If Wishes Were Horses (17 page)

“You need to watch that, boy,” Obie said, gesturing at the beer in Johnny’s hand. “That can carry you right away before you know it.”

“It’s floatin’ me away right now,” Johnny joked and went around behind the barn to pee. He wished everyone wouldn’t take such an interest in how much he drank.

He watched the old man work on the engine, and he watched Etta come out on the porch and look their way, then go back inside, then come out about a half-hour later and do the same thing again.

The entire time Johnny felt an intense restlessness creeping over him.

Along about sunset, Obie got the car to start, and at the sound Etta and Miss Latrice both came out on the porch.  They were halfway across the yard when the engine died. Obie got it started again, but he couldn’t keep it running.

“This carburetor is old, and likely the fuel lines are all gunked up from the car sittin’ here for so long,” Obie said, rubbing his head as was his habit when discouraged. “I don’t mean to talk poorly, Miz Etta, but this thing’s been sittin’ up so long, it’s ‘bout froze up.”

“It’s okay, Obie. I appreciate you tryin’.”

Johnny felt as if he should do something to help her. He had saved up a bit of money, but not enough to get her a new car. Even if she would have taken one from him. Besides, he needed that money for when he had to move on in a few weeks.

 She was not his responsibility—and she’d likely make enough off the sale of this place to get her a car, if not a new one.

Latrice said, “Y’all come in for supper.”

Supper was fried ham slices and cabbage, Miss Latrice obviously forgetting what Johnny had told her at the outset about hating cabbage. He smelled it the instant his foot stepped on the porch, and he almost didn’t go inside, but he was at the door and thought it would be impolite to turn around and leave.

There was just something that seemed to have a hold on him and to keep him there, going in and sitting at the table and eating, all except the cabbage. At least there were Miss Latrice’s biscuits. Johnny put a lot of honey on them.

The meal was what was termed subdued. Obie tried to pick things up by mentioning ideas he had yet to try on Etta’s car. Latrice mentioned Walter Fudge, saying she thought he would drag his feet on making any kind of offer, in order to save two pennies if he could on buying this place.

“That’s how a man like Mr. Fudge gets to be where he is,” Obie said.

“Where’s that?” Latrice asked. “He’s got ‘bout three thousand acres now, and money in two banks, and he still won’t let his wife have but monthly help in the house.”

Etta said next to nothing and looked so hang-dogged that Johnny began to get annoyed with her. She wouldn’t look at him at all. He wished very badly to do something for her. He felt he needed to point some things out.

“You know, all that’s needed to raise some good rodeo stock is right out there. The corrals, good pasture. Could board horses, too.”

He didn’t know what got into him, butting into what wasn’t his business. He kept his gaze on the honey he dribbled into the coffee Miss Latrice brought him.

“Mr. Roy used to board horses from time to time,” Obie put in.

“That’s so . . . but we can’t pay the mortgage by boarding horses,” Etta said, “and we sure can’t start another ranching endeavor without any money.”

The disparaging manner in which she spoke made Johnny shut his mouth, and he didn’t linger over coffee or partake of the gingerbread Miss Latrice had made. The smell of the cabbage overpowered any aroma of gingerbread.

“I got to see the horses fed,” he said.

“I’ll help,” Obie said, and slowly started to rise, being stiff from bending over the engine all afternoon.

“No. I can do it fine,” Johnny said, sharp enough that everyone looked at him. “Thanks anyway,” he added.

He set about feeding and watering the horses by the meager light of twilight and the single pole light near the barn. He tossed their grain and hay with a fervency, working quickly, eager to be done and go, and it occurred to him that he was thinking of driving over to the roadhouse.

The thing to do, he thought, was go to town and get drunk and get laid.

He had not been with a woman in months, and his sperm was getting all backed up. That was not healthy. That was why he was feeling tight and restless and irritable as hell.

The problem of leaving Miss Latrice and Etta alone niggled at him.

They had the bugle, he told himself, and knew how to make use of it should they need help. Undoubtedly Obie would stay awhile anyway. Undoubtedly nothing would happen. Etta Rivers was a woman strong enough to go climbing on fences and chasing horses, so she most probably would have no trouble popping out a baby should her time come early.

He washed in his makeshift shower—it wasn’t nearly so cold these days—shaved and put on some sweet-smelling aftershave, slipped into a clean shirt that Miss Latrice had starched nicely, his best jeans, and good boots. As he went to his truck, he glanced over at the house. It was a big black hulk with yellow lights showing from the living room and Etta’s bedroom upstairs. He thought he caught sight of a shadow at the window of that room.

He needed to hang it up with a woman, he thought, driving off at a good clip. That’s what he needed, the same as a rooster had to crow, made by God to do so.

The roadhouse was one of the rougher places, and the women who frequented it tended to be the rough sort—the type of woman who came up to a man and asked him point-blank if he wanted a piece. This behavior unnerved Johnny considerably. He never had felt easy with lewd talk.

He drank at the bar and fell to talking with some boys he knew from the stockyard. After a while his eyes connected with a woman across the floor. She didn’t look half bad; she had golden hair. Then it seemed like he turned around, and she was right beside him. It wasn’t far from there to going outside to his truck. She just seemed to lead him along.

Her name was Becky. She laughed easy and smelled like flowers. Johnny was getting good and excited and kissing her and fumbling with her bra, when the next thing he knew the door of the pickup came open. Surprised, he turned, and something smacked him upside the head. As the blackness was sucking him down, he felt someone shove him over and caught the scent of the woman.

When Johnny came to, his head felt like it held a gallon of sloshing water, and his fingers came away bloody from just over his left eye. He found his wallet lying beside him in the seat, and the glove compartment open, stuff from there thrown all over.

He’d been robbed, and he still had all his sperm blocking up inside him.

For a few minutes he just sat there. He thought of searching for a pint bottle under the seat, but he didn’t feel like bending down. He thought of going into the roadhouse and finding the son-of-a-bitch who’d hit him, but he didn’t see any worth in that, either. What the law said about such things was that he shouldn’t have been drinking in a dry state.

At last he started the truck and slowly headed out onto the road. For a moment his head pounded so bad, he thought he might throw up, but that settled down into a severe ache.

He drove, not really knowing where he was going, just staring into the dark where his headlights faded. Then he was at Obie’s driveway and turning in, coming up to the house that glowed softly. A hound as old as his master barked a warning.

Obie’s silhouette appeared at the door, peering out, and Johnny felt ridiculously glad to see him.

“Good God, boy,” Obie took hold of Johnny and pulled him into the house. “Come on back here to the table and let me see that.”

“It ain’t so bad really. Just stunned me some. And the forehead always bleeds like a stuck pig.”

He followed Obie through the front room, the middle room that was obviously Obie’s bedroom, and to the kitchen at the back. A radio played softly. Johnny slumped down into a chair.

Obie brought a cold cloth to press against the wound on his temple. “What happened, boy?”

“Well . . . I tried to get laid and what I got was robbed.”

Obie shook his head. “How much did you lose?”

“Five dollars. That’s all I keep on me when I go out to a roadhouse. If I need more, I got a pouch stashed back in the bed.” He chuckled dryly. “Just about got my brains knocked in for five dollars.”

Obie was shaking his head again. “Younguns . . . you got to lay off that whiskey. It’ll kill you. I’m tellin’ you truth. I know, ‘cause I been there.”

“Ain’t whiskey that did this. It was a woman.”

Obie said, “It was whiskey that stole your senses, boy.” Then he added, “Women can do that, too, I guess.”

Obie made a fresh pot of coffee—the cowboy way of throwing the grounds in the water and boiling it atop his wood-burning stove—and Johnny sat there and drank it with him and talked about which team would take the World Series and the price of cattle and pickup trucks.

Johnny told about being on the rodeo circuit, and about lying in the mud with a jeep on his knee, about that being a time he knew he’d died and seen a great light and had never again feared death or God, but had not been any less sinful.

Obie told of playing baseball and how he drank and gave it up and why and how he came back here to live with his wife who six years before had died in his arms, bled to death because the only doctor had been a white one and wouldn’t see to her. It seemed as if Obie was as lonely as Johnny and needed to talk.

The two of them dozed a bit in the early hours. When Johnny came fully awake, he found himself lying over on the table. The sky was growing light in the east.

He got up and went looking for Obie, who had moved to a big chair in the tiny front room. Grabbing up a small quilt tossed on the sofa, Johnny spread it over the old man. Then he went out to his truck, started it, and headed down the road to the Rivers place. A mist lingered on the ground; the silhouettes of horses moved in and out of it.

Stopping the pickup in front of the barn, Johnny sat there a moment, staring out the windshield. Then he got out and strode, limping heavily, into the barn, returning with a halter over his shoulder, saddle in one hand and the pad in the other. His head throbbed and his poor knee pained with every step. The sky grew lighter making the mist iridescent. The horses moved about with growing excitement and began to whinny. Johnny went straight along the corrals to the one where the red gelding waited.

“It’s time, buddy,” he murmured.

The horse came right toward the halter, as if he, too, had been waiting and knew it was time. He trembled as the halter went on, then tried to bolt, but Johnny caught the rope and jerked hard, giving the horse his first obedience lesson. He tied the horse to the fence and saddled him up, went right about it, even when he heard the back screen door of the house squeak across the morning stillness, and Etta call out, “Johnny!”

She reached the fence as he pulled the girth strap tight. She was in a white gown and flowered silky robe, barefoot, and holding her robe closed with one hand and her belly with the other, her hair curling all down around her creamy face, and her blue eyes mad as hell.

“What do you think you’re doin’?"

“I’m ridin’ this son-of-a-buck.”

“You have no right. He is
my
horse!”

“Yes, ma’ am,” Johnny said and swung himself up in the saddle, reading for the horse to go to pitching.

Etta hollered, “Johnny!” and the red gelding quivered and pranced. Johnny pulled him in a circle, and then he saw Etta flinging the gate wide. He thought for an instant that she was going to bar his way, but then the entry was clear, and he pressed the red gelding’s side, sending him straight through the gate.

Johnny caught a flash of Etta’s angry face and bright robe as they passed, then streaked down the alley and out into the freedom of the pasture.

They rode high and wide, Johnny ignoring his screaming knee and letting the horse have his head. Letting the horse take him back into the life he’d once had, where there never had been a horse he couldn’t ride or a woman he couldn’t love.

Etta scrambled up on the fence and watched him. Hair blew in her face, and she angrily pushed it back. She watched as the mist of the lower-lying pasture swallowed the red horse and the man atop him, and then out they came, brilliant in golden sunbeams breaking over the horizon.

Then she was crying so hard she could not see. Blindly, she got down from the fence and strode back to the house, burst inside, and let the screen door bang behind her.

“Johnny’s taken Little Gus. I never said he could, but he’s ridin’ him just the same.”

She went to the cabinet, got out a cup and poured it full of coffee, tossed in a heaping teaspoon of sugar, and went to sit at the table.

Latrice pulled things for breakfast from the refrigerator and spoke from its depths. “You’ve been holdin’ that horse out like a carrot. He’s gone and taken a bite.”

“A carrot?” Etta did not appreciate the way Latrice seemed to be taking Johnny’s side.

Latrice sent Etta a look over her shoulder. “You think that once Johnny Bellah gets his hands on Little Gus, he might discover the horse is not all he hopes it will be, or else he will satisfy all his longings, and then he will leave. You think the desire for the unknown horse is what has made him stay.”

Latrice smacked the iron skillet upon the burner. Etta stared at her back, at her shoulder blades moving beneath her dark blue dress.

“You can sure make somethin’ out of nothin’,” she said. Latrice cast her one of those knowing looks and then went about plopping bacon into a warming skillet.

Etta drank half the cup of coffee before it began to give her a sour stomach. She got up and went out on the porch and peered and peered, looking for Johnny and Little Gus. She saw them; they were heading back, and she waited there on the porch until they were coming through the rear pasture gate.

She went down the steps, and when she hit the yard and sharp, prickly grass, she realized for the first time that she had not put on any shoes. She ignored this and kept on walking to the edge of the yard, where she stopped and waited for Johnny to approach.