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

The clerk was a teen with big black-framed glasses and a full figure. She cut eyes at Nan while she rang up the dresses, underwear, some T-shirts, a black bikini. Nan threw in a bag of barbecue pork rinds last minute.

“Thirty-six seventy-five,” the girl said, defeated, pushed up her glasses.

Nan looked in her red wallet, looked at me. “Frankie, seems like I’m out of cash.”

“What do you mean you’re out of cash?”

“I guess I spent my last on lunch.”

“You guess.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“When?”

“Soon. I promise.” Imp. Trickster. Little crushable pretty hand.

We just stood there. The clerk bagged up the slinky stuff.

“Wait,” I told her.

“I will,” Nan insisted. She could rot in that apricot dress. She could starve. Throw her to the hyenas, Mave would say. But Nan knew I’d buy. She knew we were already bound in ways we couldn’t yet understand.

I snatched the pork rinds from the plastic bag. “I’m not paying for these.”

THE 1-65 INTERCHANGE WAS HAIRY, CONGESTED. We didn’t talk. I narrowly dodged some shredded tire. As soon as we were sailing on, I tried to keep focused on the road, hands at ten and two, extra mindful of the bikers on old Harleys, the speed limit, the brake lights of others slowing me down. I wanted it quiet but, inevitably:

“So what did we decide on the Great Lakes? I think we could use a dip.”

“Nah,” said Mave. “I’ll spit in the desert dirt and make some mud and you can roll around in it.”

“You said this was a truth-telling trip, Crazy, so why do you want to see the desert? O’Keeffe lived there, okay, so what? If you ask me, her big flower paintings are the best. All that color. I want life to get big and colorful, not shrivel up, and we’re going a long way to a dried-up nowhere.”

“You might tell the truth about how much cash you’ve got on you.” I avoided her midnight poppy in the rearview.

“I said I’d pay you back, Frankie. I needed that stuff. I left everything in that house in the goddamn swamp.”

“Caudell is rightly a boreal bog,” said Mave.

I read the license plates. Old Bush-Quayle stickers.

“The ancient glaciers left their mark,” Mave went on. “You could feel them sludging back toward us at home, couldn’t you? The glacial shadow creeping up on the sedges and the black spruce. It was best to blow town. We were to the point that the shallow pools would never dry up, like a weepy cut in dog days.”

“The hell you talking about?” Nan’s voice scratchy.

“I don’t think anybody noticed the wreckage coming but us, Nannette.”

I read on a Ford Escort My Other Car Is a Piece of Shit Too.

Why the desert, Ruth? For Mave, it was of course because you loved the Sinai. And the open plains would give us space, let one word find form and purchase and time, let it spread out its ample limbs. No longer stifled by the losses junking up our lives like the TVs and rotted things subsuming Mave’s porch. The trip was not supposed to end everything, but begin it instead.

I focused, the road beckoning. I focused hard to guide the heavy blue car. We’d come from the swamps, we were bog people. Thick, we wanted to slim down, empty out, bottom out, crush into campfire smoke. There was a long history of this, of course. I’d read in your desert-fathers wisdom books that the stick-people leaned into the wind, the fourth-century hermits who’d fled the city for the Persian desert, as you did as a younger woman, before you crushed your leg, before you met Mave, and you must have never fully left there. Your books, your hieroglyphs, your photos of the three-toned dunes, the sand I imagined always in your long gray hair.

“You might watch out for that, Frankie,” said Mave.

“For what?” But I hit it. I ran right over the large deer carcass before I could swerve, a huge rolling thump. “Shit.” The car fishtailed and I struggled to regain control. I pulled off to the shoulder without signaling, my hands shook. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t see that. How did I not see that?”

Mave got out to inspect the tires. So did Nan and I. Rust flaked under the black stripe up the side of the car, like a bed’s dust ruffle. But the tires looked okay. We forgot Ellis and he plodded off to poop in the grass, and I saw it was a little runny. “Sorry,” I said again. “I need to focus.”

Portable tank in hand, Mave walked back several feet toward the mangled heap of deer. Nan followed. I hooked Ellis’s leash, and he was shaking like me. I told him I’m sorry, I’ll focus, I’ll be careful. It’s okay, Flop, we’re okay.

Cars zipped past, all with sense enough to change to the left lane. The two women, one aged and sick, one hungry and small, gazed steadily at the head of the deer pointing toward them. I installed the hound back into the Olds and joined them to study the doe’s head with most of its skull showing. Its eyes no longer there. Its body a pile of bloody ribbons. It was impossible to tell what part of the damage we had done. Nobody said anything else. Eventually we piled back in and I slowly edged us back onto the highway.

What I focused on then was the skull. Because, for me, that was why the desert, Ruth. The best paintings are the skulls. The faces of the other two fugitives watched the early evening interstate—median and tree line, respectively. I had this feeling we should have strapped the doe’s horrible body onto the roof and carried it on.

This trip was for Mave, but I wanted to see Abiquiú too, where Georgia O’Keeffe had once had a roofless room to let light in so she could paint the longhorn skulls, souvenirs of death. And Mave had looked pale as death as we’d watched an O’Keeffe special on