The road to the Rio del Oro showgrounds was narrow, winding, unlit, and deserted except for Billie. She needed to be finished and out of there before dawn, when people would begin moving about and she would be spotted. She wanted to get in and out while it was dark and the trainers and grooms were asleep. The dashboard clock read 2:17, so she had about two hours before daylight. She pulled into the showgrounds and parked behind the barns, between a huge pile of dry, old manure and a row of dumpsters. Certain the rattle of the trailer would bring someone to investigate, she sat with the window down, listening for voices, footsteps, the sound of a door closing. But except for a couple of whinnies, she heard no one.
She pulled the keys from the ignition before opening the door so the alarm wouldn’t sound. It did anyway, warning beeps so loud she was sure it would summon security. Panicking, she fumbled with the steering wheel controls and discovered that she had left the parking light wand cocked on. She twisted it off: silence. Her heart made its own racket while she waited to see if anyone would show up to find out who she was and what she was doing there in the middle of the night.
After a few minutes, satisfied that no one had been disturbed, she whistled softly for Gulliver and headed for the filly’s barn. A few blue lights outside fried bugs, making loud zapping sounds, but the arena and barns were dark, lit only by an occasional dim bulb.
The barn doors were locked, but the shutters on the filly’s stall window stood ajar, and when she checked, they were unlatched. She climbed in over the sill and dropped into hay that reeked of something she couldn’t identify that made her eyes water. Behind her, Gulliver scratched on the outside wall and whined.
“Okay. Up!” she whispered and he jumped onto the sill and from there down into the stall with her. Instead of startling, the filly seemed frozen in place.
Billie waited for her eyes to get accustomed to the darkness, deeper than the starry night outside. She heard banging and what she thought were moans. Feeling her way along the wall, she went to see what was wrong. In the other stalls, horses stood tied, their heads only inches from the walls, their hooves beating against the wood. A few who weren’t tied lay stretched out in filthy bedding.
She unlocked the big doors at the end of the building then entered the stalls, untied each horse, and left the doors open.
The horses didn’t move. But at least now they could.
She returned to the filly’s stall. Billie could just make out the fleece bandages that wound up her legs to her knees. Billie knelt beside her and struggled with the Velcro closure at the top of one of the wraps, finally getting it to open. As fast as she could, she unwound the bandage then the plastic wrap that covered the horse’s lower legs. Something thick and slimy filled Billie’s palm. Flesh had pulled off with the wraps. Appalled, she scrubbed her hands against her jeans. The filly tried to pull away from her. Billie didn’t know what to do—keep unwinding and pull off more of her skin or stop and let the chemicals stay on her legs. Billie stopped. Since she didn’t know what to do, she would do nothing more. The lead rope, pulled taut by the filly’s efforts to get away, was knotted so tightly Billie couldn’t undo it, so she grabbed the filly’s halter and led her down the aisle, shushing as the filly nickered to her barn mates.
“Hush,” Billie whispered.
Lame on both front feet, the young horse stayed close to her, obedient.
Billie expected to be stopped, but no one came. No one shouted at her, no one grabbed her.
She loaded the filly into the trailer, amazed by how easily the baby stepped up and walked into the dark metal box. Billie closed the trailer door, got into the truck with Gulliver, and drove out of the Rio del Oro showgrounds a horse thief.
It was nearly dawn when Billie pulled into her barnyard. The sky was turning ashy, but the barnyard was still dark. She didn’t want to unload the filly, asking her to step into an unfamiliar place on her painful legs, so she left her loose in the trailer so she could move around as she wanted. Billie hung a hay bag stuffed with alfalfa and a bucket full of clean water from the trailer wall. Exuberant whinnies greeted them, and the filly called back.
Billie climbed onto the haymow. Alfalfa stalks stabbed her hands and the backs of her legs as she sat. Gulliver curled up in her lap. She fell asleep with her feet dangling, leaning against a bale, listening as the horses settled down. She slept until the sun pierced the eastern sky. Gulliver still dozed on her lap, stirring only when a coyote—skinny, lame, and mangy—trotted across the barnyard and passed beneath their perch. The little dog whined, and the coyote glanced up to see who had made that sound, then trotted on about his business.
As the searing sun split the horizon, Billie pulled out her phone and called.
“Doc,” he answered, already awake.
“It’s Billie.”
“What can I do for you?”
The glare of the sun spreading across the flat grazing land to the east felt Saharan. “I went to the show again last night,” Billie said. “I saw that filly I told you about.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I went into her stall, and I undid her bandages.”
She paused, waiting. Still he didn’t say anything.
“I tried to take them off but her skin came off too.”
Silence.
“Wads of it,” Billie said. “In my hand.”
He sighed. “Nothing I
