Funerals for Horses (21 page)

An hour later I see the trees of the wash in the far distance, water, shade. I feel almost as though we might survive this journey; to have believed otherwise, in the first few miles, seemed a frightening omen.

The sun rises again as we walk toward that ribbon of green. It is farther away from us than I allowed myself to believe.

I stop and give Yozzy the last of the water, pouring it into my hat and offering it to her. I take only a swallow for myself. Now I believe it’s fair to ask her to carry me again.

I use a rock to mount, and I hold the sleeping bag against my left thigh; the rifle droops against my right. The reins lie untouched across Yozzy’s shoulders, and she navigates.

I feel a great relief, my feet dangling comfortably.

Heat rises in shimmery waves, disturbing the continuity of the landscape, and I begin to fear the green trees are only a tease, a mirage, but we do reach them, and they’re real.

I slide down, pull off my shoes, and we stand in the cool water together, me in my wet socks, Yozzy on sore hooves; then I lie down and roll around, soaking my clothes.

I fill my hat, turn my face to the sky and pour water over my head.

I lean back on a tree trunk, in its scant but blessed shade. I have to sleep. We have to stay here, Yozzy standing with her feet in the cool water of the wash, already shallower than it was the night before. We can’t walk now until sundown. I fear I cannot walk at all, yet I know we’ll have to load up on water again, at some point, and I’ll have to set out on foot. In the meantime I need to sleep. I can only avoid it for just so long. I sit with my knees drawn up, the rifle across them, watching Yozzy nibble and drink.

I wake because a voice tells me to. It’s not my voice. It’s not the voice of anyone I know. It’s only words in my head.

Wake up.

The voice conveys such a sense of panic that I grab for the rifle across my knees, but it isn’t there. I look at the ground, feel the ground all around me, but I didn’t simply drop the rifle. It’s gone. The sun beats into my eyes from directly overhead; I hope this is all part of a dream.

Then I see him. Lying on his belly in the wash, his beard in the cool water, his blanket cape moving slightly with the pull of the wash toward home. He has taken his rifle back, pressed his eye to the sight; he is aiming, ready to fire. But not at me. I try to leap to my feet, but my hips have stiffened in sleep, I have painful sores on the insides of my thighs from riding, my feet have been bleeding again, and the dried blood has cemented my soles to my socks. But, out of necessity, I do make it to my feet.

I look up the wash in the direction his rifle is pointing, and I see Yozzy, grazing a few dozen yards upstream. He is aiming to shoot my horse.

I move without thinking. I move faster than any thinking process would allow. I must pitch forward through the air at some point because I could swear I land on his back before my feet touch the water. The rifle goes off, and in my peripheral vision I see Yozzy spook sideways and canter a few yards away.

I hook one arm under the wild man’s throat, applying the kind of pressure that rage and fear evoke in someone who would not normally possess great physical strength. Suddenly I’m on my back in the wash, my advantage lost, waiting to die. Waiting for his hands around my throat, waiting for him to pick up the rifle and aim it at my face. But he doesn’t pick up the rifle. He doesn’t take advantage of my moment of helplessness.

He runs away.

I look to Yozzy, who is watching me with her neck straight, her head held high. In her moment of attention she looks younger and more beautiful. She is alive and, as far as I can see, unhit.

I pick the rifle up from a patch of tangled grass growing out of the water, wondering in a distant, disconnected way how wet it might be, whether it’s safe to fire a wet rifle, knowing that I am about to learn my answer the hard way.

I stand with the shallow water flowing over my wet socks and aim the rifle at the retreating figure, the running man who killed my brother, who tried to kill my horse. I steady the rifle at my shoulder, squeeze my eye tightly against the scope. The crosshairs rest right between his shoulder blades. I squeeze off a shot.

For some reason the dry click surprises me. I’m not sure why it should. I know the rifle now, I’ve used it to save Yozzy from coyotes; I know it must be reloaded between shots. Yet somehow I expected the rifle to concuss against my shoulder, the metallic ringing to linger in my head, to hamper my hearing; I expected the wild man to fall.

I watch the running figure disappear over a distant rise.

I turn back to Yozzy and lower the rifle. She picks her way back to me. I examine her carefully, run my hands along her neck, across her sides, down her legs. As if she could be hurt and I wouldn’t know, wouldn’t see. As if I can’t trust my eyes to tell me. She is unharmed. We are all unharmed.

And if I had shot the wild man? I think about that as I settle again under the tree, as I pull a wet cartridge from my pocket and reload, just in case. How would I have explained that to the world, to those whose job it is to inquire? He tried to kill my horse, so I shot him. In the back, at several hundred paces, as he was running away.

And yet part of me wishes I had. Part of me wishes the wild man had left me a double-barreled shotgun. One chance to make things right. But maybe I would have missed anyway. I’m not a cowboy. I’m not a crack shot. So far I’ve only practiced on coyotes. I’m not sure if I could shoot a man at this distance with only a rifle and the sheer will to do so.

We wait out the day’s heat in this place, but of course I no longer enjoy the luxury of sleep.

THEN:

Here’s something I remember about Simon. Almost a real something, in retrospect.

I was four years old, DeeDee six, Simon ten, about to become the man of the family.

Our mother used to read to us at bedtime. She’d sit at the edge of DeeDee’s bed; Simon would come in from his room, in his robe and slippers, and sit on the end of mine. On the night in question, she read another installment of our ongoing trip through The Wind in the Willows.

She and my father had been fighting. We could hear him scream at her, as we brushed our teeth, as we changed into our pajamas, systematically avoiding each other’s eyes.

When she came in to read, at the usual time, her eyes looked puffy and red, her breathing sounded uneven, but she offered a forced smile and began that night’s chapter, and we all fell silently into our family pact. Why is this night no different from all other nights?

There is a line from The Wind in the Willows that burned itself on me like a mental tattoo: “Up popped Ratty.”

As my mother read this, we heard my father’s car start in the driveway. She threw the book on the floor.

“No,” she said, in a hushed tone, as if we wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t notice. She ran to the window, threw it open, screamed his name out into the night. “Gabe!”

Looking out from my post in bed, looking past her out the window, I saw lights switch on in neighboring houses.

Our mother ran out of the room. Simon picked up the book, and sat in her spot, on the end of DeeDee’s bed.

“Up popped Ratty,” he said, as if we’d all enjoyed the line so much the first time, we might care to hear it again. I suppose he was only being a letter-perfect reader, assuring himself that we all remembered just where we had left off. Behind and underneath his voice, we heard them shout at each other in the driveway, heard the squeal of tires, our mother’s curses, in a volume to follow him through the night. Simon finished reading us the book over the next twelve nights. Our mother never read to us again.

With that one simple stroke, Simon appointed himself torchbearer, seeing to it that every story had an ending.

Trouble is, I never heard another word of The Wind in the Willows. The last words I can remember are up popped Ratty.

We ride away into dusk. If we ride all night, maybe we could make it to Sam Roanhorse’s by daybreak. Or could we? What has it cost us to travel along the wash? I am guessing it runs east, farther away from Everett’s all the time, or he would have suggested it. How many miles have we sacrificed? Five or six at the top of our journey—how many more when we cut west again? Has the thirty-mile walk to Sam’s house become fifty?

And when we turn from the wash, water bottles full, will I be able to walk that far, or at all?

We ride through blackness, under a dome of stars. The empty plastic bottles bump against my knees.

The stars are all around us. I wonder if they would remind Simon of anything, if Simon were here.

We make a final stop at the wash. Yozzy drinks. I slide down and open my sleeping bag, and pack all my belongings at the bottom—which I had not thought of earlier—and throw it double across her back to cushion her against the weight of full bottles. I suggest we stop to rest, but she does not stop. We turn west and walk.

Before I hoist the bottles onto her back again, I apologize to her. For the difficulty of the journey, all hers. For the danger. For the miles. For the load.

Nonsense, she says. We came here to do just this, and we are doing it.

We walk off into the night, away from the wash. Away from our best shot at survival. I don’t know where Sam’s house is, I don’t know where I am, but I trust Yozzy, even as a part of me tightens, worries for our future.

The moon glows yellow over the horizon, casting shadows of rock formations and stands of scrub, like ghosts or demons, like the netherworlds and dark forests of the fantasy tale that is my real life. I know now I fear this land.

When sunrise comes at last, we are nowhere. We are not near anything. We have no shade. I hope Yozzy knows where we are. We bake in the sun all day. I open out the sleeping bag, drape it over parts of us for shade, but it is never enough.

When night comes we are out of water. So at least I can ride.

I ride through blackness, under stars, beyond hunger pangs, beyond exhaustion, but dizzy from fasting, from lack of sleep. Yozzy lays her ears back now and then, and I whip my head around to see what she hears. To see if he is back there, stalking us. Once I think I see a moonshadow move in the dark, but it could have been the sudden motion of my eyes. It could have been an illusion or an animal.

I remind myself that he is unarmed, as far as I know.

I tie my shirttail through the trigger guard of the rifle, lean onto Yozzy’s neck and surrender to sleep.

I wake up on the ground. I have landed on the rifle, its barrel bruising my ribs. I jump up to see Yozzy on her knees, struggling to rise. I wait with her until she finds her feet again. I do not try to mount.

We walk side by side, and I shiver with a deep cold, running into the center of my sleepiest place, but the walking brings my temperature up. I feel the cold but don’t mind it so much.

I walk until my feet beg not to touch the ground, but I force them to. I try to make myself lighter, but the lightest step brings pain. I walk until I can’t walk, but I can’t stop, and there’s no carpet of madness, nowhere to sweep the pain; it’s mine, I have only to live with it.

I walk until I see a house, just a dot on the horizon, with a thin trail of smoke, suggesting life. I walk until I know I can’t walk to this house. I walk until Yozzy goes down again, striking her knees on the hard, unforgiving ground.

She throws her weight forward as if to rise, sinks to her knees again. I wait. She tries again, and this time finds her feet.

Her left knee bleeds a little, and I tear a long strip of my shirttail, and tie it around, not too tightly, mostly so she won’t grind dirt into it when she falls again.

I hold her with my arms around her neck, and I talk into her warm coat, but I don’t know what I say, or if it is important.

We set off, the two of us, on foot, side by side toward the house I pray is Sam’s. Failing that, any house will do.

I walk with my unrolled sleeping bag around my shoulders for warmth.

I walk until I would rather die than walk. I feel my palm on the cool barrel of the killer’s rifle, and I know what I would do if I was out here alone. I would hold the barrel in my mouth, like some thin, wordless Hemingway, and write my own ending to all this pain.

But I am not out here alone. I will not give up with Yozzy watching, or rather, watching myself through her eyes.

I walk some more.

In time I fall to my knees, like Yozzy intermittently does, and I cannot get up. I sit for a moment, and she waits for me, stares silently, blinks and waits.

When I’m ready to move on, I rise only to my knees. I will crawl to Sam’s house. I watch it grow large in the distance, and I am more convinced that it is Sam’s house. After all, Yozzy leads me to it. Doesn’t that say enough?

I crawl until my knees ache, and the heels of my hands are raw, and I straighten onto my knees, upright, and try to breathe, and try not to breathe, but I have to. It’s my job.

Such a short distance left to go, my eyes say. As I kneel in the dirt, watching Sam’s house in the distance, Yozzy lowers her great weight gently, to curl by my side.

I don’t know how long we stay that way. I don’t know how or even if we cover that last mile.

I just remember us, looking off in the direction of Sam Roanhorse’s house together, watching another day break to the east.

THEN:

When I was a baby, my brother Simon used to pick me up and hold me. Whether he thought I’d serve as a teddy bear, or whether he knew I would soon need one, I don’t know.

I know I’m not supposed to remember back so far. I’ve grown tired of being told that no such thing is possible, and as a result, I rarely admit early memories out loud.

In fact, I remember being born with the caul, and by this I don’t mean that I remember hearing about it. I remember the caul, and then the sudden absence of it.

DeeDee stared into my crib when I was a baby, as though weighing me with her eyes. I knew, in some wordless way, that I was destined to love her more than she loved me. These lines are drawn early, and we only pretend we’ll cross or transcend them. Or so I believe.