The God of Animals
Chapter Four, pages 86—88

The sky was black as ink, the stars flickering by the thousands. "People from the East might act like their way of life is so much better than ours," my father said. "But I'll tell you what, they never see a sky like this."

I sat beside him in the water and tried to think if we knew any people from the East.

"It's one of the only things your mother ever liked about the desert," he said, his hands moving beneath the water, sending soft ripples lapping up against the metal edge.

I held my breath. My father never talked about my mother. Not ever. "What is?" I whispered.

"The sky," he said. "She grew up in the Midwest, you know?" In the darkness, I nodded, dipping my chin into the water. Nona had told me how our mother first came out to the barn, back when the house used to belong to my grandparents, and my grandfather gave riding lessons on the weekends. This was all I knew of my parents' history, that my mother had taken lessons from my grandfather, then married his son. When my parents got married, my grandparents retired, leaving the desert, the house, the barn, and all the horses for my parents to build their new life on.

My knee was almost touching my father's elbow beneath the water, but his eyes were on the sky and I made myself rigid, afraid that even the movement of air through my lungs might remind him where we were, might break whatever spell he seemed to be under and silence him completely. I felt suddenly light inside my skin, weightless, and my eyes closed, trying to locate myself. Maybe I was still upstairs in my sister's closet, still listening to the waves of Mr. Delmar's breath. This was all a dream. My body, my breath, my entire life, it was all just pretend.

In the distance, I could hear the hum of barn lights, the creaking choir of crickets in the pasture beyond us. "She was such an oddball when she moved here," my father said, his voice sleepy, his eyes still watching the sky above him. "This strange little flower. She was always talking about how the desert dried her skin and the air made her hair brittle." He laughed out loud and I took a slow, careful swallow of air, holding it inside my chest.

"Once," he said, "I told her to put mayonnaise on her hair, said that it was what we did for the horses to keep their tails shiny. And she did it! Smeared it all over her head. She washed and washed, but it wouldn't come out. For days, her hair looked all wet and greasy — this big, oily mess. She smelled like a salad rotting in the sun. I would sniff the air around her and say, 'What's that smell?' And she would hit me and scream, 'I hate you, Joe Winston!'"

My father's body was shaking with laughter, sending the water across the bin in even rolls that splashed up onto my neck. "God," he said to the stars. "What a funny kid."

I waited for him to go on, to say more about her, about who they had been when they used to belong together. But the only sound came from the ripples of water that his hands made as he moved them beneath the surface.

I lowered my shoulders into the water, dropping my arms until they sank beneath the dark surface of waves. The water lapped across the palms of my hands, curling my fingers with pain. This was real.

In the black sky, I followed the imperfect pattern of stars, trying to trace their endless trail with my eyes. Behind us, in the arena, I could hear the thumping of Darling's hooves as she broke into a trot and moved, invisible, through the darkness. I wanted to ask my father what we were going to do with her, how he would ever find the time to train her, where we would keep her when we had to use the arena. But then I thought of the look that had crossed his face when he watched her. She was still full of promise, still perfect in her mystery. For this one day, he could look at her like she might be the answer to all his prayers, the end of every worry. Once, he had looked at Sheila Altman that way, and before her, my sister. There must have been a time, back before I had knowledge or language or memory, when he had looked at me that way too.

Tomorrow, the sun would rise and deaden the land beneath its indifference. My father would remember the hay shortage, the empty white envelopes in their little drawer, the air conditioner. Tomorrow, the new mare would kick or bite or break a bone and prove that she was no different from any pretty new horse that had come before her. Tomorrow, in the honest truth of daylight, our own private swimming pool would be only what it was: a rusty metal bucket made for watering livestock.

Upstairs in my sister's closet, I had closed my eyes and seen a place I hadn't known existed. There was no anger, no loneliness, no jagged icy fear gnawing at the wires of my body. For that one moment, the noise inside my head had turned still and silent. If hell was real and true and all around us, then heaven was too. And so I said nothing. I let my father's moment last. I let it go on until it ended.