The Walmart does not end. It goes on and on, windowless and solid. Beatrice thinks of the old cartoons. An illustrator draws two panels of background, a desert or a pine forest, and by bringing one panel in front of the other, he can keep it going forever, a duplicated landscape Wile E. Coyote can run through. If she had four legs like Humbletonian she’d be able to get around the back of the mall faster. She thinks to skip but after ten or eleven lengths her lungs chug and backfire on the cold air. She walks the rest of the way.
Behind the shopping center there are bulldozers, at least twenty of them huddled with their backs to Beatrice, in a private conference. It’s freezing. Apart from the dozers there’s nothing here except a gigantic hole. It is tremendous, far larger than a football field, and it is filled with water. In the dark, the hole extends beyond the limit of Beatrice’s vision. Clem is already standing at the edge, looking down into it. Humbletonian is there, too. She has climbed down into the pit and is walking across the surface of the ice formed there. It’s like a lake. Maybe one of the bulldozers broke a water pipe while digging. There’s a lot of water here, a reservoir’s worth, or, Beatrice hopes not, frozen sewage. Humbletonian is walking across the ice, bending every now and again to lick the surface.
“Woo-hoo! Humbletonian!” Clem yells. “Good horse. Good horse,” he shouts. Humbletonian turns from where she is, halfway across the ice, and when she sees Clem and Beatrice she begins to trot across the very center of the pit toward them, more like a dog than a horse. Her coat is as silver as the ice, and beautiful.
Beatrice lifts up her arms and shakes her hips. “Woo-hoo! Horsey!” she calls. Time slows to a pace where Beatrice can notice every single thing. Humbletonian’s muscles, her breath coming out of her flared nostrils, and the odd rhythm of her trot. She notices the gorgeous ice and dirt and the lovely darkness, thick as felt, existing in this ugly place. She can hear each hoof as it falls against the ice. Beauty stands nearby, a shadowy person whose exhales become Beatrice’s inhales, warming her up. This moment of warmth, this beautiful horse. A jealous hole cracks open in the ice, swallowing the back legs and hindquarters of Humbletonian faster than thought.
Humbletonian tries to clear the water, but each clop of her front hooves shatters what she’s grabbed. There can’t be that much water underneath her. But she’s not touching the bottom. Clem starts to swear, but slowly; everything is happening so slowly at first that time will come to a halt and the world behind the shopping center will be all right. It might even be possible to ignore the drowning horse. Beatrice and her brother are here only in a dream. They will both wake up soon.
Beatrice reaches her arms even higher. “Clem,” she says. Clem wrings his hands. He lowers himself into the pit, down to where the ice starts. He is moving carefully. Humbletonian is thrashing. It’s the only sound. The water must be freezing. “Clem,” Beatrice says again, and again Clem wrings his hands so hard he might tear them off by his wrists. He steps out onto the edge of the ice and creeps toward Humbletonian. She is in up to her middle. Only her front hooves and her head are above the ice. Clem stops. The horse is twisting and snorting. She screams as much as a horse can scream. Clem raises his hands to his face. He takes another step toward the horse. “Clem,” Beatrice repeats his name a third time. He turns to look at her. A seam has been cut open in Clem through the center of his face. A seam that says there is no way to stop this. No way for a man to save a horse drowning in freezing water. Clem brings his hands up to his ears and, pressing the small knobs of cartilage there, he stops listening.
Quiet moments pass. The static returns, as though it were being broadcast from nearby. Humbletonian starts giving up. The water has dropped her into shock. Beatrice can see a lot of white in the horse’s eye, as though it had been pried open. It blinks dry air once more. Humbletonian’s head goes under. Her forelegs, above the barrier of the ice, kick, emptying what’s inside them. It is a gruesome convulsion.
“She’s getting away.” Beatrice skids on her heels down to where her brother stands. She walks out onto the ice. A loud crack bellows from the frozen water, like a whip pushing Beatrice back, away from her horse. Beatrice drops to her knees and Humbletonian goes under all the way. Their horse is gone. The water flattens out over her head.
Clem lowers his hands. “Don’t.” But Beatrice doesn’t listen. She sits down on the ice and watches the hole where Humbletonian went. She slides toward it on her knees. The hole doesn’t do anything.
The silence fills in around Beatrice and Clem like insulation. The two of them look down into the black hole, waiting, maybe, for some triumphant geyser, a phoenix, or Pegasus to rise up out of the water. Fifteen minutes pass, maybe half an hour before they recognize what they are staring at: an empty black hole.
“Clem.” Beatrice has her back to him. “You know what Mom told me?”
“What?”
“She gave the doctor permission to kill Dad.”
“Yeah, I know,” Clem says.
“You know?”
“She asked me what I thought before she did it.”
No one asked Beatrice. She sat by her father’s hospital bed for days, rubbing lotion into the dry skin of his calves and feet, and no one said anything to her. “No one asked me.”
“We already knew what you’d say.”
Since her father’s death, Beatrice’s parents have been two-dimensional pieces of paper she folds up, tucks into her back pocket, and forgets about when she does her laundry, fishing them out of the lint trap later: her mother all things bad, her father all things good. But Clem ruins it every time. There’s Clem, sitting on the ice, shaking his head, saying, “It’s no one’s fault, Bea.” But Beatrice would like to find someone to blame.
Even with the static, she sees a map in front of her, a map of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. She sees that they arrived here at this future rather than a different one. One with horses. Maybe that future would have been better. But they had arrived here to a time when their farm is dead, when Beatrice has moved away to the city, when Clem is stuck in place, and when, most nights, her mother walks down to the end of the driveway, out to meet the incoming tide in Pennsylvania.
Beatrice leans forward, lowering her whole body onto the ice. She pushes herself on her stomach out to where the horse disappeared. She rests her cheek there for a long time. She pets her horse through the ice. “Don’t go any farther,” Clem says. Beatrice dips her hand inside the hole, into a land that is already lost.
THE HOUSE BEGAN TO PITCH