Call It Horses by Jessie Eerden (the reading list .TXT) 📕

short-sleeved button-up, both sitting up front breathing a righteous air, or an air of relief at my life locking into a notch they finally understood. The twins there, still boys to me but not really boys, Ron slight with feathery hair and Benji arms crossed and face set square like Rex’s. Beside them, cousin Tuffie, preferring black rayon blouse and face powdered pale, and the oldest one my age, my almost-sister, Belinda, her two toddlers left with a sitter. Belinda bursting from her silk dress’s neckline, her tapered waist, her hair in a blond-brown pile of pinned ringlets that made her everywhere soft. No bridesmaids or groomsmen to flank us, only the reluctant Baptist preacher. Lottie would be a spare bundle of gray dress and crocheted shawl on Clay’s arm. A gathering of bodies with hearts beating in the crabgrass, a man and wife up front almost gauzy, somehow resisting witness.

I could remember what you’d written me, Ruth, about the heartbeat of the world. You’d once gone three weeks to the Sinai Desert and had never been that alone in your life, you wrote, and something made you hear the heartbeat—what was it? Was it the ardent, clarifying work of aloneness? I heard voices up above and the tuning gospel band, Stew’s bass guitar easing into sound, Stew with his chiseled, unreadable face. And underneath that, I heard the low tremor of the generator for the amp.

Mave opened the milkhouse door and called my name.

HOW BREAKABLE AND SOFT THE BODY. The inner ankle, the earlobe, the abdomen that one palms in the early morning before rising. I watched Nan’s bruised arms in the mirror, ever raised in hair management attempts. Twigs anyone could snap.

We started looking for food when we crossed into Kentucky on 64. Ellis had gotten the last of the bologna sandwiches. The Indian Summer air of mid-October stayed thick, and since the Olds had no air conditioning, we ignored Nan’s protests and kept the windows down. So when we pulled into the place with a nondescript Restaurant sign, Nan strewed together an impressive collection of expletives, ordered me to pop the goddamn trunk, and rooted around back there, presumably for her hairbrush. She huffed toward the brick restaurant and left the trunk open.

“Why did you dump your pills?” I asked Mave. Nan addressed her calamity’s reflection in the building’s window, starting at the frightful tips.

“Let’s just leave her here,” said Mave, “let her hitchhike.”

“We could,” I said. Nan held her lipstick tube in her teeth.

“It’s like being naked in a burlap sack.”

“What is?”

“Living inside time.” Mave patted the paper bag in the door. “I didn’t dump the good ones.”

“If anything makes you feel out of it, it’s the codeine.”

“Keeps me lucid.”

“Keeps you numb. You took too many.”

“There’s less chafing.”

“Let me see your eyes.”

“End of discussion. Back to Little Gypsy Moth—since you won’t desert her, you might try talking to her. The silent treatment puts all the pressure on me, and my pipes are bad.” She watched Nan flit into the restaurant.

“What do you think she wants?” I said.

“I doubt she knows.”

“You feel sorry for her?”

“Me? Hell no. The only one I feel sorry for is the ransomed dog. Come on, boy—” She got out, air tank in hand, opened the door to the backseat and hooked his leash and Ellis fumbled forward. “—he’s got no idea where he even is. Look, Dog.” Mave pointed up to the sign she led him towards. “Don’t you love that? Just call the thing the thing—Restaurant.” She floated on the pills and he hobbled to keep up.

Why not Florida, Nan had whined, to the beaches? Why the desert?

Because it has rained here for forty days and forty nights, said Mave—

No it hasn’t, said Nan—

Something is rotting, Mave went on. It’s my feet, I think.

But it’s true we were drowning. The swamp would have to rupture and drain; there would have to be something else, something new and strange, even for Nan. The red rocks—wouldn’t they have the secret? Some message etched a billion years ago into their sandstone ledges?

Again the conviction to call Clay, and, again, I dodged it. I grabbed my wallet and circled back to shut the trunk. But first I surveyed Nan’s rubble, her black overnight bag unzipped to its skimpy contents and various cosmetics spilled from the bag. I fought the urge to rummage. Some brown powder dotted the trunk bed from a compact; I dusted it off and felt a bulge, something solid and bulky beneath the thin carpet pad. Under the carpet corner, a handgun. Mave’s Browning pistol.

Unbelievable—when had she stuck it there? I looked over to where she’d disappeared with Ellis. I’d seen the gun before, loose in her hands, or sitting off to the side, her gaze blackened, the gun like a hairy spider about to jump. I covered the pistol and gathered Nan’s tubes and mini jars into her bag and shut the trunk.

Inside, it was dim, everything orange plastic and brown. Old- fashioned bar stools lined a counter where a few truckers had installed themselves, one waitress in white tending them. Sun-bleached photographs of wildlife hung above the diners’ heads on the wall where the sun hit in full force. A buck with a washed-out rack, a wolf pair running, a bear in a grove somewhere far from I-64. I saw that Nan had claimed a booth in the back and had also attracted the attention and talk of a man middle-aged. So be it.

I headed to the bathroom. Two stalls, both empty. I sat to pee in the cleanest stall. On the door, drawn in lipstick at eye level: a huge calla lily with stamen sticking out enlarged, an obvious cock. I recognized the signature curves in Nan’s lines. The crude provocation but also the quick artfulness, no question. I smeared it with toilet paper, riled more by the gun in the trunk than by Nan’s lewd graffiti.

At the booth, Mave sat on the outer edge of her