If Wishes Were Horses (5 page)

She stopped, imagining the compact landing in the dried winter weeds and lying there, sinking into the orange sandy dirt and rusting, forever ignored and forgotten. Just as her hurt had been all these years.

No.

Wrapping the compact in her tight fist, she closed the window and left the room. Realizing she was barefoot, she stopped to retrieve her shoes from the bathroom floor. At the guest room she slipped into her coat Latrice had laid across the bed. Then she tiptoed down the back stairs that came out in the kitchen pantry.

She was caught up now by fury long pressed down into deep recesses where it had grown like yeast in volume and strength until it no longer intended to be restrained.

When he saw the gal, Johnny Bellah was out in the corral with the red horse, studying its feet. In Johnny’s opinion, the most important part of a horse was its feet. Lots of poor horses had been sold by being shown in tall grass. Johnny had pulled that trick a time or two himself. He didn’t feel guilty about it. If a fellow was stupid enough not to look at a horse’s feet, then he deserved to get took.

The young gelding appeared born of an even temperament and had obviously been handled. Once Johnny got him hemmed up into a corner, he allowed Johnny to pick up first one foot and then the other. He was a little squatty son-of-a-gun, rangy and not at all much to look at, but Johnny still had to look at him anyway, so there he was, bending over, the high breeze tugging at his hat, when the horse stiffened.

Johnny looked over to see the gal on the back porch and thought:
Well now
.

The woman—Roy Rivers’s widow, he knew now and recognized by her dress and coat—hung on to the porch post and put on her shoes. The action seemed a mite odd. Then she lit out across the yard, coming toward him. It was his first sight of her hair, shiny honey curls blowing in the breeze. The wind caught her coat, and Johnny saw with something of a start that she was pregnant.

It struck him as quite tawdry, a man dying in a lover’s bed and leaving at home a pregnant wife. He had overheard comments made at the funeral—obviously he hadn’t quite caught it all—but being a man who didn’t care to indulge in gossip, he hadn’t discussed the subject. He figured there was a lot he didn’t know, a lot even those people doing the talking didn’t know. Besides, Roy Rivers’s business had been his own.

Johnny remembered then that he was standing in Roy Rivers’s corral, and he felt a little embarrassed. It was possibly a rude move on his part, taking the liberty of going into a corral and messing with a horse not his own.

The gal wasn’t coming toward him, however; she hadn’t even seen him at all. She was heading for the old Ford sitting beside the barn. The horse brushed past Johnny and stuck a curious head over the fence, but the gal paid him no mind. She got into the Ford and tried to start it up. Johnny was surprised when it cranked, for about fifteen seconds, sluggishly with its last dying breaths. Then it went completely dead, which Johnny didn’t think should come as any great surprise. Weeds were growing up around its tires; that Ford was old and couldn’t have been driven since last summer.

Johnny, reticent about calling attention to himself, watched the gal get out of the car and struggle to get the hood up. He couldn’t leave her to do such stuff, of course, so he went toward her, his bum knee protesting since he’d been standing a bit long.

“May I help you, ma’am?” he asked while still inside the corral. He thought it best to alert her to his presence before approaching closely. As it was, she spun around, her hand pressed over her heart.

It was Johnny’s first good look at her face that had before been thoroughly covered by veiling. He saw eyes big and blue, the bluest, most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. Eyes a man could fall into.

Then he realized she was staring at him, and that he had been staring at her in a most impolite manner

He shifted his gaze, saying, “Uh . . . I let myself be forward and took a look at the colt. I didn’t mean any harm.” He gestured at the car. “Could I be of assistance, ma’ am?”

"Oh . . . yes, please.” She drew her gaze from him and motioned toward the car. “I thought maybe if we could clean the battery cables, it might start.”

Johnny had high doubts about the car ever starting, but he slipped through the fence to open the hood just the same. He cast quick glances at the gal as he did so, and noticed she cast him a couple of curious looks, too, in the manner of a man and woman who are strangers, yet suddenly thrown close together.

“Would you have a pocket knife?” she asked, even as she impatiently started right in trying to loosen the cables from the battery terminal by hand.

“Sure . . . let me pry them up for you.”

The gal gave way for him, but as he worked on the corroded cables, she stood close, giving advice as to how he could loosen them. She had that sweet smell about her, like women do. While the dark bowels of the engine were full in his face, he kept thinking of her blue eyes.

He got the cables and the terminals clean and put back together. “I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know a lot about engines, ma’am, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this to help much.”

She only glanced at him, went around, slipped into the seat, and tried the key again.

The starter still didn’t turn over, didn’t even give out so much as a click. Johnny felt a little at a loss at not having helped her. He might not know about engines, but he had noticed in the past that a person could feel death in mechanical things just like living things. This car felt dead. He looked through the windshield at the gal, wondering about her and Roy Rivers.

She got out from behind the wheel and slammed the door hard. Pushing back the honey-brown hair the breeze was whipping into her blue eyes, she said, “Could I borrow your truck?”

The request startled him.

He gazed at her, wondering why she wouldn’t ask someone in the house—a friend or relative? And she looked to be in something of a state. He didn’t think she needed to be driving his truck in a state.

“Well now, ma’am . . . I’m livin’ in that truck right now,” he answered, rubbing the back of his neck. He didn’t want to be impolite by refusing outright.

“I don’t want to take it from you,” she said, her voice having an impatient edge. “I only need to go up to Chickasha for a bit. Maybe an hour.”

Johnny thought that he had just eaten a fine meal out of her house. He considered as he looked over at the red colt that was nibbling what weeds he could reach beneath the bottom rail.

“I guess I could drive you. It has a tricky clutch.” He truly doubted she could handle the clutch. She might lose control.

She looked a little relieved, but without bothering with a thank-you, the gal turned and went on ahead of him to his pickup. Johnny followed, his bum knee slowing him down. He never liked to hurry with it; the way he gimped along made him feel awkward and like a worrisome old man when he hurried. When he got behind the wheel, he saw she had pushed aside stuff in the seat and slung her feet over his bundles in the floorboard. She slumped down, hiding.

Johnny glanced at the house, then down at her. She looked a bit uncomfortable. He was a little uncomfortable.

“Will you just go on,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked out the windshield and started the truck.

Once they were headed along the road, she sat up. He told her she could roll the window up, if she wanted, but she shook her head and let the wind bat her hair about her face.

She looked very young. A girl, Johnny thought, but with a woman’s eyes. His gaze slipped down to her belly. She had pulled her coat closed, and he might not have thought her pregnant, if he hadn’t already seen. And he had seen. He wondered about Roy Rivers running around on such a woman. It was funny how a man soaked up gossip, despite not wanting to pay it heed.

He saw her glance down at the seat between them—at the fancy china plates and the silver fork that belonged in her dining room.

“I didn’t have a chance to take the plates back inside,” he explained. Then, not wanting her to think he was just any old freeloader, he added, “I wanted to pay my respects, but it was a little crowded in there, so I came on outside.”

Somehow, his explanation came out sounding as if he had been totally intent on the food, which was the truth of it. He figured Roy Rivers owed him enough to give him a meal.

“I didn’t think you were stealin’ two plates and a fork,” the gal said. “What did my husband owe you?”

Johnny was taken by surprise, and it was a second before he said, “Eight hundred dollars.”

“Well, I don’t have it,” she said, turning her face away, and tucking her hair behind her ear.

Johnny didn’t know what to say. Talking about money in this particular mourning moment seemed in poor taste. But the gal seemed like she was just going to let it all go at that—that her saying she didn’t have it should serve. Johnny did not think that Roy Rivers’s dying changed the fact money was owed him. He expected the Rivers estate to pay up. Johnny needed that money.

The funeral meal was the most substantial Johnny’d had in almost a week, the amount of time he had been sinking ever onward to flat broke. Today he had begun to consider what he would pawn—his last remaining army medal, or one of the two silver belt buckles he had left. He had a nice bit left, but it wouldn’t bring much. Maybe his handmade snakeskin boots. He thought a time or two about his saddle, but he didn’t think he was that far down yet. He had eight dollars left and a full belly. Surely things were looking up.

“You can turn left here at the grocery store,” the gal said, startling him out of his thoughts. “That way’s a little shorter.”

Johnny put on brakes and made the turn, causing his tires to squeal. He continued to think hard about what was appropriate to say to the gal. He felt something should be forthcoming on his part, and it would be best that it lead into the subject of the eight hundred dollars he was owed.

Finally he came out with, “I’m sorry about your husband, Missus Rivers. He was as fine a man as any I have ever worked for.” He thought she might ask him about the work he had done.

The gal cast him a sideways glance through her windblown hair and didn’t say anything at all, which gave Johnny the impression that he might as well refrain from speech altogether. The remaining twenty-minute drive seemed awfully long.

When they got to Chickasha, she directed him through the streets and then to turn down an alleyway behind some swank houses with careful lawns and tall elms and maples, pretty much leafless but heavy-budded.

Johnny had the swift thought that maybe she was going to rob someone. Maybe she was going to kill someone. He didn’t know why his mind had the tendency to run in such directions. He had always been a man possessed of a great imagination.

She told him to stop at a clapboard garage, the sort that looked like it had once had a chauffeur’s apartment upstairs, but it wasn’t used anymore. There was a brick walk leading across a neat backyard to a big white house.

“Wait here for me, okay?” she said and hopped out.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, tamping down his irritation at her high-handed manner. In Johnny’s opinion irritation generally served no purpose except to ruin a good mood. He didn’t like poor moods, and he felt he needed to make allowance for the gal, being recently widowed and pregnant.

She didn’t hear his sarcasm anyway, didn’t even cast him a backward glance, intent as she was on going to the house. As she rounded the hood, he looked at her hand that was stuffed into the pocket of her coat. Concern nipped at him again. He sure hoped she didn’t have a gun in there. He would then be an accessory.

Johnny watched until she was hidden by the corner of the garage. Then he took off his hat and raked his fingers through his hair, wondering what he had gotten into. Why he had gotten into it, the way he seemed to get into a lot of predicaments in his life. Predicaments just seemed to trail after him. Thinking this made his mood dip low.

He rubbed his aching knee and thought about driving off, but he couldn’t let go of his eight hundred dollars that easily. Besides, he had nowhere to go. He’d seen a roadhouse on the way into town, but like as not it wouldn’t open until nearer dark. Thinking about the roadhouse, though, made him think of the bottle of Jim Beam in his glove box, and he drew it out and took a couple of swigs.

Thoughts passed across his mind—his money, and the red horse at the Rivers place, and the big barn with the hand’s room he’d seen inside it. And the gal’s blue eyes.

He had told the gal he would wait for her, and he generally tried to follow through with his word.

He drank a few more swigs from the whiskey to ease the aching in his knee. Then he turned on the radio. Music usually lifted him up. Hank singing “Kawliga” came out of the round speaker, and Johnny immediately felt a little better. As he rolled himself a smoke, he patted his boot to the rhythm. Then he dug behind his seat and found the current book he was reading,
The Foxes of Harrow
, by Frank Yerby. The binding was a little warped from where it had been thoroughly soaked sometime before he came upon it at the Salvation Army store. He forced the book open straight and propped it on the steering wheel to read, while he waited for Roy Rivers’s widow.

Etta felt herself carried along by the one fervent thought, and that was telling Corinne Salyer a thing or two. She had in times past imagined herself doing so, but what she had perceived as good sense and refinement had held her back. Also uncertainty of consequences.

Well, Roy was dead now. Etta didn’t think consequences could get any worse than that. She intended to have the satisfaction she had long forgone with Corinne. She wanted satisfaction even more than she wanted coffee.

The maid was surprised to see her at the back door, of course. Etta drew herself up and said, “Would you please tell Miss Corinne that Missus Rivers is here to see her.” She wished she had worn her hat. It gave her courage.

The maid said, “I’m sorry, Missus Rivers, but Miss Corinne ain’t here.”