Billie felt as if she should explain, tell her this was a show for sound horses, but that felt like asking for a kind of fight she didn’t want.
As the three of them stood there in awkward silence, the announcer’s voice welcomed the exhibitors to the show, thanked Billie for her hospitality in hosting it, and read an invocation. Everyone stood, hands on heart, for the Pledge of Allegiance. The national anthem, sung by the organist in a ripe mezzo-soprano voice, ended in cheers.
When the announcer called the first class, horses streamed into the ring, took up positions along the rail and waited to be told what to do. The riders wore tight pants in black, brown, red, olive green, and tan, with matching coats and bowler hats. It looked like a photograph from a much earlier time, maybe from the 1930s.
“Flat walk,” the announcer said. “Riders, please show us the flat walk.”
“I’m leaving.” Billie watched as Josie turned and headed back toward her truck. Even over the announcer’s voice, Billie heard her slam the door.
As the sun set and shadows lengthened, the temperature dropped, a breeze ruffled the horses’ manes, and the lights Bo had installed came on in the arena. Class after class was judged, applauded, and exited, ribbons fluttering from the horses’ bridles. Horse after horse passed through inspection, and as she watched, Billie imagined that this little show here at her place might actually be the future of all walking horse shows: sound horses, happy people.
Good slogan, she thought, and pulled her notebook from her pocket to write it down.
“You taking notes?” Dale stood close behind her, his mouth close to her ear, his tone sarcastic.
She hadn’t seen, heard or felt his approach. The tone of his voice flooded her with the adrenaline of danger.
She held out the notebook so he could read what she had written down for himself, and she also recited: “‘Sound horses, happy people.’ It makes a good slogan.” She nodded at a blue ribbon clipped to the trainer’s breast pocket. “You won.”
“More to come,” he said.
“I guess you’d know.”
“You’re pretty rude,” he said.
“You’re pretty crooked.” She said it before she knew she was going to.
He brought his face so close to her she smelled hamburger on his breath. His eyes drilled hers, searching, threatening. He stepped forward, to force her backward. She shoved him hard in the chest.
He stumbled, caught himself. “Oh lady, you have no idea, do you? No idea at all. Well, you will.” He turned and walked stiffly away.
She made it to the feed shed and turned on the lights, inside and out. Flies and moths gathered instantly, creating fluttering pillars of bug life that thickened by the second. They battered the windows and crawled on the walls: June bugs, kissing bugs, walking sticks, and praying mantises. She leaned against the side of the building in a dark, bugless spot and tried to stop shaking. Her mouth tasted like she’d chewed aspirin and hadn’t spat it out. Her skin felt clammy. She couldn’t breathe.
When that first breath finally came, she realized that Dale was busy talking animatedly to Richard by the arena in-gate, not paying any attention to her. Alice Dean was with them, playing at her father’s feet. Billie shoved herself off the wall and, wobbly legged, drifted back toward the trailers, looking for Dale’s rig.
Just as she found it, Dale’s groom Dom backed out of the trailer on hands and knees, patting the floor as he went, as if he had dropped something. He rose to his feet, gave the trailer a final searching look, and sprawled onto a lounge chair. A match flared. Slowly he lifted a joint to his lips and inhaled, the tip glowed. He held the smoke in his lungs, stretched his arm to watch the ember fade, and then put the joint back between his lips for another toke.
Billie pulled out her cell phone and started a lively conversation with dead air, chatting about her board rates as if to a customer. Pretending to be distracted by her conversation, she drifted over to the trailer and plopped onto its fender. The groom looked up sleepily. Billie gestured at the air for emphasis.
“No, I charge more than that,” she said. “And I add on a service charge for…”
She slid off the fender and wandered toward the back of the trailer, talking. Most of the trailer stalls had horses in them, but the one Dom had been searching was empty. She leaned against the trailer fender outside that stall, bracing herself with her free hand behind her. As she babbled on, her fingers explored the stall floor, searching where she had seen him looking. She touched something small and long and round under sodden sawdust, closed her fingers around it and slid it out of the muck just as Dom appeared in front of her.
“I know! I know!” she said to the phone, hoping he thought she was as oblivious as she was pretending to be.
He snapped his fingers to get her attention then waved her off the trailer. She stood, mouthed sorry, and walked away. When she looked for them, Richard and Dale were still talking.
She considered what she had found, a small syringe with a short slender needle, maybe 27 gauge, maybe even smaller, still in its guard. She held the syringe up to the light and saw that there was still some fluid in it. In the feed shed, she stored the syringe in a baggie on the refrigerator shelf beside other medicines.
She closed and locked the door when she left. As she stepped outside, a blurry movement, something dark at the edge of the shed wall, drew her attention. Maybe just a guy peeing where he shouldn’t. But he turned without hitching his pants, looked both ways as if worried he’d be seen, and limped away. She couldn’t see his face, but she had watched him limp away from that same building when they were in it the day
