The Trigger

The horse is like an ocean wave. Never turn your back on it. Respect the ocean’s power with your attention, your mother told you growing up. You imagine the horse crashing over you, the image of his hooves lifted off the ground and churning through the air replaying in your mind.

“Hey! Let’s get going.” Your friend tugs at your sleeve and you realize you’ve been thumbing the plastic wrapping of a chocolate bar on display in the check-out line.

“Oh, sorry. Yeah. Let’s go.” You put the chocolate bar back in its wooden display and try to stop thinking about Payaso. Better skip the extra cost, you think. Pay’s been shit at the ranch and the hours have been longer than ever taking care of the massive bay horse whose power makes you think of hurricanes, thunder, waterfalls. Why did his owner name him Payaso? Trying to come up with a better name, you’ve been stumped. Anything is better than clown, but he needs a name that matches his might. As a placeholder, you’ve been calling him “P.”

The day P fractured his hip, the vet guided your hand along his back towards his haunches until you felt a single bony bump.

“There should be another bump right next to that one,” the vet said. “That’s where it’s broken.”

“Broken?” you asked, feeling the bump again. Just hours before, you were watching him gallop across the open pasture, all muscle and focus, his eyes honed in on the herd of bison his rider was asking him to chase. His nostrils were flared. Tail held high—you’d never seen such magnificence.

Hearing that P had a sixty percent chance to recover, the ranch owners decided the odds were worth keeping him alive. You felt a wave of relief. He’d be fine, he would heal. You would make sure of it. After that, you took meticulous notes on the vet’s marching orders for his care.

“He needs stall rest for a week. After a week, you can walk him for five minutes, twice a day. The next week, ten minutes. Once you get up to twenty minutes, twice a day, I’ll come back and give him a checkup,” the vet told you.

Four weeks later and you’ve gone on fifty-six walks with P. Every time you walk up to his stall, his eyes turn to you with a wild pleading. As you lead him out of the barn, you keep your voice low and take slow, deliberate breaths. The smallest disturbances set him off, like the stray grocery bag in the far pasture a few days ago. He ripped the rope out of your hand and reared up, beating his hooves over your head. Then he rushed away, galloping down the hill until he stopped in front of the pasture and stomped his front feet at the threat. When he broke away from you, you were angry with yourself, imagining his hip and the delicate thread of bone cells growing back along the fracture line ripping apart. Every day, you try hard to soothe the churning force that hums under his skin with the small walks of freedom he’s been allotted. The vet comes next week and you’re hopeful that P’s progress will please her.

At the last minute, you plop the chocolate bar back into your red shopping basket.

“For strength,” you laugh self-consciously. Your friend rolls her eyes as she waits for you by the exit.

On the way back to the ranch, the roads are clear, but a storm is coming. Black asphalt shines wet under low slung clouds. You see two figures on the shoulder, hands in the air. They’re in trouble, your friend says from the passenger seat, and you press down hard on the brakes, swerving to the side. The sky hinges, heavy gray, as you swing the truck door open.

There are two women. The first. Tall and slender. You can’t see her face, her hands cover it completely. The second. She has black, wavy hair. Shoulder length. As the second woman rushes to you, a gust of wind blows into your open coat and you zip it up.

“She’s still alive, she’s still alive,” she points to the other side of the road. Her finger a feather.

“I wasn’t going fast, I wasn’t. She came out of nowhere, nowhere,” the tall woman gasps, peels her hands from her eyes, her pupils swim towards you for an answer.

“Nowhere?” you repeat, trying to take it all in.

“She’s over there. There,” the woman with the wavy hair points again.

You feel for your knife, knowing you’ve left it at home on the kitchen table. You left in a hurry to make the meat delivery in town.

“Do you have a knife?” you ask, and the tall woman pulls one from her pocket.

You thumb the blade. It’s dull. Too dull to split anything open. You look to the other side of the road.

“No gun?” you ask, and she shakes her head.

“You’ll have to grab her back legs, pin her down,” you say, walking across the road without seeing.

“You’ll have to hold her down,” you say again, louder, and the woman with the wavy hair nods, following behind you.

“I didn’t see her, I didn’t see her,” the tall woman is calling from across the road. Her eyes are wet, eggy.

“You didn’t,” you repeat like a song, not knowing what the woman did or didn’t see.

The deer is down in the ditch, and she can smell you coming. She’s shivering under her winter coat. She wants to survive. Her whole body tells her to go, go fast, go towards freedom. You come as the predator, with a knife.

“Oh,” the woman with the wavy hair moans, as you both watch the deer trying to get up, dragging her broken legs across the grass, then collapsing under anxious breath.

“I had a vision, I saw her before I hit her, I knew . . .” the tall woman is chanting from across the road. Her voice strangled, uttering, “I knew.”

“You knew,” you echo.

Your toes are numb as you watch the deer, her whole body heaving in breath. Sucking it all in, wanting more, more, more. Wanting to live. You thumb the blade again and shake your head, looking over your shoulder for an answer.

A truck is coming around the corner and you step towards it, waving your arms like the women did to you.

“Wait,” you shout, and the truck’s brake lights shine red.

“Wait,” you say again to everyone. Wait. The clouds have moved over the sun.

A young man with red hair and cheeks dotted with freckles walks towards you. You gesture to the ditch, and then push your thumb and pointer finger up in the air. He nods and runs back to his truck.

He returns with the revolver, sheathed in black, and you shudder. The arrival of the gun signals an unspoken ending. She doesn’t want to go, her breath so eager, her sides still heaving. Her winter coat so soft, glistening in the twilight.

You back up and let the man walk closer to the deer. She drags her body across the grass again. Her wet coat is clumped, heavy and her legs useless. Broken. He points the revolver at her as they jitter. Then waits. She stops to take another breath. He inhales, shoots.

 Her head falls and the life shudders out of her. Her tongue hangs from her mouth, pink. There is nothing more to see. You all turn and face the road. The man waves, jumps back into his truck, and pulls out, tires squealing. You see a small face, his daughter’s. Her red cheeks are pressed against the passenger window and her wide eyes blink in your direction.

You turn to the women. She has inhabited them, you. Their breathing, your breathing, is heavy, heaving. Their legs jitter across the asphalt. Your muscles tense, their memoried strings ready for flight.

You stand in front of their car, hands in your pockets.

“The radiator’s busted,” the woman with the wavy hair says.

“Busted,” you repeat, looking at the crumpled metal—thick, brown hairs wrapped into it.

“The boys are in the back,” the tall woman says, and you suddenly realize that it’s cold. It’s 4 o’clock and the sun, already behind the clouds, will go down soon.

You offer to give them a ride to town, but they’re headed the other direction, back to Dulce.

“I called the police. The tow truck is coming.” The wavy-haired woman shakes her head.

Pointing to your truck you tell them again, “I can take you to town. Get a tow truck there.”

The wavy-haired woman looks down at her sneakers, bright white and shining. She doesn’t want to leave her car. You look to the tall woman.

“I didn’t see her, I never saw her,” the tall woman says, again.

“You didn’t,” you say, before walking back to your friend, who’s waving you over to the truck.

The women were gone by the time you drove the same road home that night. You prayed they were OK, that they hadn’t vanished like so many women had, off highways. You thought of the woman’s two sons. Two babies. Their cheeks, red.

Then you thought of her baby, tucked somewhere in the trees, knees shaking, watching with wet, eggy eyes as the group of you shot her mother.

You wonder what it would be like if there was a common language. Have we just forgotten it? Surely, you should have sung a mourning song for her, her two back legs broken, her body still warm, wanting for life. Surely, you should have waited with the two women, their two babies. This is how we vanish, you think, looking out into the trees for an answer. It is dark, but you swear two eyes are there, looking back. You didn’t even ask their names.

By the next day, it’s snowed and you are driving around the same bend in the forest road back to town. You look off to the left and see her body. It’s still there, now with snow piled on top of it. If you hadn’t known about her, you would have never noticed the body, crumpled there. You think of the women, how your friend made you go.  I’ve had two friends get hit and die helping people on the side of the road, she said, and so you left the women who said the police, the tow truck, were coming.

________________________________ 

You are staring at a text message on the bright screen. A month has gone by and you’re in town for another meat delivery. Turkeys this time. The message is telling you that P was “put down.” A gentle way to say that the ranch owners killed him. Why couldn’t the ranch manager just say it? They killed him. On your day off. Knowing you’d be gone. Damnit! You stub your toe on the curb headed towards the Trader Joe’s entrance.

In the store, you start to feel sick. You think, it’s a sickness, humming there, underneath the plastic wrapping that covers the Christmas cookies. A sickness, the red and black lines marching across spreadsheets that decide what lives, what dies. The ranch owners were only concerned with the red line, the cost in dollar bills. Kill the cost. They were blind to their responsibility as caretakers of P. Maybe because they hadn’t done any of the caring. You were the one who saw his slow path towards healing. Back towards his former glory. Moving through the grocery aisles, you clench your jaw in anger. There’s a difference between ordering the shot and pulling the trigger. Between looking the animal in the eye as he dies and having someone else tell you he’s gone.

The lights inside the store are too bright. You buy the cheap Christmas cookies and go. You cross the street and start crying. Because, like you, P had a name. Albeit an imperfect one. And he had grown a big, fuzzy coat for the winter not unlike the one you are wearing, except his was his own and yours is synthetic. In the text, the ranch manager had included a picture. He is standing in the snow, casting a wild white eye at the camera. Still alive. You wonder what made her think of sending you his picture after he was already dead.

The first time you shot a horse, the vet showed you how to make an “x”, from each ear, across the forehead to the eye sockets. Where the “x” crossed was where you needed to put the bullet. Because a horse’s brain is the size of a walnut, she told you. You held the revolver right up against his skull and shot. His stomach had twisted into knots and there was no way to save him. His whole body was sweat, burning, and his legs buckled beneath him. It’s a strange thing to watch pain leave a body. The muscles were so tense; they relaxed slowly, many minutes after he was already gone. What more could I have done? you asked yourself in the silence.

What more could I have done? You ask yourself again, holding your cell phone, looking at the white words in the blue bubble and the picture of his head. You think of a walnut. What if you had a smaller brain and a bigger heart? A gust of wind blows a scatter of leaves across the pavement. A hard lump develops in your throat and you think about slamming your phone down in the parking lot and watching the glass screen shatter. Instead, you stuff it back in your pocket as angry tears prick at the corners of your eyes.

That’s when you know that you’ll leave the ranch, or maybe they’ll fire you. Because they never saw what you did: the longing in P’s eyes when he craned his neck to the pasture, watching the other horses run.

You get in your truck and sit behind the steering wheel. You start thinking about the difference between holding the knife and mourning the body. Between taking a life and tending to it. You remember when the rancher shot the bison cow, on that bright September day. The whole herd circled around her, saying goodbye. Circling, the bull wouldn’t leave her body until the rancher ran him off.  You wonder when the distinction between your body and theirs developed? Are we not all alive? The radio is talking about war, and the words feel far away. You think of all that we’ve done to strip the consciousness from our bodies and rest your head in your hands. You wonder if P is in the ground now, or if they will bury him tomorrow. And if his eyes were open when she took the shot.

It’s late and starts to snow as you head back out to the country. The sun sets purple over the white mountain tops and for a moment you can’t think about anything else besides what it would be like to have the sun sit upon you like that.

Then it’s almost dark and your headlights tunnel a pitch of light in front of the car. It’s snowing harder and the black asphalt disappears under a blanket of white. Your hands tense. You hate driving in the snow, imagining the rubber of your tires fishing around for road underneath them. Your wipers are on high, and in the split second between them beating and your breathing, you see two sets of hands waving. They’re waving from the side of the road. You think, they’re in trouble, and you slow down, pull over.

Two figures run up to you, and you roll your window down. They are two women with round, purple hoods pulled over their heads. One stares at you through big, brown eyes. The other looks to you through the whites of hers. You can hear their breathing, heavy, heaving. They point to the side of the road with their mittens. You try to get out of your truck but the lock is stuck. The woman with the big eyes is crying, pointing out into the dark whirl of snow. The other woman looks at you sideways through the window, shivering from her knees.

You’re jimmying the lock up and down, up and down, and finally it pops, letting you out. Your boots crunch through the icy crust and sink down into the snow. You’re afraid it will never stop snowing. You follow the purple head of the woman with the big eyes and watch as she steps down into the ditch next to the road, consumed by the night. You think, she is leading you to her car, slipped off the side of the road in the storm.

As you step off the road, the snow gets deeper, all the way up to your thighs. You can feel the wet dripping through your jeans and shiver. The air smells of animal. Damp, fur. You turn to look for the other woman, but she is gone. The headlights of your truck leave orange pools of light on the road, and you can see the flakes of snow as they fall through the air.

You keep walking. The snow falls down the tongue of your boots, water pooling around your warm feet. Snot runs down to your lips and you wipe away the taste of salt. You follow two pairs of boot tracks down into the ditch, but they don’t stop there. You keep following them, grabbing for your phone and turning on its flashlight.

“Hello?” you call, before seeing a streak of red across the white field. The boot tracks stop where the red line begins. Deep depressions are scattered in the snow ahead, but you can’t tell if they’re animal or human. You shudder, fingering the dull knife blade in your pocket. You’ve been busy, slaughtering the turkeys for Christmas, and forgot to sharpen it again. You push your thumb and pointer finger in the shape of a gun, but there is no gun. You walk forward into the small puddle of light your phone makes, following the red line.

“I didn’t see her,” you hear from far out in the muffled world.

“You didn’t see her,” another voice echoes. You are in a dark tunnel, and the words barely seem to reach you. Then, you hear the gun shot. Bang. The sound cleaves your eardrums open.

You hear footsteps returning to you. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Your fingers tighten around your knife.

Maybe they had to chase her down, you think. You see the image of the deer from the month before, both her back legs broken. Her front legs dragging her heavy body forward.

“She came out of nowhere,” you hear. You thought you heard. In between the crunch, crunch, crunch. Your toes have frozen together now.

You hold your phone’s light up high, but the snow is coming down in a sheet. You can’t see anything.

“Hello? Do you need help?” you call out. There is no answer.

I’ve had two friends get hit and die helping people on the side of the road. At the time, you thought she meant people getting hit by cars.

Your breathing is heavy, heaving. You, want to survive. Your muscles tense, their memoried strings ready for flight.

The woman with the big eyes returns with the revolver, sheathed in black, and you shudder. The arrival of the gun signals an unspoken ending. You don’t want to go, your breath so eager, your sides still heaving.

You back up and she walks closer to you. You drag your body through the snow. Your wet coat is clumped, heavy and your legs useless. She points the revolver at you. Waits. You stop to take another breath. She inhales, then shoots.

Your head falls and the life shudders out of you. Your tongue hangs from your mouth, pink. “Wait,” you were saying. Wait. The clouds have moved over the moon. There is nothing more to see. She turns and faces the road.

 “I didn’t see her, I never saw her,” the woman with the big eyes says to the police officer on the side of the road.

“You didn’t?” the officer asks.

Two eyes wake, blinking. They could be yours, only you’re seeing them from afar. Across the road they open, reflecting the streetlight in two small orbs of green. As you watch them dart away, you find you’re still parked at Trader Joe’s. It’s dark and your car is freezing. You look down at your phone and there are seven new text messages.

“I had no choice,” reads one. “They wanted him gone,” reads another.

You stop reading and put the phone down. Your toes are frozen inside your boots.

The stars are coming out and you turn on the engine. The heater blasts cold air and you inhale a deep breath. The radio is still talking about war, and you think about what it means to live in a power-hungry world.

You feel for your legs but they are numb, useless. You try to wriggle your toes, but they are also not there. As you reach for the shifter to put the truck in gear, you can’t move your fingers. The engine is humming and the air is starting to come out warm. You put your hands to your mouth and blow. The force of your breath makes you dizzy.

You are stumbling through the snow again. You are grasping at the edge of the woods with your eyes. You just need to go a little further until you vanish into the tall trees. You can’t feel your legs, but the shouting burns your ears. You didn’t see her, you think. You never saw her coming. You’ve had friends die on the side of the road.

Your head jerks back off the steering wheel. The car heater is blowing hot now. Your tears have dried. Still, you can’t feel your legs. She is leading you down the hill, away from the barn. There is snow on the ground and it crunches underneath you. You look up, and the moon is rising. She stops, pulls out a gun from her pocket and presses it against your head.

Your head hits the back of your seat. You open your eyes and they adjust to the bright parking lot lamp as you shake off the dream. A small stream of saliva is running down your chin. Damnit, you say, pressing your palm to your forehead. It is hot. Your fingers are cold against it. You can feel your toes again. You turn your headlights on and slap your cheek. Wake up.

You thought you were the deer. You could have been the horse, you think. And the woman who shot you, who was she? Her wet eyes won’t leave you as you drive home. You watch for wildlife on the dark road. The snow is thick on the roadside and the sky is clear. Your phone starts vibrating and you pick it up. The ranch manager is crying on the other end.

“It came out of nowhere, nowhere,” she says.

“Nowhere?” you repeat. 

“It was out of my control,” she sobs. “They wanted him gone. He should still be alive,” she gasps, waiting for you to answer.

You hesitate, sucking in your breath.

“But you pulled the trigger,” you say finally and hang up, hands shaking.

You pull over on the side of the road and step out into the snow. Reaching for your knife, you thumb the blade. A sharp pain pulses hot and you draw your thumb back from the metal. A red line erupts from the skin, and you plunge your thumb into the snow. The snow turns pink around it and pushing down, you feel a form underneath your hand. You wipe the snow away and it is her, the deer.

“She’s still alive,” you say.

But it’s only your blood that’s warm. Her eyes, closed, don’t look back at you.

Over your shoulder, the roads look clear, but the storm is coming again. Black asphalt shines wet under low slung clouds. The sky hinges, heavy gray, as you swing the truck door open and climb back in.

Carmen Taylor is a fiction writer, horsewoman, and educator. She was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There, in North Cheyenne Cañon, she developed her love for reading and observing the life of the mountains. She now lives on a small farm in Chimayó, New Mexico and has worked on farms and ranches in northern New Mexico since 2017. She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Urban and Rural Ecology and her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Published August 15 2022