Full Body Burden (18 page)

O
NE DAY
, years in the future, Randy Sullivan will tell his children how lucky he is to have grown up in Meadowgate Farms. The world feels wide open. Kids run free in the neighborhood, and most boys and girls have a horse or dirt bike. In the winter all the kids skate on the frozen pond. Sometimes there are as many as thirty or forty kids on skates, twirling and chasing hockey pucks, and some of the older kids like to spin donuts on the ice with their motorcycles and dirt bikes, even though it’s been strictly forbidden. Summer days are for floating on inner tubes along the network of streams and irrigation canals that flow to and around Standley Lake. He has a host of pets—turtles, hamsters, dogs, and whatever he can trap and domesticate. Randy remembers days in high school when he and his friends would ditch their afternoon classes and drive down to the local grocery store and dare each other to shoplift a six-pack of beer. They would then head out to Standley Lake and take turns jumping off the pipe.

The cycles of snow in Colorado are punctuated with days of clear, clean sunshine, when the snow melts and the air turns as warm as summer. The setting sun burns the sky peach and then brilliant orange and the mountains turn from gray to cobalt blue. In his house in Meadowgate, Randy looks out the window of his room to a house on a hill a few blocks away in Bridledale. He has a straight view. He watches a second-floor window to see if the lights come on. They do. He goes out back to the horse pen behind the house and bridles Cocoa, his creamy-colored palomino. He loves to ride. His father has given him a beautiful saddle, but he prefers bareback. He calls to his Labrador and the three of them clop along in the half-dark. He rides down the quiet streets, turns left on 82nd Avenue, and trots to the end of her driveway. He pauses for a long moment. If his friends found out what he was about to do, they would tease him mercilessly. But he does it anyway. “Hey, Kris!” he yells. He waits for a response. There is none. He yells again. “I love you!” Silence. Suddenly embarrassed, he turns and sets his heels to Cocoa and gallops back up the street.

I
T
’
S A
Saturday morning, early, and Karma and I are getting the horses ready to go to the county fairgrounds for a gymkhana, one of the first equestrian competitions of the summer. Karma loves pole bending, a timed race that involves weaving your horse in and out of a line of tall poles without knocking one down. My love is the barrel race. Tonka loves it, too. My knees are scarred from taking the barrels too close—you can skim them as long as you don’t knock them over—and more than once I’ve had a rein break or slip from my fingers as Tonka races across the finish line on his own with my hands twisted in his mane. Our best time is just over seventeen seconds, nearly as good as the pros. There are other contests as well: the keyhole, the goat rope, calf wrestling. Sometimes there’s a greased-pig contest. It costs two dollars to enter each event, and if you’re lucky you get a ribbon or a plastic trophy.

With a round wire brush I rhythmically rake Tonka’s coat to tease out the last of his winter hair, and then use a soft brush to stroke his coat into a high sheen. Karma works over Comanche in the same manner. The bridles and saddles are oiled. My hair is in pigtails to keep it out of my eyes, and my white cowboy hat waits on the backseat of my dad’s Blazer. Karma, never one for frills, doesn’t wear a cowboy hat. None of those fancy cowgirl shirts for her, either, just boots and jeans and a quiet determination that serves her well in the arena.

My mother usually drives us to the fairgrounds, but this morning my father emerges from the house, looking unshaven and unkempt from spending the night in his recliner. He’s heavier now and seems disconnected from his body, his clothes loose and flapping. Let’s go, he says. The familiar scent of bourbon is on his breath, and I find it almost as comforting as the scent of cigarettes and aftershave that clings to his body. He’ll drive us to the fairgrounds and drop us off, leaving the horse trailer, and then head to his office until the end of the day, when he will return to pick us up. He backs the Blazer up to the trailer and drops the hitch over the ball. We load the horses, first Comanche, then Tonka. They’ve had their breakfast, but there’s a cup or two of Omolene in the feed bin to keep them busy. Tonka presses his face to the little window at the front of the trailer. He likes to watch the road. Trains and loud noises
make him nervous. We don’t tie either horse to the front of the trailer because sometimes, when spooked by a locomotive or motorcycle, Tonka will jump feet-first into the hay bin and tangle his feet in the rope.

We pull out of the driveway. Karma sits in the backseat and rolls the window up. The air smells like rain. I sit in the front, my legs tucked up, hugging my ankles. None of us wears a seatbelt.

The neighborhood is quiet. There’s no one on the road. We don’t speak, but it’s a comfortable silence. Or comfortable enough. We turn onto 80th Avenue and then left on Simms, to go past the junior high school. We pick up speed.

“Dad,” I say cautiously. It’s not uncommon for him to drive fast, but this is faster than usual. He doesn’t like backseat drivers.

The road rises slightly and we hit the railroad tracks, the same tracks where my sisters and I laid pennies. Then the road dips. Suddenly the Blazer feels like it’s flying. The trailer begins to fishtail, and the car swerves sharply to compensate. My thoughts freeze as my body seems to rise in slow motion, up toward the roof of the car.

Later my father will say he swerved to avoid an oncoming car. He will mention the rain and the slick pavement. He will say he saved us from a head-on collision.

My sister and I never saw another car.

The car and the horse trailer separate after the first roll. My father swears. The car rolls again and again and then everything tumbles into an explosion of glass and grass and bodies. The rain comes in. I feel a sharp, crushing blow to the top of my head. Then I find myself lying flat in the back of the Blazer, surrounded by metal and glass, facing the back window, curiously open. My head and neck feel wrong.

“We have to get out,” Karma says. Her voice is calm and seems to be coming from a long distance away. “Are you okay?”

“I think I have glass in my eyes.” I’m afraid to turn my head.

“Can you see?”

“Yes.”

We crawl across what used to be the roof of the car and out the back window. The window itself is gone. The Blazer is upside down in a dry
irrigation ditch, flattened, the roof and hood pressed into the ground and the belly of the car facing the sky. My father’s door is partially open. I can see his shoulder pressed against the window glass. After a moment the gap in the door widens and he pushes out. There is blood on his cheek, and his voice is thick. “I’ll flag someone down.” He stands. “I think I’ve hurt my back,” he says.

I feel the cool rain on my cheek. There are no tears. Karma and I walk over to the horse trailer, which has rolled and then lodged in the ditch a few yards back from the Blazer. Tonka and Comanche lie on the floor of the trailer. They look like they’re asleep.
I’m glad we didn’t tie their heads
, I think. Unlike the car, the interior of the trailer is nearly intact.

A man appears, slim, blue-jeaned, wearing a straw cowboy hat. Who is this angel? A passerby or a neighbor. He stoops down and puts a hand on Tonka’s warm flank. There is a shudder in the flesh. I look over to Karma, who has moved to Comanche’s head. “They’re alive,” she says.

“They’ve just been knocked unconscious,” the man says. “It’s probably what saved them.” He tells us to sit on the grass. He crouches next to their heads, stroking their cheeks, and then he rises and kicks open the trailer door. The horses scramble awkwardly to their feet and he backs them out, blinking and shivering, into the rain. “They seem to be okay,” he says. He ties them to the fence. “Do you live far?”

“No,” we say.

“You should walk them home,” he says. “They probably won’t want to get in a trailer again.”

“Okay,” Karma says.

“Are you two sure you’re all right?”

“We’re fine,” we say in unison. We never see him again. We brush the crumbled glass and bits of dirt and grass from our arms and faces. No blood. No tears. I can’t stop shaking. It’s the cold rain, now steadily streaming.

An officer arrives and agrees to drive up to our house and inform our mother. “Tell her everything’s okay,” we say. My father agrees. “Tell her we’re all fine.”

My mother takes the news calmly—it’s not the first accident my father has been involved in. She hopes the neighbors don’t notice the police car in the driveway.

There is minimal fuss and no ambulance. The Blazer is towed away. Karma and I walk the horses home and I lie on the couch until I stop shaking. I have a headache and I feel afraid to turn my head. My parents do not take us to the doctor. “I’m fine,” I say. Karma says she’s fine, too. We’re Norwegian. Norwegians are tough. Or so we think.

Besides, we all agree this is something the neighbors don’t need to know, especially since my father’s practice has been a little shaky lately. He needs his clients—many of whom, ironically, are fighting DUIs. He’s the best in the business. Neighbors, clients, family, friends: no one needs to know about the accident.

Weeks later, when my father can no longer sit in his office chair, he goes to a doctor and discovers he has a fractured vertebra in his lower back. He wears a brace for a few weeks and then tires of it and throws it out. Years later, after ongoing headaches and pain, I learn I have a broken neck, two fractured vertebrae that have fused together over time. A quarter-inch higher or lower and I would have been severely disabled. You’re lucky you didn’t end up like Christopher Reeve, a doctor will say.

We never speak of the accident again. Silence is an easy habit for a family or a community. This is just for us to know. Eventually we’ll forget this ever happened.

Before long the entire incident is, indeed, forgotten.

A painting hangs in our living room, a blur of blue and gray with a woman’s face in the center, her body mostly obscured. A long lock of dark hair falls across her eyes and only her mouth is visible, a pouty smear that’s sullen or seductive, it’s hard to tell. My mother doesn’t like the painting—our uncertain budget has curtailed her home decorating impulses—but it’s a gift from one of my dad’s clients, a payment, and he says it’s art.

My father’s law practice is, as my mother likes to say, going down the tubes. It’s feast or famine. From time to time the electricity at our house is shut off. My grandfather, a stern man who worked as a banker during the Depression—traveling from bank to bank, looking at balance statements, and determining whether or not an institution should remain open—swoops in to oversee my dad’s office. He and my grandmother Claire sell their home, drive west, and move into an apartment in Arvada. Grandma Claire is a retired schoolteacher. She dotes on my father, her only child, and now she dotes on us kids. She wears round,
dark-rimmed glasses that make her look intellectual despite her flowery dresses and plump arms. My grandfather is as impenetrable as my father.

Both my parents feel a little panicked.

I’ve shot up like a weed, Grandma Claire says. I hunch down in my desk at school. I drink coffee on the sly when she scolds that it will stunt my growth.

Tonka suddenly seems like a pony. At fourteen and a half hands, he’s on the small side as far as horses go. But my father knows a man at the local racetrack—the same place where our neighbor Bini Abbott buys many of her horses—and the man has a horse. A mare, a tall Thoroughbred mix, too old and used-up at four years of age to make it at the racetrack but maybe a good kid’s horse or broodmare. Her bloodlines are good, he says. Her name is Sassy Cowboy. I call her Sassy.

On a startling fall day we hitch up the trailer to pick her up. The sun burns bright and the aspen leaves glitter like gold coins. Sassy is a tall, elegant sorrel with a white stripe down her nose. She’s jumpy and nervous and we have to coax her into the horse trailer with horse candy.

“Is she broke to ride?” my dad asks. “Or just broke to race?”