Addie’s lament reminded her of what Simeon had said earlier, the complaint about unfair inspections. She unfolded a chair and set it beside Addie, who offered her an orange from the ice chest and crossed her ankles to wait for the show’s classes to start. Billie wondered how people who picnicked beside a spectacle of tortured horses could think of themselves as innocents.
She wanted to ask those questions in the article, so she retrieved her notebook from her bag and scribbled them down. As she slipped her pen back into the notebook’s spiral binding, a movement in the trees at the far side of the field caught her eye. A person? she wondered, peering. She couldn’t see anything. Most likely a deer or a cow.
Addie still talked beside her about the horses she used to own. She’d be a good source about the breed’s history, Billie realized, as Addie reminisced about showing in the 1950s and 1960s.
Billie saw movement in the woods again. Then, again, it stopped. She kept her eyes on the area where she’d seen it, and when she’d finished scrawling her notes on what Addie had told her, she excused herself and headed around the far side of the arena, and from there to the woods.
The loamy smell of damp soil rose from the ground. She heard a bird’s song. But she didn’t find anything there, just some trampled leaves that could have been a spot where deer or wild pigs slept. Deeper in the woods, she saw a flock of startled birds rise. Shiny vines twisted around the tree trunks. Poison ivy? Poison oak? Poison sumac? She tucked her arms in close to her body and sidled back out toward the show. Maybe she’d imagined something to get away from Addie’s lecture and the stress of waiting to become a spectator again at another Big Lick show.
Over the sound of a woman on the PA system announcing the sponsors for the horse show—truck dealerships, a restaurant chain, a mortuary, and a meatpacking company—Billie tried to listen for sounds in the forest. She strained to hear footsteps or voices, but a splatter of applause gave way to a man’s voice reading the Lord’s Prayer, children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, then a live organ played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which ended in cheers.
Billie saw Charley standing beside a black horse with white legs, brushing it with long sweeps. She walked over. “Hey.”
He looked at her without pausing but glanced around.
“This is the first time I’ve seen a show where the feds showing up didn’t send everyone scurrying.” He pulled a comb from his pocket and ran it through the horse’s mane, carefully straightening knots. “I’ve been wondering if what I heard was true—that there is a new way to fix a horse, a way that doesn’t show up during inspection.” He coughed.
“Wouldn’t you know about that?” Billie asked.
“Once I would have. Not so much now. The boss is keeping an eye on me, I’m pretty sure. I don’t get told the things I used to. But no one knows which shows get the federal inspectors coming in. Mostly they don’t appear anywhere—too little funding, too few inspectors, too many shows.” He attached a ribbon to the browband on the horse’s bridle, fluttering it with his fingers. “There’s so much hostility toward them that even in their righteousness, they hate their job. You see them when they came in?”
“I did.”
“You see how they stick together like gum on the sole of a boot?”
“That doesn’t really work,” Billie said. “As an image.”
Charley ignored her. “They’re scared to death. Walk like guns are trained on them.”
“Are there? Guns?”
“There is everything, Billie Snow. Mostly though, shit happens behind the scenes. The good folks of Shelbyville don’t want an OK Corral shootout and forever fame. They pick their targets pretty carefully.” He stuck the comb back into his overalls pocket then slipped it out again to tap himself on the chest. “You see this?”
“What?”
“This is a bullseye right here. Maybe you can’t see it, but I sure can feel it.”
A string of riders passed by, calling hellos to Charley who answered each with a cheerful “Good luck!”
When they had passed, he flipped a saddle pad onto the horse’s back and followed it with a saddle.
“I saw you chatting with old Addie Stockard. Her son Vern has been showing sore horses all his adult life, starting with the horses he trained for her. There was a time when she’d say he’d never sore a horse. I have heard that bullshit ever since I started to work in stables as a little bitty boy. ‘Oh no, ma’am, your horse is so talented. I’d never have to resort to that!’ All these trainers say that to their clients if the clients bother to ask. Most owners know damned well what’s going on in the barns and don’t give a shit. Long as their horsie comes home with rosettes and a trophy, it don’t make an anthill of difference how that happened. But some are natural-born worriers, like Addie. Don’t hurt my horse. Just make sure it wins.”
She should be writing this down, but she didn’t want to interrupt him, slow him, or call attention to herself. She’d just have to remember.
Charley bent double wheezing. “Damned asthma. Maybe I caught some damned bug from the kids at Dale’s barn. When school’s out, the place crawls with kids. Their parents pay for them to have lessons and the character-building experience of cleaning stalls and brushing horse hides. And the folks get a few hours each day to work or fuck.”
“Did you babysit Richard’s kids?”
Billie watched Sylvie, several trailers away, prepare Dale’s blue roan stallion for this evening’s show. She had him tied to the side of the top-of-the-line Sundowner four-horse, aluminum, gooseneck trailer. She knelt beside him with a long-handled screwdriver in her hand, tightening the bands that held on his heavy shoes until he pulled back from pain.
Behind them, seated on the fender of
