Funerals for Horses (6 page)

“Hand it over then,” Earl said.

Simon handed a five dollar bill over the seat. “Here’s five to ease your situation, Earl. But if I give you all of it, we’re as good as dead out here. Try to understand. We’ll drive you all the way to Las Vegas, because we may as well go that way as any other, but we need gas money to do that, Earl.”

“Look, I’ve got a knife.” He pulled it from his pocket as he said this, but Simon, with his eyes on the road, didn’t see. Earl never opened out the blade.

DeeDee cut in right about then.

Tell him he wont hurt us. That’s what I heard DeeDee say. So I said, “I know you’re not going to hurt us, Earl.” Because just hearing it from DeeDee would not likely be good enough for Earl.

“Oh yeah? Why the hell shouldn’t I? What are you to me?”

“Why?” I heard Simon ask. I wondered if he was thinking out loud or questioning DeeDee.

Because he's too decent a man, DeeDee said.

“Because you’re a decent man, Earl,” I said, in case Simon hadn’t heard. “Just down on your luck is all. And because you know we’d never hurt you.”

Simon waved the five dollar bill to call attention to his offering.

I watched Earl’s eyes, illuminated in the lights of westbound traffic, thinking of the spark wheels we used to play with in our genuine youth. I’d like to say I was afraid, but I wasn’t, not really, because Earl was obviously just a scared child, like any other desperate man.

Earl cried. He took the five dollars out of my brother’s hand and threw the knife onto the front seat.

“Here, this is worth five dollars.”

Simon thanked him and gave the knife to me as a gift.

“That’s good,” Earl said. “She should have that. Not safe to be a young girl anymore. Not like it used to be. You can just pull over anywhere and drop me.”

“Don’t you want to ride on to Las Vegas?”

The sparks had gone from Earl’s eyes, and he averted them as if we’d somehow become his superiors, as if he felt unworthy.

“You ain’t gonna take me to Vegas after I tried to stick you up.”

But of course we did, dropping him on the main drag just before sunrise, wishing him the best of luck turning five into a million. The neon of the hotels and casinos flooded the night like a diamond bracelet in the sun, at this of all hours.

I asked Simon if he’d been scared.

“Of course. Weren’t you?”

I told him I was, because I didn’t want him to know I’d forgotten how to feel. If I was becoming more like our mother, I didn’t want to burden him with it now, when he had so much else on his mind.

On the way out of town we picked up Mrs. Hurley, a thin, frail old black woman with a thick braid of gray hair and a mouth full of jumbled teeth.

“Why, thank you, children,” she said in a sweet accent as she settled her lean old bones onto the back seat. “Poor old woman like to freeze out there in this desert. Can’t believe that bus driver begrudge an old lady some medicine for her arth-er-itis.”

She pulled a flask from inside her cloth coat and pulled a short swallow.

“He made you get off the bus?”

“Well, not the first time. First time he just took it away. But I got two, see, ’cause you never know. Second time he says, lady, I just cut you all the slack I can cut by law. And he set me by the side of the road. Can you imagine? I says to him, I says, somebody ought to be nicer to your grammy, and I hope they do. But he just drove on.”

I squirmed all the way around in my seat to watch Mrs. Hurley’s face. When she saw me watching, she smiled at me. It was a kind of smile I’d never seen before. Easy and real, as though it required no planning. Every one of her teeth seemed to point in a different direction, but no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t make that smile any less beautiful.

It made my stomach tingle. I worked on smiling at her, so she’d smile back. But it was an effort for me, a trip into the unfamiliar. It made me think of the tin man in The Wizard of Oz, getting his mouth oiled because he’d been left out in the field too long, to rust.

Mrs. Hurley asked our names, and why we were out in this cold, difficult world alone.

I watched Simon’s face change, watched the thoughts at work behind his eyes, deciding. Then he told her the whole truth about our parents.

“Sometimes it makes you wonder,” she said, “why the Lord would choose to balance so much on young shoulders. Must be because the young are so strong. Not rigid strong, but strong like a green stick.”

DeeDee said, good theory, lady. But of course Mrs. Hurley couldn’t hear.

Then Simon told her we were going to see our grandmother, who we’d never met, and who might or might not want to see us. Mrs. Hurley said she couldn’t imagine a woman on god’s green earth who wouldn’t be pleased to meet her own grandchildren.

Simon drove silent for a mile or more. Then he said, “She doesn’t like us because we’re half Jewish.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Hurley said, “there’s something I know and can understand. You wanta know something about me? I’m only three-quarters black. My father’s father was a white man. You think anybody cares? You think anybody gives me a quarter the respect they pay a white woman? No, sir.”

At a rest stop somewhere in northeast Arizona I woke in the morning to find Simon sitting on the hood of the Studebaker, and Mrs. Hurley snoring in the back seat, her cheek flattened against the glass.

I stepped out into the chilly desert morning to sit with Simon. I stared where he stared, at a red-brown mesa, stretching on forever, whittled and designed by eons of wind. I watched my brother’s eyes, knowing he saw something I didn’t.

“What does it look like to you, Simon?”

“Almost like god.”

I figured that Simon, damn near eighteen, must be close enough to god to see him in the distance like light at the end of a tunnel.

“Go in the ladies’ room and wash up,” he said. “And put on clean clothes and comb your hair. That’s important. If we don’t, we’ll look like hoboes, and that’s like sending a signal to everybody that we don’t respect ourselves. So then, why should they?”

I cleaned and groomed myself carefully, and when I came out, I found Simon still staring at the godlike mesa.

Mrs. Hurley bought us breakfast and a tank of gas, and we offered to drive her right to her doorstep in Columbus.

Halfway across the Texas panhandle, we had to stop over a whole night for Simon to catch up on his sleep.

Mrs. Hurley and I, who slept whenever we wanted, sat out on a bench in the starry night. I made a game of seeing how many times I could get her to smile.

“Isn’t Texas just the flattest place on earth,” she said, wrapping me against her in her huge coat.

I looked around, saw nothing to break the landscape but the rest station bathrooms, a building in the midst of nothing like the manger in the nativity. The stars seemed to surround us in wide-angle, as if we lived inside the dome of a snow globe.

“I’ve heard it said there’s more stars in Texas than anywhere else in the world,” she said. “You know, he’s a fine young man, your Simon.”

I smiled without trying. “You know what my sister DeeDee says? She says insanity runs in our family, but it jumps over Simon.”

Mrs. Hurley laughed, a light, ringing sound, like something that would come naturally with the spring.

“I think it mighta given you a clean miss too, little Ella.”

“Oh, no. Not me. Only Simon.” Then: “Mrs. Hurley? Do you think maybe our grandmother really doesn’t want to know us at all?”

Mrs. Hurley hugged me tighter to her bony side. “Well, now, honey, maybe she just thinks she doesn’t. Because maybe she just doesn’t know yet what fine young people you grew up to be.”

We sat alone under the great dome of lights, allowing ourselves to be ever so much smaller than the world until Simon woke up.

The hawk screams, and light spills into my tunnel, dispersing it. I squint, then press my eyes shut for relief. When I open them I see a town.

More significantly, I am standing barefoot on a spot my brother Simon has crossed. For the first time since the start of my wanderings, I have chanced across a piece of my target.

I am pleased with myself for knowing this.

The town spreads out a mile or so below me, but the back door of the nearest house is practically in my lap. I stand facing a board fence where, just the other side, a fiftyish woman in a denim shirt and sun hat and heavy work gloves prunes roses.

The hawk screams again. I look up to see him above her yard in a tree, watching me with agitation. I wonder why the woman does not look up. Maybe the hawk is not really there. Or maybe I’m not. I could be invisible. It’s happened before. I take two steps toward her fence. My movement catches her eye; she looks at my face, questioning at first, then she smiles.

“Good morning,” she says. “You took a nasty scrape there.”

My hand flies to my chin, a band of cracked scab. I’d forgotten, although it hurts. I pull the photo from my bedroll.

“I’m looking for my brother Simon,” I say, and show it to her. “I thought you might have seen him.”

She studies the picture longer than necessary. She likes him, I can tell. Everybody likes Simon. She’s thinking that if she had lost someone like that, she’d want him back, too. I can see that in her face.

I want to tell her that my brother Simon used to be a gardener, years ago, but I am just lucid enough to know she doesn’t care about that.

“I can’t say that I have.”

“His clothes were found twenty or twenty-five miles west of here. I thought he might have come by this way.”

“Clothes?” she asks. “You think he might have come by here without them?”

“Well, it’s unlike him. But it’s hard to know what to think.”

“Unless he was the naked man. But that was over two months ago.”

“The naked man?”

“Well, he wasn’t naked, really. He had on jockey shorts. Walked down off the hill, just like you did now, then on toward town.”

“Was he a blond man, like my brother?”

She shakes her head. “Too far away to tell. Didn’t care to get too close to him, you know. We all thought... well, we weren’t sure what to think.”

“Who else saw him?”

“Seems like nobody except my neighbor. We think he’s the one stole that pair of overalls down off Mr. Mobley’s clothesline. Because a naked man in town—now that would’ve turned a few heads.”

I want to know which neighbor. She says the one who’s in Chicago just now. No, no emergency number. “She didn’t say if he was blond, only that his forehead and arms were all blistered from sunburn and he had something in his hand, something small and flat.”

We talk until I realize she knows nothing more to tell me, then I thank her and limp into town. I feel nothing. How do you feel things, Simon?

I show his picture to every shopkeeper, every passing pedestrian. Everyone shakes their head.

I change into my clean clothes at a service station, wash with paper towels, comb my hair, brush my teeth. This is important. I take my dirty clothes to wash at a laundromat, and as they’re washing, I eat lunch in a diner. The waitress notices my bare feet but chooses not to fuss. I have a turkey sandwich, a Coke, two pieces of apple pie, and seven glasses of water. My legs throb and tingle and stiffen up, and I find it hard to stand again. The linoleum floor of the diner burns my wounded feet with its coolness. I can’t walk anymore. I take wincing baby steps to the cash register. I never should have stopped.

I stay over one night in a bargain motel. In the morning I lever out of bed and crawl to the shower, standing in the warm water until a wash of diluted blood puddles under my feet and swirls down the drain. I comb my wet hair and touch the black scar of my chin.

I can barely walk.

I roll my belongings into my sleeping bag and head out of town anyway. As soon as I do, I can’t feel him anymore, though I know he went this way. East. Due east. Sunset at his back, sunrise in his face. But I can’t feel him. And in losing him, I lose myself.

I try to move my legs, but my steps remain short and jerky, like an old woman hunched over a walker. A little cry of pain accompanies each step, but this is the least of my worries.

The tunnel slams in, full and extensive, so long that no light filters along its length to meet me.

Somewhere in this siege I lose several days. I suppose, looking back, that they are days well lost.

I remember finding a creek, drinking my fill, rolling in it to soak my clothes in its icy relief, a strike against the gathering heat. I remember a glimpse of light as I do, and traces of blood left on the rocks as I step in and out.

Other than that, there is no accounting. No Simon, no time.

Still, life gives us so many days, often more than we would have ordered. Perhaps this is my way to strike back.

THEN:

Grandma Sterling’s house looked scarier in person and in color. It was the first thing I saw when I woke up. Then I saw Simon, resting his head on the steering wheel, his eyes open, unblinking, staring at his feet.

“Hey, Simon, how many people live in there?”

“Just one, I think.”

I wanted to ask Simon why only one person would live in a house clearly big enough for twelve, but he seemed busy in his own head. I stared out the window.

Grandma Sterling trained roses to climb trellises on the sides of her house. She trained ivy to climb the gazebo in the side yard. Every window was framed by open shutters, every blade of grass a uniform green.

“Simon? How come we’re not going in?”

He lifted his head as if a great, invisible weight rested on the back of his neck. “Okay, let’s go, then.”

On the way up the walk I took in the weedless border gardens, the two floors of smudgeless windows, and I wondered, when a person does all this, do they have time left over for other things?

On the way up the walk my heart pounded too hard, a sensation I could feel in my chest and hear in my ears, and I wanted to ask Simon if that was what scared meant. I didn’t. Maybe he thought I already knew, and I didn’t want to complicate his thinking.

I walked so close behind him I almost stepped on his heels, and I remember thinking the sun must have gone behind clouds, turning the red and green and white world a little grayer. I didn’t know yet what that meant.