Horse Pucky

I should’ve known better.

I mean, my father had turned it into a proverb. “Don’t trust a horse breeder with a Western name.”

Oh sure, Nathan Dixon looked and sounded like the real thing. The right number of arms. The right lingo. An accent that was Orbital, not Southern. One-hundred-ten percent authentic.

By the time he started using words like “rodeo” and “ranch,” I was too far gone to pay attention. I was going to buy.

So it was that I blew my whole savings on a horse that was so bad at being amphibious, I had to keep them in a bathtub all day round. Even when I was cleaning their spines.

Almost every hour off-shift from the 7-11 was spent tending the poor thing.

Nathan Dixon wasn’t returning my calls. Eventually, the number was disconnected, and I couldn’t even leave a voicemail.

Weeks later, when there was a knock on my door, I jumped like someone had goosed me. I’d almost nodded off during a spine cleanse.

The horse barely stirred, wheezing, while the knock repeated itself. Five knocks, then two. Five knocks, then two.

Who knocks anymore? Didn’t they have a smartphone? I’m not particularly privacy-pilled, nor was I back then, so my public number was right outside my apartment door. Right over the doorbell.

“Coming!” I yelled at the door.

I tried to finish the spine-cleanse before I left the backroom; the horse thrashed forcibly and spat in my face. Twice.

I sighed. I hadn’t even named the wretch yet, but I had learned their moods. After humming at them for a couple of minutes, they settled down and I finally went to answer the door.

I should have known better.

I should have looked through the peephole or at least at the doorcam. I was just so glad the person had been patient enough not to knock again that I simply opened the door.

The woman was in her fifties, with old-school pop-punk purple hair, second-wave emo jeans and black collared shirt.

And a shiv. Just a sharpened piece of scrap, with duct tape around one end for a handle. She pushed it into my gut, almost cutting through my T-shirt.

There was no preamble. “You got a horse in here?”

I considered lying, but blurted: “Yeah yeah! I got one!”

“Is it this one?” she said, holding up a printout in her left hand, the one without the shiv.

It was an image of a horse labeled “Tornado Jester” in a Garamond font. It was my horse, right down to the spine pattern.

I didn’t even have to say anything. She took one look at my face and she smiled.

Too many teeth.

“The owner wants it back,” she said. “Well, unless I have a reason to keep this quiet.”

I got it. She was shaking me down. At that point in my life, I’d never been so much as mugged, but it wasn’t like she was being subtle.

“What do you want?” I asked. “I spent all my money on that horse.”

Back in the bathroom, Tornado Jester started to cough and sputter.

The woman laughed. “Who’d you buy it from? That’s a good start.”

I was never more grateful to throw someone under the bus in my life.

“Nathan Dixon,” I said. Then I gave her his number, warning her it was disconnected, and used my phone to show her the ad where I’d found him.

She shook her head. “Yeah, between you and me, the owner’s getting more on insurance than he would have actually earned on that piece-of-shit horse.”

Her sudden chumminess didn’t pair well with the shiv that hadn’t left my gut.

“So you keep it,” she added. “So long as your little tip works out, we’re square.”

I wasn’t particularly relieved at being an indirect accessory to a sort of insurance fraud, not to mention Nathan Dixon’s theft or horse fencing or whatever, but the shiv brooked no argument.

Instead I breathed: “Thank you.”

She leaned close, and for a stupid, giddy second, I thought she was going to kiss me.

But she hissed: “You’re a piece of work.”

And she stepped off and out and closed the door in the same smooth motion, so fast that I still felt like she had the shiv in my gut.

I looked down, and discovered that the shiv had left a mark. She’d cut through my shirt and cut me, just a little.

A minute later, back in the bathroom, Tornado Jester screamed at me from the tub while I stood at the sink and cleaned out the wound, again and again, slathering on neomycin before putting something like three band-aids on it.

Once that was done and overdone, the first thing I did was give the horse a new name. A few minutes with my phone and the Internet, and Tornado Jester was now “Personal Jesus.”

I felt a lot better. Nathan Dixon had done at least one thing right, in that if the horse was registered, it wasn’t in the local region, so no red flag on the registration site.

It also meant that the rumors of the time were true, and different registration regions still used courier-delivered pieces of paper to exchange information. I was safe for at least another year, probably two.

After that day, there was a routine for my days off from the 7-11.

First, I’d wake up to the dulcet 80-decibel sound of Personal Jesus’s twittering.

I’d feed them, and spend five minutes wishing I was dead. That was the same every day, even days I didn’t have off from the 7-11.

But then, to hype myself up, I’d watch the online video of last year’s regional horse pageant.

It was on the second viewing that I noticed none other than Nathan Dixon, under the name Nelson Brown, trying to win with an undermodded old school horse, complete with hooves, only four eyes, and an ultraviolet undermane. He came in dead last, and I got in the habit of laughing every time.

Fortified, I’d spend the next two or three hours trying to drag Personal Jesus out of the tub. They’d spasm and barely breathe, but never died.

Then, with the help of cheap horse treats and creative profanity, I’d try to run the horse through a routine or two.

That would usually take a solid nine or ten hours, after which both of us were so exhausted that it took everything I had to drag Personal Jesus back into the tub, splash some hot water on their spines, and feed them.

Sometimes I fell asleep in the bathroom, and the horse was too exhausted to mind.

I’d like to say that I had a lot more confidence by the time the pageant rolled around. That would have been a toe-curling lie.

Even then, I should have known better.

When the day came and we were all lined up backstage, I could see most of the other contestants were rich people who didn’t need the money that winning the pageant would represent. I recognized two people, though.

One was the woman with the shiv, though she’d swapped the shiv for a high-end purebred horse, dripping salt water and glowing with health. Her name tag said she was Kimberly Barbosa, and the horse was Midnight Oatmeal.

The second was Nathan Dixon, or Nelson Brown, or as the name tag said this time, Kenner Drumpf. He had another old school horse, almost identical to the one from the video, except with bright pink bristles and a surprisingly powerful aura of health. Its name was Retired Dixiecrat.

Let’s cut to the chase. I didn’t win. I didn’t get close enough to Kimberly or Nathan / Nelson / Kenner to talk to either of them. No struggle plus victory, and no personal catharsis.

Sure, Personal Jesus did okay in the motocross and mediocre in the talent competition. They didn’t drop any of those juggling knives, even if we’d originally practiced with steak knives! But they failed at the aggression test, which meant I still had my left arm when it was all said and done.

Dixon / Brown / Drumpf got his left arm chomped off, but that was the only test that his throwback succeeded at. It must have cost him a lot to get that arm regrown just to get it eaten yet again, but he seemed happy.

He was even happier than the runner up, some blond dude I hadn’t even noticed before, and happier than Kimberly Barbosa, formerly the mystery woman with the shiv, who didn’t change her expression at all when she and Midnight Oatmeal won first place.

But we got fifth place and Personal Jesus had won a special prize for their placid temperament, which gave me just enough money to try again next year, with a horse that I got straight from a retail store, certified not-stolen.

I really should have known better by that point. That’s a whole other story, though. Let’s just say two years later, I’d lost an eye and both my arms to the horse industry.

I should’ve known better.