Three Horses
Mark Jacobs
The day she gets fired, Raelynn Jacks stops at a strip mall on the way home and nods out in the truck. Behind the wheel. Sitting up. Her nose is running, her gut is tender, she’s super anxious. The price you pay for a boat ride on the river of bliss. It’s been worse. More often than she likes to admit, it has been way worse. The anxiety is the part she really hates, even knowing it won’t last forever. Here’s what the girls don’t get: Raelynn has the situation under control. She can stay ahead of disaster, she is smarter than the stupid things she does.
It was a dumb risk to take, granted, showing up high at the Institute. The only reason she did was, she needed some company in her head and found a little surprise in the glove compartment. It’s a bitching commute from the ranch. Shitty luck that Peters, the VP, showed up. He knew what he was seeing. Sorry to lose you, he said. You’re the best trainer we’ve got, Raelynn. She is pretty sure he meant it. Her instincts are good. Her judgment is not. She likes a warm and fuzzy buzz, likes it a lot. That’s not her fault, it’s her destiny.
Knuckles on the window jolt her awake. It’s a teenage cowboy with a pretty face wanting to know, is she all right. Is that lipstick? Nah, it’s just his sweet red baby lips. Fine, she tells him, I’m fine. Sorry to disappoint.
Back on the highway, thinking about the horses. Staying three mph over the limit to avoid any more problems. Arrowhead is the flattest, lonesomest county in south Texas. Live here long enough – say, the fifty years Raelynn has lived here – and your dreams flatten out to match. The landscape of your sleeping mind is brown, the trees stunted by wind, the sky so vast God himself gets lost in it.
She has a problem. Or will, soon enough. Harper’s friend Maria Elena works at the Institute, does something in the IT department. By now Maria Elena has heard that Raelynn got fired. She and Harper go to the same megachurch, where the preacher has convinced everybody that Jesus wants them to be rich. Maria Elena will text Harper. Harper will call Maddie. Then look out.
Raelynn’s girls have been threatening what Madison calls an intervention. Raelynn’s first-born is studying to be a psychiatric nurse and has lots of vocabulary. Raelynn is not one hundred percent sure what an intervention would involve. Her fear is they will haul her away to some rehab clinic, and when she gets out the horses will be gone. Oops, sorry, Mom, but you know it’s for the best. She’s not going to let that happen.
Niña, Pinta, and Holy Mother. Three mares. Niña is a chestnut Morgan and her tallest animal at fifteen hands two. Pinta is a Choctaw with a pinto pattern. Mother is a quarter horse, sorrel in color and proud in temper. What binds the three together, and her to them, is how they’re wild. They’re broke, that’s not it. She broke Niña and Mother herself. She rides them all, always has and always will. But they are wild regardless. It’s a spirit thing, a blood thing, some sort of spark in their horse brains and horse hearts that keeps them free. Free, Raelynn has learned the hard way, sometimes hurts.
If Jesus wants certain Christians who go to certain churches to be rich, does he want the rest of the country to stay poor?
By the time she turns onto the long snaking drive at Tres Yeguas, it’s late afternoon. The red sun has a droopy look; it’s tired of its day. She is feeling a little less rotten and has her plan. Part one of the plan is, get rid of Trey. Like that’s going to be easy. Trey Gold has made himself at home at the ranch. He claims to want to move on from rodeo hero with a bad back, but so far she has seen precious little forward motion. He thinks – and he is right, he is right as raisins – that the two things they have in common, horses and painkillers, give him a special status. Also, there is no denying the advantages of a younger man when it comes to satisfaction in the sack. His busted back is no impediment. The girls don’t trust him, which in a funny way further cements his position of privilege.
She parks. Walks out to the corral. The horses come forward looking for a treat and some affection. She gives both, and speaks to them about the plan. They will have their part to play, she makes them understand. Holy Mother, a.k.a. Unholy Mother, looks skeptical. That’s her job. She’s seven years old and leads the way. The other two will do as she does.
The house is long and low, a single story with a porch like you see in Westerns, down to the rockers with sagging leather seats. In the living room, on the couch under polished cowhorns, Trey is watching the Cowboy Channel. The Reno Rodeo is on. He is a small man, finely built, with a pouty face and black hair that has some curl to it. Altogether he looks like the boy king of Tres Yeguas. Normally that would make Raelynn laugh, but she can’t afford the humor just now.
Fast. Everything has to happen fast, or her plan won’t stand a chance.
He waves lazily at her. “You’re home early.”
“Felt like shit. Took a few hours off.”
He gets up and embraces her. Rubs her back up and down. He is no pig, he’s a man who knows how to treat a woman. It’s not manipulation, it’s who he is.
“How ‘bout I fry you up some eggs? With toast and jelly.”
A genuine offer, but she’s not ready to eat.
“Thanks, not hungry yet.”
“I was about to get me a beer. You want one?”
A beer sounds good. Sometimes, when she is jangled after buzzing, beer lubricates the scratchy parts inside.
They drink some beer and watch the rodeo and Trey withdraws into himself the way he sometimes does. It means he is fighting the urge to feel sorry for himself. Raelynn has the advantage because she knows what she wants to happen. By the time they get up from the couch he has agreed to go apply for that job he heard about in Paint City. Service manager at a tractor dealership. He grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and knows tractors. The hard part is making it real in his mind. If the job becomes real then he is no longer the rodeo hero he was meant to be.
“It has to happen,” she tells him gently, “you know it does.”
“You tryin’ to run me off the place?”
“You get the job, you can make the drive from here.”
“It’d be one damn long haul to get to work.”
“I know that, Trey.”
She also knows he has to make up his own mind.
Later, once they eat, Trey uses her computer to look up the tractors sold by Harriman & Son. Massey Fergusons and Kubotas. He needs to familiarize himself with the product lines ahead of his interview. Raelynn thinks she’d like to ride one of her horses, but whatever was in that pill she swallowed has been unkind to her. She’s not up to a quick canter. Instead she curries Mother in the barn, a thing that generally settles down both of them. She bets with herself that Maddie will be the one who calls. Wins the bet; there is no prize.
Madison Jacks is formidable, and Harper defers to her on the big decisions even though they are close in age and had different fathers.
“I heard you lost your job.”
There is no good way to handle this.
“You heard wrong.”
“What happened, Momma?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Harper’s scared. I am, too.”
“Nothing to be scared of.”
“I’m making an appointment for you.”
“No need. I had my teeth checked not five months back. No cavities, he said. Said my mouth is in great shape for a woman of fifty.”
“Will you go, if I set it up?”
Denial smooths all too easily into a lie. Raelynn tells her daughter she will go see whatever doctor she wants her to see. No gamble in that. By the time Maddie is able to get her in somewhere, her mother will be elsewhere.
That night she fucks the ears off Trey. For two reasons. One is, he lacks confidence. He’ll do a better job at his interview if he is mellowed out by good sex. A scientific fact. Two, it’s probably the last time. She is fond of the man and can think of no better way to say goodbye.
In the morning she walks him to his truck and hugs him for luck. She is careful not to signal any sort of farewell because he’ll get distracted from the task at hand, which is to learn to be somebody who’s not a broke-down rodeo cowboy.
Before the dust of his wheels settles in the drive she is on the computer. Far. She has to go far away, someplace the girls will never think to look.
Raelynn has money in the bank to finance her escape. At the Telemethods Institute she made good wages training people to work phone jobs. Companies of every description sent their new hires to the Institute to learn how to achieve their objective while talking at a distance. Hotlines, product service centers, crisis counseling organizations, telemarketers, you name it. Raelynn taught them to use the telephone, not be used by it. It helped that she has a voice to which people pay attention, composed of equal parts honey and grit. It was Trey who made the connection between her voice and her gift of command with the horses. Fierce they might be, but she opens her mouth and those three mares know who’s in charge of their wild.
She can get another job, once she figures out where she’s going.
She starts searching for property in Oklahoma. A whole ‘nother state. The girls won’t find her there. But as she surfs the web her focus keeps moving east. She’s never been on the other side of the Mississippi. Why not?
She gets bored and takes a break. Saddles Niña and rides her hard across the brown Texas earth until the nasty feeling that has been clogging her up goes away and she feels clean. And a little tired. She lopes back to the barn and rubs down the horse. Carrots all around.
It’s not her age – fifty is nothing; she knows a woman of eighty five living on her own place and doing just fine – it’s her addiction to evil pleasure that worries the girls. Because of the side effects. Eighteen months ago she had something in her system with oxy in the name and made the mistake of riding high. Late in the day, a somber sky, the kind that makes you remember the idea of sin. A snake jumped up in front of Pinta. The horse reared and threw Raelynn. This was before Trey was in the picture, and she had forgotten her phone, so nobody came out looking for her.
Grim. She spent a miserable cold night outside on the ground, shivering and hurting and unbearably sober, Pinta standing faithful guard, sorry for what she had done. She couldn’t move much, tried but could not climb onto the horse. A broken foot, a broken rib. Not until eleven the next morning did Harper come riding up on the ATV. What’s that old-fashioned word? Recriminations. There were plenty of those. Get yourself straight or get off the ranch, that has been the girls’ ultimatum since then. Like it’s up to them.
She goes back on the hunt for a place that is out of their reach. Why she lights on Virginia she has no idea unless it’s an old family story, never quite clear in her mind, about her great-great-grandmother making her way west from that state upon the death of her husband when the bank foreclosed on their farm. Whatever. It’s a stretch.
She calls a realtor who is advertising thirty five acres. Small house, cute red barn. The fences around the pastures look to be in pretty good shape. The realtor sends her to a video walk-through of the house and the land. It’s not a mansion, it’s not Paradise, but the place appeals to her. Maybe it’s all the green, which gives this property in Broadhope County in the Piedmont a welcoming look.
She has been known to be impulsive and is now. She makes an offer on the place. To her surprise, the offer is accepted inside an hour. The owner, according to the realtor, is old and feeble and needs to sell. He’s moving into assisted living. It will take a while to close on the property, but Raelynn is confident the sale will go through. The realtor promises to expedite the process. It’s in everybody’s interest.
It’s February. Winters in Virginia are short, the realtor tells her. By March she’ll see some new green coming up, coming out. By April, she won’t be able to escape it. This sounds good to Raelynn, it sounds like a thing she would like to experience.
Hauling three high-spirited horses across the country in a trailer. Now there’s something to think about.
Trey comes home happy and sad. He got the job. He’ll have a paycheck now. He’ll also be slugging a suitcase heavy with memory wherever he goes. Sure as shit, sooner rather than later some asshole will walk into the dealership and say, I seen you ride in Albuquerque, I seen you fall. Raelynn focuses on the positive even though she feels bad for not telling him what she is about to do. She can’t. Trey is not a strong person. If he knows where Raelynn is gone to, the girls will hammer it out of him. There are some prime steaks in the fridge, New York strips, his favorite. She broils them with potatoes, makes a salad that has a festive look, which she does not quite understand but that’s how it is. After dinner she pours him a double shot of Johnny Black on ice, and they sit on the front porch. When Harper calls, Raelynn passes the phone to Trey so her daughter can congratulate her man on the new job. Which she does, grudgingly.
That night, Raelynn would not mind making love again, but Trey is keyed up about starting at Harriman & Son. He has never punched a clock before. On the one hand, he wants to do a good job. On the other hand, well, on the other hand he is definitely, now, ex. They lie in bed spooning like an old married couple, and she falls asleep with a sense if not of guilt then of betrayal.
She’s up early in the morning to pack him a lunch. Like a wife, which she will never be. He comes into the kitchen wearing a shirt with the company logo on the pocket. It makes him feel self-conscious and looks stupid. I love you, Raelynn, he tells her ten minutes later, sliding in behind the wheel of his truck, because that’s the kind of man he is.
It’s artificial, the sense of urgency propelling her to pack her things and go, go now, go today. She makes it real. You don’t have to do this, she tells herself. But she does. She will not be dictated to by her children just because she likes the feelings she gets from certain chemical combinations.
In fact a minor buzz would be nice, right about now. She could paint the walls of her brain a soft color, easy on the mind’s eye. She doesn’t. Experience tells her that, once she starts, she will wind up going too far. If she’s going to get out of here today she needs a clear head. In fact, here’s a thought: stay straight all the way to Virginia. Would that be a good idea?
She takes some time with the note to Trey. She owes him that much.
Beautiful man Goodbye. Something came up, I can’t get into it. I won’t be back. Right now, this very moment, I am seeing you at the new job. It’s a damn fine picture to look at. You’ll knock ‘em dead, I have no doubt. Feel free to stay here until the girls push you out which they will waste no time doing, count on it. Anyway if you get yourself a place in Paint City you won’t have that long drive every day. What else? You made me happy. This way you won’t have to watch me get old. Your loving lover, R.J.
Her truck is a Silverado, red and chromed up, 35 thousand miles on it is all. She hooks it up to the trailer. She loads everything, the horses last. She has to soothe them some before they agree to walk the plank. They know something is up. Pulling onto the highway she does not look back. She knows what the ranch looks like.
⻢
“It’s the wind got ‘em riled up.”
So says the man who claims to have been known, back in the day, as the Cajun Cowboy. Not that Raelynn necessarily believes his story. He’s old, got to be seventy five and gray all over like a hairy fish. Walks like his boots are too tight. Never rode in Texas, he claims. That alone makes him suspicious.
“It ain’t the wind,” she corrects him, “it’s the change in the weather. The wind’s just part of it.”
They stand inside the fence around the big, level pasture in Robicheaux Parish that belongs to him. The chilly Louisiana night is moony, but they keep losing the light as dark-bottomed clouds move in and cover the chubby yellow disc. Then they’re gone, the light comes back, and the watchers can clearly make out the horses thundering across the ground, Mother in the lead.
“Them mares of yours do like to kick up their heels, don’t they?”
“They been cooped up in that trailer. They need to run.”
“Shit, they can run all night long here, they want to.”
His name is Georges Bergeron. He has a bullfrog voice. An ancestor of his fought at the Battle of New Orleans under General Jackson, or so he says. She has no reason to doubt anything he says, and no reason to believe it. He uncaps a flask and passes it to her. She won’t ask him what the fiery liquid is that scalds her throat going down. She does not dislike the man.
“Virginia, huh?”
She nods. Probably he does not notice. He is as transfixed by the sight of her flying horses as she is. In the lacquering moonlight they do not look quite real, they look like their own individual idea.
This is how she is constructing her trip. Drive a while. Look up a place to spend the night where the horses can run and graze and not be passengers. Head there. There is not a bit of hurry to the way she is doing it. She keeps her phone turned off, for the most part, so the girls don’t pester her. She switches it on now and again to talk to the realtor when a text won’t do. Maybe she hasn’t earned the relief she feels, but she’ll take it.
Georges offers her another slug from the flask. She shakes her head. Somewhere between the Tres Yeguas Ranch and this Louisiana parish, it came to her that she is not running away from her daughters, really what she is doing is clearing a space where she can be alone and break her addiction. Which thought is already different. Progress, from a mental point of view. Back home if Madison or Harper said she was addicted to painkillers she’d bite their head off.
When the horses slow down and drop their heads, she follows Georges back to the house where she is renting a room for a couple of nights. A widower, he lives alone. He is no threat, he’s only lonely and hoping to be entertained. The house is on the small side, the furniture has a musty smell. An old dog with a chopped off tail sleeps next to Georges’ chair, breathing loud. A calico cat paces, keeping its distance from the interloper. The place could use a good airing out, but other than that Raelynn doesn’t mind being there.
It’s late, but Georges has neither schedule nor obligation, and he heats up some red beans and rice for both of them. She wins praise for the quantity of hot sauce she puts on her bowlful.
She tells him some stories. Some of them are true, or partly true, or start out true. The stories make him laugh.
“You have got quite the voice,” he tells her, “if you don’t mind me saying so. Makes the words go down easy.”
There is a ragged, racing feeling in her. She recognizes the signs. She is jonesing. Sometimes sex can turn aside the drive. Sometimes alcohol will do the trick although drinking can open up a whole new set of complications, and the complications have been known to trigger more dangerous cravings. Once in a while, if she can fall asleep, the desire will pass.
“You okay?” Georges wants to know.
It must be obvious. That embarrasses her a little, and makes her defiant. Her leg is jiggling.
“I’m fine,” she tells him, “I am just fine, George.”
Seeing she needs to be distracted he tells her some stories of his own. About horses he rode, competitions he won or came in second. His son, who went to Baton Rouge and wants nothing to do with Robicheaux Parish. His wife Heloise, who died from cancer a year ago. His stories are at least as real as hers, and somehow – later, she cannot retrace the path they took to get there – they are on the subject of religion and she tells him her father was a Baptist preacher.
“I used to call him Rev Daddy when I was a teenager. Not to his face, of course. He’d a whupped my ass.”
“Got you some laughs with your friends, I bet.”
It has been forever since she thought about vacation Bible school where they sent her the summer she turned thirteen. She was restless and rebellious, mouthing off left and right to anybody who said a word crosswise to her.
“It didn’t turn out the way my daddy hoped.”
“Didn’t calm you down none?”
“One of the counselors, a blonde boy with a face like he was about to bust out crying, he had a horse. Tim. Tim let us ride. Somehow my daddy heard what was going on. Next thing I knew he came tearing up to the camp in his station wagon and hauled me out of there in shame and disgrace.”
She’s having a hard time controlling the jiggling now. First one leg and then the other.
“Daddy wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. My mother had to pass it on to me. Behind closed doors, so to speak. He believed girls got turned on by riding a horse. Sexually. They have to spread their legs, right?”
Georges nods. “It’s not the first time I’m hearing that. It’s what the old-timers used to think.”
She loses the thread. Possibly her eyes close. Georges’ words come at her out of nowhere.
“So tell me, when do you close on that place in Virginia?”
An ambush. She’s losing it. She has forgotten, for a second, where she is. Also why, and possibly who. What most people don’t realize, will never realize, is the sheer strength of the rush you get when it’s good and nothing stands in your way. You’re a honeycomb, and in a flash all your cells fill up with warm honey. You experience the pleasure of filling, and then the pleasure of being full. Nothing like it. That, plus the thrill of movement. All you have to do is lift your arm, shift your position an inch or two. You feel tinkly, you feel rich, you feel like this is what you’ve been waiting for all along, what took you so long?
Georges goes to the kitchen, comes back with a glass of water she does not want. If she drinks it, she’ll heave.
“I know what you’re going through,” Georges tells her in his froggy voice, standing there with the glass of water.
“Yeah, right.”
He won’t go away. She feels crowded. Feels sweat running down her torso. Georges is breathing more than his fair share of the air in his stale little living room.
“My boy, that’s Albert, he gets that way. The way you are now. I suffer when I see my son suffer.”
Raelynn’s ability to feel interest in or sympathy for the lonely hurting man is just about gone, driven out by dirty desire. She’s glad when he shuffles out of the room. She nods out briefly, and then he’s back with a pill bottle.
He opens it, spills a few capsules into the palm of his horny hand, then holds them out to her.
“Doctor give these to Heloise, toward the end, when the pain got to be more than she could bear. She didn’t take them much. They made her vomit. This is what’s left.”
She allows him to dump the pills into her outstretched hand. Her fingers close on them as if to hide them. Georges steps away. He coughs politely. Gobble gobble, Raelynn. You can gobble these little fuckers down like a freaking animal.
No.
In her frustration, which cannot be distinguished from her anger, she flings the pills against the wall. With some difficulty, the Cajun Cowboy bends his old body down. One by one he picks up the scattered pills.
⻢
Ten thirty. Too late to show up at your new house, too dark to see. Raelynn parks in the drive and steps out of the truck. The engine ticks. The humidity grabs her by the throat. It will take some getting used to, after the dry bones of Texas. Fine. She’ll get used to it. The night bugs are loud. Tree frogs, she thinks, and cicadas. There’s a pond down in the pasture. That’s where the thwock of the bullfrogs is coming from.
Her throat is dry, her body hums from driving all day. She craves relief. It can come in just about any form.
She is curious about the house but needs to let the horses out first. Using a hooded flashlight she unloads them one by one, walking them to the pasture gate, which she remembers from the video. Mother first, always Mother first. The horse is unsure about this new terrain and waits for the others. When all three mares are in the pasture she closes the gate and watches them wander, exploring, snorting a little in consternation and disapproval. They won’t run yet. The place is as strange to them as it is to her.
Strange doesn’t cover it. It feels like the scene of a crime she has not yet committed. Part of a moon hangs in the sky, tending what she thinks must be southward, but it is visible only as a pearl blush behind stuck clouds. She has never lived outside Texas, and seldom traveled. An idea has been driving her. It seems to have to do with another person. Now she understands. She is that person.
She steps into the cramped little foyer and knows she has made a mistake. It’s as musty as Georges’ house, for one thing. But it’s more than that. She goes room by room discovering things each of which compound her error of judgment. The walls are moldy. The ceilings are streaked with leaks. The furniture, which came with the house, is shoddy and needs cleaning. How in the hell did they make the place look so good in the video?
There’s a box of crackers in the truck, and a fifth of Jim Beam. She brings them inside. Nibbles and sips. She is exhausted and would take a happy pill if she had one. She finds what she hopes are clean sheets in a closet and makes the bed. She strips and lies down. Gets up when she notices a cobweb in one corner of the ceiling. It seems to be trembling, but maybe it’s her. She hunts up a broom, knocks down the cobweb, lies down again. Switches off the light. She experiences chills and pulls the sheet up around her shoulders. All the small devils of desire, there must be a hundred of them, converge on her person. She feels old. She feels beleaguered. The idea of making good decisions is suddenly preposterous. It’s somebody else’s burden, not for her.
Sleep helps, however, it definitely helps. In the morning she comes across a scrawled note of welcome from the old codger she bought from. In the kitchen she finds coffee, eggs and butter, a loaf of bread. With food in her belly the situation does not look hopeful, just less dire. She calls the realtor, gets voicemail. Figures. She leaves a blistering message about how he misled her, but the relief of speaking her mind is short-lived.
She unloads her suitcases – she hasn’t brought much – then unloads the tack in the barn, which is in better shape than the house. She only brought one saddle, the oldest and her favorite. It knows the shape of her backside perfectly.
Make it work. Plan, part two.
She will put Tres Yeguas up for sale. That means swearing the real estate agent to secrecy – she has somebody in mind – so the girls can’t track her down. When it sells, she’ll have money to fix up this place. Meantime she can start on the basics. Find a roofer, and somebody to paint. When she can, she will replace the old guy’s furniture. A room at a time. Patience. Not something she is known for. It can be learned, anything can be learned.
She goes out to check on the horses. Honestly, they are content. They’re horses. She drives to Briery, the county seat, and buys groceries. Before heading back to what does not yet feel like her new home she has an idea. She drives to the Wal-Mart, parks in the massive lot. Sits there with the radio on listening to Outlaw Country while studying the people coming and going. Most of them are fat, white and Black both, and have a somewhat downtrodden appearance although maybe that’s just their big box parking lot look. After ten minutes she moves to another section of the lot. Scans the rows of vehicles and the faces of the shoppers.
The fourth time she moves, she sees what she has come to see. A dude of forty or thereabouts is leaning against the hood of an old black pickup, arms crossed. He has sunglasses and a John Deere cap. His honey-colored beard is braided, and she spaces out for a minute watching it tugged by the breeze.
The transaction she observes, five minutes later, is quite smooth, and hard to detect unless you know what you’re looking for. Money passes from the hand of a hard-faced woman to the retailer as a plastic baggie from him moves from her hand to her purse.
So. Now she knows.
Not that she has specific intentions.
Driving back to the country she make an effort to think about normal things. Spaghetti for supper, no meatballs. She has bought a new mop and bucket. She wonders how Trey is making out at work, wonders about the latest point of view Madison and Harper have adopted regarding their mother.
A step at a time. A day at a time. She can make it work. Fix up the house, learn to like Virginia. Get a job. Dream clean. Stay out of dark corners.
That evening the spaghetti tastes pretty good with red wine. She leaves another voice mail rant for the realtor because it feels like the responsible thing to do.
The wine brings out her generosity, or is it common sense, and she sends short texts to the girls and to Trey. She tells them she needs time. That’s no lie. More, right now, she cannot give.
She settles in. It’s not as hard as it could be. The pasture is plenty big, stretching to woods that are thick, dark, and secretive in their eastern way. She rides each of her horses in turn. Starts calling roofers. She deals with a nosy neighbor who shows up. He’s her age, which he thinks gives them something in common. She makes up a story about herself that goes some distance toward satisfying the man’s annoying curiosity.
One night she sits on the porch with whiskey and comes within a hair’s breadth of calling Trey. But doesn’t. His texts keep coming but have the opposite effect of what he intends. He is sounding more like a boy, in her absence, than a man. She does not need a boy in her life.
Probably it’s something to do with Trey that pushes her, next morning, to drive to the Briery Wal-Mart. She parks in the lot, scans and waits. But after forty minutes staying alert there is no sign of Honeybeard. She is jangled and pissed off, driving back.
A roofer fails to appear and give her an estimate. Fuck him. She calls another. The nosy neighbor comes back with a plate of cookies. They are store-bought. She finds her ability to tell amusing lies to the man has no limit. He appears to be grateful. She has the damnedest time remembering his name.
Suddenly it’s May, and hot. Have the horses forgotten Texas? Everywhere you look there are trees with brilliant purple buds. Down the road, an Amish farmer’s sprouting cornfield is full of boys and girls in sober antique clothing. Draught horses with mighty chests switch flies with their tails. The farmer’s wife in a dark dress tends rows of pale lettuce in her garden.
Raelynn does not miss Trey anything like she expected to, but thinking about the girls can send her into a tailspin. It’s hard, Maddie keeps insisting, not knowing where your mother is. Fair enough. But it’s just as hard to be the missing mother.
Several things come together in the wrong way. A too long visit from the neighbor, whose fascination with her grows. He runs cattle and looks it. A second roofer fails to show. A fungus she has never seen before appears on Pinta’s hooves. She burns her hand on the stove, making supper. Meantime the slumbering devils open their eyes – they have coordinated this on previous occasions – and march against her, grinning. Harper sends her video snippets of her pastor’s last sermon. It’s true, Jesus wants you to be rich.
Then here she is at Wal-Mart on a humid afternoon. And here, too, is Honeybeard in his banged up old truck. There’s a dog in the front seat, the meanest looking mutt she has ever seen. It bares its teeth. She knows how to approach the man without spooking him, and gets what she came for.
Home at sunset, jonesing bad. Honeybeard has sworn by his oxy, it’s the real deal, and no death chemicals mixed in. This is a mistake of her own free choosing. She swallows two pills down with Jim Beam. Value for dollar, as advertised. The rush, when it comes, makes her stagger. She sits down hard on the porch steps. What took her so long?
More whiskey, because certain mistakes dare you to double your wager. She wants to heave, but the tremor passes.
The third pill is a mistake in its own special category.
It’s dark now, or getting there. She wants to ride. Luckily she left the saddle on the pasture fence. It has somehow become heavy. Mother. She’ll ride Mother. But the horses are not stupid, they know something is not right. She manages to grab Mother by the halter. Niña and Pinta want nothing to do with Raelynn and move away.
With great difficulty, really with surprising difficulty, she gets the saddle on Mother. To mount, she stands on a fence board and clumsily climbs because she has surrendered the strength in her legs to forces beyond her control.
The mare is jumpy. Raelynn nudges her with her heels. Her shoes have fallen off. When did that happen? Something to do with sexual pleasure, it seems.
She heads for the black woods at the pasture’s far edge. Everything is farther away than it used to be, not long ago. It’s a test of wills. Mother does not want to run, does not want this fucked up woman on her back, never mind the history they have together, the trust.
Somewhere, maybe halfway to the woods, maybe not, Mother decides she has had enough. She whinnies in fury, comes to a hard stop, rears up. Raelynn wraps her arms around the horse’s neck as though it’s her first time riding. So dark now, it’s so damn dark. She digs her heels in, squeezes her legs against the horse’s flanks. She will not be thrown by this panicked animal.
A little window of clarity opens. Raelynn sticks her head through it. Here is the situation. She has messed up again, messed up big time. It shows she was right to get out of Texas. She’s a fool, but she’s strong. She is stronger in will than her powerful horse. She will stay on. When she gets off, in a moment of her choosing, she will quit what needs to be quit.
~ ~ ~
March 2026
Mark Jacobs
The day she gets fired, Raelynn Jacks stops at a strip mall on the way home and nods out in the truck. Behind the wheel. Sitting up. Her nose is running, her gut is tender, she’s super anxious. The price you pay for a boat ride on the river of bliss. It’s been worse. More often than she likes to admit, it has been way worse. The anxiety is the part she really hates, even knowing it won’t last forever. Here’s what the girls don’t get: Raelynn has the situation under control. She can stay ahead of disaster, she is smarter than the stupid things she does.
It was a dumb risk to take, granted, showing up high at the Institute. The only reason she did was, she needed some company in her head and found a little surprise in the glove compartment. It’s a bitching commute from the ranch. Shitty luck that Peters, the VP, showed up. He knew what he was seeing. Sorry to lose you, he said. You’re the best trainer we’ve got, Raelynn. She is pretty sure he meant it. Her instincts are good. Her judgment is not. She likes a warm and fuzzy buzz, likes it a lot. That’s not her fault, it’s her destiny.
Knuckles on the window jolt her awake. It’s a teenage cowboy with a pretty face wanting to know, is she all right. Is that lipstick? Nah, it’s just his sweet red baby lips. Fine, she tells him, I’m fine. Sorry to disappoint.
Back on the highway, thinking about the horses. Staying three mph over the limit to avoid any more problems. Arrowhead is the flattest, lonesomest county in south Texas. Live here long enough – say, the fifty years Raelynn has lived here – and your dreams flatten out to match. The landscape of your sleeping mind is brown, the trees stunted by wind, the sky so vast God himself gets lost in it.
She has a problem. Or will, soon enough. Harper’s friend Maria Elena works at the Institute, does something in the IT department. By now Maria Elena has heard that Raelynn got fired. She and Harper go to the same megachurch, where the preacher has convinced everybody that Jesus wants them to be rich. Maria Elena will text Harper. Harper will call Maddie. Then look out.
Raelynn’s girls have been threatening what Madison calls an intervention. Raelynn’s first-born is studying to be a psychiatric nurse and has lots of vocabulary. Raelynn is not one hundred percent sure what an intervention would involve. Her fear is they will haul her away to some rehab clinic, and when she gets out the horses will be gone. Oops, sorry, Mom, but you know it’s for the best. She’s not going to let that happen.
Niña, Pinta, and Holy Mother. Three mares. Niña is a chestnut Morgan and her tallest animal at fifteen hands two. Pinta is a Choctaw with a pinto pattern. Mother is a quarter horse, sorrel in color and proud in temper. What binds the three together, and her to them, is how they’re wild. They’re broke, that’s not it. She broke Niña and Mother herself. She rides them all, always has and always will. But they are wild regardless. It’s a spirit thing, a blood thing, some sort of spark in their horse brains and horse hearts that keeps them free. Free, Raelynn has learned the hard way, sometimes hurts.
If Jesus wants certain Christians who go to certain churches to be rich, does he want the rest of the country to stay poor?
By the time she turns onto the long snaking drive at Tres Yeguas, it’s late afternoon. The red sun has a droopy look; it’s tired of its day. She is feeling a little less rotten and has her plan. Part one of the plan is, get rid of Trey. Like that’s going to be easy. Trey Gold has made himself at home at the ranch. He claims to want to move on from rodeo hero with a bad back, but so far she has seen precious little forward motion. He thinks – and he is right, he is right as raisins – that the two things they have in common, horses and painkillers, give him a special status. Also, there is no denying the advantages of a younger man when it comes to satisfaction in the sack. His busted back is no impediment. The girls don’t trust him, which in a funny way further cements his position of privilege.
She parks. Walks out to the corral. The horses come forward looking for a treat and some affection. She gives both, and speaks to them about the plan. They will have their part to play, she makes them understand. Holy Mother, a.k.a. Unholy Mother, looks skeptical. That’s her job. She’s seven years old and leads the way. The other two will do as she does.
The house is long and low, a single story with a porch like you see in Westerns, down to the rockers with sagging leather seats. In the living room, on the couch under polished cowhorns, Trey is watching the Cowboy Channel. The Reno Rodeo is on. He is a small man, finely built, with a pouty face and black hair that has some curl to it. Altogether he looks like the boy king of Tres Yeguas. Normally that would make Raelynn laugh, but she can’t afford the humor just now.
Fast. Everything has to happen fast, or her plan won’t stand a chance.
He waves lazily at her. “You’re home early.”
“Felt like shit. Took a few hours off.”
He gets up and embraces her. Rubs her back up and down. He is no pig, he’s a man who knows how to treat a woman. It’s not manipulation, it’s who he is.
“How ‘bout I fry you up some eggs? With toast and jelly.”
A genuine offer, but she’s not ready to eat.
“Thanks, not hungry yet.”
“I was about to get me a beer. You want one?”
A beer sounds good. Sometimes, when she is jangled after buzzing, beer lubricates the scratchy parts inside.
They drink some beer and watch the rodeo and Trey withdraws into himself the way he sometimes does. It means he is fighting the urge to feel sorry for himself. Raelynn has the advantage because she knows what she wants to happen. By the time they get up from the couch he has agreed to go apply for that job he heard about in Paint City. Service manager at a tractor dealership. He grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and knows tractors. The hard part is making it real in his mind. If the job becomes real then he is no longer the rodeo hero he was meant to be.
“It has to happen,” she tells him gently, “you know it does.”
“You tryin’ to run me off the place?”
“You get the job, you can make the drive from here.”
“It’d be one damn long haul to get to work.”
“I know that, Trey.”
She also knows he has to make up his own mind.
Later, once they eat, Trey uses her computer to look up the tractors sold by Harriman & Son. Massey Fergusons and Kubotas. He needs to familiarize himself with the product lines ahead of his interview. Raelynn thinks she’d like to ride one of her horses, but whatever was in that pill she swallowed has been unkind to her. She’s not up to a quick canter. Instead she curries Mother in the barn, a thing that generally settles down both of them. She bets with herself that Maddie will be the one who calls. Wins the bet; there is no prize.
Madison Jacks is formidable, and Harper defers to her on the big decisions even though they are close in age and had different fathers.
“I heard you lost your job.”
There is no good way to handle this.
“You heard wrong.”
“What happened, Momma?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Harper’s scared. I am, too.”
“Nothing to be scared of.”
“I’m making an appointment for you.”
“No need. I had my teeth checked not five months back. No cavities, he said. Said my mouth is in great shape for a woman of fifty.”
“Will you go, if I set it up?”
Denial smooths all too easily into a lie. Raelynn tells her daughter she will go see whatever doctor she wants her to see. No gamble in that. By the time Maddie is able to get her in somewhere, her mother will be elsewhere.
That night she fucks the ears off Trey. For two reasons. One is, he lacks confidence. He’ll do a better job at his interview if he is mellowed out by good sex. A scientific fact. Two, it’s probably the last time. She is fond of the man and can think of no better way to say goodbye.
In the morning she walks him to his truck and hugs him for luck. She is careful not to signal any sort of farewell because he’ll get distracted from the task at hand, which is to learn to be somebody who’s not a broke-down rodeo cowboy.
Before the dust of his wheels settles in the drive she is on the computer. Far. She has to go far away, someplace the girls will never think to look.
Raelynn has money in the bank to finance her escape. At the Telemethods Institute she made good wages training people to work phone jobs. Companies of every description sent their new hires to the Institute to learn how to achieve their objective while talking at a distance. Hotlines, product service centers, crisis counseling organizations, telemarketers, you name it. Raelynn taught them to use the telephone, not be used by it. It helped that she has a voice to which people pay attention, composed of equal parts honey and grit. It was Trey who made the connection between her voice and her gift of command with the horses. Fierce they might be, but she opens her mouth and those three mares know who’s in charge of their wild.
She can get another job, once she figures out where she’s going.
She starts searching for property in Oklahoma. A whole ‘nother state. The girls won’t find her there. But as she surfs the web her focus keeps moving east. She’s never been on the other side of the Mississippi. Why not?
She gets bored and takes a break. Saddles Niña and rides her hard across the brown Texas earth until the nasty feeling that has been clogging her up goes away and she feels clean. And a little tired. She lopes back to the barn and rubs down the horse. Carrots all around.
It’s not her age – fifty is nothing; she knows a woman of eighty five living on her own place and doing just fine – it’s her addiction to evil pleasure that worries the girls. Because of the side effects. Eighteen months ago she had something in her system with oxy in the name and made the mistake of riding high. Late in the day, a somber sky, the kind that makes you remember the idea of sin. A snake jumped up in front of Pinta. The horse reared and threw Raelynn. This was before Trey was in the picture, and she had forgotten her phone, so nobody came out looking for her.
Grim. She spent a miserable cold night outside on the ground, shivering and hurting and unbearably sober, Pinta standing faithful guard, sorry for what she had done. She couldn’t move much, tried but could not climb onto the horse. A broken foot, a broken rib. Not until eleven the next morning did Harper come riding up on the ATV. What’s that old-fashioned word? Recriminations. There were plenty of those. Get yourself straight or get off the ranch, that has been the girls’ ultimatum since then. Like it’s up to them.
She goes back on the hunt for a place that is out of their reach. Why she lights on Virginia she has no idea unless it’s an old family story, never quite clear in her mind, about her great-great-grandmother making her way west from that state upon the death of her husband when the bank foreclosed on their farm. Whatever. It’s a stretch.
She calls a realtor who is advertising thirty five acres. Small house, cute red barn. The fences around the pastures look to be in pretty good shape. The realtor sends her to a video walk-through of the house and the land. It’s not a mansion, it’s not Paradise, but the place appeals to her. Maybe it’s all the green, which gives this property in Broadhope County in the Piedmont a welcoming look.
She has been known to be impulsive and is now. She makes an offer on the place. To her surprise, the offer is accepted inside an hour. The owner, according to the realtor, is old and feeble and needs to sell. He’s moving into assisted living. It will take a while to close on the property, but Raelynn is confident the sale will go through. The realtor promises to expedite the process. It’s in everybody’s interest.
It’s February. Winters in Virginia are short, the realtor tells her. By March she’ll see some new green coming up, coming out. By April, she won’t be able to escape it. This sounds good to Raelynn, it sounds like a thing she would like to experience.
Hauling three high-spirited horses across the country in a trailer. Now there’s something to think about.
Trey comes home happy and sad. He got the job. He’ll have a paycheck now. He’ll also be slugging a suitcase heavy with memory wherever he goes. Sure as shit, sooner rather than later some asshole will walk into the dealership and say, I seen you ride in Albuquerque, I seen you fall. Raelynn focuses on the positive even though she feels bad for not telling him what she is about to do. She can’t. Trey is not a strong person. If he knows where Raelynn is gone to, the girls will hammer it out of him. There are some prime steaks in the fridge, New York strips, his favorite. She broils them with potatoes, makes a salad that has a festive look, which she does not quite understand but that’s how it is. After dinner she pours him a double shot of Johnny Black on ice, and they sit on the front porch. When Harper calls, Raelynn passes the phone to Trey so her daughter can congratulate her man on the new job. Which she does, grudgingly.
That night, Raelynn would not mind making love again, but Trey is keyed up about starting at Harriman & Son. He has never punched a clock before. On the one hand, he wants to do a good job. On the other hand, well, on the other hand he is definitely, now, ex. They lie in bed spooning like an old married couple, and she falls asleep with a sense if not of guilt then of betrayal.
She’s up early in the morning to pack him a lunch. Like a wife, which she will never be. He comes into the kitchen wearing a shirt with the company logo on the pocket. It makes him feel self-conscious and looks stupid. I love you, Raelynn, he tells her ten minutes later, sliding in behind the wheel of his truck, because that’s the kind of man he is.
It’s artificial, the sense of urgency propelling her to pack her things and go, go now, go today. She makes it real. You don’t have to do this, she tells herself. But she does. She will not be dictated to by her children just because she likes the feelings she gets from certain chemical combinations.
In fact a minor buzz would be nice, right about now. She could paint the walls of her brain a soft color, easy on the mind’s eye. She doesn’t. Experience tells her that, once she starts, she will wind up going too far. If she’s going to get out of here today she needs a clear head. In fact, here’s a thought: stay straight all the way to Virginia. Would that be a good idea?
She takes some time with the note to Trey. She owes him that much.
Beautiful man Goodbye. Something came up, I can’t get into it. I won’t be back. Right now, this very moment, I am seeing you at the new job. It’s a damn fine picture to look at. You’ll knock ‘em dead, I have no doubt. Feel free to stay here until the girls push you out which they will waste no time doing, count on it. Anyway if you get yourself a place in Paint City you won’t have that long drive every day. What else? You made me happy. This way you won’t have to watch me get old. Your loving lover, R.J.
Her truck is a Silverado, red and chromed up, 35 thousand miles on it is all. She hooks it up to the trailer. She loads everything, the horses last. She has to soothe them some before they agree to walk the plank. They know something is up. Pulling onto the highway she does not look back. She knows what the ranch looks like.
⻢
“It’s the wind got ‘em riled up.”
So says the man who claims to have been known, back in the day, as the Cajun Cowboy. Not that Raelynn necessarily believes his story. He’s old, got to be seventy five and gray all over like a hairy fish. Walks like his boots are too tight. Never rode in Texas, he claims. That alone makes him suspicious.
“It ain’t the wind,” she corrects him, “it’s the change in the weather. The wind’s just part of it.”
They stand inside the fence around the big, level pasture in Robicheaux Parish that belongs to him. The chilly Louisiana night is moony, but they keep losing the light as dark-bottomed clouds move in and cover the chubby yellow disc. Then they’re gone, the light comes back, and the watchers can clearly make out the horses thundering across the ground, Mother in the lead.
“Them mares of yours do like to kick up their heels, don’t they?”
“They been cooped up in that trailer. They need to run.”
“Shit, they can run all night long here, they want to.”
His name is Georges Bergeron. He has a bullfrog voice. An ancestor of his fought at the Battle of New Orleans under General Jackson, or so he says. She has no reason to doubt anything he says, and no reason to believe it. He uncaps a flask and passes it to her. She won’t ask him what the fiery liquid is that scalds her throat going down. She does not dislike the man.
“Virginia, huh?”
She nods. Probably he does not notice. He is as transfixed by the sight of her flying horses as she is. In the lacquering moonlight they do not look quite real, they look like their own individual idea.
This is how she is constructing her trip. Drive a while. Look up a place to spend the night where the horses can run and graze and not be passengers. Head there. There is not a bit of hurry to the way she is doing it. She keeps her phone turned off, for the most part, so the girls don’t pester her. She switches it on now and again to talk to the realtor when a text won’t do. Maybe she hasn’t earned the relief she feels, but she’ll take it.
Georges offers her another slug from the flask. She shakes her head. Somewhere between the Tres Yeguas Ranch and this Louisiana parish, it came to her that she is not running away from her daughters, really what she is doing is clearing a space where she can be alone and break her addiction. Which thought is already different. Progress, from a mental point of view. Back home if Madison or Harper said she was addicted to painkillers she’d bite their head off.
When the horses slow down and drop their heads, she follows Georges back to the house where she is renting a room for a couple of nights. A widower, he lives alone. He is no threat, he’s only lonely and hoping to be entertained. The house is on the small side, the furniture has a musty smell. An old dog with a chopped off tail sleeps next to Georges’ chair, breathing loud. A calico cat paces, keeping its distance from the interloper. The place could use a good airing out, but other than that Raelynn doesn’t mind being there.
It’s late, but Georges has neither schedule nor obligation, and he heats up some red beans and rice for both of them. She wins praise for the quantity of hot sauce she puts on her bowlful.
She tells him some stories. Some of them are true, or partly true, or start out true. The stories make him laugh.
“You have got quite the voice,” he tells her, “if you don’t mind me saying so. Makes the words go down easy.”
There is a ragged, racing feeling in her. She recognizes the signs. She is jonesing. Sometimes sex can turn aside the drive. Sometimes alcohol will do the trick although drinking can open up a whole new set of complications, and the complications have been known to trigger more dangerous cravings. Once in a while, if she can fall asleep, the desire will pass.
“You okay?” Georges wants to know.
It must be obvious. That embarrasses her a little, and makes her defiant. Her leg is jiggling.
“I’m fine,” she tells him, “I am just fine, George.”
Seeing she needs to be distracted he tells her some stories of his own. About horses he rode, competitions he won or came in second. His son, who went to Baton Rouge and wants nothing to do with Robicheaux Parish. His wife Heloise, who died from cancer a year ago. His stories are at least as real as hers, and somehow – later, she cannot retrace the path they took to get there – they are on the subject of religion and she tells him her father was a Baptist preacher.
“I used to call him Rev Daddy when I was a teenager. Not to his face, of course. He’d a whupped my ass.”
“Got you some laughs with your friends, I bet.”
It has been forever since she thought about vacation Bible school where they sent her the summer she turned thirteen. She was restless and rebellious, mouthing off left and right to anybody who said a word crosswise to her.
“It didn’t turn out the way my daddy hoped.”
“Didn’t calm you down none?”
“One of the counselors, a blonde boy with a face like he was about to bust out crying, he had a horse. Tim. Tim let us ride. Somehow my daddy heard what was going on. Next thing I knew he came tearing up to the camp in his station wagon and hauled me out of there in shame and disgrace.”
She’s having a hard time controlling the jiggling now. First one leg and then the other.
“Daddy wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. My mother had to pass it on to me. Behind closed doors, so to speak. He believed girls got turned on by riding a horse. Sexually. They have to spread their legs, right?”
Georges nods. “It’s not the first time I’m hearing that. It’s what the old-timers used to think.”
She loses the thread. Possibly her eyes close. Georges’ words come at her out of nowhere.
“So tell me, when do you close on that place in Virginia?”
An ambush. She’s losing it. She has forgotten, for a second, where she is. Also why, and possibly who. What most people don’t realize, will never realize, is the sheer strength of the rush you get when it’s good and nothing stands in your way. You’re a honeycomb, and in a flash all your cells fill up with warm honey. You experience the pleasure of filling, and then the pleasure of being full. Nothing like it. That, plus the thrill of movement. All you have to do is lift your arm, shift your position an inch or two. You feel tinkly, you feel rich, you feel like this is what you’ve been waiting for all along, what took you so long?
Georges goes to the kitchen, comes back with a glass of water she does not want. If she drinks it, she’ll heave.
“I know what you’re going through,” Georges tells her in his froggy voice, standing there with the glass of water.
“Yeah, right.”
He won’t go away. She feels crowded. Feels sweat running down her torso. Georges is breathing more than his fair share of the air in his stale little living room.
“My boy, that’s Albert, he gets that way. The way you are now. I suffer when I see my son suffer.”
Raelynn’s ability to feel interest in or sympathy for the lonely hurting man is just about gone, driven out by dirty desire. She’s glad when he shuffles out of the room. She nods out briefly, and then he’s back with a pill bottle.
He opens it, spills a few capsules into the palm of his horny hand, then holds them out to her.
“Doctor give these to Heloise, toward the end, when the pain got to be more than she could bear. She didn’t take them much. They made her vomit. This is what’s left.”
She allows him to dump the pills into her outstretched hand. Her fingers close on them as if to hide them. Georges steps away. He coughs politely. Gobble gobble, Raelynn. You can gobble these little fuckers down like a freaking animal.
No.
In her frustration, which cannot be distinguished from her anger, she flings the pills against the wall. With some difficulty, the Cajun Cowboy bends his old body down. One by one he picks up the scattered pills.
⻢
Ten thirty. Too late to show up at your new house, too dark to see. Raelynn parks in the drive and steps out of the truck. The engine ticks. The humidity grabs her by the throat. It will take some getting used to, after the dry bones of Texas. Fine. She’ll get used to it. The night bugs are loud. Tree frogs, she thinks, and cicadas. There’s a pond down in the pasture. That’s where the thwock of the bullfrogs is coming from.
Her throat is dry, her body hums from driving all day. She craves relief. It can come in just about any form.
She is curious about the house but needs to let the horses out first. Using a hooded flashlight she unloads them one by one, walking them to the pasture gate, which she remembers from the video. Mother first, always Mother first. The horse is unsure about this new terrain and waits for the others. When all three mares are in the pasture she closes the gate and watches them wander, exploring, snorting a little in consternation and disapproval. They won’t run yet. The place is as strange to them as it is to her.
Strange doesn’t cover it. It feels like the scene of a crime she has not yet committed. Part of a moon hangs in the sky, tending what she thinks must be southward, but it is visible only as a pearl blush behind stuck clouds. She has never lived outside Texas, and seldom traveled. An idea has been driving her. It seems to have to do with another person. Now she understands. She is that person.
She steps into the cramped little foyer and knows she has made a mistake. It’s as musty as Georges’ house, for one thing. But it’s more than that. She goes room by room discovering things each of which compound her error of judgment. The walls are moldy. The ceilings are streaked with leaks. The furniture, which came with the house, is shoddy and needs cleaning. How in the hell did they make the place look so good in the video?
There’s a box of crackers in the truck, and a fifth of Jim Beam. She brings them inside. Nibbles and sips. She is exhausted and would take a happy pill if she had one. She finds what she hopes are clean sheets in a closet and makes the bed. She strips and lies down. Gets up when she notices a cobweb in one corner of the ceiling. It seems to be trembling, but maybe it’s her. She hunts up a broom, knocks down the cobweb, lies down again. Switches off the light. She experiences chills and pulls the sheet up around her shoulders. All the small devils of desire, there must be a hundred of them, converge on her person. She feels old. She feels beleaguered. The idea of making good decisions is suddenly preposterous. It’s somebody else’s burden, not for her.
Sleep helps, however, it definitely helps. In the morning she comes across a scrawled note of welcome from the old codger she bought from. In the kitchen she finds coffee, eggs and butter, a loaf of bread. With food in her belly the situation does not look hopeful, just less dire. She calls the realtor, gets voicemail. Figures. She leaves a blistering message about how he misled her, but the relief of speaking her mind is short-lived.
She unloads her suitcases – she hasn’t brought much – then unloads the tack in the barn, which is in better shape than the house. She only brought one saddle, the oldest and her favorite. It knows the shape of her backside perfectly.
Make it work. Plan, part two.
She will put Tres Yeguas up for sale. That means swearing the real estate agent to secrecy – she has somebody in mind – so the girls can’t track her down. When it sells, she’ll have money to fix up this place. Meantime she can start on the basics. Find a roofer, and somebody to paint. When she can, she will replace the old guy’s furniture. A room at a time. Patience. Not something she is known for. It can be learned, anything can be learned.
She goes out to check on the horses. Honestly, they are content. They’re horses. She drives to Briery, the county seat, and buys groceries. Before heading back to what does not yet feel like her new home she has an idea. She drives to the Wal-Mart, parks in the massive lot. Sits there with the radio on listening to Outlaw Country while studying the people coming and going. Most of them are fat, white and Black both, and have a somewhat downtrodden appearance although maybe that’s just their big box parking lot look. After ten minutes she moves to another section of the lot. Scans the rows of vehicles and the faces of the shoppers.
The fourth time she moves, she sees what she has come to see. A dude of forty or thereabouts is leaning against the hood of an old black pickup, arms crossed. He has sunglasses and a John Deere cap. His honey-colored beard is braided, and she spaces out for a minute watching it tugged by the breeze.
The transaction she observes, five minutes later, is quite smooth, and hard to detect unless you know what you’re looking for. Money passes from the hand of a hard-faced woman to the retailer as a plastic baggie from him moves from her hand to her purse.
So. Now she knows.
Not that she has specific intentions.
Driving back to the country she make an effort to think about normal things. Spaghetti for supper, no meatballs. She has bought a new mop and bucket. She wonders how Trey is making out at work, wonders about the latest point of view Madison and Harper have adopted regarding their mother.
A step at a time. A day at a time. She can make it work. Fix up the house, learn to like Virginia. Get a job. Dream clean. Stay out of dark corners.
That evening the spaghetti tastes pretty good with red wine. She leaves another voice mail rant for the realtor because it feels like the responsible thing to do.
The wine brings out her generosity, or is it common sense, and she sends short texts to the girls and to Trey. She tells them she needs time. That’s no lie. More, right now, she cannot give.
She settles in. It’s not as hard as it could be. The pasture is plenty big, stretching to woods that are thick, dark, and secretive in their eastern way. She rides each of her horses in turn. Starts calling roofers. She deals with a nosy neighbor who shows up. He’s her age, which he thinks gives them something in common. She makes up a story about herself that goes some distance toward satisfying the man’s annoying curiosity.
One night she sits on the porch with whiskey and comes within a hair’s breadth of calling Trey. But doesn’t. His texts keep coming but have the opposite effect of what he intends. He is sounding more like a boy, in her absence, than a man. She does not need a boy in her life.
Probably it’s something to do with Trey that pushes her, next morning, to drive to the Briery Wal-Mart. She parks in the lot, scans and waits. But after forty minutes staying alert there is no sign of Honeybeard. She is jangled and pissed off, driving back.
A roofer fails to appear and give her an estimate. Fuck him. She calls another. The nosy neighbor comes back with a plate of cookies. They are store-bought. She finds her ability to tell amusing lies to the man has no limit. He appears to be grateful. She has the damnedest time remembering his name.
Suddenly it’s May, and hot. Have the horses forgotten Texas? Everywhere you look there are trees with brilliant purple buds. Down the road, an Amish farmer’s sprouting cornfield is full of boys and girls in sober antique clothing. Draught horses with mighty chests switch flies with their tails. The farmer’s wife in a dark dress tends rows of pale lettuce in her garden.
Raelynn does not miss Trey anything like she expected to, but thinking about the girls can send her into a tailspin. It’s hard, Maddie keeps insisting, not knowing where your mother is. Fair enough. But it’s just as hard to be the missing mother.
Several things come together in the wrong way. A too long visit from the neighbor, whose fascination with her grows. He runs cattle and looks it. A second roofer fails to show. A fungus she has never seen before appears on Pinta’s hooves. She burns her hand on the stove, making supper. Meantime the slumbering devils open their eyes – they have coordinated this on previous occasions – and march against her, grinning. Harper sends her video snippets of her pastor’s last sermon. It’s true, Jesus wants you to be rich.
Then here she is at Wal-Mart on a humid afternoon. And here, too, is Honeybeard in his banged up old truck. There’s a dog in the front seat, the meanest looking mutt she has ever seen. It bares its teeth. She knows how to approach the man without spooking him, and gets what she came for.
Home at sunset, jonesing bad. Honeybeard has sworn by his oxy, it’s the real deal, and no death chemicals mixed in. This is a mistake of her own free choosing. She swallows two pills down with Jim Beam. Value for dollar, as advertised. The rush, when it comes, makes her stagger. She sits down hard on the porch steps. What took her so long?
More whiskey, because certain mistakes dare you to double your wager. She wants to heave, but the tremor passes.
The third pill is a mistake in its own special category.
It’s dark now, or getting there. She wants to ride. Luckily she left the saddle on the pasture fence. It has somehow become heavy. Mother. She’ll ride Mother. But the horses are not stupid, they know something is not right. She manages to grab Mother by the halter. Niña and Pinta want nothing to do with Raelynn and move away.
With great difficulty, really with surprising difficulty, she gets the saddle on Mother. To mount, she stands on a fence board and clumsily climbs because she has surrendered the strength in her legs to forces beyond her control.
The mare is jumpy. Raelynn nudges her with her heels. Her shoes have fallen off. When did that happen? Something to do with sexual pleasure, it seems.
She heads for the black woods at the pasture’s far edge. Everything is farther away than it used to be, not long ago. It’s a test of wills. Mother does not want to run, does not want this fucked up woman on her back, never mind the history they have together, the trust.
Somewhere, maybe halfway to the woods, maybe not, Mother decides she has had enough. She whinnies in fury, comes to a hard stop, rears up. Raelynn wraps her arms around the horse’s neck as though it’s her first time riding. So dark now, it’s so damn dark. She digs her heels in, squeezes her legs against the horse’s flanks. She will not be thrown by this panicked animal.
A little window of clarity opens. Raelynn sticks her head through it. Here is the situation. She has messed up again, messed up big time. It shows she was right to get out of Texas. She’s a fool, but she’s strong. She is stronger in will than her powerful horse. She will stay on. When she gets off, in a moment of her choosing, she will quit what needs to be quit.
~ ~ ~
March 2026
