A girl travels down the bar ditch astride a little chestnut quarter horse, flipflops dangling from her toes. I own an appendix quarter horse, a tall, good looking bay mare with a little dot of white on her forehead. At the moment, the very moment I\u2019m standing on the side of the highway with the sharp industrial reek of hot-laid asphalt in my nostrils, staring at the girl riding the cowpony bareback through the bar ditch, a girl with bare tan legs that look mature enough for me to stare at, my bay is foaling. In eastern Washington at my father\u2019s ranch, four-hundred miles away. She\u2019ll be dead by morning. The foal, too. A filly.<\/p>\n
But I don\u2019t know that now. I think I\u2019ll ride her again, her baby trailing along through sandy washes lined by rhyolite boulders. I am thinking about this, and other things, as I watch the girl riding bareback, wearing shorts and a tank top, flipflops dangling from her pretty toes painted red. Her heels barely clearing Kochia weed and dried up wheatgrass. Old stirrings rambling around in me.<\/p>\n
Look away.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t look away. I\u2019ve never been able to. But then I glance at her face. It dawns on me that she is probably a teenager, and I\u2019m a dirty forty-three-year-old man, the father of daughters not much younger than the girl. I let my eyes fall away, but not before staring at those hard thighs. They roll back and forth with the rhythm of the horse\u2019s stride, a dark line of sweat and grime on her skin blinking each time her leg rolls forward.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Is it forty-three that did it to me? This unraveling. Is it too much beer? I don\u2019t drink that much, but I\u2019ve been knocked out a few times, back when I was a bull rider. I\u2019m not a bull rider anymore. I\u2019m in a hotel room and it feels like a donkey is sitting on my chest. My fingers and toes tingle. My breathing is rapid. My heart seems to have left my chest and entered my skull. It beats against my eardrums.<\/p>\n
How did I end up here, having a panic attack in a hotel room hours from home, sure I\u2019ve missed something? A run of rebar, a splice. A row of hairpins. The bridge will fall, people will die. I can already see the cracks developing in the concrete, the massive abutments bulging under the millions of pounds bearing down on them. The concrete girders, all that steel, the bridge deck. I\u2019ve missed some key component. It will fail. This is the thought that is swirling around in my head in a hotel room hours from my home.<\/p>\n
I know I\u2019m not having a heart attack, but if I was I imagine this is how it would feel.<\/p>\n
The bridge was built years ago. It\u2019s still standing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I\u2019m on a street in Boise. A cool summer rain patters on my hardhat, taps my shoulders. A wonderful respite from the unending heat.<\/p>\n
Across the street on the pedestrian ramp stands a girl with bright red hair, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with some kind of print on it. Some rock band, or youthrage slogan. I don\u2019t know. Her red hair is pretty. Her pale arms fall from her black short sleeves, skin tattooed. Fierce tattoos they seem from here. Violent dark colors. I can\u2019t really make them out, but I imagine skulls with mouths wide open spewing flame and smoke and fury.<\/p>\n
The WALK sign flashes. She steps off the pedestrian ramp onto the street. Her lowtop Converse sneakers stepping tentatively across the crosswalk bars, stepping around puddles that have gathered in the rutted pavement. Almost on tiptoes, almost dancing. She\u2019s slightly pigeontoed. I can\u2019t stop staring. I should. It will make her uncomfortable, to see a forty-three year old man staring at her that has spent most of his life in the sun and has a creased and wrinkled face. The face of a sixty-year old, says my wife. But I can\u2019t get past the conflict the girl represents. The fierceness of her tattoos, and her timid, pigeontoed steps. Her face, as she nears, there is nothing angry, nothing brooding, nothing fierce about it. It is the freckled, pretty face of a happy redhead walking through a cool rain on a hot summer day in Boise. She even smiles at me as she passes. A nice, How are you? smile. If I was younger, if I wasn\u2019t a forty-three year old with the skin of a sixty-year old I might think the smile was flirty. But I know better than that.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We got greedy. We wanted a baby out of her. She was so nice we couldn\u2019t just have one of her. We needed two. Now we have none of her.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I sit on the bed in my boxer briefs, just home after a thirteen hour nightshift. Maybe it is the morning after I saw the girl riding in the bar ditch. She came back, on the same horse, only saddled this time. She wore jeans and boots. Was it the same night? I don\u2019t know. The days, this summer, it\u2019s all running together. It\u2019s a big mess. But there in the bathroom is my wife, nude. I\u2019m staring at her through the open door. She doesn\u2019t know I\u2019m watching. She has stepped out of the shower. She\u2019s older than me, forty-five. She was petite when I met her, five-foot three, one-hundred eighteen pounds. Hard ass. That\u2019s right. Hard, tight ass. She\u2019s grown. But that isn\u2019t bad. Her breasts are full, hard, almost like they were store-bought, but they\u2019re not. They\u2019re hers. And even though she\u2019s thirty-five pounds heavier, it\u2019s in all the right places. She leans over the sink, up on her tiptoes, staring into the mirror, smearing something on her face. Her bare calves are tight and her toes dig into the rug that fronts the vanity that holds the sink. Her rump pops out, protrudes. I can already see my hands on it, see my thumbs pressing into the flesh. Jesus, I\u2019m forty-three and I\u2019m wrinkled like a sixty-year old, but looking at my wife, after fifteen years, thirty-five pounds and two kids, I\u2019m randy as hell, randy as a fourteen-year old on a church bus going to church camp in the back seat with the easiest girl in the entire school, with my hands down her pants and her hands down my pants. That\u2019s how my wife makes me feel. I\u2019m thinking I\u2019m going to sidle up behind her and take advantage of her state of undress. So I slide out of bed, move on through the door and then I see that she\u2019s not smearing something on her face. She\u2019s wiping it off. Wiping off tears. She sees me behind her. I don\u2019t try to touch. She\u2019s crying. This is a no go.<\/p>\n
She glances at my reflection. \u201cWe killed her. We got greedy and killed her. It was our fault.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I\u2019m riding the bay mare through the sagebrush on my dad\u2019s ranch, moving along the deep, cottonwood-bottomed draw that splits the property. She\u2019s trotting out nice. Those long legs covering ground. We\u2019re headed to the wall, making a big circle, gathering cattle and pushing them into this same draw. The draw like a natural cattle chute, as long as you can keep the cattle out of the trees, right on up to the ranch house. I\u2019m thinking about cattle and then she snorts, jumps sideways, bends and sidepasses so fast through the brush it\u2019s as if she\u2019s running sideways. I\u2019m trying to get a hold of her, bend her around. I\u2019m not sure what spooked her, but then I do know because I smell it. The smell of carrion. I look to my left. There\u2019s four of them in a clearing between the sage, stiff-legged, bloated, their shod hooves pointing right at me. Four old horses worth no more. I know what happened to them. Four bullets. No need to keep feeding them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I was forty-one when I saw the girl with the fierce tattoos. The rain wasn\u2019t pattering on my hardhat. It was on the windshield of my pickup and she had to turn her head to look at me. But she did smile. That part was real. That and the way she walked. And the tattoos. They were real. I just can\u2019t remember what they depicted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How did this happen? I used to be a bull rider. A goddamn bull rider. I used to slide up on my rope and nod my head. I\u2019ve been knocked out, ran over, hooked. My shoulders are titanium, the rotted and pitted balls of them sawed off and replaced by new steel ones. I didn\u2019t cry then. I wasn\u2019t frozen and crippled by panic like I am now in this hotel room hours from my home and my girls. The bridge is still standing. I spent hours, days, months studying the plans. Making sure each run of rebar was in place, making sure each splice was tied. Confirming. Verifying.<\/p>\n
Seriously, the bridge is still standing.<\/p>\n
Until the earthquake. Wait until the earthquake comes. Jesus, I think the donkey just turned into an elephant.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That might\u2019ve been the last time I rode the bay mare. Or was it in the desert, after the big Soda Fire, when my wife was on the palomino and she flashed me? I took a picture. I have it on my phone. My wife\u2019s beautiful breasts. College tits, that\u2019s what her two friends call them. That sounds right to me. Although I never saw a college girl with tits that beautiful.<\/p>\n
Yes, that was the last time I rode her. The last time I rode our pretty bay mare. There was no sagebrush for her to sidepass through though. It was all burned up. It was all gone except for the black ghosts that its ashes left on the charred desert floor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We got greedy. We wanted a baby out of her. She was so nice we couldn\u2019t just have one of her. We needed two. Now we have none of her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","writer-rex-adams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14017"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14363,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14017\/revisions\/14363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}