Four Dead Horses Read online

  and give me work that’s open to the sky;

  make me a pardner of the wind and sun,

  and I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.

  Let me be easy on the man that’s down;

  let me be square and generous with all.

  I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town,

  but never let ’em say I’m mean or small!

  Make me as big and open as the plains,

  as honest as the hawse between my knees,

  clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,

  free as the hawk that circles down the breeze!

  4

  The leitmotif of denial that had marked the Oliphant’s Conversation Candlelight dinner dogged the rest of Martin’s summer. When he dropped his mom at Swinehurst Hospital for her mastectomy, he didn’t even go to help her check in. They shook hands on the curb outside the in-patient entrance, as if he were a long-time chauffer depositing the lady of the manor for a fortnight in the country. While she was recovering, he visited every morning. They would sit in her antiseptic room, watching reruns of old black-and-white sitcoms on the wall-mounted TV, never discussing her sunken chest, the drainage tubes sprouting from the short sleeves of her gown, or her prognosis. When The Andy Griffith Show came on, Martin would make his exit, return home, and continue to watch daytime TV. In the evenings, his anesthetic of choice was a bottle of wine from his dad’s cellar and a Dick Francis paperback from the stash in the den.

  After two weeks, Dottie moved back home with the help of Nurse Hawkins, a rounded woman who smelled of starch. Martin’s routine hardly changed, except that he watched both his morning and afternoon TV in the basement rec room, while his mom and Nurse Hawkins used the set in the master bedroom. Another two weeks and Nurse Hawkins decamped, professing herself satisfied that her patient was on the mend and that Martin could handle the caretaking duties on his own. After all, how hard was it to warm up a can of Campbell’s Chicken & Stars or scramble an egg?

  Not that hard, fortunately, because by mid-July, Martin accepted he was on his own. His dad had announced he was proceeding straight from closing on the Final Paws Pet Mortuary ’n Cemetery of Kansas City to Palo Alto, where a failing sports equipment store chain was headquartered. From there, he’d also be able to keep an eye on Frank, who’d almost been kicked out of Dick Gould’s Junior Summer Tennis Camp for an incident involving a missed curfew, a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine, and a bikinied Stanford grad student, who was old enough to know better. Martin appreciated that he should be angry with his dad, but Martin also appreciated that his dad was reacting to Dottie’s frailty the only way he knew how—from afar and with lots of cash. He instructed Mrs. Priebe to collect and pay the bills and dispense whatever spending money Martin deemed necessary, no questions asked. Martin recognized that addendum for what it was: the only attaboy he was likely to receive for taking on solo the terrifying task of waiting for his mom to get well, or not.

  He knew it was bad. The mastectomy had gone as planned, but as the summer weeks ticked by, Dottie didn’t get better. She remained skeletal. She limped. She needed help getting out of bed. Martin was sure the cancer had spread. When he expressed that concern to their family physician, Dr. Elliot Broad, he answered, “the body is an amazing thing” but offered no other comments, diagnoses, or timelines. Martin’s mom complained but only of tennis elbow.

  Once, at the beginning of August, Martin battled back his ennui enough to make a trip to the Pierre Public Library to start his planned study of cowboy poetry. The outing was a failure. The scratched oak file drawers held no card for Ben Arnold, nor for any of the poets Beaufort and the hands had performed: Bruce Kiskaddon, Henry Herbert Knibbs, Badger Clark, S. Omar Barker. Martin found no anthologies of the classic cowboy poets’ works, no listings for cowboy poetry in The Readers’ Guide to Periodic Literature, no librarian familiar with the canon of that particular folk art. When he left the central-air chilled sanctum, with its perfume of carpet glue and mimeograph ink, he left convinced that, in Pierre, he was alone in his passion for cowboy poetry, alone and without resources.

  And he was half right. It would be a few more years before NPR’s Saturday night staple, “The Cowboy Poetry Hour,” would introduce Western verse to Midwestern sensibilities. In Pierre in 1985, Martin was indeed cowboy poetry’s sole devotee. But he would have been wrong to think he could not have found a solid grounding in the art on the shelves of the Pierre library. Cowboy poetry—recited, sung, and translated (for many of the earliest campfire performers were vaqueros from south of the border)—was first chronicled among the stockmen working the cattle drives after the Civil War. These were men who had, in school, memorized Longfellow, Shakespeare, and the Bible and, in parlors, listened to Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Allen Poe, such orations being one of the most popular American entertainments of that era. Thus primed, and with six months to kill while trotting up the Chisholm, Shawnee, or Goodnight-Loving trail, cowboys would create their own ballads and odes. To the beat of horse hooves on packed dirt, they would rework “Gunga Din” or a Shakespeare sonnet to feature a few more skittish calves, a just-broke stallion, and a honky-tonk whore with a heart of gold. If Martin had bothered to look, he could have found the forefathers of cowboy poetry all over, and rarely checked out from, the Pierre Public Library stacks.

  He did not connect again with his passion for cowboy poetry until the late August night before he was to pick up his dad and Frank from O’Hare Airport. He wandered into Carroll’s home office in search of the index card on which Mrs. Priebe had typed the number and time of the flight from San Francisco. He sat in the desk chair, leaned back, sniffed at the Vitalis that had soaked into the pleather headrest, and struggled to work out how he felt about the return of the other half of his family. He had become accustomed to floating alone in the timeless stream of nescience that had become his summer. Mrs. Priebe had sent in his tuition for the fall trimester at U of C, but Hyde Park seemed a million miles from his and Dottie’s days of Stouffer’s Macaroni and Cheese, three o’clock naps, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Dottie, on the other hand, was elated and had claimed she was already feeling better knowing that “my boys” would soon be home. Martin saw no evidence of improved health on her part, just the opposite in fact, but he chose to believe it because she did.

  He pushed around the mail on top of his dad’s blotter: J.C. Penney’s catalogue promising an “acid-washed summer of denim fun”; the First Methodist of Pierre’s newsletter, A Pew Words; a March of Dimes appeal; a flyer for twenty percent off on an oil change at Dougie’s Engine Shoppe. And, at the bottom of the pile, Jimmy Sneedle’s Tennis and Dude Ranch Chronicles: Summer Edition.

  Reading the masthead quickened Martin’s breath and hardened his cock. He scanned the front—an announcement of a name change, come October, to “Jimmy Sneedle’s Tennis and Golf Ranch;” a boxed invitation to purchase, at a “friends of Jimso” rate, one of the “clubhouse view timeshares”; a photo of a barren patch of desert, a bulldozer, and a sign that read FUTURE HOME OF THE JS ENTERPRISES CHAMPIONSHIP GOLF COURSE. Martin thought the bulldozer was parked where the barn used to be, but he couldn’t be sure, as he recognized nothing familiar in the picture. No horses, no cacti, no sagebrush, no cowboys, no Ginger.

  He flipped the newsletter over and gasped. There it was, covering the back page: A column by Beaufort, a couple of verses of poetry, and a large black-and-white photo of Martin performing “The Campfire Has Gone Out.” Martin thought he could make out the back of Julie’s head in the front row and next to her, Ginger, leaning forward. He had not imagined it. His life had changed that night.

  He read Beaufort’s article with care, noting that the Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence he spoke of attending had long passed but also that he had called it the “first annual” of such events. Martin vowed then to be at the second. He turned his attention to the Badger Clark poem, “A
Cowboy’s Prayer,” subtitled “A Prayer for Mother.”

  How could he not believe this, and the note above it, was a missive for Martin and Martin alone? He gently tore off the back page, vowing, starting immediately, to practice reciting the poem until he knew it as well as “The Campfire Has Gone Out.” But that night, he only got as far as the first lines—I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well, that You have made my freedom so complete—before the phone rang. He picked it up.

  “Hello?” It was Frank, via clicky long distance, Pierre to Palo Alto. “You’re coming to the airport, right? I think there’s something wrong with dad.”

  Martin scanned the passengers disembarking from the TWA SFO-LAX-ORD red-eye. Though only ten a.m., the heat of Chicago in late August made the planes outside the terminal windows wave and bend, as if they were tuned in on the kitchen RCA. He had promised to meet Frank at the end of the jetway to help with Carroll who was, in Frank’s words, “acting strange, even for him.” But that was last night and the flight took five hours, enough time for the chronically distracted Frank to forget he even had a brother. If Martin missed them, there would be panicked calls to his mom, who was not well enough to pick up the phone. There would be frantic white courtesy phone announcements. There would be an impossibly expensive cab ride home and recriminations all around and somehow, inevitably, it would all be down to Martin. So he noted each deplaning passenger with the intensity of General Custer astride his horse, scrutinizing the horizon, waiting for that first Lakota or Oglala or Miniconjou to come and shoot him dead.

  Martin spotted his dad first. He walked with a starboard tack and his right jowl slouched a good three inches lower than his left. He passed by Martin; less a snub, Martin thought, than a lack of vision out of a sagging eye socket, so loose the eyelid had completely covered the pupil and most of the iris and was working its way through the bottom half of the sclera.

  “Dad,” Martin said and reached a hand to the shoulder of the listing man’s checkered travel blazer. “Are you all right?”

  “I know,” said Frank, a step behind Carroll. “He won’t stop doing that.” He wore a shiny tracksuit in Stanford red and black and carried a matching bag sprouting three tennis racquet handles.

  “What’d you say? What’d you say?” Carroll’s good eye ping-ponged between Martin and Frank.

  “He does that too,” said Frank. “Maybe his ears are clogged.”

  “How long has he been like this?” said Martin.

  “I dunno,” said Frank. “A couple of days. Since he came to see me play on Wednesday. But sometimes he’s okay. Like he can drive fine. He keeps both hands on the wheel now. His face, though, it’s messed up. Anyway, we should get our bags before some asshole takes them. I have valuable stuff in there.” By “valuable stuff,” Martin assumed Frank meant drugs.

  “Where’d you park?” Carroll angled his head so the left side addressed Martin in a sharp voice infused with familiar and oddly comforting vibrations of contempt. He sucked in a breath. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Then the right side of Carroll’s lip let loose a cord of spittle, which shimmered and twisted in the light from the floor-to-ceiling plastic windows.

  “Did you go to a doctor?” Martin asked.

  “Flu,” spat Carroll.

  “You think I should?” said Frank. “You think it’s catching?”

  “No. For Dad,” said Martin.

  Frank shrugged. “He says he’s fine, just needs some sleep. He’s probably fine. It’s probably not catching. Let’s get home. How’s Mom?”

  At the baggage carousel, Martin pressed for more details on the contour of his dad’s evident infirmity, but Frank didn’t respond, too busy elbowing his way to the front of the scrum at the conveyer belt, brandishing his baggage claim, and cross-checking it against the tag on every black hard-shelled Samsonite that looked like his, which was all of them. Carroll continued to talk out of the dextral side of his jaw, telling Martin about the great impression Frank had made at the tennis camp. Martin tried to quell a rising bile of terror, one he could taste as regurgitated airport hotdog and Crown Cola. He was meant to return to the U of C in less than two weeks. But to do so, he needed to relinquish his nursing duties vis-à-vis his mom. And now this with his dad, who looked like he was going to require more therapeutic intervention than what was available in their medicine cabinet in Pierre: Vicks VapoRub and a half bottle of Anacin.

  Suitcases, golf clubs, and yet another racquet collected, Martin, Frank, and Carroll navigated the parking garage, trudging in single file, Carroll listing to the right and banging his shins on the bumpers of Chevy Caprices, Honda Civics, and the occasional Pontiac Fiero.

  “Watch where you’re going, asshole,” he yelled and slapped an open palm on the trunk of each vehicle as he passed.

  Once Martin got the baggage loaded in his mother’s station wagon, and once he had safely merged onto I-90, he asked his dad again what had happened.

  “Flu,” he answered and fell asleep, expectorating right cheek pressed to the passenger-side window.

  Martin left his brother and the functioning half of his dad wrestling their bags out of the back of the wagon and headed to the house. He needed to decide what to do first: warn his mom about the fractional state of her husband, or help her to her feet so she could appear, if not well, then better than she usually did. He opened the door from the garage, and Dottie stood in front of him, eyes shut, upright, clutching in one hand the end of the faux antique chinoiserie screen that separated the entryway from the family room and in the other, a neon yellow tennis ball.

  “Welcome home, boys.” She exhaled and opened her eyes. She dropped her hands, and her shoulders sagged. “Where’s your father?”

  “They’re coming,” said Martin.

  “You caught me doing my grip strengthening exercises,” she whispered, head drooping, looking not at Martin but down at the rug on which he stood. This sounded to him as if it were a practiced line and practiced not for him.

  “I may need to sit,” she said.

  She slumped forward, and Martin leaned to catch her under her puny arms. He realized her hail-fellow-well-met routine must have exhausted her. How long had she been there, pressing that ball and grimacing like the teaching skeleton in Dr. Broad’s waiting room?

  The tennis ball dribbled from her hand and rolled next to the bar refrigerator. Martin two-stepped Dottie backwards and around the screen. He maneuvered her to the far end of the room and onto a tweed couch covered in a nubby gold-and-orange fabric that looked like a weave an ophthalmologist might choose for his second-best suit. Martin gathered a few needlepointed throw pillows and arranged them around her, sandbags to keep her from eroding into a pile of bone fragments and dust.

  Frank followed a minute later, dropped his Samsonite in the middle of the living room, and pushed next to Martin.

  “Hi, Mom. You look great.” He kissed her cheek then whispered in Martin’s ear. “I gotta get out of here. Please, man, just for a little bit.”

  Martin looked into Frank’s shell-shocked eyes and gave a tight nod. He was just a kid. And Martin was a man, he realized, hatched out sometime over the long summer. A kid ran. A man stayed.

  Frank grinned and leaned back down to Dottie. “I’m going to Ron’s. Dad said okay. You really do look wonderful.”

  “Thank you, dear,” said Dottie and descended sideways until her head stopped on the armrest.

  Carroll, dragging his golf bag on his good side, where it was well positioned to clip and collapse the screen as he came into the den, shouted at Frank, already back out the garage door, “Don’t forget, work on your serve, five hundred tosses a day, that’s what Gould said. Five hundred a day.” Carroll shook his head at the answering rumble of the Custom Cruiser turning over.

  “Welcome home,” said Dottie, still propped on her ear at about a thirty-degree angle to the couch, eyes shut. “How was Californ
ia?”

  “What’d you say? What’d you say?” Carroll yelled. “Who’s dat? Who’s dat?”

  Martin would come to recognize those two particular questions as rhetorical, primitive communications from the stroke-ruined regions of his dad’s brain, the parts where neurons continued to fire but only blanks. But now he took Carroll at his word and chose to answer the second inquiry.

  “That’s Mom. She not feeling well.”

  Dottie tackled the first. “Can you hear me, Carroll? Are your ears plugged from the plane?”

  “Who’s dat? Who’s dat?” Carroll repeated. His good eye darted nervously. “What’d you say? What’d you say?” He crouched and raised his hands, like a child mimicking an attacking lion.

  Martin stepped closer. “It’s Mom. She’s not well.” He punched out each word, as he would for a non-English speaker, even though he sensed it would not help.

  Dottie moaned. “My poor Carroll. You’ve gone deaf.”

  Good an explanation as any, Martin thought. He could work with that. A hearing aid, everyone speaks up, maybe his dad learns to read lips. As for the disintegration of half of his dad’s face, well, if his mom could ignore it, so could Martin. A disability denied is a disability discharged, their new family creed. Martin reached for the bag Carroll had dropped on the carpet.

  “I’ll take that,” the ravaged man yelled and ran out of the room empty handed.

  Excerpt from the file of Carroll Oliphant, male 51

  Dr. Elliot Broad, GP

  Office visit, 8.22.85

  Carroll Oliphant, male 51, patient since 6.15.58, presented with hemiparesis in dextral side of frontal cranium, dysarthria evident in approximately 50% of patient’s speech, signs of dementia (patient claims to have “banged the shit out of” Barbra Streisand, played trombone for F. Sinatra orchestra, no evidence of either event) and disassociate amnesia (no memory of wife, see file Dorothy (Dottie) Oliphant, female 48). In-office tests, patient self-reporting, and declarations from son Martin (see file Martin C. Oliphant, male 21) and employee of Oliphant Holdings, Inc. (see file Janet E. Priebe, female 57) indicate that patient exhibits normal if not hyper-competence at mechanical (e.g., driving) and employment-related (e.g., mergers and acquisitions) tasks. No indication of external head or brain trauma or pre-conditional oxygen deprivation.