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

didn’t watch her walk more than a few feline steps in her black ballet shoes. Men whistled, men blew. Fine, I was at sixteen forty-nine, sixteen fifty.

I skipped the oil and took Ellis out on the leash toward the grassy patch beyond the air compressor. He looked bewildered. I scratched among his neck folds and stroked his ears. “Hey, Flop, hey,” I said. I held a pack of Shop ’n Save mini donuts and gave him one. His thick black and tan body gave itself to me and leaned into my leg, then he moved on and peed. My husband would not miss me, but he would miss this sack of hound. The payphone was right there. It was his dog.

I called my friend Clarissa instead. The only one who knew where we were.

She’d waved goodbye that morning from the wide porch of her house, having given us a Tupperware of bologna sandwiches and saltines with peanut butter. In her flannel robe, her light hair messily frothed about her face, she’d tied a sheer scarf around my neck, a gift from her daughter Tess. I’d loved the feel of the scarf, though I’d removed it and stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans. I touched it now. The phone rang.

“Hey,” she said. “You okay? Are you in a ditch somewhere?”

“Remind me why we’re doing this.”

“I have no idea why you’re doing this. I just packed you a lunch.”

The phone line buzzed, a tractor trailer stuttered. I saw one of my fellow fugitives emerge from the Exxon, the one with an external lung.

“Hey?” says Clarissa. “You know why you’re doing this. You know it’s for Mave.” Her kicked heart still opened and stayed fleshy—how? If I could love, I’d love like Clarissa, my friend since childhood.

“What if I commit murder?”

“Don’t commit murder. Nan’s harmless. How’s Mave?”

Clarissa had a few souls to spare. She who bruised more easily than a ripe peach, who worked hard to stay upright in this world. I told her she’d forgotten the mustard.

When the time came, Mave had gone in for one round of chemo only. Her mouth parched, she puked herself dry. With that cobwebbed throat, you’d think she’d have wanted the seepage and the marsh of home, but she wanted dry mesa air, she wanted all the humidity and haze drained away. “I just want clarity,” she said. “The bog’s big voice is drowning me out. I want sagebrush and piñon pine and the white snow of cottonwoods along the scarce river. I have never seen the desert.”

I said okay. I knew she wanted your Egypt. Your Persia. Your hieroglyphic scrawl baked by the sun. I said I would drive her west, down off the ridge of the Caudell swamp and wetlands.

“Then I want Memphis on the way,” she said. Neither of us had been west of the Mississippi.

I’d prayed, May the skunk cabbage stink of her life dissipate. “Get me out of the bog, Frankie,” she’d said, “and far from the damp limestone caves. I just have to get out of here.” She’d shivered, her face white from the poison in her body, the metal splinters in her lungs.

When we loaded back into the Olds, Ellis licked Nan’s face and investigated her pork rinds.

“Hit the road,” Mave said. “Why are we still sitting here?”

Only for a second did I think I’d turn back and forget everything. Get her to a hospital, get my husband’s supper on the table. I started the car. “I’m worthless now,” I told her. “It’s past noon, we’re in the dead hours, all bankrupt.”

“Don’t worry.” Mave rode the wind with her right arm. “If we hit tolls, we’ll offer Little Gypsy Moth Hair as barter. Pay with her. That all right with you, Nan?”

“Fuck off.” Big territorial crumple of pork rind bag.

You wrote me once: This is how to let the world in—say Croatia. Argentina. Abiquiú. Put fingertips on the globe of green and beige and deep blue and on all the scattered names. Say the names until you go there and learn what names they were before that, names pulled from the first dirt. When you’re there, weep with all the people, laugh with them. Tell them everything. Love them.

I’ve been nowhere all my life, Ruth, except in that house across the break in the fence from hers. She and I have not wept. You wrote me once that Mavis, her full name, means song thrush, Celts pulling words from the world. From the dirt and sky. The drawing of acacia tree means sweet, you wrote. There’s a bird that means soul. Let the world in, you told me—all the names across time are real, each with a heartbeat.

But sometimes I could not find the heartbeat.

CLAY ASKED FOR MY ANSWER BY SUNDAY, a Sunday back in that early spring of 1989 when Mave’s drinking would get worse then better then worse again. The Good News Boys would play a set at the Chapel at Snyder’s Crossing. Baptists liked announcements and liked Clay, his every contour meek. To me, they would object. Snyder’s Crossing was Uncle Rex and Aunt Miranda’s church, and it had been my mother and dad’s and mine until I was orphaned at sixteen and quit the pew when Mave had given me the choice. Miranda, with my four cousins bunched behind her, had studied my bloodless face, put a hand to my head for fever. “What’s wrong with you?” she’d said, always asking underneath, what are you, what manner of thing? The oldest of the four, my age, my pretty cousin Belinda, had slipped over and taken my hand, until Miranda had herded them off. Belinda and I had once found a baby bat snagged in a window screen in daylight, its whole body in a terrified squint, native to darkness. I’d wanted to tell her that’s how I felt in the oak pew.

Friday night I’d left Mave’s house for mine knowing I would refuse Clay. I’d ringed my jars of glowing