The Colors of Horses
Old Egypt
Well, the horse had been buried, and then it had come back up, heaved out of the earth by some sort of antigravity, lying on its side, the teeth in a loose dirt-crusted smile, the freckled flesh of the lips and nose slack under the snowflake hair, the lunette of the upper nostril an entrance to the mysteries of the body. One bloody ear, stiff as though listening, unraveled mane ropes, the eyes out of sight. It was Old Egypt and she wished to god Fay McGettigan hadn’t shown him to her, never.
The thing on the roof
She came back to the ranch around that time in the summer of 1980 but not alone; with her she had Vergil Wheelwright who had been in Vietnam; she had written to them, this one was for keeps, the real one. He was coming across the country with her, she was bringing him to her mother and father whom she had not seen for five years, not since Simon Ults, her first husband, shot the horse and her father shot Simon. She didn’t tell them that Vergil had been married before to a nurse he met in Vietnam, a bad marriage of crazy drinking, drugs, fighting and punch-ups, which broke apart when Lily, the wife, put a restraining order on him, divorced him, and moved away to parts unknown. He seemed to be over it.
She talked sporadically, told Vergil wait until he met old Fay, must be seventy years old anyway, the ranch hand who had pretty much brought her up, described the glass milk bottles of coins he had in his trailer, his skill with horses, his knowledge of equine disease. There was a picture of him, a photograph stuck to the wall with a pin, she said, taken when he was a kid—God knows who or why anybody pointed a camera his way—and he’s sitting on a wooden keg, barefoot, maybe twelve years old, pants just rags, wearing a man’s jacket and there aren’t any buttons on it, just these short pieces of stick sewed on, probably with a grain-sack needle threaded with twine, they’re curved, those needles, and inch-long pieces of stick where the buttons should have been, he poked them through the buttonholes and they worked. She talked more of Fay than of Kenneth and Bette, her parents. She told him of the times Fay had seized her ankles and lifted her high in the air upside down, the giddy swung feeling, her arms outstretched and fingers wide, whirling through the air, the yellow horizon spun hollow, the horses streaked and warped by unfocusing eyes, and Fay singing “and our funds was running low …,” some song he knew. He knew hundreds of old songs that no one else remembered, a lot of them dirty cowboy songs, but Irish songs too which he sang in a sad but beautiful tenor while accompanying himself on a little squeezebox.
She described the whirling as though it were an extraordinary event in her childhood, but, thought Vergil, it was as common as grass, every kid got whirled; about the shooting, details he greedily wanted to know, she said very little. She was slick at veering away from the subject. He kept glancing at her, taking in the familiar dry-wheat hair that rose from her broad forehead, the colorless eyebrows and eyelashes that she sometimes darkened with a brown pencil, a long nose that reddened in cold weather, a nose with such narrow nostrils it seemed she might have difficulty breathing; indeed, indeed, she suffered sinus infections. Her mouth was thin and uncolored. He thought of it as a Nordic face, though she said not. He didn’t know what she was and what did it matter anyway? He liked pale women.
They were still two states away but it was the west, all right, and they were driving down a red dirt road. In a curving railway cut, the road crossed the tracks between cliffs so stuffed with fossils they seemed to be pouring down, eroding before their eyes into the crushed stone beside and under the ties. A tie was on fire, burning, sending up a thick rope of white smoke that coiled into the still air. The curve of the rails reflected light and their own smoothness, nothing more.
They stopped, could see where someone had built a fire of sticks and dry weeds on the tie and left it smoldering. He kicked dirt on it, she poured their jug of spring water and it steamed as though the devil were underneath, his horns just below the tie. Vergil crouched beside her, watching her serious, frowning face, the milky, untanned legs smooth and flexed, nacreous polish on her toenails, bare in earth-folk sandals, and he thought that he was doing this for her, this trip to people he guessed would be trying and awful. The parents of his first wife, Lily, had guided their lives by astrological signs and spontaneous hunches, fed him frozen tacos and canned pears, made him sit smiling while they took instant photographs, telling him not to look so serious. He had married Lily three weeks after he came back from Vietnam. In thirty-six hours he had traveled from Da Nang to Travis Air Force Base to the New Hampshire mill town where he’d grown up. He hung around the house for two hours while his father talked about how he should start looking for a good job and his mother pushed a bowl of popcorn saturated with margarine at him. He went to Boston and holed up in a hotel, spent the week on the phone talking feverishly to Lily, telling her to get a plane to Boston, they had to get married. He flushed the toilet thirty times a day just to see the water cascade.
“Why would somebody set a tie on fire?”
“It was Jesse James. Stop the fucking Express Limited and rob the passengers.”
A few miles later he braked hard for a Brangus cow standing on the center line, a calf beyond the fence.
“Fuck! Fucking cow.”
They went along, the junk in the back seat shifting and sliding. Josephine, puffing up the idea of adventure, had tried to find a yard sale in every state; in upstate New York they’d bought a painted plywood sign, BLESS THIS MESS, in Pennsylvania a faceless Infant of Prague and a copy of Zane Grey’s Stairs of Sand, in Ohio a twenty-pound cane encrusted with glassies and a leather pillow with the burned-in image of a running ostrich, in Indiana the bullfighter ashtray. Illinois? Nothing but heavy truck traffic, innumerable tollbooths for ten cents, twenty cents, forty-five cents, until Vergil made a wrong exit on the edge of Chicago and she saw the yard sale first, the sawhorse table in front of a dumpy grime-stained house, the cardboard sign—MOVING TO TEXAS.
Josephine touched the doll, the goose lamp, picked up a button and let it fall, held up the bomb-shaped saltshaker lettered FAT BOY.
She said, “the winnah!” and paid a dollar. Vergil said, “fucking Lawrence Welk special,” picked up the old accordion, made it wheeze a sick chord or two. Three bucks.
He mumbled, “what the fuck are we going to do with this shit?” He put the saltshaker in the glove compartment, the accordion in the back seat with the rest of the stuff. “OK,” he said, “that’s Chicago. What’s next, fucking Iowa?”
“Fucking Iowa. Let’s get out of here.” The streets were getting bad, trashy, decayed buildings, the sidewalks filled with black people.
“Fucking try this,” he said, shooting up a ramp, but it was blocked off halfway up and he had to back down, twisting in the seat and looking out the rear window. They could hear the roar of the highway above them.
“Christ, why not fucking block it at the bottom? OK, there’s gotta be another one. Gotta hit it if we just go west under the highway, whyn’t you roll us a joint?” It seemed a long time, a dangerous long time driving through the teeming streets, people drifting slantwise against traffic and lights, drunks lurching out, swirls of paper and gaudy plastic trash ankle-deep, every other shop a liquor store or a fortune-teller, and dark faces turning toward them, looking at the car, looking at them, clusters of young big men in athletic shoes and shirts slouching along, kicking, tossing, restlessly looking around.
“Jesus,” said Josephine. “How’d we get down here?” But Vergil wasn’t talking.
A man with a scissoring walk glared at them, mimed throwing something, and as though the gesture was a command, one of the kids bent down and picked up a pint bottle leaning against a graffitied wall, heaved it lazily in their direction. It broke in front of the car, flecks of glass pattering on the hood.
“Motherfucker asshole,” said Vergil.
“Thank God he missed,” said Josephine, gripping the edge of the seat, wishing the car had tinted windows.
“The fucking
dickhead missed on purpose. Just a symbolic throw—these fucking guys play basketball sixteen hours a day and he could probably hit a fruit fly with a fucking grain of rice from two hundred feet.”
“That’s comforting.” In the side-view mirror she could see them all pretending to hurl things, maybe pitching more glass bottles they couldn’t see, shining missiles tumbling through the air at fifty or sixty miles an hour to take out the rear window.
“There it is.” A car ahead of them swerved up a ramp and they followed, in seconds bursting into the stream of elevated highway traffic pouring west, the beginning of the rush hour. The traffic began to slow, then creep, and far ahead, by leaning out the window, she saw flashing red and blue bubble lights.
“Accident.” On they crawled looking down at a brick and chain-link-fence wasteland, hearing a tremendous pounding and pulsing from a factory, seeing a grimy bar with a photograph of Pope John Paul II under a beer sign, BUD, a desolate slum of brick buildings with bad windows, the exteriors marred with wires, drainpipes, fire escapes, cables, a few small ugly shops on ground level, BARBER, RESTAURANT SUPPLIES, a prostitute leaning on a railing, glossy black wig rising from her peeled-egg forehead, carcasses hanging in a doorway under a faded sign, BANJO MEATS, SMALL BABY LAMBS, and the open backs of trucks. They crept past pylons and Vergil said, “no, it’s road construction,” as they came abreast of an orange sign, DETOUR, and a wattled cop who waved them back into the warren of streets below and a gauntlet of traffic lights.
“Christ! Will we ever get out of this?”
They waited at a light, the traffic choked and trembling all around them, the ruddy flare of brake lights giving the scene heat and feeling, cars and trucks packed in as tightly as shells in an oyster bed. The light changed again and again and a few cars tried to escape the jam, locking the metal knot tighter, when they heard something land on the roof, a thud and then a scrabbling sound. A mask of fur and red eyes hung over the windshield for a few seconds and disappeared.
“Ah!” cried Josephine, and Vergil said, what the fuck was that. There was a scampering overhead and it was gone, whatever it was. In another lane someone was patting a horn, bluh bluh bluh bluh.
“There it is.” Josephine pointed at a creature bounding over the cars ahead of them, saw it leap onto the roof of a white delivery van, the rear door lettered SPEEDY. The jam began to open up, traffic crawling away from the trouble, a lockup of more flashing bubbles and street glass, and they jerked away in their lane, but the next ramp was also closed and the traffic diverted into a long underpass.
“What the hell was it, a fucking monkey?” The white van was eight or ten vehicles ahead of them. Near the end of the underpass, the grey hole opening into new streets, they felt the jolt of the wheels going over something.
“There’s a ramp.” Josephine looked back in the side mirror. There was nothing to see. It could have been anything.
As Vergil plunged once more into the westward stream of cars and trucks, she slumped in the seat, calm again and even loving, watched the sky, itself a tinted windshield, clear near the horizon and dense blue halfway up the dome. An isolated cloud, a strip of torn tulle, then another and another, erasures of scumbled strokes, dirty and pink. A black dot appeared, moving swiftly toward the highway from the south and crossing almost directly above them—a child’s Mylar balloon, she could see now, and watched it until it disappeared, a fleck of darkness. The road surface dimmed, the blazing headlights of oncoming vehicles filled their eyes despite the lucent sky, amber and rose and filling now with unknown clouds shot with patchy glimmers.
“Let’s find a place and stop,” she said. She longed for a bath and a drink and an hour trying to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the fat book sliding back and forth all day on the nylon carpet by her foot. She was only on page fifty-three. He didn’t answer but she knew he was thinking of lying naked on the bed, the ice in his drink clicking, the hay-scented smoke muddling the television glare, watching the news, too tired to go out for dinner, why didn’t she call room service and get whatever, get it and get on the bed with him and get down over his stiffening prick, do some of that good stuff, why the fuck not. What the hell was wrong with her anyway, frigid? And she would say no and do what he wanted. She switched on the radio, NPR, a drawn-out story of a man who manufactured bungalows of recycled plastic for tropical climates. They passed an overturned chemical fertilizer truck, the wheels still spinning, a drift of white across the highway.
“It had to be a fucking monkey,” said Vergil. “Fucking escaped. I ever tell you about the time I ate fucking monkey brains in Nam?”
Roads
Coming out of Coaldust the next day, he asked her, how many fucking custard stands do you think are built on sacred rocks? She couldn’t answer that. Well, how many fucking roads transecting the fucking medicine ravines? Didn’t know the answer. I bet you think this fucking country is real, he said.
“Real what?”
By this time there was red-edged cloud over every black building and from some buildings issued vapors colored by the time of day. The exhaust from the power plant thick and beautiful like violet cloud, the moiré waste ponds azure and cobalt, magenta, the bulldozed earth heaped in vast demilunes that jet passengers peering through face-sized glass might see as overlapping fruit slices of a topographic tarte aux pommes. The black coal cone of a railroad tipple rising Egyptian in the thin dust, a hut with a green roof and an oil tank, window frames painted red. To the side lay the raddled ground once high plains prairie, once hissing grass stirred by wind.
Vergil drove the interstate hard, past the trailer towns with two steps in front of every door, antennaed roofs, torn curtains and open windows close to the superhighway with its blur and roar, and beyond these trailers a hundred, a thousand other trailers, a yellow sign outside a trailer café, JUMP INN. Above, the clouds in holy knots and saturated colors that transcended neon hues. Stinging hot air from trucks, the smell of diesel and hot rubber; they were coming up on night and rain.
He pointed at a darkening bluff, said up there might be stenciled hands, marks of life, remembrance. Signs and mazes on the blackest rocks, a trail of bird feces adding a curve where nothing else was curved. Over there was baked white rock that should never have been touched, yet used as a military range, turned into a crusted landscape the texture of burned scrambled eggs but pierced with the deep holes of bomb craters, still strewn with wrecked trucks, some collapsed mowing machines and reapers, a bulldozer flaking into the pocked soil. Everything over there deliberately ruined, he said, to prove it could be ruined.
The next day they crossed the river. Plenty fucking deep, he said. The greasy khaki water gnawed a quarter of a mile down into the brown rock, pulling down slopes and cliffs, licking out caves, long horizons of limestone and fossil beds, thickened shells in white reeds like bird bones, sheets of stone. And the great dull bridge itself, a ruler road atop its red arches footed in concrete, the monotonous railings more of an idea than safety catchers.
Then it was the end of the day again, at a rest area above a sulfurous pool, a scummed shallow oval of alkali water studded with beer cans, baby seats, wadded plastic, rocks. Slopes of hills around them, thirty-seven-degree slopes navy blue against a faint sky, the horizon unsettled a little. The lights on, every door open, the radio blaring, she got out and crouched on the dirt, feet wide but not wide enough to escape spatters on the ankles, and she stared at the car’s white fenders. In the looming darkness the car was as nostalgic as a lighted window in a northern village.
Fay McGettigan
Bette Switch, in tight designer jeans and a man’s sweatshirt, opened the door, embraced Josephine, gave Vergil her hand. Her scent mingled bourbon and perfume and tuna fish. She led them into the living room, decorated in the western style with log furniture and a bearskin rug, parchment lampshades, the edges laced with plastic simulated rawhide.
“Is this your first time in the west, Vergil?” She didn’t look at him.
/> “No. I’ve been out here a dozen times. Worked on a fucking ranch a couple of summers when I was in college, the Briggins Triple-Y, about fifty miles west of here, over in the fucking Gaunt River country. Thirty-two thousand acres. Ocean of grass. And so forth.”
“Well, I think you’ll like the wide open spaces. It’s a very healthy rural life. Kenneth and I usually get away in the winter, leave it all in Fay’s hands, he’s our ranch hand, I’m sure Jo told you about him, they were great pals when she was a little girl. We were on Montserrat last winter, in the Caribbean—I could live there forever, that blue-green water and white sand. And this year we’re going to Samoa. Have you been in the South Seas, Vergil?”
“Yeah, I was in Western Samoa, on Upolu, two years ago.”
“If you get a chance you ought to go—it’s exquisite. The resort we’re going to has a black sand beach. Anyway, here we are in Montana, so let’s make the best of it. Cocktails at five after you two freshen up.”
“I don’t drink,” lied Vergil, crazy for a drink and with the same feeling a fireman gets when the burning stairs behind him collapse.