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

“Tomorrow you get the trunk,” Mave said.

“Fuck off,” said Nan, as if they were now a comic routine.

I exited, heading for the huge red six on a pole sprouting from a Denny’s lot. Mave waved her hands in front of her. “Let there be hash browns, let there be cable TV. And I saw that it was good.”

“I’ll go in,” I said.

“I’ll go in,” Nan mocked from her angry slump.

“You’re welcome to pay for the room.”

Mave got out and stretched, scratched her butt. Shook her oxygen tank, like a can of shaving cream. She said, “We’ll wake to the Warm Morning stove, bank the fire in its belly, dress languidly. Nan last so we can linger on her little body. Then a Western omelet, hot coffee, and hash browns,” one hand spreading up and out like a slow firework. She kept talking, walked toward the streetlamp in the evening gray. We watched her, Nan and I.

“How can you tell when she’s talking out of her head, and when she’s just talking?” she asked.

“Sometimes I can’t.”

Mave leaned her back against the lamppost, closed her eyes.

“Nan,” I said, turning to the backseat, “why did you drive to my house? And why are you here with us in this motel parking lot?” No response. “What is it you want?”

A murmur, delicate face in profile, pointing toward Mave.

“What did you say?”

“I said I just wanted more.” She faced me but eyed Ellis and stroked his head. “I want the more that you two have. Like a bigger life or something.”

“There’s nothing big about my life.”

She didn’t say anything else, so I said, “Probably no pets. Keep him down on the floor, okay?”

“Yeah. Ask if there’s a pool.”

SMOKING OR NON, I TOLD THE CLERK SMOKING. This was White House, Tennessee. She studied Mave under the lamppost through the window and I saw the woman’s kind yellowed eyes go tragic on the oxygen tubing. People always studied Mave to ascertain—man or woman, crazy or drunk. She spied Nan, too, in the lot’s light. The TV bolted to the wall blinked out the weather, colored globs all over the US map, rain on its way. I grabbed the Tennessean for whenever the other two watched TV. We would need dinner.

“Anyplace to eat besides Denny’s?” I asked.

“Not especially.” She wanted to ask how long does the old woman have or something more trivial: are you headed to the Grand Ole Opry, where’s home, who slugged that pretty girl in the car? “You’re in 110, around back,” she said. “Here’s two keys.”

I thanked her and asked for extra towels, and she ducked out to a back room. In a full-length mirror in the lobby, between piled chairs, I caught my own yellowed eyes. I thought of the antique mirror Clay would walk past, heading upstairs to bed wondering where on earth I was, how the glass would yield to him his gentle oblong face washed softly by the hall light and, beyond him, the cavernous house with the blue kitchen chairs where we had sat and he’d offered me pancakes and offered me everything only a year and a half ago, and what kind of steward of his offering had I been? I’d not even been able to carry his child.

The motel felt moldy like a holding tank, but I already sensed the desert coming, where eyes could unyellow. Where there would be no comfort, no routines, no supports, no gentleness to confuse you. Nan was mistaken. There was no enviable largeness to my life, only an internal useless clutter of confusion, crowded like the landfill of Mave’s porch. Mave had said, as we’d packed, that we would take dirt baths out there, she would wash her remaining hair with sand. She’d said, “Your mop will take longer.”

I glimpse you sometimes, Ruth, in the Sinai, in knee-high boots, treading. Upon the barren scrub, could you not see yourself in the light, in the red dust, finally with absolute clarity?

I thought meanly toward Clay—There is lasagna in the freezer. Sing your pious songs, Clay, you are the kindest man really, but you knew, didn’t you? That our matrimony would settle over us like soot in a summer chimney where birds get stuck and pulse and quicken and then give in? Sing the refrains that sit like stacked bowls in the cupboard of your mind. The clerk appeared with a clutch of thin towels and I jolted, as if she had caught me in a low-down, untoward act. I returned to the car.

“You see a pool?” asked Nan.

I looked up and said it would rain soon.

WE GOT DENNY’S CLUB SANDWICHES TO GO. Room 110 was poorly lit, everything beige except for the matching beach paintings. I breathed in the lingering tar smell emanating from the walls.

“It stinks in here.” Nan dropped her overnight bag, crinkling the Family Dollar bag inside.

“I used to smoke,” I said. “I prefer smoking to non.”

“Maybe there are more people on this trip besides you.”

There was a table with two chairs and Mave sat, unwrapped the Denny’s foil, and Ellis snapped to attention at her elbow, waiting. He got the pickle and cheese. I said I forgot something and walked into the drizzle. I popped the trunk to feel for the pistol bulge. Still there. I would hide the keys. Nan slipped out of the room barefoot and walked to the vending machine a few doors down. She wore Dillon’s Army jacket that must have been in her bag. Fritos, Twizzlers.

“Where’d you get quarters?”

“Found them. Twizzlers are for you.”

The little bit of rain slimed the road dust in my arm hair. In the room, Nan sloughed the jacket to the floor, bolted to the bathroom with her bag, and started the shower with the door open. Mave watched the open door as she lay down.

I sat and scanned the Tennessean. Top headline read “Two Dead Babies Found, Omaha, Nebraska.” The first paragraph said their