Funerals for Horses (8 page)

Its light floods my eyes, bigger than life, and I realize the tunnel is gone completely, and I cry. Because Simon would be so proud if he were here, that I came through so well. Then I realize he’d be proud of me for crying, and I cry harder.

How do you stop crying, Simon?

THEN:

Mrs. Hurley died in Las Vegas, a little over a year after Simon and I found her again. We were there. The trip was an eighty-seventh birthday present, her own special request. The night before she passed away, she gave us an enormous handful of money that she’d won at the crap tables.

She said it was because she never would have won it without Simon to blow on her dice. I think she knew she’d have no need of it where she was going, and although she seemed ready enough to move on, it must have troubled her to leave us to our own devices.

The last thing she said to me was this: “Take care of that brother of yours.” My mouth fell open. Simon needed no care that I could see, and surely I’m no caregiver. Her voice fell a little thin then, but I heard her loud and clear, though it took me a while to sort out what I heard. “I always worry about the ones say everything’s okay.” I’m still not sure I completely understand.

Simon tried to give the money back to Mrs. Hurley’s daughter when she flew out to make the arrangements, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“If she gave it to you,” she said, “she wanted you to have it.”

We drove back to Columbus for our things, and for the funeral. Simon swears I attended, but I remember nothing to this day.

I know I’m leaving out a chunk of history, the whole year we lived with Mrs. Hurley, but at this point in time I remembered not one day of it, so I feel it does not rightfully belong here.

We moved to L.A., where Simon got a job as a gardener. By then he’d had experience. Simon was a good gardener. Plants couldn’t wait to grow for Simon. He inspired them.

Simon found us a furnished room to rent in a private house less than two miles from Griffith Park. He enrolled me in school but I rarely attended.

He dropped me at school every morning on his way to work, and from there I usually walked to a stable at the edge of the park and stood in a corral with the horses. They accepted me immediately. Unlike people, they don’t judge much by your outsides. They knew I was one of them.

Problem was, when one of the employees came around to ask what I was doing there, I was pretty caught up in being a horse, and I spooked. I felt my eyes widen, showing white all the way around, as I pictured it, and I flew straight up and came down dancing. And the other horses, they followed my lead. I considered that a high compliment, that they would stampede on my say-so.

Nobody else seemed to like it.

The man—I think his name was Frank—hauled me out of there and asked who I belonged to, but by then I’d forgotten. By then I thought I belonged to the earth and the sky, and the sharp, pushing blades of grass that grew for me.

Simon came and found me in time, and from then on they’d call him to come get me. Since he couldn’t be reached at work, and he didn’t come home until six, and since it caused a great stampede to scare me in any way, I found plenty of time to pursue equine grace.

Standing in that paddock, shuffling in the green grass, the blue sky looked a mile wide, and I had to squint against the open brightness of the world. But as soon as Simon packed me in the car to go home, the world narrowed and drew in, going to gray at the edges.

By the time we got back to our room, I had to stand a foot away and squint into his face as he talked to me, to follow his lips. Sometimes my hearing went a little flat, too.

“We’re taking you to a doctor,” he said one day, and I eventually conceded, though I felt it might be cheaper and more direct to allow me to stand out with the horses.

Simon bought me a health insurance policy, which required physical exams, and he stood close to me and held my hand during the eye exam, and talked to me about horses, and the harmonica Mrs. Hurley had given him, that used to belong to her freeman grandfather, and the tattoo of the rose I saw on her left shoulder. I’d forgotten all that. He even made me laugh, reminding me what she’d said when I saw it. “Never really know somebody, do you, child?” with a high-pitched giggle she usually reserved for evenings after a few slugs of apricot brandy.

I was diagnosed as having twenty-twenty vision.

Then Simon waited awhile to take me to the doctor, so it wouldn’t appear shady.

In the evenings Simon and I would walk up to Griffith Park Observatory, or drive up if it had been a long day. Simon liked to look down at the lights of the city, and up at the lights of the stars, preferably both on the same night. He said it gave him a sense of perspective, how everything is relative to everything else. He said it reminded him that the world was so much bigger than just the part we’d already lived.

We’d stand in line to look through the telescope, sometimes twice in one night, at Mars, or the moon, and the astronomer would tell us which craters we could see, or the name of a mountain range. I think he liked us.

Simon told him he wanted to be an astronomer, but I didn’t know yet that he meant it. We’d stay after, when the viewing time was over, and Virgil—that was the astronomer’s name— would show us pictures in his books of the planets.

Maybe he took a liking to us because Simon told him we were on our own, that he, Simon, was my legal guardian and worked as a gardener to support us both.

At first I thought I might have ruined things by telling Virgil what I thought about the man in the moon. I said I knew exactly how he felt, floating up there in space, the only life on his barren planet, seen by a billion people who never believed he was real. Virgil thought about it awhile, then told me that just about every human being on earth must have felt that way at one time or another.

Still, I think it was Virgil who talked Simon into taking me down to County Mental Health. Not in a mean way. I think Simon asked him what to do, and that was his best answer.

Two things might have happened to cause Simon to ask for that advice. The first was the test results. I had an eye exam, and a brain scan, neurological testing, the whole nine yards. I was fine. Textbook normal. That concerned him, I think, because he might have wanted them to find some simple, obvious condition that could be treated with a drug or whatever.

Then, upset by this news, he came to me one night and asked me to promise never to do what our sister DeeDee did.

“Sure, Simon,” I said, “no problem.” I was always glad to do anything to help Simon out. “What did she do?”

About two weeks later he got me an appointment at Mental Health. He took the day off work to wait in the big, bare outer office with me, stiff on folding metal chairs, staring down at our feet and the checkered linoleum.

“Look,” he said, “they’re going to let you talk to a lady. Her name is Miss Rose. I want you to tell her everything that might help. Anything you can think of that’s important.”

“Okay, sure, Simon. How do I know what’s important?”

“Well, just whatever bothers you, or what goes through your head. Just be real honest with her, okay? So she can help you.”

Miss Rose wore a gray suit with a straight skirt, and a little teddy bear pin on her lapel. Her hair was thick and wild, like mine, only drawn back in a barrette and not given its freedom.

Her face was kind, but worn down.

She led me into a room with a narrow table and two metal folding chairs. I wasn’t afraid, as far as I could tell.

“My name is Wilhelmina,” she said, “but call me Willie. I like it much better. I hate the name Wilhelmina. What about you? Do you like the name Ella?”

I shrugged with genuine curiosity. I watched her face, looking for things to like about her, and doing well so far. “I never really thought about it. I mean, it’s my name, right? Like it or not.”

“How old are you, Ella?” I knew that Simon had told the lady at the desk, who had written it down on the same chart Willie held on her lap, so I concluded that she was attempting to put me at ease, which I already was. I debated how long I should humor her.

“I’ll be thirteen next month.”

“Your brother Simon brought you here, I see. Was it his idea, or yours?”

“Well, he thought of it, but I don’t mind.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s important.”

My eyes drifted out her window to a solid wall of ivy that I knew in my head was a freeway embankment, but which I found strangely beautiful in that contrast, that frame. I’d been focusing strongly on green since my days in pasture seeing through the eyes of a horse. Just gazing out the window brought light into my field of vision.

“May I say some things?” I said. I knew it might take a while her way, and I wanted to tell her everything Simon would want me to say.

“Yes, of course, Ella—you can say anything you like.”

“I can think of three things.” I decided that sitting on a metal chair with my hands on my knees felt confining. “Can I sit on the windowsill?”

“Wherever you’re comfortable, Ella.”

From my window seat perch, if I looked up, I could see the cars on the freeway, feel the rumble of the big rigs rolling by, but I didn’t mind any of that.

“Here’s one, Willie. Have you ever met somebody—I’m just learning about this—who thinks they were born the wrong sex?”

“Yes, I have. Does that feel like you, Ella?”

“I don’t think so. But have you ever met anybody who thinks they were born the wrong species?”

I didn’t watch her face, so I’m not sure how any of this affected her. I fixed on green, my visual lifeline.

“Well, I’m not sure. Can you tell me any more about it?”

“I think god made a mistake with me. I think I should have been a horse. He probably has a lot on his mind, you know. I don’t just mean I want to be a horse, or I wish I was. I mean I think I am, only stuck in the wrong shell.”

“You think and talk well, Ella. I can tell you have a person’s brain.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the very most tragic part of the whole thing. Here’s something else I need to tell. I feel all the time like I’m standing on something about the size of a toothpick. Over a deep well. A well with no bottom. And every single minute of every day, it’s all I can do to stay up. It’s a full-time job. Believe me, I get plenty tired. But what can I do?”

“Are you afraid of the well, Ella?”

“Oh, no. It’s inviting. I’d love to just let go. What a relief that would be. It doesn’t hurt to fall, you know, only to land, and the well has no bottom.”

“So what do you think keeps you on the toothpick, then, Ella? If it’s something you want to talk about at all.”

“Oh, that’s easy. Simon. He’s lost everybody else to the well. It’s important to him.”

“You’ve told me quite a lot, Ella. I must say I’m surprised. You’re very cooperative with me.”

“Simon said to tell you what I could. Oh, one more thing. I saw something on the news last week. They’re trying to pass a law that says dog pounds can’t turn unwanted dogs over for lab experiments. The people who want them—you know, the experimenters—they say the dogs’ll just die anyway. But you know why they want to pass the law? They say it’s cruel to hurt them once they’ve known a decent home. They say it’s not the same as a rat that’s never known a better life, only pain.”

“I can see that means something to you, Ella.”

I turned my face in to Willie, away from the green, and watched my field of vision zoom into a spyglass pattern, darken to almost obscure her.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I think it would be better if we’d never gone to live with Mrs. Hurley.”

“Mrs. Hurley? Who was that?”

I said I didn’t remember, and unfortunately, that was true.

I sit back against a Hopi blanket on the seat of Rick’s truck, my shirt soaked through with sweat. I wipe it out of my eyes, and it tickles as it rolls into my collar. Across the hood of the old Chevy pickup, heat rises in waves, a shimmering disturbance to the natural order of the air. I lift my hat, wipe my forehead on my sleeve, and tuck it back down again.

I wiggle my toes in my heavy hiking boots, testing my level of pain. It’s too soon, of course, but here I go.

Rick gave me the hiking boots. They’re three sizes too big. “Just the point,” he said, and supplied the accompanying five pairs of socks. “This way when your feet swell, and they will, you can peel off socks.”

I thanked him and settled up my doctor and pharmaceutical bills, leaving me with fifty-three dollars’ life savings.

“You sure you’re not cutting yourself too short,” Kathy had said, at least four times.

“I’ll do fine.”

Of course I was cutting myself short. But Simon taught me to face financial needs as they arise. Never short current obligations for those you can’t even see yet. That’s what he used to say.

Vegas is a dream on the unseen horizon. I’ve been there twice before. Once saying hello to Mrs. Hurley, once saying goodbye. For the longest time I hated hellos, thinking the one leads to the other.

Rick always says what’s on his mind. I tolerate this in him because he saved my life and then some, but it’s a character trait that tends to make me want to fly away.

“You know,” he says, “if your brother tried to walk through here—”

“Rick,” I say. I don’t need to elaborate. He nods and falls silent. I must have mentioned Simon in my delirious moments. Since coming to my senses, I haven’t said his name aloud once—an attempt to circumvent this moment.

I think of the bleached bones on Rick’s walls and mantel. Then I don’t anymore.

He stops at the Las Vegas bus station. I reach across the seat to shake his hand. It’s a strong grasp, on both of our parts, full of respect, and the regret of parting.

“Thanks for everything,” I say, and he shifts his eyes to the floor and shakes his head. Gratitude and charity must have muddled in his brain. He won’t take it. I tell him to thank his wife again, and that I hope his kid grows up strong and safe.

I step down to the pavement and disguise my initial wince of pain by waving to the tailgate of Rick’s retreating Chevy.