And then the last thing, the goddamned frosting on the goddamned cake: the horses. This was the best work there was. There was something about a horse that he loved. They told no lies and if you handled them well, they responded. He never met one that was ambitious or jealous or hypocritical. They were honestly stupid creatures, strong and dumb as oxen, but with that magic component that he so loved in animals even when he’d hunted them, which he did no more: some magic would come over them and in a flash they’d go from grazing herbivores to sheer dancing beauty on the hoof. To watch them run—especially, say, under the tutelage of some small girl like the one that owned Billy or the one that was his own and would grow in time to be a horsewoman herself—to watch them run, all that muscle playing under the skin, all that dust ripping up beneath their powerful hooves, by God, that was a kind of happiness that could be found in no bottle and in no rifle and he’d looked for happiness in both places.
He worked Billy. It was called lunging; the horse is on a tether and if you work it around in circles, cantering twenty feet out on a lunge line, driving it with a lunge whip or, as now, if you’ve bonded with the horse, with voice alone.
“Come on now, Billy,” Bob crooned, and Billy’s muscles splayed and flexed as the horse rotated around Bob, though to Bob it was straight ahead of him, because he was rotating with it. The dust rose and clung to the gray’s sweaty shoulders; he’d need a good rubdown afterwards, but that was all right, because they were coming to get Billy that afternoon.
Twenty minutes. When Billy had begun to recover, Bob had started lunging him, to get the softness and soreness out of his limbs, get those muscles hard and sleek and defined again, get him back to what he’d once been. In the beginning, the animal had balked, still unsure because the ulceration had eaten into his vision and he only saw 60 percent in the bad eye, and could only go seven or eight minutes before beginning to act out; now he did twenty minutes three times a day, no problem, and was looking as if he could show again soon.
“Okay, boy,” Bob called, and began to draw in the lunge line that ran to a halter called a caveson. Slowly, he brought the horse in and at last halted him. He snapped off the line, removed the caveson and threw a halter over him. Now he’d walk the animal for another twenty minutes to cool him down; you never put a hot horse away. Then he’d wash him off. Mrs. Hastings and Suzy would pick him up at three, and it would work out just fine. Billy would be gone back to his life.
You had to do something and this was it for Bob. His marine pension still came in, his wife, Julie, still worked three days at the Navajo reservation clinic, and sometimes more if necessary, and there was just enough for everybody to have everything they needed.
“Daddy?”
Nicki was four, blond, and a tough little thing. It’s good to raise them on a ranch twenty miles from town, he thought: teach them to get up early and go feed the animals with you, form their character early to hard work and responsibility, as his had been formed, and they’ll turn out fine. He had been raised with a father lost to grotesque tragedy; nothing like that would happen to his child.
“Yes, YKN4?”
“Billy’s sweaty.”
“Yes, he is, baby girl. We got him lathered up fine. Just a good workout. Now we got to get him cooled down.”
“Are they coming to take Billy today?”
“Yes, baby girl, they are. He’s all better now. See, some scars, some vision loss, but other than that, he’s okay. We got him through it.”
“I’ll miss Billy.”
“I’ll miss him too. But he has to go back to his life. That girl Suzy, she’s missed him too the last four weeks. Now it’s her turn to be happy.”
YKN4 wore jeans and Keds and a little polo shirt. She was, as are all children who pass the better part of their times in barns among horses, dirty and happy. She bobbed along beside her father as he took Billy in slow, cooling circles around the corral until finally the animal’s breathing had returned to normal.
“You gonna wash him down, Daddy?”
“Help me, honey?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You are such a big girl, YKN4,” said Bob, and his daughter’s face knitted up and laughed.
YKN4 took the horse by the halter line and drew it into the barn, where she strained to link it to a rope. The big animal yielded entirely to her bossy directions. She didn’t give it a chance and she didn’t back down. “Come on, you big old dopey thing,” she shouted, shoving against its shoulder to move it backwards. She brought another line over and clipped it to the halter, effectively tying the horse in the middle of a stall.
“Can I give him a carrot, Daddy?”
“Let me finish, honey.”
Bob turned on the hose and fixed a pail of soapy water, then moved to the horse and began to rhythmically sponge it, neck to shoulders, shoulders to withers, down each muscular leg.
“Daddy,” said the girl.
“Yes, honey?”
“Daddy, there was a man.”
Bob said nothing at first. A little steam gathered behind his eyes, a little fire. “A skinny man. Thick hair, dark. Looked intense?”
“What’s intense, Daddy?”
“Ah. Like he’s galloping only he’s just standing still. Not a smile nowhere on him. Face all tight like a fist.”
“Yes, Daddy. Yes, that’s it.”
“Where was he?”
“He was parked just down the road from where the bus let me off this morning. Rosalita looked at him and he looked away.”
“In a pickup truck? White?”
“Yes, Daddy. Do you know him? Is he nice? He smiled at me. I think he’s nice.”
“He’s just a fool boy with the idea I can make him rich and famous. He’ll get tired. He’ll go away. I thought he got the message but I guess he’s more stubborn than I give him credit for.”
Would they ever leave him alone? You get your goddamned picture on a magazine cover and the whole world thinks you got enough secrets in you to write a best-seller. Over the years, no end of assholes had come at him. How did they find him? Well, it was like his address was out on some nutcase Internet, and all the losers and loonies came sniffing along. Some weren’t even American. The goddamned Germans were the worst. They offered him money, anything, for ah interview. But he was all done with that. He’d had the worst kind of fame, and it was enough for him. He was done with that.
“Did he bother you, honey?”
“No, Daddy. He just smiled.”
“If you see him again, you tell me, now, and I’ll speak to him, and then he’ll go away. Otherwise, we’ll just wait until he tires himself out.”
Many of them just disappeared after a while. Their ideas were so absurd and ill formed. Some of them didn’t even want to write about him and make money; they just wanted to see him and draw something from his presence, from the thing that his life had been. So stupid. His life wasn’t a monument or a symbol or a pattern: it was his life.
It seemed for a time the boy vanished. Then he was back again one night, sitting patiently in the truck across the road. Julie was back; they’d eaten and were sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea and watching as the sun set behind the low mountains in perfect serenity.
“He is stubborn.”
“Damn fool boy.”
“At least he keeps his distance. He has some manners.” In their time, people had pulled into the yard, jumped out and begun offering contracts, setting up camera lights, glad-handing, carrying on, sure they were onto something big, they’d found El Dorado at last. Bob had several times called the Sheriff’s Office, the last time for the Germans, who were extremely obnoxious.