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

they won’t interfere with the blue line. And then of course we’d head south, across the sea, to the deserts and the pyramids. Yeah.” She opened the long book, vertically long, to the prints in the middle. There were those couple she had torn out, only jagged edges, the ones we still had stowed in the pockets of our jeans, but there remained Red Hills and White Flower, Red and Pink Rocks and Teeth, Red Hills and Bones. There was still From the Faraway Nearby—that skull with multipronged antlers, and the poppies and poppies and iris and nudes. We looked at them all until we got to the text of the letters. My head near hers, hearing her breath as something no longer her own. No longer guaranteed.

“It would never work,” she said. “A transatlantic flight, even stowing away on a cargo ship. A road trip is all I can manage, I think. Somewhere we can get to in a few days. I want to go west. Like all the young bucks.”

Give me her Evening Star, or one of her Blues. Sky above Clouds.I’ll take My Last Door. The horrible black square. I heard Mave’s aided breath. “That dream thing” O’Keeffe called it, whatever it was. Abstraction Blue.

“I don’t think we should do that,” I said. “What will we tell Miranda?”

“Gone fishing. Be back tomorrow.” She perused the letters written by O’Keeffe in reply to letters not collected in the book, a one-way conversation. “‘To Maria,’” Mave read, “‘I have left the good country—I must get myself ready for the other kind of life with the dawn.’ Let’s go to her desert, where it’s less peopled, Frankie. We’ll mud up a house and thatch a roof. No, no need.” She turned the page. “We’ll find her roofless room in Abiquiú. I’ve always wanted to see that. I want to see her roofless room.”

“Want to sleep for a while?”

“Good idea. You go shop for provisions. We’ll pack tonight.”

“Mave.”

“Frankie.” She flipped back to the prints. “Look at this one. This one of Pedernal, the view heading out of Ghost Ranch. Tell me you don’t want to see the mesas. And this, Red Landscape. When she first saw red it was in Texas. Look at her heart in that sky above Palo Duro Canyon, how the white gypsum and red claystone made her feel. The yellow ochre mudstone. Tell me you don’t want to see that.”

“I don’t want to see that.”

“Bullshit.”

“I want you to rest.”

“Start packing. Say your goodbyes. Fucking Dillon—sayonara. Should have done that long ago. Clay, he’ll understand. I’ll come up with a roof if you’re afraid it will rain. But the rain will be rare.” The first out-of-breath gasp, the love affair with the tubes and tank beginning. I stared back at the stem of bittersweet, away from her, how it was framed by the bedroom door, like a picture, and I thought, red ochre. When I looked back at her, she’d flipped forward in the book again, to the letters. “‘To Carl,’” she read, “‘Tonight I will sleep in some of our barest country.’”

Somehow, eventually, she convinced me to leave soon, at the start of October, and in some compartment of myself I knew from the beginning it was her suicide mission, but how could I say I didn’t want to go? And, really, was she going for me more than for herself? Didn’t she know I needed to go? Of course she knew. She always knew.

I’m cold, she said. I want the scarcest river, she said, the Chama, she said, I want the clarity.

I DID SEE DILLON BEFORE WE LEFT —not in his grandmother’s house, but in the Shop ’n Save one evening with Clay, the evening before the trip, near the paper towels because I remember the word Bounty off to my left. But first I saw more of Nan’s paintings. I knew they were hers, the same signature style from the Train Cave graffiti, this time on the brick retaining wall at the four-way stop near the Shop ’n Save. She must have painted in the middle of the night, some kind of desperation move—lilies, which seemed pretty, seemed innocent and childlike, until you looked harder. And Clay—how could I have not written more here about Clay?—Clay contentedly set his forearm on his driver side door, window down despite the bite of cool October air. Shirt sleeve rolled up. Such a solid arm. Strong hand upon the door.

“Clay,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

I almost told him I’d be heading west in the morning. “Nothing.” We got out and got our cart as husband and wife, trolled the aisles. It was so strange to be there in the Shop ’n Save getting supplies, Clay unaware that they were road trip supplies—tampons and breakfast bars and donuts. I should have been more strategic about getting Mave’s favorite things.

Then there he was. In all the force of his decade-aged body. In the paper goods. Clay beside me, he knew Dillon too, and of course what Dillon had been to me. Dillon’s black hair exactly the same, beautiful and smuggled under a forest service ball cap with white netting on the back half, which I saw before he turned my way. Hollower now at the cheekbones. Narrow-waisted still, a T-shirt, blue I think it was, with an animal on it, the hem of it pestering and teasing around the top of his belt. Perhaps Clay understood the privacy needed, the gravity and gruesomeness in the moment, but he didn’t leave my side, simply stood there with our cart, both hands on the handle.

I saw no boy in Dillon then, I knew he was a husband and he flew planes and dropped killing spray. I knew very little else about him anymore. At one time, he was my mirror and his silence I’d taken for understanding. You’re the one, his wife Nan had said to me at the co-op gathering that night. The one that what? Was I the one he