He nodded and left, limping across the shimmering barnyard and out onto the road.
A few minutes later, feeling guilty, Billie followed in the truck with Gulliver. Two bottles of water jiggled on the seat beside her. She drove to the wash and beyond, but didn’t find Charley. When she got out to look for his tracks, all she saw were the maze of daily tire crossings left by ranchers on their way to check livestock.
CHAPTER 7
JUST AFTER NOON Doc’s truck bounced over the washboard road and parked in front of the barn. He slid out, holding his left arm close to his body, in a sling, his face tight and gray.
“It’s nothing,” he said, his voice breathless from pain. “That bull just wanted to keep his balls. Understandable, but I got ’em. Then he got me back. Busted my collar bone. Not serious. Hurts like hell though.”
“And you’re working today?”
“You sound like my daughter, Billie.”
“I do?”
“Molly and I couldn’t have kids. But I imagine if we’d had a daughter she’d have been a lot like you.”
Billie looked away, confused by his compliment.
“Maybe you’re lucky you didn’t have kids,” she said. “I can’t have any. I used to wish I could… But I can’t and that’s that.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Billie shrugged. She wanted him to say more to her, tell her what he liked about her, what made him feel she could belong to him, even remotely. It had to do with what she did rather than who she was, she was sure. Still, she wanted him to explain the goodness he seemed to see in her.
“What do you want me to look at?” he asked.
Grateful to move on, Billie pointed. “Behind the barn.” Her voice sounded high and childish to her, the words coming too fast.
They scuffed their way around the barn, Billie adjusting her stride so Doc could keep pace with her. The last time he’d been out he had hiked around the corrals like a young man. Today, aged by exhaustion and his broken collarbone, he seemed old.
“She’s still in the trailer,” Billie explained as they approached. “I parked it in the shade.”
Doc glanced at her but didn’t say anything as Billie unlatched the groom door at the front of the trailer and half stepped, half pulled herself inside.
The little horse stood with her head down, her eyes half-closed. She didn’t startle when Billie appeared or flinch as Billie clipped a lead rope to her halter. Billie thought she looked like she hurt too much to move.
Billie leaned down to give Doc a hand as he negotiated the high step up into the narrow trailer door. Having his arm in a sling made his balance uncertain, but in no way diminished the power of a lifetime of physical work with big animals.
“You shouldn’t go climbing into trailers with injured animals,” he told her. “Way to get yourself hurt.”
“She won’t hurt us, Doc. She can’t even move.”
“I can see that.”
Slowly, in the cramped metal horse trailer, he examined the filly, first with his eyes, then with his one good hand, his fingers light and careful over her burned legs.
“The man I got her from says she needs to be put down.” Tears surprised her. Quickly she wiped her eyes.
“Who’d you get her from?” Doc asked.
“A guy named Charley.”
Billie figured that Doc knew she wasn’t telling him the whole truth but had decided not to press it. Knowing what had really happened wouldn’t change his diagnosis or prognosis of the horse.
“I’ve been doing this for fifty years,” he said, turning to Billie. “And I’ve treated horses burned by fires and hurt by stupidity. And I read about this soring stuff, but I’ve never seen it for myself. Until now.”
Looking back at the filly, he said, “She’ll be scarred, Billie, but she could recover.”
“Really?”
He picked up the filly’s hoof. “Oh, those sons of bitches.”
“What?”
“See this?” With the index finger of his damaged arm, he pointed at the bottom of her hoof cradled in his good hand. The filly squealed and tried to pull away from him. While Billie leaned against her shoulder, gently stroking her neck, murmuring reassurances, Doc explained that someone had rasped her hooves until they bled then cut into the laminae, the tender quick. “Their next move would have been to stick something up in her hoof—a screw or something like that—then nail on shoes so it wouldn’t be seen. Good thing you got her when you did.”
Doc released her leg, and Billie winced as the filly set it gingerly on the ground then tentatively eased some weight onto it to relieve her other foot.
“I won’t have anything to do with these people,” Doc said. “They maim their horses for a rayon show ribbon.”
“I was thinking I should write an article about it,” Billie said.
He placed his stethoscope against the filly’s heart. “You won’t be the first.”
There had been articles about soring for decades, he told her, watching the second hand of his Timex. “Pulse is seventy-eight,” he reported. “An elevated pulse means pain.”
He placed the head of his stethoscope against the filly’s flank, listened, moved it lower, listened again. “Diminished gut sounds,” he said, sliding around to her rump on her other side. Before he placed the stethoscope on her right flank, he said, “A couple of years ago a national veterinarians’ association wrote a white paper calling for the end of soring.” Looking at Billie over the horse’s back, he shook his head. “It didn’t do any good. Nothing stops these people.”
Billie felt sweat running between her shoulder blades and down her back. She wiped her forehead with her palm, pushing damp hair up her forehead, then wiped her upper lip on the inside of her shirt. It was cooler in the trailer than out, but it had to be over a hundred degrees.
Doc looped the stethoscope around his neck and looked in the filly’s eyes and mouth. He stroked the side of her face.
“Poor girl,” he said. “You didn’t deserve this.”
Billie backed out
