Summer Off

Short Story excerpt from Death & the Dream by J.J.Brown

It’s been a hot, dry summer in Horseman’s Valley and too deathly quiet for a ten-year-old child. Sandy’s up visiting from the City with nothing much to do. She invents her own games waiting for her mother to come and take her back home to Brooklyn.

The girl sneaks out the door. She races across a four-foot high wall of cement blocks that stand abandoned behind the house. She’s staying at Auntie’s, the dilapidated place Auntie inherited and her great grandfather had built way back when. Nestled at the base of the valley, the two-story wooden structure is set back a bit from a narrow paved road. Nearly invisible unless you’re looking for it.

Like a secret, Sandy thinks.

She stops midway across the wall, surveys the overgrown backyard below, kicks off her worn tan moccasins and wriggles out of her red T-shirt. Bare-chested. 

Forbidden for a girl out here, she knows. 

She throws her top toward the weeds, brittle-brown burdock stalks and pointy thistle tops that seem to burst with wispy purple flowers and white fluff. The plants are as tall as she is, if she’d been at ground level. But she’s not.

Her shirt lands right beside her aunt. 

A muscle-bound, working woman of about forty in a white tank top, black jeans, heavy gloves and leather boots, Auntie is dripping with sweat. She digs a ditch with an enormous steel shovel, working her way along the cement block wall. 

She hears the crackle of dry stems snapping when the shirt hits. Flips her short black hair out of her eyes. 

“Sandy,” she yells, “put your shirt back on! What’s wrong with you? You crazy?”

The girl openly enjoys irritating her mother’s older sister, Auntie. It’s a way to pass the time. She reaches down and grabs Auntie’s thick denim jacket from where it lay beside the wall. 

It’s a game we play together, she imagines.

“Oh no you don’t,” Auntie warns.

Sandy pulls the jacket on to cover her bare chest and jumps down off the wall. She ducks under the wooden fence that delineates the border of the family plot from their neighbor’s property, and races away across Horseman’s field. 

Off-limits there, she knows. Auntie’s sure not to follow.

“I’ll tell your mother, damn it!” Auntie calls out using her biggest voice, though she knows the girl won’t care.  “Strange kid,” she mutters and goes back to digging. Probably her sister’s fault, she expects. But who knows? Might have been the father’s genes. Or the bad combination of the two of them together. Or neither. Simply neglect; that could have done it.

The trough Auntie digs will be useful as a drainage ditch, if she ever manages to get her garage built. The cement wall was meant to be the building’s foundation when the project began some three years back. It was one she half-expected to finish alone even then. Not that remembering this now made things any easier.

Disembodied car parts litter the property. She’s collected them steadily over the years, and so it’s become a kind of junkyard. “Unsightly,” she’s been told by the men who gather to drink coffee at the local gas station mornings. “An eyesore.” She’d rather get her stuff into a workspace resembling a somewhat normal repair shop. Slow the gossip. She knows she’s a thorn in their sides in all kinds of ways. Single, female, but with property and skills. 

Sandy runs by two dark brown mares where they graze peacefully, and runs past their sleepy-looking red barn. Her bare feet ache from the jabs of rocks and sharp stubble of recently cut big weeds. She keeps going anyway until she’s winded, then stops and bends over; holding her knees to catch her breath. 

Here is the dead center of Horseman’s carefully tended field. The wide, flat expanse serves as a trotters’ practice course for the old man’s horses, summers. And right here in the middle of it is a stand of five tall cedar trees. The perfect hiding place. 

She crouches down and crawls beneath the thin lower branches onto a patch of evergreen needles. So soft. The space within is not much bigger than she is. She tries to stay completely still. Auntie will never be able to get through the scratchy branches to this enchanting, private sanctuary. Sandy is sure of it. A real secret. 

She will wait for Horseman to come. Spying on him is another way to pass the time until she can go home. She’d much rather play with her little friend Marco in the City. But what can you do? 

It’s a game I play alone, she knows.

In this magically secluded place, light filters in shards through densely packed branches. A lifeless dance of yellow-white lines cuts through the shade. Acrobatic spiders spin their webs crisscrossing stones covered with blue-green moss. The spongy floor beneath the cedars is carpeted with layers of short needles from past seasons. 

The girl collects newer pliable needles into bundles and uses them to build fragile miniature sheds. Arranges pale blue cedar berries inside. Playing house. 

Horseman comes. Sandy hears his boots crunch through grass patches along the open field. Sounds like he’s brought one of his horses. Maybe the stallion who some days pulls a creaking trotter’s buggy, though she doesn’t hear one today. 

Sandy sees the man’s tall shadow stop beside her circle of trees. Watches him take a silver flask out of his jacket pocket. Hears him drink. And then cough. 

Hide from Horseman. Hide and no seek.

She shifts away from the light filtering through the branches. Scoots deeper into the shadows of her cave. 

Scruffy, bristly, Horseman reeks of tobacco. He also carries the faintly pleasant scent of starch-pressed shirts, bay leaves and lime around with him. He smells like she imagines a man should, though she’s never smelled a grown one up close, on account of her mother being nearly allergic to men of any variety. 

Horseman’s hair is white and evenly short all over, as if he’d recently shaved his head. Sandy’s not sure how he manages that, but he always looks the same. His skin is deeply tanned and covered with fine, dry wrinkles. 

He pats his horse’s lovely, shining shoulder ever so gently. 

“Oh, Goddamn it, Star,” Horseman says and coughs long and loud. 

The man uses a soft, slow voice whenever he talks to his animals, she’s noticed. She listens closely hoping for news of Brooklyn. She longs for it. Not television news, real news. Something with meaning.

She tries not to make a sound, not even when she breathes. Pulls her knees up close to her chin.

“What’d ya say, old buddy, if I tol’ ya a story? Ya won’t believe it, that I’m sure. Here goes, anyways. In the City we walk down un’er groun’. We go down, down inta tunnels, crammed in back-ta-back like ol’ dead timber logs. What’d ya say ta that?” 

Horseman coughs again more violently.

Star’s coat is solid black, except for the white star-shaped mark on his forehead for which he’s named. The long, silky hairs of his mane and tail are always perfectly brushed. He used to be a prize-winning trotter; now he’s out to stud. The two mares Horseman keeps do seem to like the stallion. 

He is cared for, Sandy knows. He is loved, she imagines.

“Right down inna tunnels un’er the groun’,” Horseman goes on, his voice low and husky. 

Her mother’s told her the smokes – years of hand-rolled cigarettes without filters – will give the old man cancer one day. It’ll kill him.

Star turns his regal head away from the man and shakes it up and down. 

Stomps his big strong front hooves. 

Pounds the ground.

“No, nonna the horses go down in the tunnels. No animals at all, na for the most part. Just the people.” Horseman pats Star’s neck and looks up at the hills surrounding his field. “Though they do get a few of  ‘em ta go roun’ the park. Horses. Older ones. For tourists, mostly. They shouldn’t, ya know. Pavement’s na good for the hooves. No, no, no sir. Not at all.”

He understands animals’ talk. And he knows the horse things. 

Her mother’s told Sandy how their neighbor made the field into a racetrack of sorts. All by himself. And one summer Sandy had actually seen him run his trotters around the loop with the buggy. Fast, loud, exciting.

“Getting the horses ready for the Saratoga races Upstate,” Auntie had said. She bragged Star had won some of those races. The ones Sandy had not ever been allowed to go see, on account of the doping and gambling. 

More forbidden things.

“Every day, we ride the un’er groun’ train.” Horseman coughs again, over and over. After a time he breathes easier and continues. “Somma us damn fools ride for, oh, up ta an hour. Now. Can ya believe that? Goes in a track, runs in a circle. Just like yers! But we go down un’er ta get ta work. Get out the otha side a the tunnel, up out’a the groun’. No winnin’ ‘bout it.” 

Horseman kicks the packed dirt where Star had stomped. Spits languidly on it. 

“Goddamn fools we all are,” he muses and pauses. 

“The City. Ya know it’d take three days for me ta get there from here, walkin’? Probably take ya two. One, maybe. Not that ya’d wanna. Hell, even I don’t wanna.”

Takes three days to get home, walking, Sandy repeats the valuable information to herself. Three days.

She watches tobacco-stained man-spittle fall and glisten amber in the sun’s rays. Sees Horseman look up at the hills, over toward the thick forest of pine beside them. She imagines he loves this valley. And he could be her grandfather if they ever spoke. But they don’t speak.

He laughs with a gentle wheeze. 

“Kinda demented, huh?” he asks his horse.     

 Star snorts. 

Horse spit hangs from Star’s chin and drips down to the dust at his hooves. 

The animal is so perfectly groomed, his black hair glistens. His skin shivers in the sunlight as he swats his long black tail across his flanks to dislodge biting flies. The girl admires him.

She could probably ride Star, she expects, if they would teach her how. But they don’t teach her to ride. Or much of anything else, really.

Horseman takes out a lumpy, hand-rolled cigarette from an intricately engraved silver case. The metal catches the sun and glimmers in Sandy’s eyes. He strikes a match, lights the cigarette and throws the used matchbook into the cedar stand. It lands right at Sandy’s bare toes. She pulls her feet away reflexively. 

Smoke from his special tobacco curls around the tree branches, leaving behind a sweet and pungent wake as the old man leads Star gently back toward the red barn. 

Sandy stares down at the half-open matchbook. She carefully picks it up and looks inside. Matches remain. Lots of them. She closes the cover and pushes the little square of it down inside Auntie’s denim jacket’s front breast pocket. The jacket chafes, harsh against her bare skin. 

Don’t play with matches.

She plays with the pine needles at her feet instead. Tears down spider webs using packs of dry brown needles, and plasters them over a bleeding spot on the bottom of her foot. Pokes a papery, abandoned wasp nest with green pine needles. She’s waiting until Horseman and Star can no longer be heard.

She digs the matchbook out of the jacket pocket. Opens it, strikes a match and watches it burn. The beauty of it mesmerizes her. The initial burst, then the way the colors change and merge. When the heat reaches her fingers the scent of burnt skin is sharp. She tosses the first flaming match through the cedar branches into the dry field. She strikes another and another, launching them one by one through the tree twigs. 

The matches finished, Sandy buries the empty matchbook deep inside the jacket’s chest pocket.

She emerges crawling on all fours out of the tree stand. 

The field smolders in front of her. Her eyes smart and tear up from the smoke. Where dry grass has caught fire in a dozen tufts surrounding the cedars looks as interesting to her as each match did separately — white, blue, yellow, red and smoky. Patches are already burned to the ground. Black and white ash drifts along in bare spots. 

The wind carries the fire away. Flames race along the field aiming for the forest like a live thing. A sudden gale transforms the fascinating into the terrifying as the base of Horseman’s Valley begins to fill with smoke. 

Sandy backs away from the fire. She tears out toward her aunt’s house ahead of the blaze.

Auntie is on the phone when Sandy pushes her way inside the house. 

A wet towel around her shoulders, fresh from the shower, she stands at the table and fusses arranging cut flowers in a vase half full of water. Her back’s toward Sandy. 

The girl leaves the door open, waits and listens, panting silently. 

“No, we don’t have a car,” Auntie says flatly.

“Right, OK, but still no. I mean, we don’t have another car,” Auntie continues. “Not a working one.”

“Nope,” she says, tapping the vase of flowers on the table repeatedly. Pauses. 

“Why, you don’t like it? What do you mean? No one likes the subway, but it’s right there. And cheap. What about the bus?” She listens motionless for a long time.

“Uh-uh. No way. Forget about it. I’m not giving you a car. Some days I question whether we’re even related. Look, I’ll take care of Sandy for another week but no way I’m giving you a car. Damn it,” she shakes her head angrily.  “Call me next week. Let me know how you’re doing then, things may change for you.” 

She looks over her shoulder, surprised to see the girl is watching her. 

“I’ll call you back,” Auntie ends the conversation abruptly. Quietly lays her phone on the table.

Sandy steps between her aunt and the phone, thinking, That call should have been for me. 

The girl puts her hands on her hips. At ten, she reaches Auntie’s shoulders in height.

“She doesn’t like the subway,” Sandy says. Defiant and out of breath.

Auntie fakes a smile, “Who?” Then she tips her head to the side. “OK. No? Why not?”

“Because,” Sandy crosses her arms over her chest, “she likes Horseman’s Star, that’s why. And she’s coming right back here to ride the horses.”

“You know that was your Mom on the phone, right? She’s…what’s that smell?” Auntie asks, distracted.

Sandy stares her down.

“You give back my jacket!” Auntie is suddenly irate, her hands shaking. She’s not sure why.

The girl  glares steadily back. 

Keeping it. Taking this one thing from her, she promises herself. 

She digs the empty matchbook out of the jacket pocket. Throws the tiny, guilty, papery square thing at Auntie. Turns, and bolts back out the open door.

“What the hell were you doing with matches?” Auntie screams after her, even knowing she’ll get no answer. 

Her barefoot niece left a blood spot on the floor, but the girl is already out of earshot.

Sandy runs toward the top of the hill flanking Horseman’s Valley to the South. Toward the City, and home.

Three days, the old man had said. He knows about those things.

Smoke drifts through the open door and into the house she leaves behind.

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