“It’s like velvet.” I put my hand on the space just between its eyes. She was right. I closed my eyes and imagined I was touching my mother while she wore her velvet Christmas dress. When I opened them the horse was looking at me with its great eyes, and in them I could see my brother touching the horse, and behind him Molly striking with her dagger. The horse did not even try to pull away until the blade was buried deep in its throat. Then it rose up, jerking the blade out of her hand and trying to hammer us with its hooves, which clattered against the wood of the stall. When it shook its head the knife flew out and landed at my feet. The horse was trying to scream, but because of the wound it could make only spraying, huffing noises.
I watched it jump and then stagger around the stall. I was still and calm until Molly took the first picture — I jumped at the flash. At thirty-second intervals another flash would catch in the horse’s eyes. At last it knelt in a wide pool of its blood, and then fell on its side and was dead. All the time our surroundings seemed very quiet, despite the whirring of the Polaroid, and the whooshing and sucking noises of the wound, and the thumping. When those noises stopped I could suddenly hear crickets chirping, and Molly’s frantic breathing, and my brother saying, “So soon!”
Molly took me home and made me get in the tub with my pants rolled up. She washed the Vaseline from my feet, and the horse blood from my hair, and then she put me back in my bed, not an hour before the sun came up. I slept and dreamed of horses who bled eternally from their throats, whose eyes held perfect images of Colm, who spoke from their wounds in the voices of old women and said they could take me to him if I would only ride.
A real live police investigation inspired Molly to lie low for a while. While Anne Arundel County police cars cruised the night streets of Severna Forest, we lay most exceedingly low; and even after they were long gone, we still did not emerge. The summer ran out and school started again. Molly mostly ignored me while we were at school, but she still came by occasionally in the afternoons, or on weekends. We sailed in her boat and once went apple picking with her grandparents, in an orchard all the way down in Leonardtown. Outside my bedroom window the leaves dropped from the trees in the ravine, so I got my clear winter view of the river, all the way down to the bay. In the distance I could see the lights of the Naval Academy radio towers, blinking strong and red in the cold. I would watch them and wait for her, my window wide open, but she did not come again until the first snow.
That was in December, just before Christmas break. Earlier that evening, down by the general store, all the children of Severna Forest had gathered under an old spruce, where a false Santa sat on a gold-leafed wooden throne and handed out presents. I knew he was a false Santa, but most of the others there didn’t. It was actually Sheriff Travis, handing out presents bought and delivered to him by the parents of all these greedy little kids. He sat in his chair, surrounded by bags of wrapped toys, and made a big fuss over whether or not this or that child had been good throughout the year. When he called my name I went up and dutifully received my present from his rough hands. It was a Fembot doll, the arch nemesis of the Bionic Woman doll that Molly had rejected. I was in my bed playing with my new toy when she appeared at my window.
“Go down and get your coat,” she said. “It’s cold out there.” I did as she told me. My father had left for the hospital shortly after we got home from seeing Santa, and my mother was asleep in her room, exhausted by an all- night flight from Lima. But almost all the other Severna Forest adults were down at the clubhouse, having their Christmas party. Several of them were famous for getting drunk on the occasion, Sheriff Travis especially. He kept his Santa suit on all night, and people talked about his antics for weeks afterward. They were harmless antics, nothing crass or embarrassing. He sang songs and said sharp, witty things, things he seemed incapable of saying at any other time of the year, drunk or not.
When we left my house, there was already about an inch of snow on the ground. The storm picked up as we climbed a tree outside the clubhouse. We waited there while the party began to die down. I could see my parents’ friends dancing with each other, and Sheriff Travis standing on tables and gesticulating, or turning somersaults, or dancing with two ladies at once. Music and laughter drifted through the blowing snow every time someone opened the door. I got sleepy listening to the sounds of adult amusement, just like Colm and I always did when our parents had one of their dinner parties, something they did often back before he died.
I fell asleep in the tree, with my head on Molly’s shoulder. We were wedged close to one another, so I was warm. It was snowing heavily when she jabbed me with her elbow and said, “Wake up, it’s time to go.” She climbed down the tree and hurried off. I jumped down, knocking the accumulated snow from my back and shoulders, and chased after her. She was moving back toward our houses, toward the tee of the seventh hole. When I caught up with her I could see another vague shape stumbling through the snow, about thirty yards before us. We had to get closer before I could make out the distinctive silhouette of the Santa hat.
Sheriff Travis lived down by the river, in a modest cottage that I imagine must have been lonely for all its smallness, because his children were gone and his wife was dead. He was taking a shortcut over the golf course. I knew he would cross through the woods beyond the green to Beach Road. He was singing “Adeste Fideles” in a loud voice and did not hear us come up behind him.
Molly had taken out her dagger and handed me a short length of lead pipe. “Be ready,” she said. When we were less than ten yards away, she ran at him, looking slightly ridiculous trying to rush through the deepening snow with her short legs. But there was nothing ridiculous about the blow she struck, just above his wide black belt, about where his kidney would be. He fell to his knees and she struck again, this time at his back, almost right in the middle, and then again at his neck as he collapsed forward. He screamed at the first blow, just like I thought he would, a great, raw scream like the one my father let go in the hospital room when Colm finally stopped breathing. She stabbed him one more time, in the right side of his back. In the dark his blood was black on the snow. He lay on his face and was silent. I stood in the snow, clutching my pipe and wondering if I should hit him with it.
Molly grabbed my hand and dragged me after her. She ran as fast as she could, through the woods, then along Beach Road to a point just below our houses. “I got him,” she was saying breathlessly, in a high voice. “I got
Back in bed I looked out my window at the storm, which was still gaining strength. It would be almost a blizzard by morning. School would be canceled. I lay watching the snow that I knew was covering our child-sized footprints, covering Santa Travis’s body. I thought of him dying, the coldness of the snow penetrating in stages through his skin and his muscle and his bone, a dark veil falling over his sight like somebody was wrapping his head in layer after layer of sweet-smelling toilet paper, like Colm and I used to do when we played I Am the Mummy’s Bride, or The Plastic Surgeon Just Gave Me a New Face. I imagined Colm, waiting patiently by the door to where he was, waiting and waiting, peering at the slowly approaching figure.
But Sheriff Travis did not die. A concerned citizen, worried because of the storm, had called his house. When he didn’t answer, people went looking for him. They found him where we left him, alive. At the hospital my father operated to repair his lacerated kidney and fretted over his hemisected spinal cord.
When Sheriff Travis woke up he said he remembered everything. Despite the darkness of the night, and the falling snow, he gave fairly detailed descriptions of his attackers. Two large black men had done it, he said, one holding him while the other stabbed him and called him “Honky Santa.” Police called on the community just outside the Severna Forest gates, and two men were arrested after Sheriff Travis identified them in a lineup. I saw them in the paper.
Molly was furious that Sheriff Travis hadn’t died. She stood in my room, kicking my bed so hard that the wall shook and the first mate sign fell down with a clunk.
“Why?” she said in a loud voice. “Why couldn’t he have died?”
I thought about her hungry blue stone while she kicked my bed some more, until my father came to the door and said, “Everything OK in here?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “We were just kicking the bed.”
“Well, please don’t.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, blushing. I looked at the sunlight on the carpet and wanted my father to leave.
When he was gone she said, “It’s just not fair.”
I thought it would be many more months before she returned for me at night. I thought we would lie low, but
