Billie backed away, bumped into the wall. She wanted to stop what she was seeing, to scream, accuse, demand, and run.
Through the wall behind her, Billie felt a thump, then another. Dom, absorbed with his dropper and the horse tied beside the stallion, maybe deafened by the fans’ roaring, didn’t react. Billie turned to look into the stall behind her where the noise came from. Blood ran from a horse’s nose. Dale raised a baseball bat, aiming.
“What are you doing?” she yelled. “STOP!”
Billie lunged forward and grabbed his wrist across the stall divider. He wrenched away and wheeled around to see who he was fighting.
“You are fired!”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Defending myself. That horse is vicious.”
Billie looked past him to the horse. Her eyes traveled down from its bleeding nostrils to its bandaged legs.
“Get out of here!” Dale ordered. “Don’t come back!”
She left the muck cart where it was and bolted out of her stall and down the barn aisle, dodging piles of manure awaiting removal. Blinded by the sunlight outdoors, she tripped over a pitchfork and fell hard onto her hands, scrambled back to her feet, and ran across the lawn to her truck.
CHAPTER 9
DRIVING HOME, BILLIE was tormented by images of Dale and Eudora’s farm, the sored horse he led, the strange room with its medical instruments. When she got out of the truck, her legs felt spongy. She remembered fear like this from her childhood, helpless terror. She made it into the feed shed, slumped to the floor and closed her eyes, forcing herself to breathe deeply and slowly, to count back from three hundred by sevens, to steady herself until her heart slowed and she felt stronger.
She still had a lot to do to bed down the horses, but it would stay light until 8:30, so there was time to head up into the mountains, change the scenery, get away from the ranch. Get away from everything.
She checked on Hope in her stall inside the hay barn. The filly looked miserable but was standing in the shade where she would be okay until Billie returned. She had hay in her feeder and bales and bales within reach, if she wanted to stretch out her neck beyond the corral panels. The stacked bales threw a little more shade onto her, blocking the late afternoon sun.
Billie silenced her phone before tucking it into her pocket. Only a few years ago, phones were in living rooms. Everywhere else, you were on your own. That’s what Billie needed now, to be on her own.
She caught Starship and, with only the halter he wore on his head—no bridle or bit—his lead rope for a rein, she got on him bareback. Then she leaned down and slipped off her shoes, tied the laces together, and hung them around her neck. She could put them on if she absolutely had to, if she fell off.
Gulliver trotted at Starship’s heels, down the road and out across the parched mesa. Sere grasses tickled the bottoms of Billie’s bare feet. She tried to catch the stalks between her toes as Starship walked.
When she came to a barbed wire fence, she turned north along the dirt two-track utility access road and climbed a series of lumpy hills until, at the highest one, she pulled up to enjoy the view. The mesa stretched south. She could just barely make out trucks and cars traveling along the interstate. Beyond it, the Whetstone Mountains jutted up into an almost white, parched sky.
They walked on, Gulliver panting as he trotted. Billie was relieved when they finally descended into a narrow canyon that led to a big metal stock tank filled with water for the cattle. The water was greenish, thick with a sort of wide-leafed desert seaweed and algae, but it was cool and wet.
She dismounted, landing barefoot in soft sand, picked up her dog, and set him into the drinker. As he paddled, she splashed water over his head until she knew he had cooled off. In the deep sand beside the trough, Starship lowered himself to his knees then his side. Grunting, he flipped to his back. From one side to the other he rolled, scratching. When he was satisfied, he rolled onto his belly, stretched his forelegs in front of himself, and lurched to his feet. With her hand, Billie brushed him to get off some of the sand. She tossed her tied sneakers over his neck and hopped up so her belly lay across his back. For a moment, she lay there, feet hanging off one side, head and arms dangling off the other, feeling her back muscles stretch. For just this moment, she was not Billie Snow, owner of a struggling horse ranch, a failure at that as well as so much else. Hanging in this perilous position across this horse she had saved from slaughter and nursed to health, she was exactly who she should be and where she should be. Then she swung her leg over Starship’s back and sat up.
Through low-hanging branches they climbed, through patches of shade populated with cattle that didn’t bother to move at their approach, continuing to lay peacefully while flies swarmed over them. They wore the brand of the rancher who leased this land from the state: a mountain circled by a crescent moon, old brands burned deeply into their skin, long ago healed.
Starship’s hair prickled against her bare legs. She felt free and happy to be out in the countryside with her horse and dog, wearing whatever she pleased, shoeless in cactus country, riding.
A couple of miles farther on, at an old campsite—its fire ring trashed with shot-up beer cans and broken glass—she turned Starship toward a mountain that rose forbiddingly before them, onto a nearly invisible trail. Wrapping her hands into his mane, she asked him to climb.
It had taken her two years of exploring to find the start of this trail then to follow it through undergrowth so densely woven that she had
