Jimmy

Jim sat in his hand-carved chair and looked Elizabeth dead in the center of her two wide, blue eyes and bellowed cruelly, with the fatigue of a man at the end of his rope:

“You wanted the girl so badly, deal with her yourself!”

Lizzy, then hardly more than a girl herself, raised her child up with trembling arms from her high-chair and wiped the orange remnants of breakfast from her chin and hands, and let her own tears fall to the floor, lips choking around her sobs as she wondered how to be a mother on her own. She gathered the bits and bobs of a half lived life: a cracked pacifier, a stained blanket, a clear plastic bottle with a broken cap, and strapped the baby into the stroller they kept by the door. She didn’t look at him then, but she felt his eyes on her own. An apology crept in the way his feet scuffed the unpolished floor. But this time, she’d really leave. Whether or not she’d be back, she didn’t know. Before leaving, she turned back once and her last glance was bitter, sharp, and final. She threw it not at his eyes but to the floor, where it landed like a stone at Jimmy’s boot-clad feet. And just like that, like he’d always said he wanted, Jim was alone.

The first thing he did after watching her taillights disappear down the canyon was walk to the barn.

To the left of the door were canvases, thick with months of paint that’d frozen mid-drip, left to warp in the air. Beside it, several brushes lie atop a large wooden easel, crusted with layers of pigment. Along the far wall are items he’d collected from the old trading post he used to ride his Bultaco to, up by Yosemite. Feathers, charms, beads, bits of braided rope. The detritus of old wrung-out stories and half-formed projects.

For the next eight years, he saw his daughter only on Thursdays and only those he could be bothered to remember. It was on one of those Thursdays in early spring that a stallion Jimmy won in a bet arrived at the ranch. The young stallion was thick-necked and agitated, tugging at the reins as it was pulled out of a truck by two young men. It was beautiful, with a dark brown, almost black coat that reflected the sunlight. He brought Ash outside to wash.

The men helped Jimmy wrestle the wild, screaming thing to the stables, tugging at it by two thick ropes wound round its neck. The horse had a long white stripe between its eyes. Jimmy named him Flint.

For the rest of the afternoon, Ash watched her father sit in the barn next to the locked door that contained the seemingly endlessly frightened stallion. For hours, the horses’ wining and bucking seemed to only grow in intensity. Her father lit a cigarette before grabbing the lead rope from its hook at the far wall, threw his daughter a zealous wink, and then unlatched the door, stepping aside to enter the horse’s stall.

“Shhh… gotcha boy! Ain’t nowhere to go for you now. Out ya go! Out!”

Ashley pressed herself against the walls of the stables and made herself small. She might’ve been as frightened as the horse, then. Her father tugged the noisy thing out by its neck and out towards an enclosure he used for training.

Ashley latched the gate behind the horse once they reached the centre, took three steps back, and watched as her father spat out his cigarette and stomped it out with his boot, clicking his tongue to his teeth.

He opened a small folded paper from his pocket, pulled out a small strip of blotter, and sat it on his tongue with a dramatic, feminine flourish. Then, shoving his dirt-crusted, paint-caked fingers between the young stallion’s lips, he slid two tabs behind its yellow teeth.

“Watch this,” he said without looking.

And in a hand-hammered rotting wooden fenced enclosure, with dry dirt cracking off the earth and spiraling up in gusts, the two creatures wrestled each other. She didn’t understand what she was watching, only that as the sun was lowering on the canyon, her dad was riding on the bucking creatures back by its mane, and her mother would drive up soon to take her home.

She knew it wouldn’t matter to remind him, so she left without a word.

And Jimmy didn’t hear the crunch of tires on gravel, didn’t register the door swinging open, then shut. Didn’t hear the car pulling away, taking his daughter back down the long road.