Her thumbs twitching over her phone’s tiny keys, summoning up facts, Lisa insisted, “Daddy, of course it’s funny.”
Randall asked, why?
She considered the question as if for the first time. “I don’t know. Because he was white, I guess.” She read details as they surfaced. The man was heterosexual, divorced with one child, and he died of a ruptured sigmoid colon. She grinned. “Isn’t this just perfect?” She nodded smugly at the phone’s screen. “He was a rich big shot for Hewlett-Packard or some other Fortune 500 member of the military-industrial complex.”
Randall challenged, “What if it had been a girl your age?”
Lisa wagged a finger at him. “If it showed a girl, then anyone who even watched the video would go to jail.”
Randall tested the waters, asking, “And if the man wasn’t white?”
Lisa scrolled and tabbed, distracted in her search. “If it was a black guy, it would be racist. No one would post it on any site.”
If the video had shown a woman with the horse, Lisa explained that it would be misogynistic, promoting the abuse of women. Even a woman who had consented, she would be considered as coerced by her culture and acting out of internalized self-hatred. The same went for a homosexual. No, what made the video hilarious was the fact that the person acted upon was white, straight, a male, and an adult. Lisa said, “I wrote a whole paper on it for our unit on gender perspectives.” She looked up from the phone, beaming. “I got an A.”
Randall stammered, “But he died.”
His daughter shrugged. “Not on the video. He died hours later in an emergency room.”
Randall’s phone rang. It was the livestock broker calling. He didn’t pick up.
Lisa speculated lightly, “It’s like watching Mother Nature get revenge for all the global warming the white patriarchy has inflicted on the environment.” She sighed. “Don’t take it so personally, Daddy. You just chose the wrong time in history to be a straight, white, Christian male.”
It was the smugness in her voice. The supreme confidence. It made Randall feel sorry for her. Miles went by before he gathered the courage to ask, “Did you kill Sour Kraut?”
Scrolling through her text messages, his daughter replied, “The bidding is now at two-point-five million.”
Those were the last words the two spoke to one another.
It was almost dusk when they got to the home place, but a group of teenage boys and girls were waiting to see Red Sultan’s Big Boy. Going into the house, Randall could hear Lisa telling them that it would cost five dollars to see the horse. A selfie would cost ten.
Around dinnertime the broker texted to say the bidding was close to three million.
Randall texted back, “Cash?”
It was impossible to not start spending that money in his head. A top-notch education for Lisa. A new life someplace that would make Estelle happy. Freedom from the past. He typed, “What happens to the horse?”
The broker came back with, “LOL. I assure you that horse will not be pulling a carriage. The horse will live a life you and I can only dream of.”
The horse in the video hadn’t looked miserable. How could someone weigh the quality of that life against, say, pulling a plow? It seemed as if human beings could subject an animal to anything—crowded conditions, chemicals, mutilation, misery, and death—but not pleasure.
That weekend, Lisa paraded the horse around the district. Showing off.
Randall. Randall went hunting through scrapbooks. The family had never thrown anything away. He found the photograph of him and Stu Gilcrest in front of the Bonnie and Clyde Death Car. The two boys were grinning with glee. Each had a finger stuck into a bullet hole in the driver’s door. Depending on who told their story, Parker and Barrow were villains or martyrs, but wherever their car was on display it was making more money than they’d ever robbed off banks.
Sunday evening, Lisa put flowers on Sour Kraut’s fake grave, and Randall drove her home to her mother. Neither said goodbye.
Monday, he remembered what the broker had said about people cutting loose their cabin cruisers. Abandoning what they’d once treasured but could no longer support. He thought of the man in the video who believed he was having the time of his life when, in fact, his insides were already bleeding to death. Randall had written down a location the broker had told him to be at. It was nothing but sage land in the middle of a hundred square miles of nowhere. He loaded Red Sultan’s Big Boy into the trailer.
Randall, he brought a .55-caliber big enough to blow a hole in Bonnie and Clyde.
He didn’t go where they’d agreed to meet. Instead, he drove a hundred klicks north.
How he saw it, he was rescuing the horse in the best way possible. He opened the back of the trailer. Took off the Arabian’s bridle. Unbraided the blue ribbons from its mane. With just a rope around its neck, he led it off a ways to where it was the only thing in sight. It continued to be the sweet-natured docile creature he’d first met. Not drugged, not sick, but damaged just the same. Randall took out the gun and set his mind to do what his own child had done to Sour Kraut. If she could, with malice and forethought, so could he be judge, jury, and executioner.
Whatever they heard next, the horse heard it first. His ears twitched toward a sound carried on the wind. Hooves, but not wild horses. Not mustangs, but horses gone wild.
Randall wasn’t here first. Atop this vast windswept nowhere. Other plain people had been forced to this same desperate place, to commit the act he was about to commit. He wasn’t alone, but everyone before him had found a better choice, and on the horizon grazed a herd of dreams they’d been driven to leave behind. All those seemingly impossible aspirations, they ran together in the distance, flourishing.
Randall looped the rope off the Arabian’s neck. He clapped and stomped to spook the thing, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, he put the gun in the air and fired a few shots. That did the trick, and Red Sultan’s Big Boy galloped away. Too late, Randall considered that he might’ve pried off the horse’s shoes. He could’ve done a lot of things better.
To test if he’d done the right thing, Randall put the gun barrel to the side of his head and squeezed the trigger one last time. The hammer fell, but nothing more happened. The chamber was empty. He’d been forgiven.
Driving home he reminded himself that he was a member in good standing at the cooperative, and that meant they’d have to buy his crop. Randall’s wasn’t a good-sized operation, but he’d still manage to get by.
ROMANCE
You should congratulate me. My wife and I just had twins, and they seem okay. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two little girls. But you know the feeling…I keep waiting for something to go wrong because that’s how it is when things get too happy. I keep expecting to wake up from this beautiful dream.
I mean, back before I was married I had this one girlfriend who was fat. We were, both of us, fat together so we got along. That girlfriend, she was always testing us on new diets to lose weight, like eating nothing except pineapple and vinegar, or nothing but green algae from an envelope, and she was suggesting we take long walks together until she started to shed the pounds, her hips just melted away, and you never saw anybody so happy. Even then I knew something would wreck it. You know the feeling: When you love somebody, you’re happy to see her happy, but I knew my girlfriend was going to dump me because now guys with careers and health insurance were getting her on their radar. I remember she was pretty and funny before, but now that she was getting so skinny it was obvious she possessed vast untapped reserves of self-control and self-discipline way out of my league, and my friends weren’t any help because they were all circling, waiting for us to call it quits so they could date her, and then it turned out it wasn’t the pineapple or the self-discipline because she found out she really had cancer, but she slimmed down to wearing a bitch’n-hot Size Two before she died.
That’s how I know happiness is like a ticking bomb. And how I met my wife is because I wasn’t going to date
anybody, not anymore, no way, so I was taking the Amtrak to Seattle. It was the year of Lollapalooza in Seattle, and I’d packed my tent and wrapped my sleeping bag to protect my bong so I could camp out all weekend like a Grizzly Adams, and I walked into the bar car on the train. You know how sometimes you just need to leave the friends and sobriety behind for a few days. I walked into the bar car, and there’s this total stone-cold-fox pair of green eyes looking right directly at me. And I’m not a monster. I’m not some reality show blimp stuck in a hospital bed eating buckets of fried chicken all day, but I can understand why guys would want to work as guards in women’s prisons or concentration camps where they could just date good-looking prisoners without those babes always saying, “Put a shirt on!” and asking, “Do you always have to sweat so much?” But on the train, here’s this goddess wearing a Radiohead T-shirt cut off to show her bare middle, and her jeans sag down to where there ought to be bush showing, and she’s wearing Mickey Mouse and Holly Hobbie rings around every finger, holding a beer to her beautiful lips and looking at me down the length of the brown bottle, just an ordinary MGD, not some pussy microbrew in a green bottle.
And guys like me, we know the score. Unless we’re John Belushi or John Candy, no hottie is going to put you in that kind of an eye-lock so, right away, I know enough to look away from her in shame. The only reason why a girl like her would talk to me is to break the news that I’m a gross fat pig and I’m blocking her entire view of the ocean. Know your limits, I always say. Aim low and you won’t be disappointed. Edging past her, I look without looking. I check her out, and she smells good, like some kind of dessert, like a baked pie, like a pumpkin pie with that red-brown spices on top. Better yet, the beer bottle in her mouth turns to follow me as I walk down the aisle to the bar and order a round, and it’s not as if we’re the last boy and girl in the whole world. A bunch of other people are drinking at the plastic tables, going to Lollapalooza from the look of their dreads and tie-dye. I walk all the way to the most faraway table from her, but this hottie watches me go all the way. You know the feeling, when somebody’s watching, you can’t take one step without stumbling, especially on a moving-around train. I go to take a drink as the train turns a corner, and I spill beer down my striped cowboy shirt. I’m pretending to watch the trees going by outside the window, but from a secret agent angle I’m watching her reflection in the glass, and she’s still watching me. The only time she looks away is when she steps up to the bar and gives the bartender some money and he gives her another beer, and then her reflection is getting bigger and bigger until it’s life-sized and she’s standing next to my table and says, “Hi,” and something else.
And I say, “What?”
And she points at my cowboy shirt, at the beer spilled there, and she says, “I like your buttons…shiny.”
I tuck my chin and look down at the pearl-colored snaps. They’re not buttons, they’re snaps, but I don’t want to scotch this moment. And right from the get-go I noticed she puts her fingers in her mouth sometimes—okay, she puts her fingers in her mouth a lot, and she uses a breathy, little-girl voice with some baby-talk words like buh-sketti instead of spaghetti and skissors in place of scissors—but for a regulation hottie that’s just textbook being sexy.
She gives me a wink and licks the tip of her tongue around her lips, and with the wet still shining on them, she says, “I’m Britney Spears.” She’s such a tease. Sure, she’s a little loaded. Impaired. By now we’re both drinking those little bottles of tequila, and it’s not as if we’re driving this train. No, she’s not Britney Spears, but she’s the same caliber of hot. It’s clear she’s pulling my pud, but in a good way. And you just need to look at her to know all you need to know.
The only chance I have is to hold on and keep flirting back and buying the drinks. She asks me where I’m headed and I tell her Lollapalooza. She’s walking her fingers up the front of my shirt, her fingertips stepping from snap to snap, from my belt up to my throat, then walking herself back down, and I’m hoping she can’t feel how hard that makes my heart beat.
And she’s such a flirt with her green eyes cutting from side to side or peeking up at me from under her long, fluttering eyelashes. And she must be beers and beers ahead of me because she keeps forgetting to end her sentences, and sometimes she points at something speeding by outside the window and she shouts, “A dog!” or one time she sees a car waiting at a rail crossing and Brit screams, “Slug Bug!” and clobbers my shoulder with her fistful of Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse rings, and secretly I hope I have the bruise for the rest of my life. And we go to Lollapalooza and pitch my tent, and Brit’s so drunk that when she wakes up the next morning she’s still drunk. And no matter how much doobie I smoke I’m having trouble keeping up. And maybe it’s because Brit’s so skinny, but she seems to cop a buzz without drinking for hours, like maybe she’s getting a contact high from my secondhand smoke. Our whole Lollapalooza is like the kind of beautiful classic romance you’d pay to jerk off to on the Internet, but it’s happening to me. And we’re dating for six months, all the way through Christmas, through Brit moving her stuff into my apartment, and I keep expecting Brit to wake up sober one morning, and she still hasn’t.
We go to eat Thanksgiving at my mom’s place, and I have to explain. It’s not that Brit is a finicky eater, but the reason she’s so skinny is she only likes to eat a zucchini squash cut in half lengthwise and hollowed down the middle to make a miniature Iroquois dugout canoe with knife scratches on the outside to look like Indian writing and a whole tribe of little braves carved out of raw carrot but with green peas for their heads, lined up and rowing the war canoe across a dinner plate covered with a thick layer of chocolate syrup, and you’d be surprised how many restaurants don’t have that particular item on their regular menus. So most times Brit has to make it herself, and that takes half a day, and then she has to play with it on the living room carpet for another hour, and that’s why she never seems to gain an ounce. And my mom, she’s just stoked to see me dating, again.
And nothing you can smoke or shoot will ever get you as high as you’ll feel walking down the street holding hands with a supermodel total stone-cold fox like my Brit. Guys driving down the street in their Ferrari Testarossas, guys with the six-pack abs and steroid pecs, for the first time in my life they have nothing over me. I’m walking down the street with Britney, and she’s the prize every guy’s trying so hard to win.
And the only buzz kill is how every Romeo comes to sniff a circle around her, trying to grab her in an eye-lock and giving her tits his best Pepsodent toothpaste smile. And this one time, riding on the bus, a pack of Romeos stand themselves around where Brit and I are sitting in the back of the bus. Brit likes to sit on the aisle right over the back wheels so she can see to punch me first when there’s a Volkswagen, and this one big Romeo comes to stand with his crotch situated at her eye level, and when the bus hits a pothole maybe his hip brushes against her shoulder until Brit looks up at him, and talking around her fingers in her mouth Britney says, “Hello, Big Boy.” And that’s just how Brit can be: friendly. And she winks and waves her wet fingers for the Romeo to lean down, and he looks around to make sure his competition is clocking his good luck, and this Romeo squats down to Brit’s eye level, his face all bedroom smirk. And maybe because she’s trying to make me jealous, Brit says to this Romeo, her smok’n-hot green eyes look at him and she asks, “You want to see a magic trick?” And all the other Romeos perk up with looks that prove they’re all listening, and Brit takes her fingers out of her mouth and slides them down inside the front of her pants, grinding her fingers around inside the skintight crotch of her jeans, and the back half of our bus gets so quiet with their watching her fingers wrestle behind her stone-washed denim zipper. And you can see these Romeos swallow, their Adam apples going up and down with all their extra spit and their eyes bulging like horny boners.
And as fast as clobbering a Slug Bug Britney yanks something out of her pants and yells, “Magic tri
ck!” She swings this thing, shouting, “Puppet show!” And swinging from her hand is something on a little string, like a tea bag only bigger. It’s like a hot dog bun smeared with ketchup swinging on a little string, and Britney screams, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” and smacks it across the cheek of the Romeo still squatting down next to her seat. And Brit chases after him, yelling and slapping his leather jacket with streaks of red. And other Romeos not looking at her on purpose, fixing their faces to stare down at their shoes or look out a window, she’s swinging her little string to smack them upside their heads with red smears, the whole time squealing, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” laughing ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, shouting, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” The bus is ding-ding-dinging for the next stop, and a hundred passengers get off at the 7-Eleven, pushing and stampeding off the bus like they all need to buy Slurpees and cash in their winning Powerball mega-jackpot tickets. And I’m yelling after them, “It’s okay, everybody!” I’m yelling out the bus window, waving to get their attention, “She’s a performance artist!” I’m yelling, “She doesn’t mean anything by it; it’s just some political gender politics statement deal.”
Even as the bus pulls away with just the two of us left on board, I’m yelling, “She’s just a Free Spirit.” As Brit goes up the aisle and starts flogging the driver with her tea bag thing, I’m yelling, “That’s just her zany sense of humor.”
And one night I come home from work and Brit’s naked and standing sideways to the bathroom mirror, holding her belly in both hands, and since we met on the train she’s gained a little weight, but it’s nothing that a couple weeks of pineapple and vinegar won’t fix. And Britney takes my hand and holds my fingers spread against her belly and says, “Feel.” She says, “I think I ate a baby.” And she looks at me like a puppy dog with her green hottie eyes, and I ask if she wants me to go with her to the clinic and take care of it, and she nods her head, yes. So we go on my day off, and there’s the usual Sunday school teachers blocking the sidewalk. They hold a garbage bag full of nothing but broken-apart plastic baby doll arms and heads mixed together with ketchup, and Brit doesn’t hesitate. She reaches into their bag and takes a leg and licks it clean like a French fry, and that’s how cool my beautiful girlfriend is. And I open a National Geographic magazine while the nurse asks her if she’s eaten anything today and Brit says she ate a whole canoe full of Iroquois warriors the day before, but, no, she hasn’t eaten anything yet today. And I haven’t finished reading this one article about ancient Egyptian mummies before there’s a scream and Britney comes running out of the back still wearing a paper dress and bare feet, like this is a big deal, like maybe she never had an abortion before, because she runs barefoot all the way back to my apartment, and to make her stop shaking and throwing up I have to ask her to marry me.