A Collapse of Horses Read online

  “The next time he put on his coat, there it was again.”

  “What do you mean, there it was again?” asked Rawley, his voice rising.

  “Just what I said. There it was again.”

  “But he threw it away.”

  “Yes,” said Sugg. “He did.”

  “Then how did it get back in his pocket?”

  “That’s not part of the story,” said Sugg. “That’s the part that gets left out. I’m telling black bark, and I know what’s part of it and what isn’t. Hush and listen.

  “The next time he put on his coat, there it was again. He took that piece of black bark out, threw it down, then reached in his pocket, and it was there again, back in the same pocket. He took it out and threw it into the fire, and a moment later, there it was back in his pocket.”

  “Why would you tell me this?” asked Rawley.

  “No matter where he threw it, it came back to him. He thought he was going mad. Finally he took the black bark out of his pocket, set it on the table, and picked up a hammer. But when he went to hit it with the hammer, it opened its eye and looked at him.”

  “Its what?” Rawley interrupted.

  “Its eye,” said Sugg.

  “Eye?” said Rawley. “But bark don’t—”

  “Don’t interrupt,” said Sugg’s voice. “Its eye. Yes, that’s what I said. Eye. And don’t you try to puzzle it out none and think that it means something other than what I said. Every time you think you have the world figured, trust me, that’s just when the world’s got you figured and is about to spring and break your back.

  “When he went to hit it with the hammer, the black bark opened its eye and looked at him. That was all, just looked. But for a long time, and without blinking. The man looked too, and though he wanted to, found he couldn’t look away. Then the black bark closed its eye, and he could look away. So the man lifted it up careful as he could, put it in his pocket, and left it there until he was dead. Once he was dead, it didn’t have no use for him.”

  When he woke up, the morning was well on. His eyelashes had gotten gummed together during the night somehow, and he had to rub them before they’d open enough for him to see clearly. Sugg was gone, though how that could be Rawley had no clue—the man had hardly been able to move, let alone walk. Where he’d been propped up the night before, the cave wall was covered in a swath of blood rendered in a vaguely human shape. Like the shape on Sugg’s horse. Hard to believe Sugg still had that much blood in him, considering what he must already have lost. So much blood, and in the shape of a man. Blood angel, thought Rawley, then he shook his head, trying to push the words out of his mind.

  He stood and rolled up his bedroll, then paused at the mouth of the cave, trying to get as much of a view of the land behind him as possible. No sign of pursuit that he could see. No sign of Sugg either.

  He picked his way down to the creek, washed the blood off his face and hands, drank deep. His horse was there, peaceful, the vegetation around it cropped close. He saddled it, rode.

  He kept on up the same trail, not knowing what else to do. Maybe the cabin was up ahead somewhere, or some cabin, anyway. He rode through groves of quaking aspen shot through with fingers of juniper pine. The peaks ahead were spattered with snow in places, bare granite where exposed. It was very cold. Why would anybody have a cabin here?

  He found a scrubby crab-apple tree and gnawed on a few of the hard fruits just to get something besides water in his stomach. The skin of them made his lips itch. There was still no cabin, nor any sign of one. When a path split off from the trail, he followed it to a boarded-over mine entrance.

  By noon, he’d begun to grow dizzy. He found what he thought was some yellow dock, seeds brown and starting to drop. He ate handfuls of them, broke the plant at the stem and stripped back the skin to get at the pith, then sat in the shade until he felt well enough to keep going.

  After a while his stomach started to cramp up, his skin grown clammy. He kept riding but slower now, hunched over. A few times he stopped and kneeled at the side of the trail, heaving, but nothing came out.

  He drank some water and convinced himself he felt at least a little better, but there were still patches of time when he wasn’t sure what or who he was, when he would come to himself on a stretch of trail with no idea how he’d gotten there.

  By early afternoon, the trail had begun to peter out, and he had a hard time following it. Soon after, he lost it altogether.

  It was near dusk by the time he made it back down to the cave. He was tempted to keep going, down and past it, but he was exhausted, his horse too. No, better to stop a few hours in a place he knew, wait a little, rest a little, continue back down in the morning.

  Near the cave, beside the creek, he found Sugg’s horse. The blood angel was still swathed on its side, nearly black now in the failing light. “Sugg?” he called in a cracked voice, but nobody answered. Sugg hadn’t had the horse yesterday when Rawley found him. It must have just wandered up here on its own, caught the scent of Rawley’s own horse, maybe, or of Sugg himself. The horse didn’t mean anything.

  Still, despite that, when he climbed up the shale slope, he was relieved to find the cave was empty.

  He lay on the floor of the cave in the dark, shivering. Get up, he kept telling himself, start a fire. But he just kept lying there.

  Outside he heard the horses neighing. He expected them to settle quickly, but they didn’t—something continued to agitate them. He closed his hand over his revolver. If he had to, he told himself, he could go out there and take care of it.

  It grew dark, then darker still. It was so dark he wasn’t sure where the cave’s opening was anymore. Everything seemed the same dark around him. Even if he wanted to gather firewood, he wouldn’t know where to go.

  After a while, he started feeling warmer, and drowsy. He didn’t need a fire, he told himself. All he needed was a little sleep. Tomorrow he’d start out fresh, ride back down the mountain, find food, find shelter, start life over again.

  He woke to the warm glow of a fire. He lay there, staring into it, watching the flames weave back and forth. When he looked up, there was Sugg standing over him. He was swaying slightly, one boot missing, his clothing stiff with blood.

  “Where the hell you come from?” Rawley asked. Or thought he asked. He wasn’t sure if his lips moved. He tried to sit up but found he couldn’t move. Sugg stayed looming over him a moment and then shuffled over to the other side of the fire, sitting heavily in the same spot he had been the night before, the spot marked out for him by his blood.

  Sugg reached his hand into the fire and stirred it around. Sparks flew up, and the air smelled for an instant of burned hair. The flames didn’t seem to bother Sugg, and he pulled his hand only slowly free.

  “Comfy?” asked Sugg. “Still alive?”

  Inside his head, Rawley asked, What’s happening? What’s wrong with me? Outside, the head didn’t move.

  “Doesn’t matter much one way or the other,” said Sugg. Then he opened his mouth wide and smiled. It was a terrible thing to watch. Rawley began to be very afraid.

  For a long time Sugg just stayed there smiling. Then, just as suddenly, his face relaxed. “Shall I tell you a story?” he asked.

  No, thought Rawley.

  “Shall I tell you the story of not black bark?” he asked. “The story of everything black bark left out?”

  No, thought Rawley. Please.

  “A story, then,” said Sugg. “A last one for the road. I’ll make it a good one.” He smiled again, that same terrible smile. Then his lips formed the words “Let’s begin.”

  —for Jesse Ball

  A Report

  A week has passed since I made my report, and since that time, confined as I am, I have turned the words over and about in my mind. Those sentences that initially struck me as fluid and concise now seem poorly assembled and easily picked apart, prone to collapse at a moment’s notice. Which, in fact, they must have done—otherwise why else woul
d I be here? What at first I thought to be a model of clarity now seems to turn and spin, refusing to hold in place. Were I asked to deliver the report now, were they to come suddenly and open the door and ask me to recite it yet again by heart, would it be the same report? No. For even though the words would be the same, the report would not be, nor could I deliver it with the conviction I once had. Indeed, I have tried again to recite my report, this time to the walls of my cell. Though I can offer it up, so I believe, verbatim, now the words themselves seem to betray me. Or I to betray them, for my voice cannot give them the resonance they once had.

  And yet they have not come for me, nor will they. All I see of them is a flash of the hand that tosses the bowl of food through the slot at the base of the door, but this is quickly gone.

  When I was first conveyed here, after delivering my report, I tried to call out. I shouted that a mistake had been made. I begged and pleaded, then cried for help. Very quickly, I heard the other prisoners calling back, telling me to hush, warning me that I was making a mistake. Yet I continued to cry out. I thought, I now believe, that some interaction with the forces that be, even a painful one that might leave me beaten or bleeding, would be preferable to no interaction at all.

  And indeed it might well have been. But this was not what I was given.

  When there came a noise at the door, I braced myself. Yet instead of the door sliding open, only the slot at the base of it did. A pale hand was quickly thrust in and withdrawn, leaving in its wake only a wadded scrap of paper. I hurriedly took up the scrap and smoothed it and saw written on it these words:

  Hush, or we shall burn the soles of his feet.

  What? I thought. This is absurd. They were not even threatening to hurt me, but threatening me indirectly by threatening someone else. Was I not even worthy of being threatened directly? And who was “he”? What was this he to me? Why did I care if the soles of his feet were burned?

  And so I continued shouting, and only stopped when there came a commotion in the cell to the left of my own. There was the sound of the cell door being thrown open, a scuffle of some kind, and a raised and pleading voice, then a sizzling sound and a smell not unlike roasting meat. And then a man screaming, screaming, screaming. The sounds faded, and I heard footsteps walking briskly away and all seemed silent. Indeed, all was silent, myself included, with the exception of the groans of the man in the cell next to me, which went on for some hours until, apparently, he passed out.

  This was day one.

  I rub my feet, the bottoms of them in particular. Ever since I received the crumpled note through my slot I have become hyperconscious of my feet. They are the first portion of my body I am aware of when I awake in the morning and the last of me to go to sleep at night. I rub them and wonder when it will be their turn to be burned.

  I cannot help but wonder if I know the man who was tortured. For why would they threaten me with the torture of an unknown man? Still, if I did know him, why would they neglect to inform me of who he is? If it is my father they torture, or my brother, or even a friend, would that not be more effective than simply knowing they are torturing someone anonymous on my behalf?

  You would think so, but as it turns out, no. It is worse for me not knowing who the man is—not knowing if I know him, not knowing if the punishment is arbitrary—than being certain he is someone close to me. If he is someone chosen at random, made to suffer for no reason at all, then we are all damned, and this is all the more terrible a place.

  Since the first day I have remained silent, or nearly so. I have had moments of briefly calling out or whispering, but have fallen silent long before scribbled notes and threats might begin to arrive through my slot. I have tried to make contact with the man in the cell next to mine, but except for the groans he made on the first and second day, and the curses he gave as he began to walk again on his injured feet on the third, he has not responded to me.

  Nevertheless, despite never having seen him, I have a vivid image of him in my head. He may very well be tall and thin, but in my head he is short and nervous. Like me. He wears the round, thick glasses of an accountant, glasses not unlike my own—or he did, anyway, before the glasses were broken, ground to pieces beneath the feet of one of the guards as he burned the bottoms of his feet. Without them the world is a blur, or nearly so.

  He is confused as to why he is here. Like me he has never been given an explanation, like me he shouted the first day he arrived, and like me they threatened him by torturing his neighbor until he fell silent. Because of this, I tell myself, he knew what would happen when somebody else started to yell, and perhaps suspected too that eventually it would be he who would fall subject to someone else’s punishment.

  But when that punishment came, would he accept it and see it as expiation for the punishment he had inflicted on someone else? Or would he resent the person who had refused to fall silent and thus gave it to him? Would he hate those who kept him imprisoned here? Yes, surely, I told myself, some admixture of all of these, though in what quantities and to what degree, who could say? And who could say too if he would go so far as to not only feel these feelings, but to despise as well the words on the scrap of paper he knew must have appeared in the cell next to his—the warning that had been ignored and that had caused his suffering.

  And was it always the same warning? Were the feet always what they threatened to burn? Did you always know the punishment that awaited you because of the punishment you had caused to be inflicted upon someone else?

  I have to wait until my fourth day to find out. Or not find out exactly, for that is what you can never do, not so long as they keep you confined. You can imagine the man in the cell next to you; you can give him an appearance, borrowed perhaps from your own appearance or an amalgam of your appearance and that of someone close to you—a father, a brother, a friend. But there will always be a gap between name and body. You will never catch a glimpse of him, never know for certain what correlation there is, if any, between your imagination and his reality.

  You can imagine too that like you he does not know why he is here. But you are not the only one who can play at this game. Surely he is imagining you as well, and in his mind, you are already other than what you believe yourself to be. Perhaps he is thinking that, like him, you are here for very specific reasons, because of your support of the opposition, say. But you do not support the opposition—you made that very clear in your report, or thought you did—I made that very clear in my report, I mean to say, or thought I did; I am getting my pronouns confused—and the idea that he might think this of you, of me, worries me. For if that is the case, who knows what else he has gotten wrong?

  And here is the real difficulty with such confinement: it is not that you are kept in, but that the world is kept out. You know the world is out there still—you are given just enough noise (footsteps, muttering, groaning) that you can’t help but know this. But you can’t construct it fully from the little you have been given. You know there are people around you, just beyond the walls of your cell, but you have no inkling of what they might look like or even why they are here, whether they would embrace you as a friend or destroy you as an enemy. You know there are guards, but you cannot begin to construct them from the brief flash of a hand, sometimes pale, sometimes not, you see twice a day through the slot at the bottom of your door. There must be a guard attached to that hand, or several guards, though even that too begins to feel subject to question: It could be a false hand appended to the end of a stick. Or even a real hand severed from a prisoner, thrust onto a stick, and operated through some morbid sort of puppetry. Not a guard’s hand at all.

  No, the last thing you were certain of was standing still before them and giving your report, and finding yourself unable to determine their reaction to the report from their faces. Your mouth was uttering the final words of the report, but by this time you were hardly paying attention to what you were saying. Instead, you were wondering if the fact that you were unable to determine their reactio
n was a good sign or a bad sign. And then you finished your report and stood there, waiting. A moment later, from behind, a sack was thrust over your head, its drawstrings pulled tight enough around your throat to make you choke, then they did make you choke and you passed out, only to awaken here, in this cell. The last thing you remember are expressionless faces listening to your report. The way that even at the very last second, just before the sack engulfed your head, they showed no reaction at all to what was about to happen to you.

  I am saying “you” again rather than “I” or “he.” And this too is part of the problem.

  The fourth day is marked by a commotion. Guards are coming down the hall in what sounds like a large group, dragging something behind them. I lie on my stomach and try to peer through the slot, but no, as always, the slot is kept blocked except when I am fed.

  In any case, I hear them pass by. Yes, I am sure they are dragging something. Or someone, I imagine. They open the door to the right of my own, and I hear the sound of someone or something thrown in. Then the door clangs shut again, and the footsteps recede.

  For a time after that, nothing happens. A few minutes pass, then perhaps an hour. Then I hear the sound of a groan and I think, We begin.

  “Hello?” a voice calls after a few moments. “Hello?”

  I do not answer. Nobody does.

  “Is anybody there?” A little louder this time. Still nobody answers.

  “Why am I here?” the voice yells. It is bawling it out this time. “Shhh,” I hear someone else say, and the voice grasps eagerly at that. “Hello, hello?” it says. “Can’t you help me? I’m not supposed to be here. It’s a mistake.” And when there is no further response it keeps saying this, louder and louder, yelling now.

  I listen to it as long as I can stand, growing more and more anxious until, at last, panicked and frantic, I can’t stop from blurting out: