It’s starting to get dark. Beatrice walks along the highway from the bus depot up to her family’s house. She avoids the roadway by walking just outside the guardrail in the long, dry grass that’s been matted down by road salt and rain, strewn with trash and the surprisingly bloated body of a dead raccoon. Beatrice imagines that every car and truck passing holds someone she once knew in high school. Inside their cars they are shaking their heads and asking, “Is that Beatrice? What the hell is she doing with a bloated raccoon carcass?”
Beatrice turns up the drive. She hasn’t seen the farm in more than a year. After her father died, she moved away to the city—not for any good reason, just for a change, and now she likes it there. She likes the fact that all the humiliations involved with entering her thirties as a single woman are happening behind her closed apartment door, out of the view of her family and everyone she has ever known.
There are some weathered plastic Duane Reade Easter decorations—a hip-high bunny rabbit and a bright-green egg—wired to the front porch. It is Thanksgiving. And so from the road where Beatrice stands it appears that, in the time she’s been gone, redneck clones of her brother and her mother have moved in and had their perverted redneck way with the house.
The farm is now an island in a sea of big chain stores. While the surrounding farms were plowed under, one by one, and turned into shopping centers, her parents had stood by. They had waited rather than selling their land, as the neighbors all had, and now, along a ten-mile strip of parking lots, stores, gas stations, banks, and supermarkets, their farm is the last one left.
It isn’t even much of a farm. Beatrice’s parents had given up farming seven years before when, one morning, Beatrice’s mother told her father, “I don’t feel like getting out of bed.” He looked her over and, holding her jaw in his hands, he studied her face for a long while before saying, “Yeah. I can see it. Right there on your forehead,” as if there were some word written across her brow, a word that excused her from farmwork for the rest of her life.
Within a few weeks, Beatrice’s father had become an expert crossword-puzzle solver. He’d even considered writing a novel, before realizing that soon they would be broke. Beatrice’s parents had to start working or sell the farm, and so they made a decision. They leased their land to a conglomerate soybean operation and applied for jobs in the new industrial park. Her father got work as a loan adjuster, her mother got a job in advertising, working in the satellite office of a company called Mythologic Development, which turned myths and sometimes history into marketable packages used for making new products and ideas more digestible to the consumer public. Her father didn’t like having an office job. He used his sick days as soon as he got them, but Beatrice’s mother had always been very dramatic, someone who swooned or leaped without provocation; the sort of person who would sing while grocery shopping and then wonder why people were staring at her. She flourished during the brainstorming conference calls that were a regular feature of her new job. She’d dominate the conversations with her patched-together notions of Leda and the swan, the void of Ginnungagap, the bubonic plague and Hathor the Egyptian goddess, whom she reënvisioned as a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian supermodel spokesperson for a vodka company.
Beatrice’s parents hadn’t been born farmers. Rather, it was one of many bright ideas they’d developed in their twenties, ideas like dropping out of college in their junior year, forgoing regular dentist visits, and having children, children they decided to name Beatrice and Clement.
“Right,” Clem says after Thanksgiving dinner. He stands to leave the table. He shakes his head at his mother and Beatrice. Clem works as a carpenter, though he’s mostly interested in small projects like cabinets and decks and hand carving the names of rock bands he likes into soft pieces of wood.
“Going to toke up?” Beatrice’s mother asks him. He pops his head back inside the kitchen. He is stocky and solid, like a bolted zucchini that has grown too long. He holds a finger and thumb up to his lips, inhaling, pinching together a vacancy in between them.
Their mother has put a feather in her hair for the holiday, her “Indian headdress.” She can’t stand it that her son is a pothead and sometimes she’ll get a look, as if she’s trying not to cry just thinking about it. She’s a very good actress. She stares at Clem. She is drunk. They all are. Beatrice’s mother can make her bottom jaw tremble so slightly that the movement is barely perceptible. She looks just like Clem—dark hair, red skin, and papery lips. She stares at him with her mouth wide open, waiting for him to feel guilty. Beatrice looks away. It is extremely difficult for Beatrice to think of her mother as someone with thoughts and desires, with plans and schemes, as someone who, quite possibly, keeps a Rimmed Rod vibrator in her bedside drawer, the way Beatrice does, as someone who might dream about a tremendous ice cube, the size of a sofa, melting in the middle of a hot desert, and wake up having absolutely no idea what the dream means—someone just like Beatrice.
“Dude, I’m so stoned,” Clem says, laughing once, faking a stumble before disappearing. As he opens the front door, the flat sound of road traffic sneaks inside. Beatrice’s mother sighs while Beatrice stands to clear the table. She holds the turkey over the garbage by its breastbone, dangling it there while her mother splits what is left in the last wine bottle between their two glasses.
“When Atlantis was sinking there was an awful period of”—and Beatrice’s mother stops to think of the proper word but can’t. “Of sinking,” she says and places her open hands on either side of her face, like the sunshine. Her mother resorts to theatrics when she is nervous. Beatrice cringes at the gesture. She knows that her mother is going to try to tell her something she doesn’t want to hear. “Imagine,” her mother says, her hands still in place. “People went to sleep inland and woke up with the ocean right there at their door. And when they stepped outside in the morning to pee or to feed their goats all the neighbors were gone without a trace and the only sound was waves lapping.” Beatrice’s mother still works for Mythologic and now she firmly believes that all concepts are better communicated through specious retellings of ancient myths. Most of the time, Beatrice can’t see the connections.
Her mother slowly drags a finger across the kitchen table and then does it again. Beatrice remains entirely still, frozen like a field rabbit, hoping that her mother will decide not to tell her whatever it is she wants to tell her. She can already imagine its perimeters: “Honey, I wish you would think about a job that offers insurance,” or, “I know a real nice young man you might like to meet, Bea.” But he wouldn’t be a nice, young man. He would be another forty-five-year-old divorced actor her mother had met through community-theatre projects, a man who also holds his hands up around either side of his face like the sunshine when he wants to make a point.
Or else maybe she wants to tell Beatrice that she is finally going to sell the farm.
Beatrice is wrong. Her mother doesn’t say anything like that. Instead she says, “When your dad was in the hospital the doctor gave me a choice, Bea.” She rubs her palms across her skinny thighs, exhaling. “The doctor asked me, ‘Do you want to stop his pain?’ And at first I said, Yeah, of course, but then the doctor asked again, ‘No. Do you really, really want to stop his pain?’ And Bea, I knew what he meant and I said yes. I killed your dad, Bea.”
She is drunk. They both are.
“You killed him?”
“Well, not me, but the doctor. I told the doctor to go ahead and get it over with.”
“What does that have to do with Atlantis?” Beatrice asks.
Her mother has to think for a moment. She looks up to the ceiling before asking Bea, “We all have to die sometime?”
Beatrice stares straight ahead like a TV stuck on static, the remote control gone dead. She blinks a series of gray and black squiggled lines. No reception. Nothing. Her mother’s words are not getting through; they are stones dropped into a bottomless hole, the hollow known as Beatrice. They fall and fall until they are too far away to be heard.
Beatrice watches the unwound egg timer beside the stove until her mother interrupts. “You want to watch a movie, hon?” The question is like a slap to the side of the TV. The static clears, the program resumes. Beatrice shakes her head. It’s a story, Beatrice remembers, about a mother and her kids on a farm in Pennsylvania, a dull after-school special broadcast for the Thanksgiving holiday. Beatrice studies her mother’s face.
Beatrice thinks, If I sit in the living room with my mother watching a movie, I will explode and all that will spill out, all that I will have left inside will be a dark-green syrup of boredom that my mother will have to sponge off the floor with some Fantastik and a towel. “No. I’m going to go see what Clem’s up to,” Beatrice says. She is still holding the turkey by its breastbone. It has started to sway. Beatrice drops the bird into the trash and it makes a great swoosh as it falls into the white plastic garbage bag.
When Beatrice was a girl, Clement still a baby, and the farm in O.K. shape, she and her father used to walk the fields at least once a day. The furrows were dry and bulging and Beatrice liked how it felt when the dirt broke underneath her Muck Boots. Before the harvest, corn plants rose so far up over her head that, walking under their canopy, she’d lose sight of everything except her father’s legs marching ahead of her. She’d put her hand inside his and he’d hold it a bit roughly, as if her hand were a tiny mouse he’d captured. She’d pretend that he was not her father at all but a boyfriend, someone handsome from the movies or TV.
He once told her, “Bea, don’t say anything to your mom, but I’m the king of all the farmers.” They walked on a bit farther and came across an irrigation hose that had cracked its rubber tubing. Her father fingered the leak and stared out at the land as if he had every intention of coming back and patching up the cracked hose. But he’d never come back. He just liked to look that way from time to time.
“Farming,” he’d say, “takes ten per cent perspiration and ninety per cent inspiration.” Beatrice had always heard this the other way around, but there was a conviction to her father’s way of talking. Maybe he was the king. He wasn’t a bad farmer. He just didn’t do things the way they had always been done. For instance, pruning trees—he had no time for it, or thinning plants. He hated to yank up seedlings that had been eager enough to sprout, and so he’d let the vegetables grow right on top of each other. He’d let the carrots and beets twist around each other, deformed by their proximity to other carrots and beets. “They still taste just as sweet,” he’d say, but no one wanted to buy the bulbous and bent oddities that came from such close growing quarters. Beatrice’s father also rarely wore proper farmer clothing. Instead he dressed in chinos, button-down Oxford shirts, and canvas sneakers. “They’re cheap” is all he ever had to say. Beatrice thought her dad looked like James Dean in the movie “East of Eden.” James Dean riding on a John Deere.
He’d hay the fields, and Beatrice would follow along behind him in the trail of the tractor’s exhaust—fumes that made her dizzy, gave her a sour stomach. Her head would fill with the sound of Munchkins singing, “Follow the yellow brick road,” because that was what the cut hay looked like. James Dean and the yellow brick road. She would have followed wherever he led her.
Outside, the sodium-vapor lamps from the shopping-center parking lots wash away any definition. Everything on the farm glows the same gray color at night. It makes it difficult to see and Beatrice trips on an old pig trough that her mother has been using as a planter for impatiens.
“What’s up, dude?” her brother asks when she yelps. Clem has converted half of the barn into an apartment, where he lives. There are no locks on his apartment because his door is an old cellar hatch from a house that was demolished to make way for a Dunkin’ Donuts. His kitchen countertops are built from plywood that one of the malls had used to make concrete molds and then tossed. Most of his apartment was built from salvage or from stuff he lifted off construction sites at night. It is a common practice among Clem’s friends. Lots of the local contractors steal from the shopping-center construction sites, too. “This used to be where Matthew Campbell’s milking pavilion was, so I guess we can just help ourselves. He wouldn’t mind.”
“Let’s go downtown,” Beatrice says. “Let’s see if the stores are open on Thanksgiving.”
“All right. I guess,” Clem says, uncertain if he wants to go out in the cold but still enough under the sway of his older sister that he’ll do what she wants to do. He detaches himself from his video game.
“Can I try that first?” she asks.
“This?” He holds the controls up. “Yeah, yeah sure,” he says and begins to set it up for her, re-starting the game. “Do you know how to play?”
“No.”
“I’ll start you off slowly,” he says and slips her hand into a glove that is rigged with controls. It is filled with tiny nodes, like suction cups. She thinks of the dead raccoon’s puckered skin. “Sit down,” he says and she does.
At first nothing happens. The screen turns blue and the nodes tickle her hand. She looks around the apartment while Clem fusses with the machinery. The space is tiny and the walls are mostly covered with shelves and cabinets. Clem moved out of the main house right after high school when he fell in love with a girl named Anna. They lived in the barn together for almost five years but Anna moved to the city a year ago. She hasn’t yet picked up all her stuff and Beatrice can see some of Anna’s clothes, some textbooks she and Clem kept from school, and a nice set of silver that Anna’s grandparents gave her. Everything is covered with small balls of dust and bits of old hay from the barn. Sometimes Anna and Beatrice meet up for coffee in the city. They never talk about the farm or about Clem. In fact, they act as though they are survivors who lived through some sort of low-budget, straight-to-DVD apocalypse that is too painful, too cheap to mention.
Finally the video game starts up. On-screen a woman is walking though a Zen Buddhist garden. She is wearing a tight silver outfit and carries a long sword. “That’s you,” Clem tells Beatrice. “Use the glove to go forward.” So Beatrice does. She walks through the garden, but slowly, because she knows that at any moment someone is probably going to tiptoe up behind her, wielding some horrible machete, and she has already had a number of glasses of red wine. She’s not sure she can fight back.
With her hand in the glove Beatrice can feel the girl walking. It makes her shiver, as if someone had cracked an egg on the crown of her skull and the yolk was oozing down her ears and neck, as if she were inside the girl’s digital skin.
Behind her, Clem lights a joint and starts to softly hum the video game’s TV jingle, giving Bea a soundtrack. He watches the girl on the screen slowly creep forward and flash the blade of her sword. Beatrice starts to smile and he passes her the joint, which she takes with her ungloved hand. She is very jerky with the controls and sometimes the girl on the screen suddenly starts to walk backward or just stands there doing nothing, flicking her sword. Beatrice takes a drag and holds the smoke, wondering if the girl in the video game will also get high. There are pathways off to the left and the right in the garden but Beatrice can’t quite figure out how to turn yet. Clem hums the jingle and Beatrice exhales, imagining a handsome man with a deep radio voice speaking over the hum. The man whispers directly into Beatrice’s ear as if reading her the fine print. He whispers a message that she can’t quite hear though it fills her with longing just the same.
A pack of ninja warriors surprises her from above and after a very short fight Beatrice is dead.
It is colder than most Thanksgivings. The ruts in the driveway have solidified, forming seals of creaky ice. Beatrice and Clem walk to his truck in silence and she feels as if she were still onscreen. She imagines that the video game has somehow sharpened her abilities. She feels as if she could control the world with her hand, sense sounds with her skin. She thinks she can hear her brother’s fingers jangling the keys in his pocket. She can even hear her mother sigh as the commercial break starts. Beatrice hasn’t smoked pot in a long time. She thinks she can feel every person who has ever stepped on the driveway before her. Oil deliverymen. Insurance salespeople. Lenape Indians. Everyone. She feels the outline of all these people so precisely that they become solid bodies beneath her feet. She worries that she might be squishing their faces with her boots.
Clem pulls his keys from his pocket and Beatrice has an idea. “Let’s take Humbletonian,” she says, letting go of the truck’s door handle. Humbletonian is a horse. When her parents sold the farm animals, they kept a few chickens for eggs and one horse named Humbletonian. Her father named the horse this because she was not a Hambletonian. A Hambletonian is a very distinguished trotting horse. A Humbletonian is nothing. It is like changing your name to Stonerfeller because you are not a Rockefeller.
“In the trailer?” her brother asks and then answers the question himself, “No. You mean we should ride the horse into town? Right? Right. Cool,” he says, his eyes a bit glassy. They walk back to the barn, breaking the ice again.
After their father stopped farming, he liked to take a sleeping bag up to the loft above the horse’s stable after dinner. He’d smoke cigarettes up there and spend the night as if he were a Boy Scout. He thought that the horse’s wild nature would make him feel better about working in an office. He thought the horse would soothe the unease inside his rib cage. From the loft, her father used to pretend that he was Jerry Lee Lewis, using an old table-saw platform for a piano. He’d sing “Breathless” to the horse. “You. Leave. Me.” Pause. Pause. “Breathless.” Though her father’s odd behavior seemed exciting at the time, Beatrice now thinks that horses aren’t wild at all, horses can’t soothe our unease in the world. Horses are about the most broken, unwild creatures in existence, except for maybe burros and dogs. They do exactly what humans tell them to do. So when she thinks of her father sleeping in the loft above his horse or riding Humbletonian across their forty acres because he thought it would cure him of that unease in his chest, pity drips from her like a bit of drool out of the corner of her mouth. She thinks, How stupid. She thinks, Dad, that wasn’t unease. It was lung cancer.
“Hello, pumpkin pie,” Clem says to the horse. He pets Humbletonian’s nose and rests his own face there for a moment before attaching her reins. The barn smells yellow, like urine and old pine boards.
The horse’s belly sags in a way that reminds Beatrice of a velour reclining chair. “Hello, La-Z-Boy girl,” Beatrice says and also kisses the horse. Humbletonian does not look particularly happy to see her. Clem puts a hand on the saddle that is straddling the stable wall but Beatrice shakes her head no. So he leads the horse outside by the reins and crouches down on one knee, keeping the other lifted square. Beatrice uses Clem’s knee as a boost and climbs up onto the horse’s bare back. “Whoop,” Beatrice whoops. In a moment her brother is seated behind her. He is so strong that she barely felt him lift himself up. He wraps his big zucchini arms around her sides, reaching for the reins.
Brother and sister are quiet as they trot out to the end of the driveway, through the fields that have been harvested for the year. The sound of dead stalks and frost crunching under Humbletonian’s hooves fills in around the gray quiet of the night. The video game’s jingle is still rattling in the back of Beatrice’s head.
“I don’t know what she’ll think of the road,” Clem finally says. “I don’t think she’s ever been past the far field.” Their mother barely uses the horse these days except when she gets her car stuck in the muddy divots of their driveway and she has to harness Humbletonian to the bumper to pull while she pushes. But they reach the end of the driveway and Humbletonian turns left and trots along the breakdown lane as if she can’t wait to get down to town, as if there were nothing to it.
Out on the road Humbletonian’s hooves sound like winter—metal on ice or an empty galvanized pail tossed down a stone staircase, a full, complete sound. They pass an abandoned barn that is wedged between two service stations and two narrow swaths of dried red clover. Someone has spray-painted the words “Luv Shak” below a tin sign advertising the Crystal Cave tourist attraction. The land is flat and open here. The road is the straightest road there is. It runs all the way down to where the Pennsylvania Dutch people live in villages that have kooky names like Paradise, Intercourse, and Blue Ball.
An eighteen-wheeled tanker speeds up behind Humbletonian. The whoosh it makes blows Beatrice a bit to the right. The truck is followed by a car honking its horn to get past the truck. Beatrice turns to look at the car as it goes by and the man in the passenger seat stares out at Beatrice and Clem and their horse on the highway. The man does not seem surprised to see a horse and riders on the highway on Thanksgiving evening; rather, he seems angry, unimpressed. He throws his cigarette butt toward them and it explodes against the asphalt like a bomb sized for insects.
“I just thought that cigarette was an insect bomb,” Beatrice says but then she realizes that Clem will think she means one of those actual bug bombs that you load into your house if the house has fleas, before vacating the premises for a few hours. “I mean,” she says, but a truck passes and then another and then she decides not to bother with the sublime clarification she was just about to make. Instead she starts to laugh. Her stomach feels alone and nervous. She cannot stop laughing until she burps a burning red-wine burp. She laughs until she thinks she will vomit. “I’m going to puke,” she says.
“No. No, you won’t,” Clem answers and pats his older sister on the back one, two, three times. And he is right. Beatrice leans forward against Humbletonian’s neck and the warmth of the horse feels good on her stomach. They ride the rest of the way in silence except for the click of Humbletonian’s hooves and the rush of the horse’s warm pulse.
One of the myths Beatrice’s mother was responsible for developing was a fictionalized version of Montezuma meeting Cortés for the first time. Her company had no qualms about taking history and turning it into myth. Her mother’s co-workers rarely bothered to differentiate between those things that had actually happened and those things that people just used to say had happened. They’d take history and add to it and no one knew the difference anymore. For example, they might say that Montezuma could fly through the air carrying three virgins at a time to a sacrificial altar in the sky. They might say that there was bloodshed when these two men met or that Cortés was part man, part horse.
Mythologic Development sold the Montezuma-Cortés myth to an amusement park in Maryland, which used it for a roller coaster called the Aztecathon. The concept sold for a good price but her mother was a salaried employee and so she saw very little of the money. Now the amusement park owns Montezuma. He is the park’s intellectual property.
Beatrice’s mother keeps a painting of Montezuma over her bed. In the painting he looks more like a famous movie star than like an Aztec ruler. Beatrice’s mother likes that about him. She tells Beatrice that she is in love with Montezuma now that Beatrice’s father is gone.
“But Montezuma is also dead,” Beatrice says and her mother smiles as if that were a really good joke.
“Who-ah,” Clem says and Humbletonian turns into the Middleland Mall Complex. They pass through a very large empty parking lot that is dotted with circles of light. It is freezing cold. “Who-ah,” Clem says again and Humbletonian clops to a halt outside the Wal-Mart entrance. At the doors, they wait on the horse. Their breath is visible in the cold air. Humbletonian stomps her hoof as though she were asking, “What next?” Her motion is detected by a sensor, which swings open the door to let them in. The store is not closed. Humbletonian is surprised and takes a few steps backward before she steadies again.
“Why don’t we just ride her into the store?” Beatrice asks. Clem and Beatrice would have to duck their heads to make it through the entry but it would be great. “I bet they’ve never had a horse inside there,” she says. Clem is tilting his neck, considering the option, when a security officer stationed by the theft-deterrent metal-detector station stands to adjust his utility belt. The security guard eyes Clem and Beatrice’s transportation with more than suspicion. He steps outside.
“I know you’re not even thinking about bringing that beast in here,” he says.
“But I was thinking of it,” Clem answers quickly. “So that’s weird that you would say you know what I was thinking, because you would be wrong.” Clem doesn’t crack a smile or move. The guard palms his nightstick. They stare each other down, Clem and the guard.
Beatrice thinks that the guard looks like just the sort of security officer who would be thrilled to call the cops and have her and Clem ticketed or arrested for some inane livestock violation that is still on the books from 1823, like No Horse-Riding on Public Holidays. Clem looks away and leaps down off Humbletonian, leading Beatrice and her over to the corral for collecting shopping carts. He ties Humbletonian’s reins to the metal bar and Beatrice slides down off the curve of her flank.
Inside, few people seem to be shopping. Clem says to one young man wearing a Wal-Mart smock, “Excuse me. What’s going on here?”
The young man raises his eyebrows but makes no response, waiting for some clue as to how he can assist them. “Lots of things are going on here,” the boy says finally.
“I mean, how come Wal-Mart’s open?” Clem asks. “It’s freaking Thanksgiving.”
The boy says nothing. He looks as if he wants to punch Clem. Instead he stares straight ahead at the dog food he’s been pricing. He looks to the back of the shelf as though he can see something golden there that’s invisible to everyone else. Clem bends to see what the boy’s looking at. There’s nothing there. Just the back of the metal shelf. “Thank you,” Clem says quickly. He grabs Beatrice’s arm and leads her away.
Up front, the store is ready for Christmas. Past Christmas comes an aisle of automotive and craft/hobby supplies, then an aisle of hair products and footwear, then an aisle of watches and diamond-chip rings. All of these aisles dead-end at the wall of sporting goods / hunting gear. Ladies’ and menswear is intersected by a row of birthday cards, logic-puzzle books, scented candles, deodorant, and toothpaste. Beatrice and Clem pass the electronics division. They’re sold out of the game Clem was thinking about buying, Dead or Alive 5000. There is a paper “Sale” sign that Clem swipes at.
“Do you need anything?” he asks. “While we’re here?”
The fluorescent lighting is beginning to drive Beatrice crazy because she imagines that she can detect its flashing pulse. “Nope. Let’s go.”
Clem takes a pack of gum, looks at it, and then puts it in his pocket. “For Mom,” he says and they leave quickly, without paying for the gum.
Outside, Humbletonian is no longer tied up. She is gone and Beatrice bets it was the security guard. “Shit,” Clem says and giggles because, by the shopping-cart corral, there is a pile of horseshit that Humbletonian left behind.
“Fuck,” Beatrice says and laughs.
Clem scans the parking lot. The circles of light underneath each lamp are still there but there is no horse. “You go that way,” Clem tells Beatrice. “I’ll go this way and I’ll meet you around back. We’ll flush her out.” Clem departs around one side of the giant complex and Beatrice walks off in the other direction.
The store is so long that she feels as though she’ll never even reach the corner of it. Beatrice imagines that she is an astronaut dragging a two-hundred-pound spacesuit and that is why her footsteps seem not to be carrying her forward. She stops. “I wouldn’t have killed him,” Beatrice says out loud and waits until she hears a question from the far side of her brain, from her mother. “What would you have done? Just let him suffer? Let him go on breathing that bubbly wet breath that sounded like a damn water fountain?” “Yes,” Beatrice answers. “Yes, I would have.”
The Wal-Mart does not seem to end. It goes on and on, windowless and solid. Beatrice thinks of the old cartoons where an illustrator would draw two panels of background, a desert or a pine forest, and then, by bringing one panel in front of the other, he could repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, a duplicated landscape that Wile E. Coyote could run through without end. If she had four legs she’d be able to get around the back of the mall faster. She thinks to skip but after ten or eleven lengths her lungs chug and backfire on the cold air. She stops and walks the rest of the way.
Behind the shopping center there are bulldozers, at least twenty of them, and they seem to be huddled with their backs to Beatrice, as if they are in a private conference. It’s freezing. Apart from the dozers there’s nothing here except for a gigantic hole. It is tremendous, far larger than a football field, and it is filled with water. In the dark, the hole extends beyond the limit of Beatrice’s vision. Clem is already standing at the edge, looking down into it. Humbletonian is there, too, only she has climbed down into the pit and is walking across the surface of the ice that has formed there. It’s like a lake. Maybe one of the bulldozers broke a water pipe while digging. There is a lot of water here, a reservoir’s worth of drinking water, or, Beatrice hopes not, frozen sewage. Humbletonian is walking across the ice, bending every now and again to lick the surface. Gross.
“Woohoo! Humbletonian!” Clem yells. “Good horse. Good horse,” he shouts, so that Humbletonian turns from where she is, halfway across the ice, and when she sees Clem and Beatrice she begins to trot across the very center of the pit toward them, more like a dog than a horse. Her coat is nearly as silver as the ice, and beautiful.
Beatrice lifts up her arms and shakes her hips. “Woohoo! Horsy!” she calls. Time slows to a speed where Beatrice can notice every single thing. She notices Humbletonian’s muscles, her breath coming out of her flared nostrils, and the odd rhythm of her trot. She notices the gorgeous ice and dirt and the lovely darkness, thick like felt, that exists in this ugly place. She can hear each hoof as it falls against the ice. Beauty is standing somewhere nearby, Beatrice thinks, and it’s a shadowy person whose exhales become Beatrice’s inhales, warming her up, and this moment of warmth, this beautiful horse is why, Beatrice feels certain, a jealous hole cracks open in the ice, a hole that swallows the back legs and hindquarters of Humbletonian faster than a greedy thought.
Humbletonian tries to clear the water, to get a hoof back up on solid ice, but each clop of her front hooves shatters what she’s grabbed and pulls it under with her. There can’t be that much water underneath her. But there is. She’s not touching the bottom. Humbletonian is flailing. Clem starts to swear, but slowly, everything is happening so slowly at first that it seems time will come to a halt and the world behind the shopping center will be all right. It seems as if it might even be possible to ignore the drowning horse altogether, as though Beatrice and her brother are here only in a dream, and they will both wake up very soon.
Beatrice reaches her arms even higher. “Clem,” she says. Clem wrings his hands. He lowers himself into the pit, down to where the ice starts. He is moving slowly, carefully. Humbletonian is thrashing. It’s the only sound there is. The water must be freezing. Humbletonian is thrashing in it. “Clem,” Beatrice says again, and again Clem wrings his hands so hard he looks as though he might tear them off from his wrists. He steps out onto the edge of the ice and creeps toward Humbletonian. She is in up to her middle. Only her front hooves and her head are above the ice. Clem stops. The horse is twisting and snorting. She is screaming as much as a horse can scream. Clem raises his hands to his face. He takes another step toward the horse. “Clem,” Beatrice repeats his name a third time, and finally he turns to look at her. A seam has been cut open in Clem right through the very center of his face. She sees it. A seam that says there is no way to stop this. No fucking way for a man to save a horse drowning in freezing water. Clem stands still. He brings his hands up to his ears and, pressing the small knobs of cartilage there, he stops listening.
Quiet moments pass. The static returns, as though it were being broadcast from nearby. Humbletonian starts giving up. She falls still. The water has dropped her into shock. Beatrice can see a lot of white in the horse’s eye, as though it had been pried open. It blinks dry air once more, for the last time. Humbletonian’s head goes under and all Beatrice can see are her forelegs above the barrier of the ice. Her legs kick, emptying what’s inside them. It is a gruesome convulsion. “She’s getting away,” Beatrice finally says and skids on her heels down to where her brother is standing. She passes him and walks out onto the ice. A loud crack bellows from the frozen water, like a whip pushing Beatrice back, away from her horse. Beatrice drops to her knees on the ice and Humbletonian goes under all the way. Their horse is gone. The water flattens out over her head.
Clem lowers his hands. “Don’t,” he says but Beatrice doesn’t listen. She sits down on the ice and watches the hole where Humbletonian went. She slides closer toward it on her knees. The hole doesn’t do anything.
It’s difficult to say what happens next. The silence fills in around Beatrice and Clem like insulation. The two of them stare for a long while, looking down into the black hole where their horse disappeared, waiting, maybe, for some triumphant geyser, a phoenix, or Pegasus to rise up out of the hole. Nothing happens. Perhaps fifteen minutes pass or maybe half an hour before they recognize what they are staring at: an empty black hole.
“Clem,” Beatrice says with her back still turned to him, still looking at the hole. “You know what Mom told me?”
“What?”
“She gave the doctors permission to kill Dad.”
“Yeah, I know,” Clem says.
“You know?”
“Yeah, she asked me what I thought before she did it,” he says.
No one asked Beatrice. She sat by her father’s hospital bed for days, rubbing lotion into the dry skin of his calves and feet and no one said anything to her. “No one asked me,” she tells Clem.
“We already knew what you’d say.”
Since her father’s death, Beatrice has tried to turn her parents into two-dimensional pieces of paper she can fold up, tuck into her back pocket, and forget about when she does her laundry, picking them out of the lint trap later: her mother all things bad, her father all things good. But Clem ruins it every time. There’s Clem, sitting on the ice, shaking his head, saying, “It’s no one’s fault, Bea. It’s no one’s fault.”
Beatrice would like to find someone to blame.
Even with the static, she sees clearly, as though there were a map in front of her, a map of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. She sees that they arrived here at this future rather than a different one. One with horses. Maybe that future would have been better. But instead they had arrived here to a time when their farm is dead, when Beatrice has moved away to the city, when Clem is stuck in place, and when, most nights, her mother walks down to the end of the driveway, out to meet the incoming tide in Pennsylvania.
Beatrice leans forward, lowering her whole body onto the ice. She pushes herself on her stomach out to where the horse disappeared. She lies there. She rests her cheek there for a long time. She pets her horse through the ice.
“Don’t go any farther!” Clem yells as Beatrice dips her hand inside the hole, into a land that is already lost. ♦
