That night Callie belonged to Father’s loneliness though he didn’t know it. Once the fire was burning, Otto turned up the music and got everyone on their feet. Even Father danced. Callie moved into his arms. Father stared at her and tried to pattern his body after hers. The farmhands retired into a huddle around the fire with a pack of Coors. Someone produced a bag of peanuts. Occasionally you heard the crackle of a shell exploding as they tossed it into the flames.
The remains of the Shetland’s gear burned into the evening. Though the body was cold in the ground, Otto figured there might be some disease still lurking in the earthly possessions to which the horse once belonged. Disease crept up out of the earth that summer. No one wanted to see any more of it. Especially Otto.
Just when talk had stagnated Ray emerged from the brush. He fired a round into the air on the other side of the clearing. “Pellets you animals,” he cried when the men started hollering at him. “Just thought I’d bring a little noise to scare off the coyotes.”
Ray was drunk. Otto and Father each took him by an arm.
“Dumb fuck,” Fender kept saying. “I should have stolen his bottle just to spare his wife half her hassle when he gets home.”
It was cold in the bushes. Our feet were damp. The liquor had dried out the inside of my head.
Fender shivered in his shirtsleeves until I put his arms around me under his jacket.
“There,” I said.
“So this is what old people do to get off?” Fender said, pulling me closer. “Light fires far enough from their homes that they don’t burn their wives down?”
I drifted off to the vision of a carnival. I was riding the old white hobby horse hanging on Otto’s porch. The music from the merry-go-round was loud and the smell of popcorn hung in the distance. Each time the ride made a turn my little white horse lurched forward. From the way it sounded when I tapped my fingers on the body, I could tell it was hollow, nothing but empty fiberglass. Just as the ride let out it started to burn.
I woke in the night to the sound of two men urinating in the bushes.
“I never meant to want much from her,” I heard one of them say. It sounded like Father. I wondered if he was talking about Callie. I wondered how far he’d fallen for her. I wondered if he’d pulled her into him as he’d done that morning with Mother in the kitchen.
The next morning we woke to the sun in our eyes. There was dew on our faces. Everything around us was wet. Fender was on his feet with a cigarette. I wiped the dirt from the backs of my thighs. “I’ll get you home,” he said. “Before they come looking.”
I walked over to the pit where the ashes were smoldering and extinguished the embers with my foot. The whole place smelled like whoring. It was the horsehair or the kerosene. I tapped the corner of the Shetland’s blanket with the corner of my toe to stir up the last of the coals.
At the bottom of the pile there was a small metal bit. “Dead weight,” Otto had described the old snaffle to me once. “Barely pulls any at the corners. Every now and again you massage his tongue with it to remind him to turn. When an animal takes to gumming the metal, he’s already broken. Best thing to do is turn him out to pasture and let him cut his teeth on the brush.”
He was an old pony that Shetland. I remembered how easy he’d taken it in the mouth.
“It’s too much,” I said to Fender as he came up behind me.
“What is?” he said.
I looked at the ashes still lighting up off one another in the fire pit and thought of the remains of the old Shetland decomposing in the pasture. And of the bodies coming home from the Gulf whose names were announced on the news. And of the eerie quiet of the Bottom Feeder in Mother’s absence. The games of Pick Up Stix with Father on the carpet. The empty couches surrounding us stripped of pillows so Birdie could build her jumps like trenches in the doorways. The house itself looked like something had exploded from within.
“All this warring,” I said.
15
Callie kept a frozen chicken in the cupboard over the sink. The flesh was stacked on the pile of china next to the whiskey and the boxes of bullion. She kept a Styrofoam tray wedged between the plate and the bird to catch the runoff from the thaw. It took a day for a bird like that to shed all its ice.
The evening after the bonfire at the butte, Callie’d invited us to a meal. Birdie and me and Father along with Callie’s husband, The Little Wrestler, and their three young brutes. It was late in the afternoon by the time we arrived. The previous night was still heavy on us. I could tell Father felt it too. “You look tired, Jeanie,” he said as we got out of the car. “Why do you look so tired?”
We gathered around the table in Callie’s kitchen and watched her prepare the meat. Never has a woman performed such surgery. She massaged that carcass like she was trying to resuscitate some old heart. After each cut was slick with dressing she floured both sides with cornmeal.
“Test the fryer for me, baby,” Callie said to me, motioning toward the pan. “Toss a little water in with your fingers and see if it sizzles.”
We were there under the auspice that Father knew something about pipes. There was a clog in her disposal. Callie said one of her boys had stuck an action figure in it again. “They’re trying to replicate war,” she’d said, motioning toward the battlefield enacted by the G.I. Joes in the living room when we’d come in. The disposal had produced a realistic mangling to the leg.
“What do you make of my handiwork?” Callie’s husband said to Father as he entered the kitchen. “I was just under there a few days ago.”
“A fine job,” Father said from where he lay on his back with his head under Callie’s sink. “I’ve never been much good with my hands. Just thought I’d lend an eye to it while you were out.”
“Don’t they teach you professor types which way to turn a screw in law school?” the husband said.
“Rick’s an engineer, Rod,” Callie said looking down at Father as he pulled himself out from the cabinet.
“That explains why he’s fixing my drain pipe,” the husband said.
He laughed then. “Next time she’ll bring a damn preacher to teach our sons to shoot hoops. If you need me I’ll be out in the yard with the animals.”
Rod let the screen door go behind him as he made his way into the yard. It slammed a little on its hinges. The spring was still tight.
“Why don’t you put all that away, Rick,” Callie said gently.
“I’ll get you a clean towel.”
“I suppose it would be good to freshen up,” Father said, brushing his hands against his knees as he righted himself in the tight space of her kitchen, ducking so as to avoid the low-hanging lamp.
Callie handed me a plastic spatula and motioned toward the chicken where it fizzled in the pan. “Let them golden,” she said. Father followed her down the hall toward the bathroom.
I watched Rod through the window over the sink as he made his way into the yard. There wasn’t much anger in him. He had a flatfooted way of walking which betrayed his low center of gravity. According to Otto, Rod had been a wrestler. Callie had met him while he was out on the circuit. “Back then she would follow anything around with a Harley and a helmet,” Otto had said. “First it was the rock bands, then the bikers. Eventually she landed with a crew of wrestlers who frequented the bar where she worked. Rod was short. It was all she could do to show herself off to him.”
The way Rod shot hoops now with his sons you could tell Callie had taken the lay out of him. He had that short guy’s way of aiming high so the ball bounced off the backboard and rebounded on the front rim before meeting the hoop. He tossed one after another like this. I’d seen carpenters nail a board with more energy.