His firstling bull has majesty

CW: Substance abuse, prostitution

A dope fiend grabs my leg as I approach the front door. They’re reclining on the pavement and turning their heads at nothing in particular like wild horses. Wild horse numbers are managed in some states by a Bureau of Land Management that captures a predetermined number and auctions them to people who dream about purchasing free-roaming horses. Free-roaming horses can be tagged, but typically they’re branded. Not all branding hurts the horses because there’s a painless way to do it called cold branding, at least that’s what people say.

The woman tells me that she orders a different guy each week because she’s going blind and she wants to see as many people as she can before the blindness sweeps down like Good Samaritans rescuing innocents from God-knows-what. She has a condition that mostly affects horses. Her laugh is beautiful, new, and sweet like Frosted Flakes before the milk soggies the corn flakes. She has a way of not really looking at me but through me. Hanging upon the wall is a picture of Saint Odile who I assume is the patron saint of going-blind people. She’s holding a book atop which are a pair of eyes, and she looks like she’s lecturing a parliament of sheep and children like on a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet. I know the saint’s name is Odile because it’s written in gold lettering at the foot of the painting. The scrawl of the painter’s name can’t be read. Je ne comprends the roses say because there are roses the dope fiends haven’t uprooted from the pots outside yet.

My roommate resurfaces and tells me that he wasn’t missing actually but imprisoned because a date gave him a painting of a saint in lieu of money since the date had run out of money and Adam didn’t have Venmo. “It’s Saint Alban, that’s why he’s holding his own head,” Adam says. “He’s headless.” After Adam’s date gave him the painting for services rendered she reported it stolen since it was insured and she wanted the insurance money. She apologized to Adam when he called her on the prison phone. I guess that’s what you call false imprisonment.

Adam’s cheerful in spite of what happened. I tell him about the going-blind woman that I’m seeing again. “Don’t get caught up,” he says. I’m grinning my hocked-up-on-cherry-soda grin. We’re at the mall and riding elevators up and down because there’s nothing to do and we already spent the money we made from dates on eating out and cologne.

Adam still has the painting of Saint Alban and I see other headless saints there too, but we don’t know who they are as their names are worn off the canvas. Adam wants to go to the tanning salon because he doesn’t feel himself if he’s not tanned. I remind him that we don’t have any money, and he says it’s okay because he knows a girl who works there only we have to make sure that we go when she’s on shift. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t feel himself if he’s not wanted.

I don’t know why having a tan should make a difference. It’s fucked up how people care so much about things that don’t matter. There are dates that like tan lines on the butt or certain other parts of the body, but you mostly never see those people again so what’s the point. Adam needs to give the painting back, but he’s entrenched on the sofa like a cartoon character and all I get are tomorrows. Tomorrow, tomorrow. An endless carousel of tomorrows.

Then I’m back at Saint Odile’s place where the woman tells me that she did many terrible things when she was young and beautiful even though she wasn’t technically beautiful but just surfing along the margins of beauty. Her words not mine. She wants to take a train with private sleeper cars to a place where wild horses are. That’s her dream. She’ll do it once she’s met all the people she wants to meet and before she goes blind.

“Why just boys?” I ask her. “You can meet anyone.”

“I can meet rabbits or people in rabbit suits,” she says. “You’re right. I can meet anyone.”

She says: “It’s funny how you can just buy things. You can buy cherries that come from nature or a free-roaming horse minding its own business.” I don’t know what’s funny about that, but her laugh spreads like wildfire. “Only you can prevent forest fires,” Smokey the Bear says on the poster in the building lobby. Then the woman plays a tiny white piano she has in her apartment, and her playing is phenomenal even though she can barely see the keys.

She has beautiful eyes. They’re the color of the milk after you’ve eaten all the Fruit Loops out of the bowl. She says I had better go because she’s tired, so I take the money off the coffee table and leave. She could have said “Get the fuck out,” but maybe it’s not in her character to speak that way. A woman brushes against me as I march out of the elevator. She turns around to glance at me, and I laugh at her excuse-my-beauty glare.

Adam sings to himself as he gets browned by the tanning booth. Music blares at the tanning salon, and Marni, the girl Adam knows, strings her fingers through a tuft of his hair like a comb in a horse’s mane. She kisses him after he opens the top lid of the booth and sits up. “Her kisses are like cherry soda,” he tells me later. I’m tanning too and when I’m done and outside Adam slaps a bug on my chest.

I’m at the mall with Saint Odile. Let’s call her Paula. She never leaves her apartment because she can’t see much, but she really wants to go to a mall since they’re mostly closing down. We’re reading a poster about the mini golf that’s opening at the mall annex, and then we go to see a man who trains roses to do tricks. The roses can’t speak French or say your name backwards, but they can uproot themselves from their plastic pots and walk across a stage. Some roses can jump over an obstacle and others can crane their stems like they’re moving their heads or smile or grimace.

Paula takes me to the brothel where she used to work. She came to this state because she thought the prostitution game was better here than in North Carolina. The place isn’t a brothel anymore but a shop that sells affordable prints of famous paintings. It’s funny to me that anyone can make money selling prints. The man who owns it seems nice. He lets Paula and me walk through the shop and we don’t even have to pretend that we’re buying anything. He just lets us walk and walk and walk. Maybe he remembers her from her brothel days. She points out to me where the lounge area was and then the rooms that the girls would take their dates to after they’d met and talked. Just small places for lovemaking not much bigger than hot dog stands. Those hot dog stand walls were all knocked down to create this great big space for the print shop floor.

But there’s a closet that used to be a lovemaking room. Paula jiggles the doorhandle. It budges and on the floor we see a watercolor painting, VHS tapes, Dobermann collars, and frilly panties. Outside the lovemaking room are height markings for a person called Mary O’Leary. There are marks for November 2009 and January 2011, and I can’t read the date for the third, highest mark. On another part of the wall someone has scrawled: “His firstling bull has majesty and his horns are the horns of a wild ox.”

Paula never talks about money. It seems she made a lot of money on penny stocks a date told her to invest in. She still communicates with him. He tells her: “If you’re smart, you’ll buy these stocks.” So she does. And she always dresses well. She wears cowboy boots with everything, and the clack of her bootheels is happy and woebegone like the thud of a pirate’s peg leg.

“The sound of a pirate’s peg leg is like a slap,” I tell her.

“No, it’s more like a thud,” she says.

The people who capture free-roaming horses have jeeps that reach speeds faster than horses. They know the horses’ preferred watering holes. Those boys yip after the horses like they’re chasing bank-robbed money. Paula sees the upturned dust from the jeep tires like she’s there.

She sees the whole world through jeep-tire-upturned dust. She tells me her father raises rabbits for meat and fur. He has other men to help him on his twenty-eight acres. She remembers being a girl and coming down from her bedroom in a storm to see a man scoring the white fur of a rabbit from the pink underflesh. She thinks this man’s a nice man. She sees him at her sister’s wedding on her family’s side of the church. Her father makes her wear white dresses with crinolines and white shoes. She gets mud and rabbit blood all over her white shoes traipsing over to see what the man has done to the rabbit. Somehow she hadn’t understood what happened to the rabbits before then. She runs screaming from the shack and the mud, and she finds a free-roaming horse sleeping against the yellow-green grass behind a trailer. The seasonal workers who assist her father live in trailers.

“Appaloosas get it the worst,” Paula tells me.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I tell her.

“Their eyes,” she says. “They get equine recurrent uveitis which makes them go blind. Pinto horses too, but really Appaloosas. It’s terrible how they lose their freedom and then they go blind.”

“But maybe they don’t know they’re losing their freedom.”

“That’s a silly thing to say. Of course they know.” She sits in the chair with her back intensely arched. “People buy rabbits from my father so they can release them from their cages and hunt them. Even the rabbits know they’re not free and are being hunted. Imagine how a Pinto horse feels.”

Pinto refers to a coat pattern rather than a horse breed. The breed of horse with this pattern is generally the American Paint Horse. Paula doesn’t have to tell me because I already know. The American Paint Horse is truly a comely horse.

“I never understood about horse genetics,” Paula says.

“They’re like people. The genes work pretty much the same as they do in people.”

“No, they’re not like people at all,” says Paula.

I don’t see Paula for more than a week, and then I get a message from her on my phone. She says to come to her place, and she sends me the code that opens the door to her apartment building. She’s not there when I arrive. There’s a letter addressed to me in a rose-scented envelope against her apartment door. She writes that she’s gone blind and had to move to assisted living since she found herself unprepared for complete blindness. She thought she had more time.

She never made the trip that she wanted to make on the sleeper train, and she’d fain go back in time if she could. So I rewind the world for her. I turn the world back to a time before she met me. She’s grasping the hand of an old boyfriend she adores and who doesn’t know that she’s going blind. She never tells him. She wears a white dress with an elaborate lace collar and a crinoline. They await the train. They take the sleeper train from Chicago to Northern California and sleep in separate cars of course. They rent a truck and drive untenanted land to reach the site of the Bureau of Land Management auction. Wow, there are so many people assembled there. Enough people to gab and drink cherry soda all the doo-dah-day. She launches herself right into the throng and says: “No! No one’s buying any wild horses today. You’re free. Go. You’re free. Get outta here!” Then she unlatches the paddock gate.