MOJAVE DESERT, 1967
Her own horse, everybody said later, into their cups, into their palms.
Charlie got into an argument with the schoolteacher she loved, her girlfriend of five years and a secret to everyone, in her room early in the morning—the wrong time for a fight, she thought. Shouldn’t the ass crack of morning be the time for the complaints of the body? That was the first thing she said to Angeline, who was unhappy and devoted and had asked about some plans for the holiday. Her sister had been gone from the country almost five years that had felt like a cavity, a mostly occluded pain that might reveal itself barbed and whistling for reasons you didn’t totally understand.
The question was, What are we going to do for Christmas? The assumption it built upon had not been discussed, or Charlie could not remember discussing it.
The horse was a drinker, too. She made him that way. Could grip the bottle nose delicately enough not to break it, then tip it back, one beer in one go.
What had she and Fay done for Christmas, for example, her girlfriend said. Charlie waved in a general outward direction, a gesture that probably looked like fuck-it-to-hell. In fact there was a shed she meant, beyond the pool, a crosshatched door painted white, then blue, inside it a cardboard box reinforced at the corners. Popcorn strings dipped in glitter, the tabs of all sodas consumed in the fall of 1958 worked together with copper wire to make the topper of a Christmas tree, an experiment that had ended badly. Honey, Charlie had said, which race car had a hair ball.
A beautiful creature, hard to say which color. She taught it to dance to “Mack the Knife.” “Hey, Good Lookin’.”
But the gesture was all she could make. Angeline set her jaw and began putting things in piles and systems, the beer cans into the trash, the change that came from Charlie’s pockets at the end of the night into denominations.
Are you under the impression you treat me well, her girlfriend said.
It was a miracle that horse had learned to be around it at all, the sonic booms all damn day. A matter of time, someone said, maybe.
She could not answer. At that Angeline shook her head and disappeared into the bathroom to fill the water for the percolator. Charlie’s voice went up, lost its core. You probably don’t even need electricity for that, hothead. Plug the thing into yourself.
To keep herself from speaking any further she walked out, boots unlaced, naked under her red union suit. The sunrise was a civil war in pinks and she tore through it to where he was sleeping. Almost never had she ridden him this early, because she woke with headaches most mornings and needed to keep the world as still as possible, a thing she could see but that she would not touch. As they set out he was distracted, surprised by tiny flowers he had seen every day of his life. She’d forgotten her patience, lost it in the bedroom where it was clear for the hundredth time she was not the woman for the job. Thoughts of love were not enough—she could not thread them through to the other side where they were felt. She had one hand on the saddle and another hanging, an open pint of Beam tugged onto her middle finger.
Could have been some new test, a noise he hadn’t heard before. That he was half-asleep. Or could have been nothing, the mystery an animal has kept his whole life and then needs to get rid of.
When he first picked up speed she was grateful. She thanked him. It was her turn to be surprised by the things she found familiar, a last look at the inn that had begun, fifteen years before, as an ink drawing circumscribed by the moisture ring on a cocktail napkin. Inside the velocity of his gallop, the things she could see became thinner, reduced to their most startling element. If you flattened its colors the desert was not beige but purple. Miles from the inn and crossing the highway, the car that nearly got them was only a sound.
Irony is they made it across. Guy driving almost crashed, seeing them.
She had stopped kicking, stopped saying his name. Whatever they were doing, wherever he was taking her, happened where speaking left off. She had belonged to him, always she had belonged to him, and it was a beautiful favor he had done in allowing the world to think the opposite. When he succeeded in throwing her she let go with a chosen freedom, knowing a locked body broke more easily.
Irony is, his loyalty. If he hadn’t come back after he threw her, who knows.
As he doubled back, a shadow galloping toward her, she put a hand over her face, a final vanity, irrelevant as any. He had come back to find her before the glister of ten miles had really left him, and could not know precisely where he was going, where his feet would land when he leapt the line of chaparral—it obscured the flat place where he’d lost her.