle, next to Joe, a little behind him, over Joe's shoulder, sort of. He was younger than any of the men. He wasn't balding at all, or graying. He wasn't fat, and he wore clean brown trousers and a tucked-in shirt with a collar. He leaned against a stall door, and same as in the barn at Sandpiper, the stall doors in this barn had bars. Chief's horse's cottage didn't have any bars, which is why he could hang his head out through the vines and over the door, but the stalls in the main barn had bars, and the man leaned with the bars behind him. The man had a pretty big camera with the strap going from his shoulder and across his chest. The camera stayed at his hip and he put his hand on it. This is why, when I looked at him, I framed up the image of him so squarely. He was on this side of the stall bars, framed by the doorframe, with his round head, his round lenses, and the camera strap slashed across his torso like a black banner. His hand on the camera was outside the image, behind Joe's shoulder. His other hand hung next to his thigh, as if it were limp and useless.

Joe bounced around on his manure tub, imitating people riding horses bareback, and the old men on buckets rocked and laughed. “Next time we have a show,” he said, “Next time we have a show, we should have a wet t-shirt class,” he said. “Right after walk-trot-canter.” He held his hands in front of his chest, cupping imaginary boobs, his cigar sticking out between knuckles. The blond girl tilted her head a little and I could see her eyebrows pull together with concern, and she pursed her mouth a little, but she didn't look up. She was only half playing with her sticks. “We should have a topless class!” one old man announced, the lightbulb burning brightly above his pate. At this, the blond girl looked at him, aghast. She took a deep breath and shook her head, squinting her eyes in disbelief at the old man.

“You can't say that,” she said. “You don't say that.”

The whole gang found it immeasurably funny and bowed and bobbed in communal hysterics. Except for me, of course, and the girl, who looked dizzy, and the man with the camera, who took his eyes off the girl for a moment and looked at me. A kind of thread of understanding emerged between me and the man—we glanced at each other and I could almost see strings of tension form across the circle between us, looping around the girl, but invisible.

Joe rocked on his tub and then stuck his hand out toward the girl. “C'mere, girl,” he said. The girl stood and took three shallow steps toward him. I could see one of his knees on either side of her. “I hear you have a little nigger friend,” Joe said to the girl. He kept his eyes on her, and then he leaned to one side and let his fingers touch the ground by his foot, where a pile of ash from his cigar had accumulated. He took a pinchful of ash and quick as a snake, he took the girl's chin in one hand and with his ash-covered fingers, he smeared soot along each side of her nose and cheekbones, one side, then the other, and then put a smudge across her forehead.

“Think you're a nigger? Now you're a nigger,” he said.

“Look, she thinks she's a nigger now!” said an old man.

The old men threw their heads around with laughter and in the noise the man with spectacles let his stoic face show anger for a tiny moment, as he broke the string that held him to me, took the stunned girl by the hand and led her into the dark corridor of the stable.

Joe shrugged with mock good humor. The men's cackling ebbed, and Joe looked at me as if he'd just noticed my presence. There was a hole in the noise, my moment to speak.

Joe said, “What do you want?”

I said, “Joe, what happened to Chief's horse?”

So you know what had to happen with the Chief's horse.

One day the Chief came out of his bedroom for his breakfast and one more time he saw the tail end of the thirteen-year-old girlfriend scooting out the kitchen door behind his wife's back, and he saw his glossy son demeaning himself and demeaning the kitchen table with the drugs. “Get out of the kitchen with that,” he said.

“What, it'd be better in another room?” said his son. “There's no good table in my room. I'd have to do it on an album.”

“Your smoke spoils your mother's food,” said the Chief.

“Hah,” said his son, his necklace like even grinning teeth. “So that's what spoils it! Just joking, Ma.”

Chief said, “Get it out of the kitchen or get out of the house.”

Chief's wife let the dish she was washing settle under the suds, and stood there with her hands under the water.

“Dad, it's
pot,”
said her son. “What, you want me selling Quaaludes on Miami Beach?”

Chief's wife stayed at the sink but she took her hands out of the water and turned around. Now they hung at her sides, dripping on the linoleum. Her son's back was to her, and he was still sitting at the formica table, intent on rolling a joint, getting it to balance tidily on the little pyramid of completed ones he was accumulating. She could tell from his hands how deliberate he was making himself be. She looked at her husband, who stood on the other side of the table with his back to the hallway that led to the bedrooms. He wore bluejeans from the day before and his leather belt with the fancy buckle she'd given him, and he too was bare-chested. His plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off was tucked in his back pocket like a mechanic's rag, like the shirt of a man who was not selling real estate. He almost filled the doorway. Only small shapes of negative space surrounded him. Sometimes when he walked through a doorway he held onto the moldings above his head and stretched as he walked through it, and now he stood with his arms just resting up there, as if he might stretch but had been stopped in mid-gesture, as if by a photograph, except he was thinking so fast his eyes moved. She thought she could see him becoming two-dimensional. Something was being sucked from him as he stood there.

In a very quick motion he undid his belt and slid it from its loops, and with the grace of a great cat tamer he stepped with it toward the table, snaking the belt like an omega in the air and let it strike the table. Coffee sloshed, and the stack of joints bounced once and then scattered. A small glass of juice tipped onto a plate of toast. Chiefs son looked at his father and sunk there, for a moment, and in the same moment he rose, with the power of his body, shoving the table, and the table struck Chief at mid-thigh. Chief was shocked, and still, and his son didn't look at him. Chiefs son kept his eyes on the tabletop, and kept shoving until Chief took a step back and was pinned, between the table and the wall. Then, Chiefs son fled out the kitchen door. Then, Chief's wife remained standing for moments long enough to count, looking at her husband truncated between the table and the wall.

“Assholes,” she said.

Chief arrived at Joe's mid-morning and used baling twine to string two bottles of whiskey at his hips, one on either side so they wouldn't bump into each other. No one was around, and he hadn't come by in so long that he walked around the stable, looking into the dark stalls, noticing which horses he knew and which he didn't. Most of the barn was painted white, and parts of it rubbed off to show gray beneath, but some whole sections of the walls were painted yellow, or pink, or light green, like a whole stall door, or most of the area between one stall and the next. Bored horses had chewed the wood between the stall bars over the years, and it looked almost as if the doors had been carved that way, to imitate waves or something, like a fancy border, like trim. The sun was intense against the bright barn, and made a great contrast between the bright light outside and the dim dusty air inside the stalls. You had to go right up and really stare to find out if there was a horse in there. Sometimes there was and sometimes there wasn't. They were denser shadows in the shadows.

And it was so quiet, except for the low noise of such large quiet animals shifting their weight in the heat, and other scuttling noises that could be bugs or small animals, or a sideways breath of wind pushing dead baish or a piece of palm frond down the cement corridor. You could hear buzzing noises that were disorientingly mysterious, that could be biologic dragonflies, or could be the electrical hum of a fan. While Chief was standing outside the vine-covered shed, fitting a bridle onto his horse, a little pickup truck with a kind of scrap-wood homemade cap on the bed pulled up and a weird little fellow with spectacles and a camera around his neck got out and looked around a little. He asked Chief if anyone was around, and when Chief said no, he drove off.

Then Chief got on his horse and rode away, bareback.

He rode off the farm and along the sand and pine trail on the side of the road across from the canal. This was a long, dark hallway of a road, with paths of sand and pine along the clumpy pavement, and eucalyptus trees among enormous evergreens dangling armfuls of long generous needles as lush as muffs, so high and soft they looked blurred, rubbed, as if in watercolor. When you drove in a car down the road, light flickered though the trees in beams, and any time of day felt like driving through blurry strobes. But trotting wasn't fast enough for that effect, and Chief was busy arranging his bottles around his waist so they wouldn't bounce and he could still lift each to drink. Chief's horse felt a little scattered at first, a little dizzy almost. First the dark stall, then the jangling haze surrounding the bare bright area around the barn, then the sudden shade of the pine-lined road. It'd been a long time since he felt anyone bouncing around on his back. He was excited to be out and annoyed with the reins, but as soon as they reached the main road, Griffin Road, the light hit like a sword, stunning him for a moment, and within seconds, the heat fell with such force that he backed off at the feel of it and then settled in under its weight, bearing it like a boa constrictor.

Chief rode his horse along the canal down Griffin Road, past orange stands with bright striped awnings and groves spotted with wooden crates piled with fruit, and then he rode his horse past a parking lot that held a line of stores, like a pizza place and an ice cream place and a hardware store and a place to buy stuff for your pool. Later they rode through a stretch of reservation billboards, drive-through no-tax cigarette huts, pawn shops, a flower stand in front of a trailer surrounded by chain-link with four giant whirligigs on the chain-link and a gun shop in the back, and roadside zoos with life-sized wooden cut-outs of Indian women in patchwork skirts pointing the way, like Obi-Wan from Star Wars. If you go back there you can see a panther in a cage. You can see seven macaws in a cage together. You can see an alligator in a puddle.

They rode past parking lots marked with stacks of tires painted fluorescent orange and green, totem poles and cigar Indians guarding the doors of high-stakes bingo huts or halls, trailers filled with postcards and plastic beaded earrings, and photographs for sale of the Osceola boys wrestling alligators, and one of their father standing waist-deep in the ocean, holding the carcass of a great white shark over his head, more trailers filled with cigarettes, more whirligigs, palm fronds flung over fences like deerskins drying, and palm fronds flung along the roadside like carcasses, and a fenced yard loaded with cement lawn animals piled, tangled, and broken in a heap in a corner of the lot, and next to that pile of animals, animals laid out for customers in cement rows and rows and rows, and past a house trailer with seven palm trees in a line leaning against it, their rootballs half torn from the earth and a man with a lawnmower, mowing around and around a cactus the shape of a human hand as big as a truck, knobby red flower-pods bulging from it like wounds.

Someone in front of a gas station waved at Chief but he didn't notice. He rode past vacant lots so heaped with scrubby brush and vines that there could be a barn within them somewhere. There could be a whole village of animals, buried, like Atlantis, or Pompeii.

He clapped his legs against the horse and they went alongside the traffic, trotting through the richer neighborhoods and whole complexes of fancy show-stables with solid five-acre grids of pasture and good post and rail fencing, past cattle farms, past enormous cranes mining sand.

You remember how hot it must have been, and how hard it must have been to ride through that heat, drinking from a bottle of whiskey, and how hard it must have been for Chief's horse, in the dirt by the canal and on the pavement along with all those cars.

It was hours later. It was afternoon. Chief would have been in pain, the insides of his legs blistered and his face sunburned because he'd forgotten his hat, except he was fuzzy with the whiskey, so the pain was intellectual, it was a distant relative, a little fact or a minor bug. At the end of the pavement, where the traffic headed sharply up and to the highway and Griffin Road turned to dirt but continued forward, Chief let his horse stop in a patch of shade to drink from the widening canal, and he thought about getting down, he was so thirsty himself. But as soon as the horse stopped moving, he noticed how drunk he was. The horse lowered his head to the water and shifted his weight, letting one front foot rest.