Craig Smith - Cold Rain

A moment later her truck started up and she drove away.

With Lucy’s help I moved back into the house. The whole process took about ten minutes. I offered to fix her dinner, but Lucy said she’d told the Sloans she would have dinner with them.

‘I’m going to have a talk with Mom when I go down for Thanksgiving, Dave. About the grass, I mean.’

‘Sounds like you’ve got your mother figured out.’

With entirely innocent eyes she asked, ‘What do you mean?

‘Molly isn’t going to want to let Olga know the two of you are having problems. Absolute best place to confess is with Olga in the next room. Your mother will just smile and say that’s wonderful, Lucy! I hope you’re only smoking good dope. Bad grass can be so irritating to your little throat.’

Lucy laughed. ‘You think?’

As she was getting in her Toyota I said to her back,

‘You going to tell her about the boyfriend?’

Lucy froze. It was a just a second, and then she turned. ‘Nothing to tell. Not yet anyway.’

‘The weekend’s coming up. You never know.’

‘That’s right, Dave. You never know.’

‘Be smart, Lucy. You want to get serious, fine, it’s your choice, but don’t assume a guy has been as careful about things as you would be. Some of these guys drink first and think later. Even they don’t know where they’ve put it.’

I sounded like Tubs and I hated myself. At least I hadn’t mentioned genitalia turning into vegetable matter.

‘Talking from experience, are we?’

‘Say hi to your grandparents for me, kid.’

After I fed the horses and fixed my dinner, I settled into the guest bedroom across from the room Molly and I had shared. Then I went up to look at the work Molly had done on Lucy’s apartment. The bathroom and kitchen appliances were in. She had the tile for the floor still in the boxes. I wasn’t doing anything else, so I started tiling the kitchen floor.

Around midnight I had a good start and went downstairs. As long as I was working, everything was fine.

Once I stopped the place felt enormous and empty.

Not really frightening. Fear comes from the unknown.

I knew who had killed the dogs, and a part of me yearned for him to show up and take his best shot.

No, it wasn’t frightening. Just empty and lonely and far too grand for a man on his own.

I spent a couple hours the next morning in my office.

The latest short story I had been working on was in trouble. At least it had gone stale on me. I could not find the excitement I had felt at the beginning. On the first page a woman had gone off to meditate in silence at a Buddhist monastery for six weeks. Coming home refreshed and revitalized, she discovered her husband was living with another woman. The thing had seemed so rich at the beginning, so full of possibilities, but I had lost the momentum. I no longer had the distance and confidence I needed to write about love and relationships. My sense of humour had died.

I had eight weeks of paid leave, I told myself. I knew writers who could crank out a novel in that time, and I knew others who could produce a chapter and a full outline. For me a short story would be about right.

The trouble was I could think of nothing but Buddy Elder, plot nothing but his murder. Pleasant as the fantasy was in the abstract, I did not dare think in practical terms about it. My greatest fear was that I would come up with something that might work.

So I went upstairs and threw myself into laying tile.

In January my life at the university would resume or it would end and I would begin something else. If it came to starting over, I would probably get another teaching position. Jinx would get me something. I wasn’t ready to learn another profession. The very idea of it at this late stage made me want to kill myself. I looked around my office and saw my shotguns in the gun case, a twelve-gauge and a four-ten. Definitely the twelve-gauge. Because if you’re going to do a job, do it right.

Like murder, fantasies of suicide were a narcotic. I knew better than to indulge in them. New job, I thought, as if it were an accomplished fact. New city. Get busy and keep busy. When the time was right, think about meeting someone. That’s what people did when they got divorced. They didn’t kill the people responsible and go to prison or swallow a shotgun while they tried to slip their toes into the trigger guard. They smiled at a pretty face. They kissed strange lips and tried to forget how much they still loved the world they had lost.

At midnight, as I lay in bed, I began to think about murder again in a purely hypothetical way. A short story. I really couldn’t help myself. It was the only thing that got me past the notion of suicide. Strange to say, but of all the sleepless nights I had spent since I learned of the complaints against me, this was the only one that afforded me some pleasure.

Lucy called the next afternoon. The rain we had gotten the night before had turned the arena to mud. She asked me to throw some more water on because she wanted to practice running Jezebel.

‘Want some competition?’ I asked.

‘Anytime you think you’re up to it, old man.’

Barrel racing is a piece of Americana. It’s simple, quick, and the wildest ride you can have on a horse short of bronco busting. The barrels themselves are set up in an isosceles triangle in one-half of the arena.

The start and finish line is well below the bottom two barrels of the triangle. A rider runs the race alone, following a cloverleaf pattern around the triangle, turning three-hundred-sixty degrees at each barrel and finishing with a run from the top of the pattern back to the starting line. It is the sort of race that would leave the greatest thoroughbreds in racing history at the back of the pack, since only the American quarter horse has the ability to hit full speed in a single stride.

Moreover it can stop and turn with the same efficiency. The trick of the race is to turn a tight circle on a reasonably fast horse. It doesn’t have to be the fastest or the most athletic animal. Turn too soon and you take the barrel out, usually with the rider’s shin taking a hit. Turn too late and the circle gets elongated. In a race measured to the tenth of a second a bad turn can cost you two or three full seconds on the clock.

In his best days Ahab was never the horse to beat.

As he got older, he got the old warrior’s applause whenever I got the itch to run him, but never the prize money, unless it happened to be raining. If it was raining, if the arena was soaking wet and getting worse instead of better, Ahab was the odds on favourite, assuming as they liked to say, Dave could stay on him to the end of the race.

When we bought Ahab, we didn’t know about his talent. We thought all his first place victories came from his speed. We had never heard of the term mudder.

It was Lucy’s belief that with patience any horse could be taught to negotiate adversity. I didn’t try to disillusion her. Time would do that. She could practice all she wanted, Jezebel was Jezebel, and Jezebel only knew one way to run a race: wild-eyed, tail straight up in the air, and blowing exhaust all the way home.

Lucy praised me for the condition of the arena. It was about six inches deep with mud. I told her to put her helmet on. She sneered but she wore the thing, and she strapped it down tight.

Since I was presumably smarter than a horse, the first time I ran the barrels I decided I should do the steering. Poor Ahab cracked his shin on the barrel.

After that, I engaged the autopilot lever attached to all western saddles. It seemed to work fine. Ahab knew where he was going and when to turn. Besides, I soon found out two hands on the saddle horn were hardly enough. At the first turn in a barrel race it feels like the horse is falling down, you get that low to the ground. While you’re still thinking about bailing out, the horse leaps into a full gallop toward the next barrel.