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

meant to marry, or was I the one that drove him off, closed him out? His eyes under the cap’s visor revealed nothing. I wanted to say I was sorry, and I wanted to say I hoped he was sorry, and I wanted to tell Clay goodbye, all things at once, unceremoniously, in aisle six, be done with everything. I wanted to say, I’m going west. I only half believed it.

What I said was: “How are you, Dillon?” Fumbling for my jeans pocket.

“Doing okay. Good to see you, Frankie. I’ve been meaning to come by. Sorry about your mom.” Speaking then to Clay.

“Thank you. She’s in a better place.”

The useless talk like hands at my throat, menacing. “Right,” said Dillon. He held tissues, or maybe toilet paper or paper plates—they are also in that aisle. My hands at my sides, big weights.

It was fitting really, to see them both at once, and in so anticlimactic a setting. I wanted to say to them I somehow had yet to begin my life. If Nan had been there, cleaving to his side. If she had looked at me out of her bat face then, I could not have managed to stay standing.

“I’m in Athens, Georgia, now, just spraying for moth around here for a while.”

A few other selves came out, in a layup in league shorts, in cutoffs with his hand down them, in a dress, and one of those Frankies ankle-deep in Heather Run before falling. What is the word, Ruth, for that kind of falling?

“We heard that,” I said. “We should go, Clay.” And we went—just like that—the longer way to the checkout than the way that would have taken us past Dillon’s body.

Back at Lottie’s—I still called the house and blue chairs and kitchen Lottie’s—I said to Clay, “I’ll stay with Mave tonight. She should have someone to watch her. I’ll see you in the morning.” I kissed him, oddly, on the forehead because he was seated, as you’d kiss a young boy. Holding my overnight bag small enough for one night but packed full and quickly.

At the truck, Ellis jumped up when I opened the door and put his front paws on the running board. He could never make that jump himself with his barrel body. I lifted him to hug him goodbye, but found myself setting him down on the bench seat, watching his body breathe as I turned the key fast like a match striking.

IN THE OCTOBER MORNING, I packed the black Ford pickup, which had run just fine the evening before, while Mave sat, patient and lordly, on her porch beside the broken butter churn. She drank coffee and set the mug on one of the TVs at intervals. I had told only Clarissa, who had promised us a sandwich lunch. The lights were on in Mave’s kitchen and bedroom.

“Want me to get your lights?”

“No, it’ll throw them off,” as if we were about to begin our real careers as fugitives. She wore her best flannel, jeans, boots. She had combed her hair wet, her head was probably cold in the early fall air. I made myself not help her step up into the truck.

“What’s with the hound dog?”

“I don’t know, he followed me.”

“You sure about this, buddy?” she asked Ellis, who licked her nose and its accompanying tubes.

I turned the key with great transgression. Nothing. Only the buzz of battery. It wouldn’t start.

“You’re kidding me,” said Mave. “Sabotage.”

“It’s not sabotage. Hold on.” I unlatched the hood and wrestled it up, selectively viewing the wires I’d viewed at some point before, to see which one looked different, out of place. Then of course the blue Oldsmobile Royale drove up my gravel drive. The pretty waif got out, ran onto my porch, then saw us in our predicament in front of Mave’s house. Here she came through the fence break, ten years younger than I, many times more lithe, so striking. I saw she’d been struck. The blackened eye and blued arm.

“Please help me,” with that pleading, ravenous look.

I calmly thought how odd it was that, twice now, I’d seen Nan’s paintings just before I’d seen Nan. Those calla lilies near the Shop ’n Save a kind of lewd sign, in the semiotics of the lost.

TONIGHT I WILL SLEEP IN SOME OF OUR BAREST COUNTRY. I believed in bareness more than I believed in filigreed fields and forests or the drench of bog. I don’t know why. Maybe you could tell me why the desert people went to the desert and walked out of their lives, or into their real lives.

We rose early without agreeing to. We rose fateful. Baby-bald Mave looked out the window at the Super 8 sign and said, “Take me to the scrublands,” as though she’d been waiting to say such a thing. Until now, she’d been careful to hide the compression socks the color of sand dune. Now she stood in them, her legs bare up to her boxers. She rubbed her hairless head, remembering it.

The truth is, I helped Mave get dressed that morning. The day was different and my throat threatened constriction but did not constrict. Nan not speaking, Nan the one loose with all words and body—Nan whose easy fountain of voice I envied—was quiet and somber and put Mave’s thick wool socks on for her, over the compression socks, and then her boots, saying only, “This one. Now this one,” as if readying a kid for the school bus Mave had once driven. Nan leashed Ellis and took him out as I packed up. We were practiced now at cohabitation.

The night before, eating pizza, Nan had given her pepperoni to Ellis and said, “Let’s get one of those Airstream trailers, the little silver compact houses. We could live out here, you know.”

Mave had said, “And one for Elijah, and one for Moses.”

I’d laughed despite myself.

That night, after I’d told Nan there was no book and she’d said Mave is near the end, after another