Sodium vapor lamps from the mall parking lots wash away any definition for miles around. Everything on the farm glows the same yellow gray at night. Beatrice trips on a pig trough her mother’s been using as a planter for impatiens.
“What’s up, dude?” her brother asks when she yelps. Clem has converted half of the barn into an apartment. She stumbles in. There are no locks on his apartment because his door is an old cellar hatch taken off a house demolished to make way for a Dunkin’ Donuts. His kitchen countertops are built from plywood the Home Depot used as concrete molds and then tossed. Most of his apartment is built from stuff he lifted off construction sites. It’s a common practice among Clem’s friends because they can’t yet not own the land they’ve always owned. “Matthew Campbell’s milking pavilion used to be here, so I guess we can just help ourselves.”
“Let’s go downtown,” Beatrice says. “See if the stores are open on Thanksgiving.”
“I guess.” Clem’s uncertain about going out in the cold, but still enough under the sway of his older sister that he’ll do what she wants to do. He detaches himself from his video game.
“Can I try that first?” she asks.
“This?” He holds the controller up. “Yeah, yeah sure.” He restarts the game. “Do you know how to play?”
“No.”
“I’ll start you off slowly.” He slips her hand into a glove that is rigged with controls. It is filled with tiny nodes like suction cups, the dead raccoon’s puckered skin. “Sit down,” he says, and she does.
At first nothing happens. The screen turns blue and the nodes tickle her hand. Clem fusses with the machinery.
The apartment is tiny and the walls are mostly covered with shelves and cabinets. Clem moved out of the main house when he fell in love with Anna. They moved into the barn together after high school and lived here for almost five years. But Anna moved away to the city a year ago. She hasn’t picked up all her stuff yet. Clothes, some textbooks that she and Clem kept from school, and a nice set of silver that Anna’s grandparents gave her. Everything is covered with bits of old hay from the barn. Sometimes Anna and Beatrice meet up for coffee in the city. They never talk about the farm or Clem. They act like survivors from a low-budget, straight-to-DVD apocalypse.
The video game starts up. A woman walks through a Zen Buddhist garden, wearing a tight silver outfit, carrying a long sword.
“That’s you. Use the glove to go forward.”
Beatrice walks slowly through the garden, because someone is going to tiptoe up behind her with a horrible machete, and she’s had a number of glasses of red wine. She’s not sure she can fight back. Beatrice feels the girl walk, inside the girl’s digital skin.
Clem lights a joint and hums the video game’s theme, a soundtrack. The girl on the screen creeps forward, flashes the blade of her sword. Beatrice accepts the joint with her ungloved hand, jerking the controls. The girl on-screen stands still, doing nothing, flicking her sword, walks backward, looks toward the couch. Beatrice holds the smoke in her lungs long enough for both of them.
There are pathways to the left and the right in the garden. Beatrice can’t turn yet. Clem hums the tune. Beatrice exhales, imagining a man with a deep radio voice speaking over the music, whispering into Beatrice’s ear, reading her the fine print. It fills her with longing just the same.
A pack of ninja warriors surprises her from above, and after a very short fight Beatrice is dead.
*
It is colder than most Thanksgivings. The ruts in the driveway have solidified, forming seals of creaky ice. Beatrice and Clem walk to his truck in silence. She still feels as if she’s on-screen with the video game’s sharpened abilities. She controls the world with her hand, senses sounds with her skin, hears her brother’s fingers jangle the keys in his pocket. She hears her mother sigh as the mid-movie commercial break starts. Beatrice hasn’t smoked pot in a long time. She feels every person who has ever stepped on the driveway. Oil deliverymen. Tractor repairmen. Lenape Indians. She feels the outline of these people precisely, solid bodies beneath her feet. She squishes faces with her boots.
Beatrice has an idea. “Let’s take Humbletonian,” she says, letting go of the truck’s door handle. Humbletonian is a horse. When her parents sold the farm animals they kept a few chickens for eggs and one horse named Humbletonian. Her father named the horse this because she was not a Hambletonian. A Hambletonian is a very distinguished trotting horse. A Humbletonian is nothing. It is like changing your name to Stonerfeller because you are not a Rockefeller.
“In the trailer?” her brother asks, and then answers the question himself. “No. Ride the horse into town? Right? Right. Cool,” he says, eyes glassy. They walk back to the barn, breaking ice again.
After their father stopped farming he sometimes took a sleeping bag to the loft above the horse’s stable after dinner. He’d smoke cigarettes up there and spend the night like a Boy Scout. He thought that the horse’s wild nature could make him feel better about working in an office. He thought the horse could soothe the unease in his rib cage. From the loft her father pretended he was Jerry Lee Lewis, an old table saw platform for the piano. He’d sing to the horse. “You. Leave. Me.” Pause. Pause. “Breathless.” Though her father’s odd behavior seemed exciting at the time, Beatrice now thinks that horses aren’t wild. Horses can’t soothe our unease in the world. Horses are about the most broken, unwild creatures in existence, except for maybe burros and dogs. They do exactly what humans tell them to do. So when she thinks now how her father slept in the barn, rode Humbletonian across their forty acres because he thought it would cure the unease in his chest, it only makes her sad. That wasn’t unease, Dad. It was lung cancer.
“Hello, pumpkin pie.” Clem pets Humbletonian’s nose. The barn smells yellow—urine and old pine boards.
The horse’s belly sags in a way that reminds Beatrice of a velour reclining chair. “Hello, La-Z-Boy girl.” Beatrice kisses the horse. Humbletonian does not look particularly happy to see her. Clem attaches bit and bridle. He puts a hand on the saddle straddling the stable wall, but Beatrice shakes her head no. Clem leads the horse outside by the reins and crouches down on one knee, keeping the other lifted square. Beatrice uses Clem’s knee as a boost and climbs up onto the horse’s bare back. “Whoop,” Beatrice whoops. In a moment her brother is seated behind her. Clem wraps big zucchini arms around her sides, reaching for the reins.
Brother and sister are quiet as they trot through harvested fields. The sound of dead stalks and frost crunching under Humbletonian’s hooves fills the gray quiet of the night. The video game’s theme song rattles in the back of Beatrice’s head.