Owen's Daughter (23 page)

Next, I’ll show him his horse.

The relationship between a man and a horse is sacred. It’s easier to love an animal than another human. Give-and-take is easy when you don’t speak the same language. And yet there are men—lost, afraid, and unable to allow the emotions of happiness and sorrow to coexist in their souls—who take their rage out on the animals.

I imagine that every single animal is welcomed into the realm without question. That they go straight to water and will never be thirsty. For some, there are seeds, and for the orangutans and parrots, perfectly ripe fruit. For the horses, beneath their hooves, the timothy grass never stops growing.

Chapter 7

At seven
a.m.
on Sunday, Skye was up, dressed, and finishing her eye makeup, listening to her dad pace across the flagstone floor, champing at the bit to get to his job interview.

“Jeepers, Daddy, you aren’t meeting him until nine, relax!”

“I can’t help it. I want to get there early enough to check the place out. Make a good impression.”

Skye laughed. “It’s not like you’re taking a test, it’s a job interview.”

“Shows what you know, Sara Kay. I got a mess of handicaps, the first one being my age, the second one being my age, and the third one—”

“Don’t call me that. Let me guess, the third being your age? Just drop me at the mechanic’s,” she said in her pre-coffee raspy voice. Everyone said cigarettes wrecked your pipes, but apparently so had booze. Soon enough, Skye couldn’t stand her father’s nerves. “Fine. We’ll go early. I hope the mechanic’s open. Where’s the damn dog?”

The answer was, already in the truck. Hope spooked her a little, seeming to sense whatever was going on, but then that was what had interested her in animals in the first place: their ability to figure shit out before a human did.

Once they were driving toward St. Francis, her dad seemed calm, but the dog kept licking his chops, so Skye knew otherwise. Lobo and Lalo’s Mechanics was a Quonset hut, but they did great work cheap. The OPEN sign was lit. “Thanks for the lift,” she said as she opened the door to go pick up her mother’s Mercedes. She’d had it since she was seventeen years old, so she guessed her mother didn’t want it back. “Go knock ’em dead at the interview.”

“I ain’t leaving until that car starts up and I see you drive away,” he said, holding the passenger door open.

“Then I guess I’d better haul ass. Lobo, where are you?”

Lalo, Lobo’s five-foot-zero twin brother, walked over.
“Buenos dias, Señorita Sara,”
he said, handing her the keys.

“
Muchas gracias
, Lalo. But call me Skye. I’m not the same woman who dropped off this car. Say
hola
to Lobo for me. And tell him
muchas gracias
for letting me store my car here.”

Lalo opened the door of her mother’s Mercedes, and Skye smelled the misery she’d left behind locked up in there. Empty bottles, fast-food wrappers, and some clothes she’d planned to take to the dry cleaner ten months ago. Guess she could throw them away now. She put the key into the ignition, turned it, and waited for the rumble of the motor, but there was nothing, not even a click. Skye’s dad sighed, and he waited some more. She turned the key three more times and then gave up. Her Spanish was not the best, but she managed, “
Qué hace el motor
every day?”

“Sí, sí,”
Lalo said.
“¡Qué hacer arrancar el motor cada día!”

“Well, then why the hell won’t it start now?”

Lalo’s face reddened as he popped the hood, exposing the massive German motor inside.
“¿Podría ser muchas cosas
,
bateria esta muerto?”
He looked at various wires and held up one cable with a frayed end.
“¡Esos malditos ratones que mastican en el cableado!”

“Lalo,” Skye said, “I have only
poco
español
.
Lo siento. Despacio.
”

By now, her dad had shut off his truck and come to take a look. “He says the effing
ratas
chewed up the wiring.”

“What am I supposed to do about that? Set a mousetrap on my carburetor?”

“
Hola
, Lalo,” her father said, and shook the man’s hand.
“¿Por favor, reparar el cableado?”

Lalo nodded.
“Si, no hoy. ¿Tal vez mañana?”

“Bueno.”
Owen took the keys from Skye and handed them to Lalo. “Just get in the truck, Skye. The car will be ready tomorrow.”

“What’d you tell him?” Skye asked once they were on the road.

“To please fix the wires the mice chewed.”

“Mice? I thought you said rats?”

“Rats, mice, what’s the difference?”

“You should slow down, Daddy. There’s bound to be a speed trap nearby. I ought to know, I got enough tickets in this town.”

“Skye, you’re giving me a headache. Please, can you just be quiet for ten minutes?”

“Well, pardon me,” she said, leaning as close as she could to the passenger window. On her lap she held the bag of apples her dad had insisted on taking to the job interview. “Like bringing flowers, or a bottle of wine to a dinner,” he’d said.

It was raining lightly—always something to cheer for in New Mexico—but soon it turned to wet splatters of snow, hitting the windshield like the spit wads kids used to throw in elementary school. Her stomach growled because they hadn’t taken time for breakfast.

“Can I have one of these apples?”

“No,” her dad said.

“You really think he’d notice one apple was missing?”

“No, I think you ought to wash the apple off before you eat it. Chemicals in everything these days.”

“All right. Soon as we get there, I’m taking one because I’m hungry.”
And angry, lonely, and tired?
she heard Duncan say.
H.A.L.T.

Oh, shut up, Duncan.

Skye wondered if Gracie was awake, having her Cheerios and drinking from the little sippy cup she refused to give up. And who was feeding her breakfast? Rocky? Rita, while smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table? As they drove down Rodeo Road, heading toward 599, she noticed a few changes in the city’s business end. In the mall, Mervyn’s, where she could find the best panties, had gone out of business. Just down the road, there were another couple of car dealerships, a Kohl’s, and a Walmart.

They headed across the intersection to Airport Road, toward the more rural community of La Cienega. There adobes dating back to 1700 stood in the shade of ancient cottonwood trees that turned to gold every autumn. But fall was a long way off, and while summer had seemed just around the corner, today it was raining, then snowing, and now it was dry again. Make up your mind, Skye thought. Overhead, the skies were ridiculously blue, as if the snow and rain were all in her mind.

They passed by the Santa Fe Trailer Ranch, cousin to the one Rita had lived in while in Albuquerque. It was a little village of singlewides set in the dirt, followed by a large lot filled with old RVs, a few “canned ham” aluminum trailers, and, scattered like precious gems among the rock, those silver bullets, the Airstream trailers she loved. The hills behind La Cienega
were the site of many petroglyphs, dating back to the 1300s. Skye had hiked there herself, years ago, but Gracie had never seen them. She couldn’t wait to show her daughter the petroglyphs and tell her stories about them. And everything else she’d missed doing with Little Gee. As the road curved, they passed a sewage treatment plant that hopefully was upwind of this yet-to-materialize stable/riding school. The
arroyo
on the other side of the road was dry, choked with salt cedar. They were less than a mile outside of La Cienega when she spotted the sign for the stable:
Reach for the Sky!
A horse-centered therapeutic facility
. “Daddy,” she said.

He clicked on his blinker. “I see it.”

She could sense the nerves her dad was feeling. At his age, was he up to this kind of work? Lifting bales, grooming twenty horses a day? Shoot, he’d fallen deeply asleep after that walk up and down Canyon Road. Which kind of broke her heart because then she had to admit he was getting old. By the time they made their way down the winding gravel road, the sun cast a rosy light against an old, corrugated-metal barn undergoing repairs with what looked like a decent-sized crew and lots of pickup trucks. He parked the truck next to a yellow Land Cruiser. Cool old car, Skye thought. A man came out of the barn to meet them, leaning heavily on a four-pronged cane.

“Wait in the car,” Owen said to the dog.

“Don’t mind me,” Skye said. “I’m just chopped liver.”

Her dad waved at the man, and she watched them shake hands.

Somehow Skye had expected the man interviewing her father would be massive and burly, the type that worked out every day and ate an entire pie for lunch. Instead, he was a slim guy—not bony, but not muscled out, either. He moved as if he were in pain, and as if it were that pain that kept him lean. His blue jeans were too nice to be working clothes and his shirt wasn’t western cut with a yoke, just a plain chambray work shirt. He had short dark hair, a firm jaw. He was part Navajo, she could tell, but something else, too. The guy had a slight military air about him, so maybe he’d gotten injured in the service, hence the cane.

Owen and his interviewer went inside the barn, which left her with the dog, who was now sitting at attention, looking out the open window to where her dad had disappeared. “Relax, Hope. Chances are he’ll get turned down in five minutes and be right back.”

While she waited, Skye looked in the glove box and found only the registration, some receipts for gasoline, and a left glove she recognized as the one her father used when shoeing horses. Skye had no watch to see how long he’d been gone. All she had to go on was the rising sun and her empty stomach, which was now feeling downright hollow. And damn it, she’d forgotten to take an apple like she’d planned to. She dozed off, then jolted awake at Hope’s whining.

“Need to go tee-tee?” Skye mumbled, and then realized it was how she talked to Gracie, not this three-legged charity case. She sighed and got out of the truck, yawning. “I’m going to see if they have a vending machine somewhere around here. You stay here, Hope. Hear me? Do not go into that barn or I will personally put you on a leash for all time.”

The dog cocked his head at her. Maybe God knew what he was thinking, but Skye sure didn’t.

Hammers and saws were at work somewhere inside the barn, and judging by the number of pickup trucks, there were construction workers inside. She couldn’t help but think of Rocky, back when he did that kind of work. He stayed off drugs when he worked construction or on the road crew. One of the workers’ trucks had a set of chrome-plated bull testicles hanging from his trailer hitch. That’d be real funny until a cop pulled him over and gave him a ticket because they were illegal, even in places like Oklahoma and Montana.

The men were building new stalls for the horses, she guessed. And where were those horses? Walking away from the noise, she checked out two good-sized arenas. There were a couple of Porta Potties and several equipment sheds, those metal prefab things you could buy at Home Depot. At her barn in Aurora, riders rented them to hold saddles and tack. Reach for the Sky had everything but a vending machine. She wandered over past the largest riding arena fenced with white pipe. Next to it was a covered arena, metal roofed like those northern New Mexico houses. Kind of spendy for a stable. She climbed the board walls and peered over. Here were the horses, wearing breakaway halters, milling about. She counted fourteen. Nothing to write home about, but solid candidates for a facility for the handicapped. They were bomb-proof and would never scare, once they got used to the kids.

Out beyond that was a wide-open space that culminated in the petroglyph-laden hills. She rested her arms on the rail, remembering the hours she put in training Lightning to become the best barrel-racing Appaloosa in the state of Colorado. Such good times. Too bad she hadn’t appreciated them more. Even all this time later, put fifty-gallon drums in an arena, and Lightning would gather his muscles and run the cloverleaf. Thank goodness for horses, because riding had kept her hormones in check for a good five years. Without them, she might have become pregnant at fourteen.

Far in the distance, there came a rider, barely hanging on his horse, which was at full gallop. The horse must have been poky on the way out and now it was barn sour on the way back. Once an older horse knew it was heading back to the stable, it often decided to gallop home. The most stubborn animal, one that balks at trotting, could suddenly get fleet feet in its rush to get home.

Skye jumped down from the fence, curious. There was plenty of time to watch him, check out his seat, assess his faults—one of which was not keeping his elbows in.
Chicken arms—bwak, bwak
, Valerie the riding instructor would say when she taught riding lessons.
Bwak
,
bwak
, indeed. He transitioned to a trot, then a walk for the last hundred feet. He knew what he was doing, even if his riding style wasn’t the best. He must have taken lessons. The chestnut horse looked vaguely familiar.