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

beautiful and red with intricate flames detailed up its hood. Stew’s truck. I felt the sweat-damp of my thermal shirt in the cave of my underarms, at the base of my neck. I rarely saw Stew anymore. I went to Mave’s during their Saturday band practices.

The two men were framed by the storm door window as they walked up. They removed their ball caps with deference. Stew’s hair black as mine, his chiseled handsome face always and ever opaque. I trained my eyes on Clay’s snug work jeans tailored by time and squats and kneeling to pavement on the job so the denim was thinned white at the knees. The sweet humid air softened their faces as they entered, Clay still encountering me in his own kitchen with some surprise, or embarrassment, and uncertainty. Stew nodded and kept his lanky form near the door like a stray unused to interiors. I wanted to smoke with him out front. He wouldn’t have minded, he minded nothing; the world came at him and he took it all easily. He’d taken, without a fuss, a wife named Jennie, the raising of three kids, his dad’s body shop where he banged out dents and sanded rust.

I knew Jennie disliked me because I’d lingered at the body shop when I’d taken in my truck with rust on the fenders a few years before. Stew seemed to take long with the job. I would watch him work before going in to LaFaber to clean in the afternoon. We smoked, I liked his permanently greased hands, his angular face and his calm, his leanness. He rarely spoke but when he did it was about the Fords and Chevys and Pontiacs strewn in the yard outside, the parts ordered, the way one of the Ellafritzes had dented up the hood. And he always looked out and up, squinting, so he reminded me of Dillon in that way, but not wound so tight. It was as if he squinted at his feeling out there in the distance, silently watching it approach, knowing it would beget another and another and he wanted to know the genealogy of the feelings before he let himself feel them. He took in my company in this unique ease. He, at times, studied my body when he thought I wasn’t looking; he’d touch my shoulder, my arm, as I handed him a glass of water. But nothing ever happened. He had seen the feeling coming and chose to head it off. One day I got there and the fenders were done, painted with new black. As if to say, that was it.

“There’s supposed to be an early frost,” Clay said, “so we should take advantage. I was thinking we could go for that load of wood.” Voice hopeful and high and gentle.

“Those downed trees on Rex’s?” I asked.

“Yeah, I was thinking that. Rex is okay with it.”

My own house had baseboard heat, but his and Lottie’s had a wood-and-coal boiler and the woodstove in the kitchen. I said I’d be glad to, and I meant it. There was the smell of the seeds and the heated-up and browned promise of work for my hands, one of which, right then, brushed some debris from the shoulder of Clay’s work jacket. In my periphery, Stew shifted his weight.

“You mind if we use your truck?” Clay asked me. “I usually borrow.”

I turned off the burner, left the cooked-down squash lidded on the stove. I lay a towel over the roasted seeds after offering a handful to Stew while Clay sought out Lottie’s small, feathery self in the front room. Stew chewed the seeds slowly, in meditation of the trucks or something out beyond the screen door. I admired his profile, features both smooth and angular at once, an artful face and neck thinner than most men’s. I asked how he was.

“Business is a little slow,” he said, fed himself a few more salted seeds. “Been working on your cousin’s Jeep, that CJ-7 he’s fixing up. Ron.”

“Miranda says the Jeep’s been good for him. And the flagger job with the State. His stammer’s not as extreme.”

“Nothing wrong with a stammer. It’s hard to talk.” Stew turned from the door to study the wallpaper trim of bonneted girls and flushed slightly with relief when Clay returned. There was some reconfiguring of vehicles because the driveway was narrow, single-file—Clay pulled his Bronco off to the side in the grass, and Stew gingerly backed out to the road and let me pull out so he could park in my place, then he disembarked and waited by his cab, as if on guard.

A new bite in the air, so I pulled back on my two flannel shirts. Stew needed a coat, wore only a white undershirt. His truck was spotless and waxed. The racing stripes up the side weren’t new, but the flames were, up the hood—they shot out of the radiator, orange and yellow with blue highlights, licking at the windshield with mean tips. We of course could have loaded the wood into his truck, but it was off limits. Couldn’t risk a scratch. Clay retrieved the chainsaw from the shed, and my body surged with its own ungivingness. I stood there and smoked alone, looking at my pickup that had taken a beating but had no rust. The surge traveled up my inner pole to my sternum, to my throat, and I felt a little peeled when Clay turned up beside me with the saw in hand and a fistful of work gloves.

“You want a pair? These are Mom’s old ones.” Leather palm blackened by use.

“No,” I said, but I took them to hold and gave him the keys. I climbed to the middle of the bench seat and straddled the floor gear shift, feeling for Stew sideways, invisibly, as if in the dark. Clay’s hand fell on my knee after he shifted. I held Lottie’s gloves in my right hand and settled my other atop his. I wanted the splinter,