Warner’s Caddy

by Liana V. Andreasen

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

“The neighbor stole the marijuana plants,” he said, and his eyes of blue steel, the same eyes that scared his neighbors’ children under the table when he stopped by, were not even looking at me.

“How do you know it was your neighbor?”

“He’s been eyeing the plants, I’ve seen him. He stole them while we were out on the two-hour ride. Stole two out of the three patches. Cut all the plants clean off the ground.”

“So, go get them back.”

“He won’t admit he did it. I can’t call the police on him, can I?” he said, and something earthy, something defeated but not done was in his voice. He did not even sound like a man whose only source of extra income was gone, and he was closer to bankruptcy than ever. He sounded just like that, like life. Things come, things go.

That’s when he put a gun in my hand, and I wasn’t sure if it had come from downstairs, maybe from that place by the curtain, or from upstairs, where perhaps he kept the loaded ones.

I told him I didn’t want to take the gun. To do what with it?

“Go saddle Tyler. We’re going to start on the two-hour path, so he’ll think we’re going for two hours. Then we cut through the woods on a path I know, and we catch him in the act. He’ll try to get the third patch for sure.”

“And if he sees us with guns, who do you think he’s going to shoot first? I’ll be like a clown carrying a gun, saying, ‘Please shoot me’.”

“Nah, he won’t try. If he does, I’ll take him down.”

That’s just Dan.

I talked him out of giving me the gun because I didn’t have a permit, he said, but I didn’t talk him out of riding our horses to sneak up on his neighbor, the thief. I knew it wouldn’t turn out as well as a Clint Eastwood movie, or at least not for me, were we to find the man cutting marijuana plants.

If this neighbor had the crazy eye like Dan, I’d be toast anyway, carrying a gun or not. Yes, I had met some of his neighbors, including one cop who smoked pot with Dan and the others and, when they tried to pass it to me, I said no, and Dan had to reassure them: “She’s cool.” I had never had pot before, and of course I could not forget that “women jump into my lap when they smoke pot with me,” so I never smoked it.

The neighbor was not there, no plants were being stolen. Instead, Dan cut the plants down himself, and we carried them to the house. All ten of them. That night, my hands were sticky and green from separating buds from leaves and stems with scissors. My hands smelled wonderful.

That’s how Dan talks me into things.

So I’m writing the names. We compromise on a hundred and fifty of them. Thankfully, I don’t have to think of too many variations, as he says he’ll only draw once, so I can write one single name a hundred times or more. I choose the name of this crazy poet from Maryland, the professor who likes to teach and write about sexual exploits and body parts in charming ways, because he mixes the metaphors with wonderful images of gum trees and goldenrod flowers.

I picked goldenrod with Dan, when I convinced him that the flowers were good for stomach aches, taken as an infusion. That’s when he said, “See, you learn a lot of new things from me, and I learn a lot from you. You have knowledge from your books, and I have practical knowledge.”

Goldenrod makes the fields smell like bees and sun when the morning loses its chill.

I write: Michael Warner, Michael Warner, Michael Warner... He watches me from behind those glasses that look misplaced on the face of a cowboy. Even in the house, he never parts with his gray hat, and he wants me to keep mine on. He gave it to me on my first day here, because I’d be in the sun all day. It belonged to Jerry, who left him three years ago, and she was about the same size as I am. My hat is gray too, except mine is limp and deformed and it didn’t get in shape even when we tried to steam it at the stove, boiling a pot of water.

His hat is sturdy, good quality. For all I know, the hat survived Vietnam too, maybe that secret mission where he killed people at close range, with a knife. It’s sticky, he says, blood gets all over you. So he says, and I’ve learned that I’ll never be able to tell between his true stories and his bullshit stories.

I wake up before him on the day of the pig roast. At night, I sleep in my pyjamas but, when I hear him coughing, I know it’s about time, and I put my day clothes on. He asks me if I sleep in my clothes. I don’t mind that I haven’t washed any of my clothes the whole time I’ve been there, because to be frank, he didn’t even put clean sheets on the bed in honor of my arrival. When I sleep, I curl away from the crumpled sheets, trying not to smell the old mattress and covering myself with an old, stained blanket.

Hell, I only took a shower twice this whole month, and now I smell like everything else: horses, and a hundred year-old house. How can I take showers when the door to the bathroom is also a dirty curtain that doesn’t stay in place? And he’s always around, everywhere I go. When Haifa, my roommate, sees me again and smells me, she may actually faint.

Haifa is not coming to the pig roast, but Dong-Xin, the shy Chinese girl, is. So is Patrick, the guy from Kenya who bought the other raffle ticket. It’s only half a pig, Dan said, because there won’t be enough people there to be worth paying for a whole one. But he’ll teach me to cut the meat right out of the red embers, with the buck knife he gave me. He said to keep it, even if it didn’t belong to Jerry.

We even had some trail rides in the morning and early afternoon. While he’s getting ready the roasting oven next to the wire fence where we throw the hay for the horses, I take the small riding parties out for the one-hour ride. I haven’t graduated to the two-hour ride. I can’t go on it without him, because as he said the first time I asked him what I should be aware of, as a trail guide, he said, anything can happen. Anything. That’s something I keep in mind every time I go on the one-hour trail, turning, as he told me, to look at every person behind me and make sure they’re not falling off or letting the horses eat, trying to get impatient little Tyler to wait for them.

Good old Tyler, who got used to me even if he’s the horse who’s bucked me off the most since I’ve been here. He used to spin so I couldn’t get on, with people there waiting for me to take them on the trail, losing business for Dan when a little girl didn’t want to go anymore because she saw me fall. Falling is overrated.

Now I love the little horse, and I hug him because he’s small enough that I can press my face into his yellow hair, and I smell hay and spunk, mixed in with that smell that is common to all horses. Dan laughs at me for hugging a shithead — that’s what he calls all his horses — and he laughs when I tell him I talk to Tyler in Romanian.

“What an idea,” he says, as he laughs. “He only knows English.”

By the time my last ride is back, there are many people at the ranch already. Some are playing at horseshoe-tossing, and Dan wants me to go try it too. “You’ll like it for sure,” Dan says. “It’s your kind of game.”

I don’t know what that means, but I give it a try, and I get beaten by jovial, round-faced people. And their children.

I show Dong-Xin around, though I don’t want to scare her by taking her into the house. It’s enough that she sees the ruggedy barn, though she says it’s exciting. Patrick makes jokes, and some are about me being there alone with Dan all this time. I shrug them off. I’ve gotten used to people assuming I’m sleeping with Dan, and I don’t even care anymore. It only hurt when Doug thought that, and I saw it on his face before he stopped coming to ride here.

Doug worked for Dan before me, and he even had a horse at his stable, until he moved out of town when he got back together with his girlfriend. He looked like a strangely misplaced, blond musketeer, with the manners of a musketeer. He will probably marry her, from what he mumbled to Dan and me when he came to take his horse.

The day goes by fast. When night falls, people are animated and surround the bonfire. Stories flow, to the sound of crackling wood and night birds. The hills are one with the dark sky, but I can guess where they are and where the fog will be tomorrow.

I impale the meat on my buck knife and join Dong-Xin and Patrick by the fire. This is the solemn time when Dan draws from a hat. I’ve shown Dong-Xin the Cadillac even if she doesn’t have a driver’s license. If she wins, she can sell it and pay six months’ worth of rent. If I win, I won’t have to worry about saving money to fly home. I have three chances. She has one.

When Dan brings the stack of papers I folded the day before, I try not to cringe. Again.

There are fewer than I remember stacking, and I have good visual memory. I almost feel as if I remember how I folded each paper, and I imagine the names written inside. I know now: he was never going to include the real names, the ones of the people I had talked into buying raffle tickets. My horse-loving professor and my other Maryland friend, and these two who are smiling broadly right next to me, waiting to win an American car.

I bend my head, for I know what’s coming. The thirty-odd people look at him with hopeful eyes, and I can see that they know too. They smile. They don’t want him to lose the farm.

He draws from his gray hat. “Michael Warner,” he announces.

People look around, as if expecting a Michael Warner to come and claim the Cadillac.

Dan waits, while I stare at the fire.

“He didn’t show up, what do you know,” says Dan. “I’ll have to call him tomorrow.”

Bankruptcy takes one small step back. The party goes on.