Horse Tales

Horse Tales
How love and fantasy and laughter
give purpose to an existence
basically defined by an apple hitting Isaac Newton on the head.

Dad drank a few beers one Saturday afternoon and said we should buy a horse.

What a wonderful idea. I was about nine years old and, wow, a horse. For weeks, as I lay in my bed in the cusp of sleep, I dreamt of it. I loved the Saturday cowboys on television—The Cisco Kid, Roy Rogers, Wild Bill Hickock and his fat buddy, Jingles P. Jones—and I loved the West as a plywood set that wobbled when the Lone Ranger led his great horse, Silver, through the papier maché rocks where he and Tonto would conspire to defeat the bad guys.

Silver, Diablo, Champion, Trigger—but, even in the throes of the most engaging of my fantasies, I never named the horse.

I knew from the moment of its mention out on the back porch—just my dad and I and the radio broadcasting Harry Cary and Jack Buck and the Cardinals with the game not even half over and all the wonders the world before me—we would never get a horse. I was a nine-year-old kid, a dreamer, a believer, but I wasn’t stupid. And Dad was no liar. With the possible exception of occasions when describing the dimensions of certain of the vegetables grown in his garden, Dad was an honest man. He never intended to deceive or disillusion his kid. I knew there would never be a horse and he knew I was never so foolish as to think there would ever be a horse. It was just a shared moment on a summer afternoon in the suburbs of St. Louis—a moment of shared “suspension of disbelief.”

It’s the stuff of faith, you know. Faith and love and most of what makes life bearable. And, though the promise is seldom real, the feeling always is.

* * * *

Carol was a beautiful young girl galloping across the meadow with such poise and assurance and, when she would draw up next to me, her face flushed, she and Joe both breathless from the running, and offer me a stirrup—man, those were some Sunday afternoons back when I was a young fellow. I wasn’t so good at the horses, but, fortunately, never one to be unduly inhibited by my own awkwardness, I would leap and sprawl-mount the steed, settling as best I could behind her—oh, the dampness of her shirt and the wild disarray of her hair and the rise and fall of deep-drawn breath within her—and grasp the sacred sexy intimacy of her hips. She would urge Joe to motion and we would charge across the pastures and up through the trees into the hills. I loved her with such erotic innocence and joy as she gracefully glided and I bounced and flopped and painfully smashed the delicate orbs of my masculinity against the back of the saddle—how I loved those miserable hours a-gallop across the immortal heartland of memory.

****

Rebel the horse probably thought he was a dog. A man has to hunch over pretty low to enter through the doorway of a tipi. You can imagine what it took for a horse to get half his bulk in there to say hello to me on summer mornings in the High Rockies. I would yell at him to go away, "Dammit, Rebel, you're a horse, not a Pekinese. Beat it before you knock my house over!" On several occasions, almost as ritual, he had a little trick he played. I had one of those big plastic trash cans in my tipi—not for garbage (you'd never store garbage in a house made of canvas in a land of mountain lions, bears, and God knows what other fanged and clawed scavengers it might attract—oh no) but for the reams of paper I would wad up and toss in the frustrating process of writing. Rebel would roll back his big horse lips and extend his big horse teeth, creating a big horsey sneer. Then, pausing to assure he had eye contact with me, he would clamp down on the rim of the trash can, drag it outside and, with a violent yet nonchalant flip of a hind leg, kick it half way down the mountain.

I had my camp in an aspen thicket up the rising meadow a ways from the log cabin of Meezie Keys. She let me live up there mainly because she's a nice lady, but, also, my haired-over, mountain-man countenance added a degree of security to the place during the nine months of winter when she and her husband Dick Stacy retreated to the warmer climes of southern Arizona. Meezie is the most elegant cowgirl I've ever known. When she celebrated her eightieth birthday up there a few years ago, people came from all over the country—one fellow flew in from London—to honor her. For thirty years, Meezie and her first husband and three lovely daughters had owned and operated the Tumbling River Guest Ranch. Throughout the decades beyond those years, the bonds that have lasted between Meezie and her perennial guests and the 'kids' who spent their summers working with her speak the finest testimonial to the grace and goodness and humor of the lady. And Dick . . . well, there's a contrast. Dick is just about the absolute opposite of a cowboy. With a Ph.D. in chemistry and a mind comfortable with the cryptic and expansive intricacies of complex science, as a convivial font of fascinating arrays of esoteric minutia, a man who could easily trifle away an entire day out in the shed searching for a handful of tacks while mentally tossing about vast imponderables with the ease of a field hand bucking hay bales—this fellow is never going to yodel. But they laugh well together, and their affection and mutual respect are rich and enduring.

* * * *

Those were good years up on Cowboy Flats. Winters of wind-blown snow and solitude; summers of friendship and society.

And with Meezie came her incredible smiling dog, Dasher, and her dog-horse, Rebel. And with Dick came Tuffy, the terrible cat. Tuffy who would eradicate entire generations of ground critters in the course of a summer’s hunt. Tuffy who would creep into my tipi in the middle of the night and leap onto my belly just for the sheer pleasure of hearing me scream. Tuffy whose interminable curiosity and unrelenting penchant for trouble created for me a dilemma of humanitarian principle versus primal urge.

Meezie and Dick and I were attaching the liner to the inside of the poles of the tipi we set up down in front of her cabin each summer. We had managed to create a maddening tangle of quarter-inch nylon cord when our beloved feline friend dove right into the middle of the mass of loops and unintended knots and almost immediately got her furry little head tightly bound in a noose.

Meezie was the first to notice. “Dick. Dick, the cat is strangling!”

“Oh my,” Dick responded—he really loved that malicious little fur ball and was distressed beyond action.

“Yes,” I thought. “Look at that little son of a bitch choke.”

“Do something, Dick. Do something,” Meezie implored.

But, of course, it was all slow-motion nightmare to him. This was a real cat, not some hypothetical Schrödinger paradigm of uncertainty. Tuffy was surely going to die if something wasn’t done and Dick simply wasn’t the one to do it. It was up to me and, frankly, I was more inclined to champion the cause of scores of ground squirrels whose heads ol’ Tuffy had munched off just for the sport of it. But—the sanctity of life, the hearts of my friends—the principle and sentiment of the situation proved stronger than my inclination to passively accept primitive justice. While Meezie pleaded and Dick bemoaned, I dove in and rescued the demon cat.

They were so grateful.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m sure these shredded appendages I once called hands will eventually heal.”

Unlike Tuffy, Rebel wasn’t evil. He was just horse-sized and some- times lacked good judgement. I’ll tell you, that horse really loved his oats. He would graze the good grass of the ranch all summer but one of his big brown eyes was always scanning the vicinity of the shed wherein was stored his daily allotment of grain. It was a small wooden

building used for odds and ends and, for whatever reason one might open its old door, within moments Rebel would be there with his big horse nose butting and begging for oats. He must have been particularly hungry one day when Dick had disappeared into the dusty confines of the shed—likely looking for a handful of tacks—for an extended period of time. Rebel, never known for his patience, eventually tired of waiting and just barged on in. You’ve got to picture this. I mean, Rebel’s hindquarters were wider than the door to start with and the building wasn’t much wider than the door and the interior was lined with shelves. Also, add to the mix, Dick is a long lanky kind of a fellow himself and by time Rebel had wedged his entire width and length into the tiny edifice there were altogether too many knees and long legs in there for comfort. Rebel, sensing the nearness of the oat barrel, had rooted around with his huge head and pinned Dick against the back wall.

By the time I arrived at the scene it was all laughter, barking,and shouting. Meezie was outside trying to urge Rebel to back up while laughing so hard there were tears in her eyes. Dasher the Dog was grinning widely and barking loudly. And Dick, with rising voice muffled by the clutter and confine of the shed and the bulk of the horse, was trying to explain how the situation was really not all that amusing.

It’s funny, what you think of sometimes. As I crawled through the legs of the horse, relieved that he had buried his head in the oat barrel by then and paid no attention to my intrusion, I recalled how Joe back then in my youthful encounters with Carol and love and all would, with an ornery turn of mahogany eye, casually plant a size triple ‘e’ horseshoe on my foot and, with the slightest shift of his massive weight, pin me to the Earth.

“Hoof, hoof . .. hoof, hoof,” I counted. “All accounted for. Hey, there’s Dick’s left foot.” And then, in the best sing-song of a cowboy voice I could muster,I started repeating a pleading mantra, “Easy, big fellow, easy.”

I moved forward, skirting the left flank and then dipping under to come up on the right. “Maybe it’s not such a disappointment after all,” I said quietly, not wanting to excite Rebel—I mean, I’d seen that horse kick. Remember the trash can?

I managed to wedge myself between Rebel and the shelves and many jagged, sharp objects and joined Dick at the front of the horse. We were both panting—me from the struggle of getting in there, him from the general compression of the situation. “What were you saying, Robert?” he gasped in much less muted tones. “I couldn’t hear you for all the damned laughter.” I imagine Meezie and Dasher must have been pretty much out of breath by then, too.

When Rebel came up for air, we got a lid on the oat drum and, with Dick and I shoving his chest and Meezie tugging on his tail, managed to work the beast out of the shed.

Rebel returned to his perpetual grazing, Meezie and Dasher chortled their way back to the cabin and Dick and I leaned against the corral fence getting our breaths.

After a while, Dick looked over at me and said,“Thanks, Robert,”

“Any time, my friend,” I replied.

“Now what were you saying in there about disappointment?”

“Oh, I was thinking maybe it was just as well my father never did buy us a horse.”