“ ‘Let’s get a look at you in the bellyband,’ he said, and took down the thick girth, angling it from just behind her withers and along the forward line of her belly. He buckled it slowly, stepping back when he’d finished, drawing deep breaths. ‘Don’t you look provocative?’ he said. ‘Too tight?’ he said. ‘You don’t want it loose and it’d take more than I’ve got to do a wench like you a bruise. Nice you’re so dark. I like a dark mare. It brings out the power. I’m a bit of a dark horse myself. Well,’ he said, ‘a girl has to breathe. I’ll take that off for a bit.’ He unbuckled the bellyband, let it lie where it dropped, fallen as garter on the floor of the shop. Then he selected a bridle, setting the headstall loosely, the thin, unfastened straps vaguely wreathing her face like the struts of some extraordinary veil. He attached the bit and curb and added a set of blinders which he took from the pouch of his leather apron. ‘Eye shadow,’ he said, then removed one of the blinders. ‘Don’t you look haughty. Like some old, one-eyed whore. Let’s take that off, missy.’
“The bridle’s reins and checkreins he allowed to hang loose, then, studying them, proceeded to wind them like sandal straps about the horse’s chest and belly and flanks. He watched silently as the mare, reaching behind her with her long head, began to undo the great, loose package of itself that my uncle had made. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘aren’t we shameless, aren’t we bold?’ He scooped off the bridle and reins and, opening her jaws, pulled the bit from her mouth, transferring it, before I realized what was happening, into his own mouth, impossibly, greedily shoving all of it inside his distended cheeks. He started to gag. He stood over the looping reins of his retching. ‘No, no,’ he said breathlessly, ‘it ain’t you. Your breath’s just as fresh, as fresh—’ He vomited again, hitting the side of her muzzle. Stooping quickly, he raised a corner of his apron and wiped his mouth on the leather. The startled horse shied obliquely, prancing back and sideways away from my uncle. I thought she was going to back into the forge. So, apparently, did my uncle, who, recovering immediately, sprang forward while she was still off balance and, shoving against her haunch, managed to knock her over.
“You’d think he’d have stopped. He was a Vermonter, a canny New Englander. The owner might already be on his way back. He was still naked, the mare was too. You’d think he’d have stopped. He cradled her head for a moment in his great arms, then allowed her to rise, studying her now from underneath. You’d think he’d have stopped.
“Then maybe he did. He stood and put the bellyband on again. Working quickly, he attached the breast collar to it, tightening it across the mare’s shoulders and holding it in place with the straps that went over her back. He stepped back.
“ ‘Lewd jade,’ he said. ‘Hussy horsy, minxy mare. Piece, baggage, chippy, drab! Floozie, doxy, harlot, tart! Racy, ain’t we, in our horse brassieres?’
“He set the breeching between her loins and croup and around her buttocks. He looped a thong through both brass breeching links and tied it off tightly under her belly. Her rump suddenly jumped into place, set off like something mounted. My uncle walked around behind her.
“He’s going to cover her! My God, I thought, he’s going to cover her!
“He raised his apron. He was wearing her crupper, my uncle’s penis in the leather loop. He’d been wearing it all along, big enough all along to wear it. ‘The smith,’ he said huskily, ‘a mighty man is he,’ and loosened the loop, rolling it down the length of his cock. Then, raising the mare’s tail, he passed the loop quickly under it, buckling it to the harness so that the tail, arched now, perked in some counterfeit of swank and hauteur and pride, the beast, arranged in leather, seeming as abandoned and wanton and vainglorious as anything my uncle had yet called it, its own leathery being made for harness, for all the dressings, gauzes, slings and splints, all the bandages, swabs and tourniquets, all that Sam Browne belt kink of girdled loin, and the intricate sexual square knots of leverage, actually prosthetic perhaps, the bandoleer and bunting arrangements, the flashy, fleshy piping of possibility.
“He’s going to cover her. He’s not even going to remove his apron. He’s going to cover her.
“But he didn’t. All he did was squat behind her on his bare feet, his long testicles grazing the floor. All he did was watch.
“Then, suddenly, the mare stiffened, locked her legs and shit a steaming mound of manure bright as tobacco. And so did my uncle.
“Yes. I wondered about that part, too. It had been a good projection, I mean an easy one. The trip to Vermont was uneventful. I wasn’t even winded. What had happened to the astral telegraph? Where was the soul semaphore, the point-to-point red alert of the heart? At first I was going to ‘speak.’ I had meant to. I had my objections and chastisements and pleas all ready. I had meant to speak out.
“First I didn’t. Then I couldn’t.
“The smith, a mighty man is he. Who denied the claims of biology and brooked no precedence in love. Who would not vary a psalm or alter an iota of eulogy and who built his coffins not to custom but to paradigm. He didn’t want his children to die, he couldn’t have known that they would. I can only presume that he knew the preferences of his glands, that he had identified them from the beginning, from the time he first went into blacksmithing — he could as easily have tapped the maple trees or farmed cider or made a crop of hay — before, perhaps, perhaps from the moment he had first seen a horse saddled. Not only permitting the old-timers and cronies but actually hosting them, wearing the scratchy checkered shirts (who wanted hide next to his skin or nothing) out of some native patience and politeness, some I’ll-come-as-you-are deference and courtesy, like a man who manages to get down some food he can’t stand simply because his hostess has taken the trouble to prepare it for him. And then permitting the children as he had permitted the cronies, not a host this time but a father, and evidently a good one, possibly a great one. Not forbidding their attendance on him even after their mother had died, only — love makes no precedence, no distinction — asking of them that they settle the pecking order themselves. The glands in abeyance, their rampage not tamed but checked, whip-and-chair’d up onto the heavy platforms of decorum, and his back never once turned.
“As I say, astral projection can take you so far and no further. As I say, it can’t even get me past the Rockies. As I say, it is often a cold comfort, well intentioned but of as much real use as the casserole of a condolence caller. It can clear the air though. Sometimes. A little, a little it can. That blazing sprint of the soul can clear the air, and perhaps may even explain the good weather, the briskness of the day, its sharp shadows, focused as ink on a bright page.
“Faithfully,
LEWIS PRESS RINGLINGER”
Kinsley was across the room watching him read, knowing, the boy believed, just where George was in the letter at any given time, not only which page but which paragraph, which sentence.
“Well?” the man said as George looked at the signature. “What do you think?”
“What did he mean ‘the boy you show this letter to’?”
“Ah,” the big man said.
“What did he mean?”
Kinsley smiled. “Perhaps only that we’re being watched.”
“Watched,” George said.
“It’s the West he can’t get to, not Florida.” George looked in the corners of the room, on the lookout for the telltale point of greasy light Ringlinger had spoken of. “I’ll tell you what I think,” Kinsley said. “I think it’s the pornography business we’re in. Death and the supernatural are merely the covers it takes. I think we’re in the pornography business, that the religion we practice, the hoodoo consolation we give away, is sexual. I’d like you to work the seances with me. I want you to be my contact, my messenger boy from Death. You’re not twelve yet. I want you to work nude. No pasties, no Indian loincloth or oversized dressing gown with its planets and crescents and five-points-to-the-star astronomy. Naked. Nude. No one would touch you. You won’t have to touch anyone. It will be dark. No one will even be able to make out your face.