Cal turned his flashlight on to step over a tangled shadow crossing his path. It was a fallen tree. He turned the light off again. “But you would probably like that,” he went on, “plowing a field, because you are so stupid.”
The horse stepped over the log and stood next to Cal. Cal could see its eye in the moonlight, looking back and forth, its ears pinned upright and turning toward night sounds. Cal thought about abandoning the horse after it bucked him, but in fact he was thankful for the company, and he brought it along because it was the right thing to do. He didn’t know if the horse could find its way back the way a dog might, and he knew how much people have tied up, financially and emotionally, in their horses. Even though Ted abandoned him, Cal could not abandon the horse. He despised his loyalty with every step. He wished he could be a real sheriff, a Rooster Cogburn sort of sheriff, just eat the horse, avenge his honor, but Cal despised that thought as well. Minus the whiskey, he couldn’t pull off the Wild West if he tried. He needed people too much. Typical, bleeding-heart Cal.
“Just think of it, Mr. Horse. You could walk back and forth with your plow. Eat your oats. Crap in the grass. That’s all a horse needs, isn’t it? Hey, maybe you could fix up an old cabin by a lake, get a dog, drink coffee in a pickup truck for the rest of your career.” Cal raised his voice. “Well, life ain’t that simple, Mr. Horse! No it ain’t! Because life don’t leave a man alone!”
Cal turned to walk again. The reins tightened and the horse plodded behind him. The grass parted as Cal stepped into it, mocking as he went. “You could move up into the Northwoods of beautiful Wes-consin. Land of the Beaver, they say. Well, I hate beavers. Hate ’em. Waterlogged sausages with their tree-chewing and tail-beating, as if anyone cares.”
Wisconsin hadn’t panned out as peacefully as Cal’s chief suggested it would, but then again, Houston hadn’t panned out either. Stress was constant in Houston. In Wisconsin, it was simply absent, or at least different in nature. In Houston he had reasons to be unhappy, circumstances to blame. Every night there were the same calls. Someone else shot, or shot at, or having heard a shot. Someone else getting bandaged up on a front porch, kids standing on couches and peering through windows while Cal tried to make some sense of what some grandmother told him. It was a man. A young man. And he had a gun. Cal could finish the story for any one of the witnesses on any night. And then, Officer, my grandson, son, daddy, brother—who ain’t done nothing—he got shot at right there under that streetlight. There was a time in his career when Cal still believed the nobility and innocence. The older cops seemed callous. Eventually it began to blur, the testimonies became redundant, mundane. Life and death became like mail, or bills, or laundry. Cal worked at night and slept during the day. He had pancakes for dinner when he got off graves, because the regular people were having breakfast, and then he’d turn in for a few hours as the midmorning sun beat through the slits in his apartment blinds. Whiskey helped put him to sleep, but it made nights worse, the streetlights harsher, the voices louder. He ate and slept and took reports. Rarely was there any real resolution, any progress. And after about four years of it, Cal’s life began to scare him. That he could feel this beaten, this numb, only a few years out of the academy was a startling revelation. The academy had been all green grass and firing ranges, drinks at the Foxhead. Cal had loved the idealism, the posturing, even though he recognized it as such. He was a fit young man with something to give to the world. But then a pain grew in his chest that wouldn’t go away. A doc gave him pills for gastric reflux—which seemed pathetic this early in life—and the pills made his stomach feel like a gallon of milk sloshed inside it, so he threw the pills in a sock drawer and forgot them. After that, Cal had a patch of gray hair sprout above his right temple, and then he caught a head cold that left him deaf in one ear for a month. The same doctor asked him if the ear bothered him in any way, and Cal told him, “No, other than the fact that it doesn’t work—it’s a terrific ear.” He went back to his apartment that day and drank until he fell asleep on the carpet. He woke shivering in the air-conditioned darkness, afraid.
“And then, Mr. Horse,” Cal said with finality, “there was that kid and his mama.”
Cal pulled the collar of his jacket up around his neck to ward off the cooling air. He and the horse stepped out of the river grass onto a higher bank covered in knee-high tangles of shrubs. White pines grew on the higher land, and the forest opened up beneath their massive trunks and branches. Cal remembered passing through white pines earlier in the day. As disorienting as the forest was, this rise in the land felt familiar. At least he hoped it did. Cal pointed his light into the shadows, turned it off again. He waded into the brambles.
It was getting harder to be a cop. Some of the old-timers who still came around the department talked
