Funerals for Horses (13 page)

I stared at Willie, but it didn’t bother her. She wore a pink blouse that day, with a gray jacket over it, and where the pink showed through it looked smooth, like satin. I noticed she seemed relaxed around me, as if talking to an adult. Her eyes eased all the way into calm.

“What do you notice about him?”

That was the moment I would have to find words for it, which seemed tricky.

“You know how if you ask a kid to write a story, the people they create are always missing something? They only do and say exactly what’s necessary for the story. They never scratch their ears with a pencil eraser, or whistle stupid songs, or snap their gum. They never have beer bottle collections or facial tics.”

“They’re not three-dimensional. Is that what you mean?”

I sat back and sighed, glancing over her gray shoulder to the horses. Help me out, guys. My brain is handicapped with too many thoughts. I’m too human to say what I mean.

“I’m not sure who Simon is. I keep watching him, waiting for him to do something that’s pure Simon, and nobody else.”

“What do you make of that, Ella?”

“I don’t know what to make of it. That’s why I brought it up. But I worry about him. Mrs. Hurley used to worry about Simon. Did I ever tell you that?”

Willie raised her eyebrows just the tiniest bit. If I wasn’t staring and assessing, I might never have noticed. I realized later that she could have said, no, you never told me anything about Mrs. Hurley. Not one word. You didn’t even know who she was or what became of her. But Willie was smart.

She said, “I don’t think so.”

“The last thing she said to me before she died is that she always worries about the ones who say everything is okay. Don’t you think that’s kind of an interesting thing to say?”

A little tremor started in my belly, and I set off in another direction, and she let me go.

She didn’t repeat what I’d said, or rub my nose in it.

After a few minutes of discussion about my brother Simon, we agreed that I had enough to worry about with me.

Willie and Simon put their heads together in the fall, and enrolled me in night school. All the other students were grown men and women. Most seemed humbled by the experiences of a high school freshman, and nobody gave me a hard time. In fact, I became something of a mascot with fellow students and teachers, the thirteen-year-old kid who acted and talked forty.

If they knew that my emotional problems had sent me into their midst, it was never mentioned.

In the morning the air is cool, the ground hard. The sun peers over the horizon with no spoken threats.

Then, as if looking into a mirror, the old mare comes to bump my face with her muzzle. She’s a battered white paint, short bristly mane, prominent ribs, chocolate patches on her neck and withers. She knows she is at home here, and questions me only slightly.

I wish her a good morning and run my fingers up her face, into her forelock.

Everett Ankeah comes out to wish me the same, bringing hot soup and half a wheel of fry bread.

“So, I see you and Yozzy are acquainted, and I needn’t make introductions.”

I thank him for the breakfast, and sit up to take the hot soup. I look around me and ask what keeps Yozzy close to home. “I don’t see any fences.”

“That’s because there are no fences. I don’t fence my wife in, but she stays with me. And if she didn’t, what could I do? All down this road you’ll see signs: Watch for animals. The sheep and horses range free. They know their homes.”

He sits with me while I finish my breakfast, though there seems nothing more to say. I’m glad for his company, but I trust him to know that.

“Is there anything I can do for you, Everett, that would mean as much as this food means to me?”

“Well, there’s a lot of work to be done in the diner.”

I nod my assent without further comment. I’m learning.

I help Everett throw an old car seat on the back of his truck, with some other trash to take to the dump, and he pulls a knife from his belt, slashes through the naugahyde, and cuts two thick pieces of foam rubber, which we duct-tape to the knees of my jeans.

“I’ll take the high road,” he says, and we work together on the kitchen area, even as I stay off my healing feet.

I clean grease off the back of the deep-fat fryer, years of grime from the inside bottom of the refrigerator cases.

“I see what you mean about the old owner,” I say, and he grunts his disgust.

We work like this day after day, breaking when May brings food and drink, and at noon for a two-hour nap. We talk little, as little needs to be said.

On the fourth day, Everett Ankeah says this:

“I had a strange dream last night. I saw your brother Simon’s camp—a makeshift tent near the mesa. The tent looked like it was made from skin. Like mule deer skin. He had a fire burning in front.”

I wait to see if he’ll continue, but he doesn’t.

“Thank you for telling me that, Everett, but it could be symbolic, too. Don’t you agree? Dreams so often are. The skin might be a symbol for the passageway between this world and the next.”

It surprises me to hear myself say this, but I do it because I don’t dare believe. It’s an old habit, to refuse to hope for the best.

“Yes, that’s possible. Maybe I’m only wasting your time in telling you.”

I say nothing. We clean in silence for another hour.

“One more thing,” he says, “that I learned from this dream. Your guide is not the hawk. Your guide is the rabbit.”

I laugh when he says this, not at him, or the idea, but at myself, because I should have known.

“The hawk threw me off,” I say. “By being too helpful.”

“Maybe you needed something closer to your own ideas.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but I don’t have to ask because he sees the question in my face. “Just as no one likes to think he was a common laborer in a past life, no one wants to take the advice of a lowly rabbit.”

“I’m all ears,” I say, and he laughs, as though I meant it as a pun, which I didn’t.

That night, as I tuck into my sleeping bag, Everett squats smoking by the porch and Yozzy sleeps on her feet close by, ears laid back along her narrow neck.

I face north, and stare through black night at Simon’s mesa. My feet are only the slightest bit better than when I arrived at Everett’s, barely able to take my weight. My goal feels suddenly impossible. Fifty miles might just as well be a thousand.

Above the mesa, I see the knowing face of the man in the moon, and he makes me cry, because he tells the truth this time, of what he knows. The trip is beyond me.

Everett must hear me cry, because he comes to squat beside me.

“You need to leave now,” he says.

“I can’t walk that far.”

“I know. I can’t let you take my truck—I need it.”

“I never meant that you should. And you know I couldn’t find what I’m looking for in a truck.” If I thought I could, I would have kept my own.

“But I will let you take my horse. She’ll stay with you. She respects you. She’s very old, but if you can find enough water, she’ll take you there. If you survive, and she survives, bring her back to me. If not I’ll say a prayer for you both.”

When I wake in the morning, Yozzy wears a leather hackamore with rope reins, and a woven blanket.

She nudges me insistently, as if anxious to leave.

THEN:

I graduated from high school after three years, an example of the reapplication of self. I learned some interesting things there. For example, I learned that restless middle-aged married men will always be drawn to me, almost against their will, like ants drawn to a scoop of ice cream when it’s wasted on the pavement. Grandma Ginsberg’s true flesh and blood, I pulled those strings, received their attention, and gave nothing back, unless my acknowledgment of their attention was all they really needed.

It seemed an odd lesson in visibility, a subject I knew little about. The more boring the class, the more likely I might turn to catch a man staring at me. I courted attention like fire, fascinated and afraid. I hated it, lured it, played with it, tossed it back. It created a hypervigilance slow to wear away. I was most comfortable when least seen.

During my three years of night school, I worked days for Lois and Herbie Greenblatt, owners of Greenblatt’s Delicatessen in Hollywood. My job was easy and normally stress-free. Trot to work in jeans, a white T-shirt and a white cap, both displaying ads for my employer. Pick up a paper bag, with a bill stapled on. Or two bags, or three. Stuff them with napkins, extra for the office on Hollywood and Bronson. Run these bags to their destinations, return to find more.

The Greenblatts liked me, and paid a dollar thirty-five an hour, which I doubled with tips. The customers were friendly because they were hungry, and I learned to run fast.

On the rare occasions someone gave me a hard time, I became invisible, or sicced Lois Greenblatt on them, or both.

The time that stands out, a man named Larry in a camera store on Hollywood Boulevard decided I had brought him the wrong sandwich. Four people from his store had ordered all at once; everybody’s order came up fine except his. He said he ordered ham, not corned beef. I shouldn’t have laughed out loud, but if he’d called Greenblatt’s and ordered ham, Lois would have called him a few choice names in Yiddish and hung up the phone. Anybody knows that.

He yelled at me. “Well, you just screwed it up.”

His dark eyebrows tried to knit together in the center. He had a strange nose that seemed to grow upon itself, like a cancer. I didn’t even make up the orders—Herbie did—but I couldn’t say that. I just made myself disappear.

As soon as I did, he turned on his heels, as though disgusted to have no one left to yell at. That’s how I knew it worked.

I ran back to the store without the money for the rest of the order. I thought Lois would be mad at me, but I couldn’t bring myself to disappear on her. I owed Lois better than that.

I told her the story. She got on the phone and asked for “this Larry,” and while she waited, her big round face reddened, and she smoothed her huge apron, as if to keep life in order.

“Now, listen, you, we don’t have ham sandwiches at Greenblatt’s. We’re a kosher deli, got that? Kosher. Next time you want to order from us you got to pay what you all should have paid today, except you chased my girl away. She’s a kid, see? You see this? You think she’s the owner? The manager? No, she schleps orders. You yell at her one more time you get your lunch someplace else.”

She slammed down the phone and the ringer resonated among the silent clientele. A force to reckon with, that Lois.

“You go right back out,” she said, stuffing a bag into my hand, “don’t lose your nerve.” On the way out the door I overheard her tell Herbie, “I just thought who she reminds me of. Benny, that’s who.” I had never heard of Benny.

Nobody thought the camera store would order again, but they did. They paid me for the previous time, along with a two-dollar tip, and Larry had to sit in the corner until I was gone, like a bad dog. I watched the angle of his face, and when it swept around toward me I went away in my head, and sure enough, he looked right through me like I was a window onto something better.

That was a great turning point for me. I ran those streets like I owned them, head tucked down to watch the streak of sidewalk cracks rush by. I watched them accumulate like shares of stock, reminding me I had as much right to this city as anyone.

Because if anyone challenged my ownership, I could be gone.

When I got back from my last run, Herbie was sitting in his office, an unmarked corner of the storeroom, doing his books.

“Pull up a chair,” he said. He liked to talk to me at the end of the day, get a sense of how everything had gone.

There were no chairs, but I pulled up a carton of halvah and sat with my knees tucked up against my chin, my breath still coming in puffs.

“You’re in good shape,” he said. He twisted a corner of his mustache. Folds and billows of Herbie pushed out against his clothes. He wore normal-sized pants that rode far below his great belly. His eyes laughed, even when I saw nothing to laugh about. Like Santa Claus, though god knows I would never say this to Herbie.

“So, how did your day go, young lady?”

“Fine, Herbie. Good. I made seven dollars in tips.”

“See, the customers like you, Ella. That’s good for everybody.”

I saw, over Herbie’s desk, a photo of a dog tacked on the bulletin board. I’d seen it before. Beside it hung photos of their two grown children, forty-year-olds with friendly, unintimidating faces, but I liked the dog best. A silly-looking dog, really. Sort of a wire-haired terrier, only no sort in particular. All the different breeds seemed to argue in this one poor little mutt, sending his hair in a wealth of directions. His head hung down, as if cowed by the camera, and the flash lit up his eyes devil red, which didn’t look at home on him at all.

This time Herbie saw me looking.

“That’s Benny, god rest his soul.”

“
That’s
Benny?”

“The one and only.”

I asked Herbie to tell me all about Benny.

“So, what about him? Good friend. Cried like babies when he passed on, both of us. Why? What do you want to know?”

“How was Benny like me?”

Herbie’s chair groaned under his weight as he shifted back into it. His eyes didn’t see the joke anymore.

“You weren’t supposed to hear that, you know, but it wasn’t an insult. You could do worse than to be like Benny. It’s just... we got him out of the pound, and he always had this look in his eyes. Always braced for the worst even when everything was dandy. We never knew what had happened to him, but it must’ve been really bad, you know? That’s all Lois meant by that. No disrespect.”

“It’s okay, Herbie, I don’t mind.”

I found it flattering, that I reminded someone of their dog.

“Take a sandwich before you go. Take two, one for your brother. Here, I’ll make it myself. What’ll you have, roast beef? Corned beef? Pastrami?”

“Roast beef is Simon’s favorite.”

I watched through the glass case as Herbie assembled the sandwiches, thicker with meat than any he sold.