the boss because he’s some rich guy who doesn’t know dog doo about cutting horses, and then moving on after six months. But I figure whatever low-rent job they throw at me, I’ll do it if it makes me a better horseman.” “I’m taking care of a horse.”
“Is that right?”
“Just learning how. I live on the hazelnut farm. Do you know Megan Tewksbury and Julius Emerson Phelps?” He loads the cooler into the truck.
“No, but I heard the names from that other little girl lives over there.” “Sara?”
He is latching up the doors of the Silverado.
“That’s right. She’s the one I was teaching how to shoot.” “How do you know Sara?”
“Seen her around town. Told her my sorry story, just like I told you.” He shrugs. “And she says she wants to learn about guns.” “She say why?”
“I never asked.”
“We’re…political, you know.”
“Not my business. So maybe we’ll meet up again. Stranger things have happened.” I hesitate. “Did I say thank you, Sterling?”
“For what, Darcy?”
“Saving my life.”
“Back at the corrals? Nah, you were fine. Horses don’t generally
He waits. Again, the patience as one wrist in a tight copper bracelet rubs at the back of his sweat-stained neck. His hair is spiky and dirty blond; his eyes, like the bracelet, are rimmed with copper, green at the centers.
“Can I give you a ride?” he asks as someone shouts,
“Sara!” he calls. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh my God!” she sobs.
We both run toward her. I’m thinking,
She is panting. “I was hoping you’d still be here.” “What’s the matter, hon?”
“On my way back, I saw a baby horse. It’s in the bushes — hurt really bad — and there’s sickening blood just pouring everywhere.” “Blood
She screws up her face. “Coming out of his eyes.”
“Get in the truck,” says McCord.
Twenty-one
The terrain rises and the vegetation becomes sparse as we roll out of the power station toward the mountains. Looking back from higher ground, you can see the cat’s cradle of high-tension wires and transformers enclosed by manzanita, like an alien marker on a planet made of sand; only in America could there exist a sanctuary both for birds and bullets.
Wheeling the vehicle with the palm of one hand, McCord swerves off-road to the riverbed where Sara saw the foal, east of where I crossed the wooded stream. The bulky black machine raises veils of dust as it lurches over the sandstone grist of an ancient floodplain, no doubt fertile as a jungle a million years ago.
“What does it mean if a horse bleeds from the eyes?”
“Snakebite,” says McCord. “The venom is an anticoagulant. They bleed out from everywhere.”
“Can they die?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Down there!” cries Sara.
McCord brings the truck to the edge of a ridge. We scramble out, into the kind of baking heat you feel with all the skin on your body all at once. A sun-dark lizard skitters at our feet. Below, a stand of cottonwoods marks the trail the river took, but since the drought, it has not passed this way in years. Birds with different voices are hidden everywhere; some sweet, some warning.
“Look! Underneath the branches.”
A slender tree with a network of smooth willowy branches, bending to the ground like an old woman where the water used to flow, seems to gesture toward the body of a white baby horse lying on its side. All four legs kick out in a spasm that breaks my heart.
Coils of heat bake the sweat off my bare shoulders. The foal, where it lies, is fully exposed to the sun.
“Let’s see what we got,” says McCord. “
He motions that we get down into a squat and crab-leg it slowly toward the animal, stopping every ten feet to test the wind. Finally we are close enough to see it clearly in the lee of the branches. Its muzzle is swollen twice the normal size and bright red blood has covered its face, attracting glittering swarms of greenflies.
McCord reaches toward the chalky, almost translucent coat. It is not pure white; you can see dark clouds of pigment underneath, like a stormy desert sky. He runs his fingers along the neck, below a two-inch strip of bristly silver mane, and down the long and fragile legs, rosy with sores. In response, the baby tries to lift its head. Its face is long and delicately etched. The eyes are crying tears of blood. Pink-rimmed, with thick white lashes, they are opaque spheres of shiny blackened indigo.
“Shh now, just lie still.”
Sara, whispering: “Was he just born?”
McCord is checking the scrawny ribs. “He’s one month old and just about starved.”
“Is he wild?”
“Probably got loose from a ranch. Looks to be part Arab. The mom either took off somewhere or she’s dead. Anyone have a cell phone?”
Sara and I stare at each other, helpless and ashamed.
“We’re not allowed to have cell phones on the farm,” she says.
“Why’s that? So you can’t talk to your boyfriends?”
“We just can’t.”
I look at the ground and say nothing. My fingers clutch the Oreo phone in my pocket.
“Will this little guy live?”
“Depends if the toxin’s already in the bloodstream. We got to call the vet.”
I am about to curl up and die with guilt. I cannot make the call. To pull out the tiny phone now would be to expose myself.
“Don’t get near his face. It’s sore and we don’t want him to move or raise his head. Damn. Everybody in the world has a damn cell phone. I left mine at the damn house.”
“Why don’t you get in the damn truck and get help?”
McCord holds his answer. He climbs up the embankment with long strides.
The girl is standing with her arms and feet all crossed up. She looks anxiously toward the truck. “Is he just gonna leave us here?”
I’m running my hand down the thin, pale throat of the foal, feeling the shuddering nerves.
“Touch him. He’s soft.”
“I don’t want to. It’s disgusting.”
“Scary, huh?”
“Not at all,” says Miss Nothing Affects Me. “I just don’t enjoy watching something die, okay?”
