Trash Bin
As Short Story
Chapter Thirteen
Trash Bin
A preview of the upcoming novel, ‘An Ounce of Man,’ by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch
When Missy passed, Lloyd turned inside himself tightening his grip on his work, his routine. Through these last years they lived apart and saw each other perhaps once a week to talk and look into each other’s eyes. They, each of them, lived in the knowledge that their perfect mate existed and that, yes, they needed each other and that the distance they chose curiously held them close. Now Missy was gone, and Lloyd felt he was gone as well. Until the young woman, Naomi, showed up announcing she was their daughter and that Lloyd had a grandson.
Lloyd felt himself struggle to get out of himself — out and yet still within reach.
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
— W.H. Auden
Inside that individual governing haze – the indistinct envelope of acceptable and required – each of us blindly trusts our sense of the location of the invisible and hurtful perimeter, that fence. We, each of us, use this instinctual knowledge as license to exhaust ourselves with false courage. The actual courage would be to move as though there be no fence.
“Hear the man? He hollers, Move – Move – Move!”
You need to decide right now whether you want a family
or to commmand an aesthetic.
“Thing ‘bout a western accent, the vernacular is always chasing the whinney-bend of the words but never quite catching it. Caint say can’t same sentence as babydoll and not find yourself naked as a headless, plucked chicken on that final run.”
“You talking western or southern?”
“Western’s often nuthin’ but Mississippi without the sweat, gravy and collard greens.”
“She says largely when what she means is mostly. And he says ‘no way’ when what he means is ‘I’d like to see you do that again.’”
Time catches up with me and I say ‘Wish I could hang out with you but I’m late for this other engagement, and after that things are a whirlwind, let’s touch base later some time.’ Hours later I think back on those words and am disgusted by my humanity.
To be uniquely human, that, right there, is a threat (perhaps THE threat) to those who have lost that way. To be beyond human would demand the test of death lest there be others to stand in stead.
Hodie and Archie repairing a tractor: What braced Archie during this most recent depression was the clear memory of so many other times of financial difficulty – and how he, plus his wife Joy and their sporatic good fortune, had managed to pull them through. This time, because he could, he wanted desperately to spare Joy from his worrying. So when Hodie had called and asked if he could pay Arch to help with a tractor motor, he jumped at the chance to be somewhere else when his worry inevitably leaked out.
Archie Jack’s tow truck had been custom outfitted with all sorts of bins, trays, cabinets and boxes, a few wooden, mostly old metal. These were full of his wild assortment of mechanic tools including some he custom-built.
Hodie had been a cattle rancher his whole long life, so he, also, had many wrenches. He did not, however, travel with those tools to work on other people’s equipment, in fact he didn’t work on anybody else’s equipment – period. Now, put two such old guys together with their own tool assortments and you would usually have a recipe for angst and confusion about whose socket is whose. But Archie’s wife, long ago had figured out a plan. She used fingernail polish to paint a purple dot on each and every wrench, screwdriver, socket or what have you.
When Hodie saw the shiny purple dots, he went after his wife, Janey, to show her.
She said, “Well honey, the only thing you got that your worried about losing, outside of me of course, are your meals. Would you like me to paint those with nail polish so Archie won’t think they are his?”
“We are lucky men Arch, to be with such funny ladies.”
Needle pushed through thickness of hem roll,
glances off thimble
and pressures for a return piercing.
Dark of morning. He opened the half door to the small stable, which contained 2 ten foot wide by ten foot deep tie stalls, mangers running across the front, grain boxes in each opposing corner. Anxious, 17h tall Rub pushed his big long-eared black head into the doorway and then backed out to allow a slow, deliberate and calm Toot to enter and proceed to his side of one of the stalls. Coast clear, Rub followed suit.
Always made him smile, the regularity of these his mules, these formerly-Titus’-mules, these gentlemen of precise footing. Enno smiled as if to deny the obvious, which was how his personality gave lisence and comfort to this now his team. Enno smiled with his humility rolled tight like a cigarette, believing the best of the mules, and that he was but an accidental observer to the comfort and comedy of it all.
He used to step ahead, at this point, and snap the mules into the manger-secured tie chains. Not anymore. Seemed disrespectful. Now, as they stood untethered at their mangers eating, he went straight to work currying and brushing each mule while very softly humming a melody construct that had snuck up on him. The mules chewed their hay, slowly opening and closing their eyes in a barely perceptible syncopation with the brushing. Should either of them begin to back out of the stall, Enno would ‘nope’ them and they would step right back up. The three of them had been through this all enough times that there’s just no longer any moment that Toot or Rub would fidgit or try to back out before he asked them to.
Done with grooming, the young man went for a short bucket of grain and two carrots. First he fed Toot. Then, as he walked around to Rub’s grain box, he noticed Toot lay his ears back at his teamate’s long-nose sniffing. Rub always suspected that Toot got something special, but the mule just could not prove it.
Twenty plus crow-flown miles north, on the reservation, a ten year old orphaned Pauite boy lived with a different family every month or so. As his story unfolded; when he was born his mother, for distraction during labor, watched a blue roan stud colt in a pen across the road from the Ditch Water motel. She looked up at Dr. Bonestock and said, “my child will be a boy. I won’t be here to see him. Please name him Blue Boy Horse.” And along with the boy, on that day the seed of the idea that the semiabandoned motel might be used as a ramshackle clinic/hospital was also born.
With the birth of Blue Boy Horse, his mother passed away. And the good doctor realized the second tragedy, the baby was mute.
Growing up, as part of his expansive, unusual and unorthodox education, bright Blue Boy Horse learned also of his family history. His grandmother had been a highly respected elder of the tribe. Her maiden name had been Lucille No Tie. And his great great grandmother had been Jessie Notye who lived to an old age along with her husband Ollie Notye. Rumor had it that Jessie had been a white woman, or had white woman blood, but nobody could tell. All they could remember was that she had white hair, nutbrown skin and that they, the two of them, were wandering magicians capable of orchestrating incredible metamorphosis with wild plants on an open fire. As for the Legend of No Tie, the variations are legion.
(mark this page number for future reference – time machine sign post).
Blue Boy Horse, Henry for short, had an small open fire right inside him. He wanted a horse. It consumed him. No one could imagine how he might get a horse. He had nothing to trade. Then he overheard two older bucks talking about a crazy white man, across the river, who had a mean stud colt. Word was whoever could halter him up could have the young horse. Blue Boy Horse had ever warmer dreams and one day he swam his twelve year old self across the frigid, not-so-deep, rapid Metolius River and headed out to terrible Fly Creek Canyon to find the crazy, sad stud colt.
if burps would only behave
Singing
On the Jalapeno Highway to Santa Gertrude
27 pistols in the road
comes a saucy armadillo walking on her toes
singin ever’ man I know is a toad
Blue Boy Horse, ‘Henry,’ did not keep track of the time it took, ‘cept to say it was days. When he did finally crawl into the dark and narrow canyon to find the odd homestead setting, a trek of a mile – off the county gravel road, through bitterbrush, sage, plus piles of dry pine and juniper branches – he came upon tin sheds, abandoned cars and trucks, parts of a dozer, two black plastic 2,000 gallon water tanks, a leaning mobile home with two lean-to woodsheds attached, heaps of trash and a crippled, ancient Rottweiler chained to a rusty-blue fifty gallon oil drum, lid cut out, laying sideways for a doghouse. The dog tried to bark but all that came out was a wheeze. The unfortunate mutt had trouble standing for more than a couple seconds.
Then Henry noticed off to the right, part of a bent steel panel fence. He shifted round and made out the haunch of a young horse.
Enno, with the dogs and the mules, had picked a way along forgotten logging roads for more than two hours when they arrived at the ridgeline above Fly Creek canyon. Looking down on the tops of dog hair thick pines and junipers it was hard to imagine anyone below muscling a homestead out of this formidable crevass, but somewhere down there, back behind, a family had made valiant effort and all but failed.
Sitting patiently out of sight, Henry Blue Boy Horse tired of waiting for the colt to show himself completely. He tilted back his head and looked up the steep canyon walls, through the thicket of small timber. He had found this place doing exactly what the elders had taught him. “Trust what you smell. If something smells out of the ordinary, concentrate on that odor until you can feel the trail it has left behind.” This place had a smell and it was sad, terrible and foreign. When he told Tall Buck he was going to Fly Creek Canyon, the old man had squinted his eyes for a long moment.
“Think, Henry Horse, why someone might name a hidden canyon Fly Creek. Many carcasses for hundreds of years have rotted in that canyon. Our people trusted their noses and stayed clear of that place. Get your job done and leave there quietly and quickly. It would serve you in later years not to admit to having been down there. I will ask Edna to make you a pouch to take with you. It will calm nostrils in an emergency.”
Remembering these words, Henry reached inside his shirt and touched the thick pouch, to reassure himself it was still there.
Top of the ridge, Enno’s two big dogs, Marva and Sarkozy, had their noses up. They had caught wind of something. They had been trained in situations such as this not to bark or growl until there was a clear objective or request. But their hair did not know how to behave. It all pointed up, as if to say “do not mess with us!” Enno put his nose up, nostrils flared, and caught the odors of many long ago slow rotting mammals. That mixed with the sour smell of fly larvae, of maggots. And laced all through, that was the punchy smell of angry regret. This canyon was bad news. And somewhere down there there was a young horse that did not deserve punishment. In testatment to how much they loved and trusted Enno, Toot and Rub willingly began to pull the wagon down the steep cutbank into the canyon of smells.
And then, another while altogether: Tinsnip, Rooster and Viney, marvelling at the fork hounds blowing gum bubbles, whispered to one another about an idea, a money-making carnival act with these hounds..
Same time, Jackson’s boys were thinking up a scheme to trick Tinsnip into digging potatoes so they wouldn’t have to.
One of them told the visitors a made-up story of the natives’ secret, the one about how when you grow taters ‘round pieces of obsidian sometimes they compress, in one season, to make a black diamond.
“You kin tell which taters have those diamons in em cuz they got green oozing sores on em. That’s cuz the diamons is crying to git out. Rule is, the person who digs the taters gets to keep any diamons dey find,”
Wouldn’t you just know it. Turns out, after feverish digging with bare hands, Tinsnip found a diamond, but wouldn’t show it to nobody because he didn’t trust them not to fight him for it.