She carried the syringes to the feed shed, lay them on the table, and got back to work, checking each bag.
“What are you looking for?” Richard asked when she got close to him.
“I don’t know. Stuff. More needles. Or…I don’t know…what’s this?” She held a nearly empty jar toward him. “Ginger?”
His eyes dropped, as if he needed to keep track of his hands. “That helps with tail set.”
Billie knew exactly what he was talking about. Smearing ginger into and around a horse’s anus burned the tender flesh and made him hold his tail high.
“It’s illegal to ginger a horse,” she said.
“Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, Billie.”
She thought back to when she was a kid running barrels on her pony at local gymkhanas while her parents watched. She thought back to when she had read every novel she could find about kids who loved horses, showed horses, cared for horses, wanted horses, galloped bareback on wild horses across the prairie, and saved horses from abuse. She had read these books while tucked into the forks of tree trunks and in the back seat of her parents’ truck. She had read them under covers, in the bathtub, in class, and in line. The literary world of horses, not far at all from the actual world she really did live in, was about ideals. She had learned right and wrong more thoroughly from the pages of Black Beauty than from watching her father school a horse or from riding that horse herself. She never lost the excitement she had felt when she read those books, never quit being involved in the story and in the lives of the horses, imaginary or not. She admired the heroes and heroines. She wanted to be them. All these years later, she still felt that way. She wondered if Richard’s kids were readers.
Outside the shed, she dragged a heavy bag to the truck and heaved it in.
“Hey, Richard, how’s Charley?”
“He’s okay. I think his asthma’s been bothering him.”
“I saw him here last night.”
“Well, he works for Dale and those guys. Want me to ask Sylvie about him? She’d know.” He unholstered his phone and called her. “Syl, did Charley come here to Billie’s with you guys last night?” he asked. “Yeah,” he told Billie. “How’s he doing?” He listened for a moment before thanking her and hanging up. “She says he’s feeling fine now.”
They worked for another half hour, until the backs of their shirts were drenched. Billie smelled her own sweat and deodorant. Her face and scalp itched with grit, but at last the barnyard looked as if nothing had happened last night—no show, no horses, no trucks and trailers.
She offered Richard a drink, but he declined in favor of going home to swim with his kids.
As he backed his truck out, mounded with trash bound for the dump, he leaned out the window. “Dinner again soon?”
“Sure,” She grinned. “Absolutely.”
After he drove away, she did a final patrol of the barnyard and arena, scuffing through soft dirt, kicking up dust as she went. She didn’t find much more, just a handful of paper hot dog boats, discarded in a heap beside a garbage can. She dragged the can back to its usual place behind the feed shed and opened a garbage bag to throw in the trash. Inside the can, she found plastic film, the same stuff used to wrap the legs of horses being sored.
She pulled it out and looked deeper into the bag but didn’t find anything else. She laid it on the table, next to the syringes and needles, and stood staring at it, wondering what those things were really about. The show here had only flat shod horses. No Big Lick horses. No chained legs, no platform shoes, no burning flesh. No sored horses. Richard had promised. Just sound walkers showing their natural gaits.
Right?
Gulliver raked the back of her calf with his paw, a rare rudeness, panting. She shouldn’t have kept him out so long in the heat.
She opened the refrigerator where she stored medicines and bottles of water, and poured one over Gully, making sure she wet under his chin, behind his ears, his armpits and belly. She turned on the table fan and directed it toward him. In a few minutes, he seemed better. Billie reached back into the fridge for more cool water and saw a piece of paper she hadn’t noticed before, folded small and placed beneath some dark brown vials of homeopathic arnica she kept on hand for injuries. After she re-wet Gulliver, she unfolded the paper.
Fs injet jnts. lk in bag. stand on sore.
It must be from Charley. She would figure it out later.
She dropped some ice cubes in Gully’s water bowl and in a glass of water for herself, smoothed the paper on the tabletop, and read it again. And again, struggling with the contracted words, trying to make sense of them.
At last, she thought she had the first sentence. “Flat shod inject joints.” She said it aloud a couple of times. It made sense with the super small gauge needles she had found. They were the right size for injecting joints. Small as a hair. Almost painless.
But why would someone inject these horses? Maybe for the same reason other hardworking breeds get joint injections—to ease pain from stress or arthritis or injuries.
“‘Lk in bag’… Like in bag, Gully? What do you think? Oh, maybe it’s ‘Look in bag.’ Which bag? And what does ‘Stand on sore’ mean?”
She rummaged through her grooming bag: brushes, curries, combs, detanglers, and sprays. She checked the old backpack where she kept wraps and bandaging materials. Not there, either. She was about to give up when she decided to look in the yellow rubberized satchel where she stored her tools. In among the wrenches, hammers, WD-40, and duct tape, she found something she had never seen before—a
