Phantom Strays

“I keep seeing this one thing,” Meredith said late one Sunday night during her last semester in town. She had decided to move to Boston as soon as she had received her B.A. in art. We were sitting at the chrome table in the kitchen in front of the open oven doors. I could see our warm yellow and orange reflections on the glass of the kitchen window (Mother hadn’t completely drawn the drapes). As a small child hadn’t I seen someone else, someone quite strange and creepy, there at the table with us in a reflection on the same glass? Who it was I couldn’t remember, but I felt a disquieting shiver to think of it even vaguely. I kept imagining it to be a toad.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I see a scene… I keep seeing it, over and over, in my mind. It’s from the rodeo time of year and it happened when I was three. I stood at a window in our home out on Allen Road, when we lived in a little adobe out there before you were born?”

  “Yeah, I remember about us living on Allen Road.”

  “Well you didn’t live there. It happened before you were born, but there I was looking at this fat lady on a horse. She rode toward our house on the dirt road with all those creosote bushes between us. I couldn’t see her perfectly through the bushes. For a while she rode fine, then suddenly she couldn’t control the horse and it started bucking, and she screamed. I remember all her clothes were like dude ranch clothes for rodeo, you know?” said Meredith.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, dude ranch stuff.”

  “You mean like that dumb puppet, Howdy Doody? Like his shirts?”

  “No, not Howdy Doody. That clown wore cotton checked shirts. Hers was a lot fancier. A shiny cloth. Maybe it was a satin shirts with snaps and cactus embroidery on the pockets.”

  “Oh yeah, I know what you mean. Clown? I’m remembering something about that—”

  “She had big embroidered flowers on her pants, too. I could see her fancy clothes. Anyway, I keep seeing her on a horse the way I saw her that day. She kept getting bucked, you see, and I was watching it. She screamed during the bucking part. Nobody else watched; we were living way out. And our house was far back from the road. I used to play with Kitty Clarke and she might have been standing with me.”

  “You saw it and couldn’t forget it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you were alone?”

  “No, I just said I believe Kitty Clarke was with me. I don’t think you listen very well to other people’s stories.”

  “I do so. I always listen and that’s a really good story. I like it. Did anyone come and rescue her?”

  “I’m not sure. I think maybe they did.”

  “Do you remember an old lady who babysat us? She told us something about a clown story? It was a strange floor scrubber lady who told us a story with a clown in it? The clown killed everyone in a stagecoach?”

  “What! No. I think you just made that up.”

  “I didn’t. This lady babysat us. She…she worked at the Historical Society…that was it and Mom knew her. She scrubbed the floors down there. I remember that she didn’t drive and Dad went to get her and boy, she was a real terror. She wanted to listen to rock and roll. Dad had just bought the Magnavox stereo, but we didn’t have any rock and roll records.”

  “Mom and Dad hired a bunch of kooks to take care of us.”

  “The rodeo time was what made me think of it; you see it was on rodeo weekend that she came. You were saying something about rodeo times. And while we’re at it do you remember that you told a lie to people?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, one time you told people we had a big ranch.”

  “Oh gee, is that all, kid? I probably said worse things. How could that cause a problem?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I think it did though, for me.”

  “Sorry kid.”