Then, a holy nudge from the darkness. Deliver me a sacrifice.
His iceberg eyes opened and sharpened like picks on a plump mare, nibbling on a fence post and shivering off flies. A horse. His turmoil was now organized by the narrow focus of a predator. With a jealous flare, he remembered the preening stallion Kit had been riding the night he discovered her outside Bible study, the way she’d caressed the length of the horse’s body, ears to rump, had held him between her thighs and flown, swiftly away from Manny, just as she had done now. The same horse he’d just seen at the vet’s, rolling in a shitty pile of hay.
When night fell, Manny returned in darkness to the vet’s stable. The buckskin appeared in the window of its stall, ears tilted forward in sudden vigilance, slivers of white around his eyes as he scanned for danger.
“Ho, boy,” Manny said and offered a bruised apple to the animal. The horse, torn by the desire for sweetness and the fear of the unknown, took two steps back and stretched out his neck, teeth grasping at the fruit. Manny kept the apple just out of reach until the horse inched close enough. He let the animal eat, juice and pulp running out the loose corners of his mouth, and clutched his halter tight. Then, with a sure swipe of his deer knife, Manny severed the jugular. A hot spray of blood and a scream. The horse reared back his head, the knife embedded in his throat, outraged for a moment, before falling into wide-eyed surrender. In his perfect vulnerability, the dying animal allowed Manny to feel a oneness, a gentle caring. The downy hollow behind his chin, the trickle of snot from his nostril, like a child. Grace, Manny thought. Then there was only the gurgling and gush of a waning heartbeat. The horse fell to his knobby knees and stayed there a moment before the full weight of his body threw him sideways and he was dead.
He had been a handsome beast, maybe a bit like him, Manny thought. Cocky and gorgeous and strong. But with all its swagger and the formidable size of its dick, it was just prey at its core. Organized around fear, those powerful legs made for running fast and far; the side-seeing eyes, the swivelly ears, the bowels that can shit on the move. In the end, there was no fight in that animal.
Knife in hand, Manny dipped his blood-sticky arm in the horse trough up to his elbow and swished it around, the green water whirling to brownish red. He splashed water on his face and cleaned his neck and hair, removed his shirt and dunked it, wringing out the blood. Now cleansed, he sheathed the blade in his belt and walked down the road in peace, his brow soft and spirit light, uplifted by the sacrifice.
Chapter Thirty-Four
That night, Kit was in a heavy sleep when she was awoken by the phone ringing. She followed the sound with a hand to the wall and went down the stairs to the kitchen. She did not let herself worry because Charlie was home and well. But she could not imagine that, at this hour, the caller could have good news.
She held the receiver to her ear and Doc spoke.
“You need to come over here, babe,” she said. Her voice was thick with sorrow. “Someone’s killed my Warbucks.”
The horror in Doc’s voice jostled Kit out of her thoughts. She jumped into her clothes, whispered goodbye to Charlie, and locked the front door behind her.
Doc was sitting on the ground in Warbucks’s stall in an area purpled with blood. She lit a pipe of something pungent; its blue wisps wrapped around her in the stillness. Without turning, Doc seemed to know that Kit had arrived.
“I was in bed when it happened,” Doc said, dazed and distant. “Laying there a bit drunk on my valerian root vodka. Just as I was slipping off into a good sleep, I felt it, my spine twanged with a knowing, child, and I could hardly croak out a spell before I heard it.” She crumpled then, a skirt of tears below her eyes. “A gruesome scream.” Her hand darted to her throat like a frightened bird. “Then silence. I knew sure as I was born that evil had come and taken the good and left. I lit a candle to light the way for a soul and went outside to see which one of my darlings was dead.”
Kit was barely breathing as Doc spoke. She recalled the strength, the enormous power of Warbucks beneath her, the thrill of galloping and not knowing, or caring, about what was ahead of them. She was a poor friend in moments like these, wished she could say one helpful thing. She sat silent in the sawdust next to her friend. The smell of iron from Warbucks’s spilt blood was overwhelming.
“If I had a backhoe I’d bury him here,” Doc said. She pulled a long one off the pipe and spoke as she exhaled, her words muffled. “We’ll have to call the county to haul him out. They’ll sell him to the glue factory, no doubt. Well, ashes to ashes . . . he’s just soft matter now.” She reached out to touch the stallion’s forelock but pulled her hand away.
“I’ll dig,” Kit said. There was something she could do.
Puffy-faced and charmless, Doc turned to Kit.
“No need. All that’s good is gone. His soul fled quick, even before his body died. Something scared him, Kit. Something dark and noxious.”
A dull choking feeling, like a child grabbing her by the throat, urged her to cry out, but she held back. Though her legs wanted to run, she stayed put. The realization struck her like a plank, squarely and out of nowhere.
That night, the coyotes. The memory was as vivid as the day it happened. She saw them huddled and wiggling, smelled the new rot on their mother. Pulling the trigger was easy. Easy because it was right. She had killed them out of mercy, to spare them the unbearable feeling of being alone in the world before they were ready; she thought he had seen that. In the car the next day he had said she was special. We’re the same, he had said. We do the hard thing that must be done, she had understood.
A sickly, guilty feeling started in her stomach. She had underestimated how much she had embarrassed him earlier that day, how wronged he would feel. Now, thinking back on the other times she had let him down—the proposal and the day she left him at Stoker’s—she was sure this was Manny’s work. But what did it mean? Was this some sort of a message? Or a threat? Or was he so hurt he had to take it out on something weaker than he was?
Doc must have noticed the look on her face and leaned forward intently. Kit could smell the cocoa butter in her curls. “You know something,” Doc said. Kit paused, unsure how to talk about it or admit that she was indirectly responsible for Warbucks’s death. She wanted to tell Doc, but what if she was wrong?
“Tell me now, dammit,” Doc said, suddenly alive, pink around the neck. “Now is no time for your little wounded bird BS. I won’t have it. Tell me what you know.”
Kit looked down. She wanted to speak but her lips wouldn’t move. Whether out of loyalty or out of fear, she couldn’t say the thing she knew. She was unable to name him, to acknowledge how her lives had merged and that it had come to this. She could not claim the past that was surely, mercilessly, catching up to her.