Funerals for Horses (retail) Read online

  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.

  THE SURFACE OF THE MOON

  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.

  A bus station clerk with an untrimmed mustache and visible undershirt lines says the next bus east won’t leave for over an hour. I buy a ticket to Gallup, the farthest I can afford to go. My change amounts to fourteen dollars.

  I ease my way down the street to the Starlight Casino. I’m testing two theories at once. I might be able to walk, get on a roll with it, put the pain aside. And I might be willing to think about her now, with all these years to buffer me.

  The walking is a bust. I figure I’ll be lucky to make it back to the bus station. The Mrs. Hurley part goes somewhat better.

  I limp into the casino and find the crap tables, thinking I will locate the very one. But everything changes with the seasons. The whole layout feels wrong.

  I know I am out of place, a rugged desert wanderer, a prospector, one step removed from the earth. I don’t mind. Wherever I go, I know I am out of place.

  I can see her, although I understand that she’s just a waking dream, shaking the dice in a loose fist in the air, then holding them out for Simon to blow on. The crowd loved her. Eighty-seven years old, and on her last roll ever. The one that would have to do for eternity.

  I had to tell her when it was over, and she lost almost a thousand back, wishing I’d be wrong. The crowd was with her. No, no, let her play. But Simon knew, too, and wouldn’t blow on the dice. We weren’t trying to ruin her moment, we just knew it was over.

  “What you mean, child? I’m winning.”

  But then she threw a two. Later she thanked us. It’s always easier to spot the end of somebody else’s roll.

  I hobble back to the bus station, and it feels like all the walking I can handle for the month. When I climb on the bus, I take a good look at the driver and decide he’s about fifty. Maybe he was working this route twenty-five years ago, I think. Maybe he put Mrs. Hurley off the bus.

  But then I think, even if he did, which is not likely, what would I feel about that? I suppose I would have to thank him.

  Something nags me about the ancient car trip to Las Vegas and back. There with Mrs. Hurley, back without her. Something Simon saw, or liked, or both, but I can’t reach it. It plays games with me, slipping away if I grab too hard.

  I should have walked, I think. I’ll lose the trail. But of course, I lost the trail many miles ago, though I only just now admit it. Even the hawk is gone.

  The desert rolls by the window in darkness, like the surface of the moon.

  THEN:

  On my fourth appointment with Willie, I saw a poster tacked to the bare walls of the room with different-colored push pins. A band of wild horses, galloping across a plain, throwing dirt in clouds under their hooves, coats wet, muscles long and traceable. I smiled, watched her face in the remainder of my peripheral vision. Watc
hed her light up to match me.

  Then, without warning, I shut down. I sank into the hard metal chair, turned my face to the window, staring into blankness.

  “What’s wrong, Ella? Do you want me to take it down?”

  I looked up at the poster again, deciding.

  “They’re going to go off without me. My legs aren’t long enough. I’ll never catch up.”

  She stood and began removing push pins, but I stopped her. “No, don’t. If you take it down, they’ll be gone.”

  That was the session I introduced Willie to my sister DeeDee. They got along swimmingly, I thought, and both seemed polite to each other, but then Willie suggested we up our sessions to three times a week.

  I didn’t mind.

  A few weeks later Simon called Uncle Manny. He did that now and then, every two or three months, to report our continued status as live humans. That’s how Simon found out our father had been released.

  We stood squeezed into the same phone booth on Griffith Park Boulevard, cars and buses droning past, pairs and groups of restless youth out walking for its own sake. While Simon dialed the number I watched a scared coyote dodge through lane after lane of traffic, then skitter out of the street and leap over a residential fence.

  I tried to focus on these things as Simon called our father. I heard him say, “Yeah, well, I called Manny. What else was I supposed to do? I didn’t know how to—”

  Then my hearing scoped down to near nothing, receptive only to the deep base of engine noise, and the night grew darker, like the blackness of a tunnel, or a well, broken only by the headlights of passing cars, illuminating nothing.

  “He wants us to come see him,” Simon told me, shaking me gently by the shoulders to bring me back.

  “So are we going?”

  “Well, if you feel up to it, it would be nice. He offered us some money. We need it. The money Mrs. Hurley gave us is almost gone.”

  We set off on foot down the boulevard toward home.

  I thought that money would last forever.

  We left after school the following day—or rather, after what would have been school, if I’d bothered to go. Simon took part of the afternoon off from work. We arrived in the early evening.

  The corner of the roof was still scorched. Thick tufts of grass pushed up through cracks in the concrete slab that had once formed our garage floor. I stared up into the late sun, taking in the attic windows that Simon and I had scaled at night, and the sky blackened and faded, leaving me smaller in its dark wake.

  I stepped in the door; the house felt close and heavy, infectious almost, as if sickness lived inside, waiting to attack the unsuspecting with every breath. My vision narrowed to a pinprick of light, and I held my arms out in front of me for radar and balance, and bounced off furniture anyway.

  I never saw my father.

  I heard him say, “What is this with Ella—why can’t she see?”

  “She’s fine, Dad. She’s been to doctors. She’s okay.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, if she’s so okay, why can’t she see where she’s going?”

  He took hold of me then, grabbed me by both of my bare wrists, and I screamed and twisted away from him and ran out the back door, slamming into walls and door frames and spinning away again. I caught a glimpse of dusky sky as I shot across the back yard for the fence, and I heard my brother Simon say, “She’s going to counseling. Why can’t you just leave her alone?”

  I scaled the back fence and felt my way into the three-acre woodlot, knowing there was something in there I didn’t like, but not knowing what it was, or how it could be worse than the house behind me.

  My field of vision opened like a sea urchin bubbling outward, searching. I sat in the dirt with my back against a tree, before remembering I didn’t like trees. My wrists felt hot and itchy where he touched me.

  I heard Simon a couple hundred yards away, calling my name, fading off in the wrong direction. That’s when I saw it, lying in the dirt, a yard or so off my left foot. A bright yellow disposable lighter. I figured it must be out of fluid—otherwise why would someone throw it away?—but it worked fine.

  Do it, DeeDee said, now. Quick. Before it’s too late. Remember the dog.

  I adjusted the flame all the way out, like a blowtorch, and arrested the disease before it could spread down into my hands, up my arms, take me over and own me. It didn’t hurt.

  I’d never seen Simon so upset.

  “Ella, my god, no!”

  He tackled me out onto the leafy dirt and wrestled the lighter away, all of which seemed like unnecessary histrionics to me. If he had just told me another way to keep safe, I’d have gladly put the lighter back where I found it.

  “Ella, don’t you get it? You can’t do things like this. You can’t.” He sounded so brave and grown up while his eyes welled up with tears and spilled over. “Why do you think Willie lets you stay at home? Because I told her you never hurt yourself and nobody ever hurts you.”

  I touched his face.

  “Don’t cry, Simon. If it really bothers you, I won’t do it again.”

  Then we heard our father’s voice, calling after us, and Simon threw me over his shoulder and we ran around the long way, through the gap in the fence, out the side street, and to our car.

  Before we could drive away, our father stood in front of our bumper, blocking the way, reaching into his pocket for his wallet. Simon tried to pull around him but he blocked us off again and signaled that he only wanted to give us some money.

  “Cover your wrists,” Simon hissed at me, and I crossed them behind my back. It hurt.

  “Here,” my father said through the window, his face thick and sad through the forced darkness. “You’ll need this.” He slipped Simon a wad of bills. “You need more, you call your Uncle Manny. I’ll give him some money to get to you if you need it. Anything you need. Don’t you think I worry about you? Do you know how it feels not to know where your own kids are?”

  Simon threw the Studebaker into drive and left him in our figurative dust.

  I didn’t imagine it could be any worse than not knowing where your own mother is.

  Simon took me to the emergency room, where they asked a lot of questions. I said I was playing with matches, and the fire got out of hand, and I burned myself trying to put it out.

  They bandaged my wrists and wrote a prescription for antibiotics, and something Simon could give me later for the pain, so I could sleep. They said I’d have to see a doctor again in a few days. Maybe even get skin grafts. But they let me go home.

  Simon called Willie and said I was sick, which might have made her a little bit suspicious, because she called me at home while Simon was at work during the day. I said I would come in next week when I felt better and tell her all about it, even though Simon said I shouldn’t, because Simon didn’t know I could tell her a lot of things he wouldn’t, because he doesn’t know her, and because he worries too much. I promised that nobody had hurt me in any way, and that everything would remain in control until then. She gave me her number at home and said I could call any time, if I was in trouble, or needed to talk.

  When I saw her the next week, I wore long sleeves, like Simon told me to, but when I got alone inside her room, with the galloping horses, I rolled up my sleeves and let her see my bandages.

  “Simon is scared you’ll make me go away if I hurt myself. But what if I just made a mistake once? You’d trust me not to do it again, wouldn’t you?”

  Willie’s eyes seemed to take back the heaviness they’d lost in my presence. “If you could tell me what happened and why, and I knew you really understood, I’d believe you. Unless it kept happening.”

  I told her the story of the dog DeeDee and I found over by the railroad tracks, years ago. A stray German shepherd with almost no hair. His skin was red and swollen, weeping. It hurt to look at him. We thought he’d been burned in a fire. He followed us for a while, and sat with us by the bus bench, but a man waiting for the bus told us not to touch him. He sa
id the dog had the mange, which was a little parasite that gets under his skin, and pretty soon it just takes over the whole dog. He said if we touched him, it would get under our skin, too.

  She watched my eyes during this story, but she knew me well enough by then; she didn’t interrupt. She knew I’d make my point in my own good time.

  “Simon took me to see our father. He’s back.”

  “Back from where, Ella?”

  “Where? Oh. You know, Willie, I can’t remember. Anyway, I didn’t want him to touch me, but he touched my wrists. I thought if I didn’t kill the sickness right there, it would take all of me over. I promised Simon I’d never do it again.”

  “Do you understand why that’s important, Ella?”

  I gazed off through the window to green ivy. I didn’t look at the horses, because I wasn’t sure what they’d think of me just then. They’d probably think it’s my human brain, and feel lucky themselves.

  “No, Willie, I don’t. But a promise is a promise. Besides, we’re not going to go visit him anymore.”

  “Simon’s right that this is serious, Ella. But if you keep coming in three times a week, and nothing like this happens again, I’m willing to trust you.”

  I wondered how old Willie was. Sometimes, like when I first saw the galloping horses, she looked about thirty. Now her eyes made me think she might be fifty or more. I wondered if I’d let her down in some way I didn’t understand.

  “You know, Willie, I never meant to hurt myself. I just didn’t want the disease. I wouldn’t do something against me. I don’t think anybody ever does. You must know that, Willie. Everybody’s just trying to stay safe. Even people who try to kill themselves, I bet they’re still on their own sides, Willie. They just want to kill the pain. Everybody just wants to kill the pain.”

  Willie sat with her elbow on the table, her hand shading her eyes. “I wish you knew how remarkable you are, Ella. So much deeper than anybody else I know. Even the grownups.”

  “Is that good, Willie? To be deep?”

  She took her hand down and her eyes looked moist.