Horse Bite

By Dave O'Leary

Horse Bite is the story of Dave and his efforts to find a bit of permanence in the balance of the things we create and the things we do to sustain ourselves. His journey jumps between morning pit stops in the ubiquitous coffee shops of Seattle and the evenings of beers and bartenders and music clubs where some bedrooms are longed for, some found. Everything slips away, though, until he meets elusive Yvonne who brings the realization from past and present that things "do end ... so we write books and songs and poems. It is the only way to make love eternal." At its core, Dave's tale is one of monster G chords, poetry, booze, goodbyes, and the chance at that which matters most of all, the heart of a woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Leung
• Release date: Dec 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781937634025

Book preview

Chapter 1

June 28, 2009 2:00 P.M.

It is a simple collection of bones.

They are fossilized and arranged just so to give the recognizable shape of a human skeleton, or more accurately a hominid, Australopithecus Afarensis, Lucy, over 3 million years old and discovered one day in Ethiopia in 1974 as her elbow bone was protruding from the earth as if to say, Hey, I'm over here. She was found thus, dug up, preserved, and now thirty-five years later she's worked her way over here to the States where she's on display at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle.

One can easily skip the awe and say it's just a few bones, very old bones, yes, but still, only bones, that they look like plastic bits of a model spread out on the floor with some pieces missing, eaten by the dog perhaps, or stepped on and broken and tossed about, or lost behind the sofa or the bed. But they are not model pieces. They are Lucy, 3.2 million years later of her, from the ordinary Ethiopian hill to a Sunday afternoon in Seattle. It's a miracle that such a fragile thing still exists after the ages, that such bones exist there in that glass case with enough completeness to be unmistakable even to the untrained eye.

She died of causes unknown all those years ago and fell to the earth. Perhaps it had rained, or perhaps she slipped into a hollow that not long after filled with water or mud, or somehow was lain intentionally by those in her group or tribe in a manner that by chance and coincidence protected so much of her for so long a time. And thus after all the millennia of shifting sands and soil, layers and strata pushing up and down and sideways, and rains and wars and civilizations, there came that day when her elbow was sticking up out of the earth as if using it to nudge someone over, Hey, quit your crowding. And on that day of her nudging, there was an anthropologist walking by who, as such things happen, looked over for no reason just at the moment when he would have seen the elbow, when it would have been unmistakable to the trained eye, Hey, I think that's an elbow. The rest of us, those untrained eyes, would have seen a stick, a hill, a sunset, a patch of grass.

But it was an elbow. It was Lucy. And there she is now, well, what's left of her anyway, which given her age is quite a bit, enough for the imagination to give rise to scenes of Lucy strolling the country side, plucking fruit from a tree, a low branch given her height, and sitting in the shade to enjoy the eating of it while watching the sun settle down behind the hills in the distance. She tapped, I imagine, a rhythm with her right hand fingers on her right thigh, just above the knee, ate with her left hand as the sun sank away. Perhaps she died while eating that fruit, say a mango or a banana, tapping that rhythm, and fell back there by the tree. The rain set in. Her head tilted sideways to the right, eyes closed. The soil loosened, and she slid down the hill to be covered for eons. Until one day when she nudged the earth with her elbow, Hey, let me up.

Evelyn said that to me once, back in the last days of my time in Columbus, Ohio, spring 1998. I'd first learned about Lucy in college a few years earlier. It was my last quarter at Ohio State, and I needed another science credit to graduate so I signed up for Anthropology 101. It was a good course, piqued the curiosity, got me thinking about first women, the first woman I slept with, the first woman I lived with, the first woman who loved me, the first woman ever. And then three years later, I mentioned Lucy to Evelyn, the sandy blond coffee shop co-owner, my boss, who had majored in Anthropology. It was an in. I told her of a story I was writing about a man who meets the first woman who matters who of course is named Lucy. She liked the idea. We developed a friendship that hinted at more and then went for it even though she was married. We spent time in the back of the coffee shop together talking at first of Lucy and my story, of Mrs. Dalloway which I'd had in my possession when we first shook hands and said our hellos. That lead to talk of orgasms and the search for their description in literary terms. We spoke of evolution, of our common interests in music, Pearl Jam's Yield in particular. She put that on once at a party as we ate pineapple and smoked marijuana. We passed the joints and turned up the music, went through that CD three times.

The pineapple ran out somewhere during the second play of the CD so I picked up the acoustic guitar from behind the lamp in the corner and played along with the bass lines. Evelyn and a guy in a Cincinnati Reds cap tapped the rhythms on the coffee/pineapple/marijuana table as a few others danced. One guy passed out on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, pants down around his ankles. Someone took photos of him of course, but we left him there because the rusty strings of the acoustic mixed with the pineapple residue on my fingers, and the sounds were good. And though the pineapple was gone, the smoke and the music and the rhythm tapping took hours to settle. After the party wound down, I slept on the couch alone, at whose house I do not these days remember, and the music stuck in my dreams with images of Evelyn sucking on a slice of pineapple and taking a hit.

We stayed late in the coffee shop one evening. It closed every day at 3:00 P.M. so after we cleaned up we sat in the back drinking a couple of beers with the other owner and her boyfriend. Then we moved to the front window where there were two love seats. We had Rolling Rocks with limes which went well with her mango green eyes, and we talked and joked and held hands. The other owner and her man left so we could be alone. Before leaving, the boyfriend had said, By the time we come back, you should have something to tell. Evelyn was in the bathroom and hadn't heard, didn't know they left to give us a moment, to give me time to seal the deal. She came back with two healthy shots of tequila, Cuervo, and two opened beers each with a lime sticking out the top. Have another? We did the shots straight and chased with the beers, laughing as each of us dribbled liquid down our chin. We sat back down, faced each other, sipped again.

Are you really going to do it? she asked.

Yes. We sipped again.

I'm proud of you. We clinked bottles.

And I you, I said. You have your own little trip planned too. We settled a little closer. You'll send some poems, right? I leaned in and kissed her once, leaned back and had a sip. We wanted each other, but the idea of her marriage was still in the way so we drank and held hands and just kissed a little and drank and drank the beers and the shots and kept getting closer and closer on the love seat as the empty bottles accumulated on the floor. She was eventually laying with her head on my lap giving rise to very sexual thoughts in my head, but we talked only of my leaving as I stroked her hair and she my knee. How long will it take you? she asked.

Oh, about five to seven days. We both sipped again.

I'll miss you.

The air hung silent with those words. They swirled in my brain.

I'll miss you.

It was as close to a declaration of love as we could get.

And I you.

She returned to tracing the shape of my knee, and I wanted nothing more than to sit and let her do so, but with all the beer consumed, my bladder was calling. I stood up to go to the bathroom. Evelyn looked up at me, smiled, and closed her eyes. We touched hands briefly before I walked to the back of the shop. In the bathroom, I decided that when I went back to her I would give it a try. Marriage in the way or not, I would do it. When I got back though, she was still and seemingly asleep. I touched her hair. She opened her eyes, but before I could fulfill that long awaited desire she leaned up and pushed her head slightly forward, then gave a quick shudder with her shoulders, and then another. I thought perhaps she was going to lean in and kiss me, but she rather leaned to her left, back over the corner of the sofa and threw up in a trash can, a little white plastic thing there for customer convenience. When the sounds subsided, she leaned back full length on the love seat with her feet hanging off the end, and her eyes closed. I wasn't sure if she'd passed out so I watched her for a little while until the smell of vomit hit me. I blamed the trashcan. With all the force in my being, I blamed the trashcan. I looked at it with anger, and then Evelyn leaned into me with her elbow, softly but with much effort, mango eyes still closed, … Hey … let me up … I think … I'm gonna be … She made for the bathroom with her left hand over her mouth. Damn trash can.

_____

For as old as Lucy is, she looks pretty good. She gives a little inspiration. Perhaps then in some far-off time, my fossilized bones will be in a museum somewhere, and in the language of the day they will say, See this specimen. The interesting thing here is the bent posture with the head down and the position of the hands, left hand extended out, the right hand anchored over the abdomen, clearly indicating that he died while grooving with a musical apparatus known so long ago as an electric bass guitar.

I can only hope the end is so good, to die, to draw that last breath with bass in hand, for such contentment in the moment of expiration for this lifetime, and to hope the millions of years afterward, all the subsequent lives, so kind to me as they have been to Lucy.

_____

A week after the trash can incident, Evelyn and I went to an open mic poetry reading. I read a few, we had a few. We kissed again. No one got sick, but then eight days later, we both left Columbus. I got in the van and drove west to Seattle. She took a solo vacation from her husband. Before going, I saw her off at the airport back in the days when non-passengers could get into the terminal. We didn't say much. She'd already said it, I'll miss you, and I'd already promised to write and send the finished poems and stories to her. I watched her show her boarding pass and walk down the gangway, turn for one last look. She gave a quick wave and then just stared. We both did for a moment. I breathed three times in and out and imagined she did the same, and then she turned and was soon out of my sight and life.

I walked up to the window by the gate and watched the plane for a good thirty minutes without seeing her in any of the little windows there in the fuselage until it backed slowly away from the terminal taking some piece of unknown size from my chest and brain with it. I turned then myself and left and with a mixture of sadness and resolve, I hit I-70 west with Yield cranked. It was a gray St. Patrick's Day in 1998, and I knew it would rain both in and out of my van.

_____

And this week, I'm here to see Lucy not without a little excitement for the opportunity to look, to observe, to contemplate and remember my talking to Evelyn about the story that never got finished and the relationship that was not consummated. And yes, it is difficult to imagine. All those years. Where does such time go? How often has the sun set in that span of time? How many rhythms have been tapped on how many thighs just above the knee, or on tables? What does such time do to the hair, the eyes, the bones, the music within? Years of my own life go by, and I can hardly remember what it was like to live back there, in the Midwest, in Ohio where Evelyn once lived, where she may still, where, I imagine, she's still tapping rhythms on tables with tropical fruit and some green. A mere eleven years, but there's nothing mere about it, indeed another life. 3.2 million? It staggers the mind. Even eleven, just eleven short years, just one over a decade, seems a different lifetime, a bygone age.

And in the years since the trash can episode – damn trash can – I still wonder at times what Evelyn might be up to, if she still has that sandy blond hair hanging down her back like the first spark of a match, or sometimes down front around her right shoulder, never the left, the mango eyes bright with the knowledge of evolution. Eyes that bit her lower lip as she scrubbed counter tops and talked about drinking beer after hours in the shop, eyes that sometimes widened suddenly while listening to poetry and that closed while drinking double shots of tequila, eyes that remained closed after vomiting. I got to know those eyes, the lips too even though it was all that lay beneath that I really wanted to know, and the lips unfortunately did that vomiting just before all that lay beneath may have been exposed. And yet the eyes and lips were not known well enough. They never can be, and through the ages I still want to know them better, long to know them better as I look upon Lucy's bones there in the glass case and wonder about Evelyn. Where might you be up to? I mutter to myself.

Lucy does not answer. Evelyn does not answer. But the woman standing next to me certainly answers with a look that says she heard my question, a look that replies with the dull surprise of her brown overweight eyes, Dude, it's a box of bones. It's been dead for … for … well, it's been dead for a long time. Those eyes roll, and she moves left with her own body, down toward Lucy's feet, or where the feet should be. And she is right of course, it is nothing now but a box of bones, the flesh that surrounded them so long gone, and yet I have them both, Lucy and Evelyn, on the brain on this Sunday afternoon, both still beautiful after the ages, and both still very much alive.

_____

And so here I am today. I trace my fingers along the bullet point history of Ethiopia. I read about the formation of fossils and the discovery and naming of Lucy, bump into the other people as we look at cultural artifacts and other ancient fossils, the simulated animations of Lucy walking. We look at each other, all of us here on a Sunday afternoon. There is anticipation, even excitement, in the air. We are here to see Lucy, Australopithecus Afarensis, evolutionary celebrity.

And we make our way to the back, past the various fossilized skulls and up the ramp to the back room where they only let in a few at a time. I wait. They let a few people in, and I wait. And more people go in, and I wait. And again. And again. And finally I am in. The room is dark. There is a skeletal replica on one side, a full replica on the other, and there in the middle of the room is a glass case with a black frame. It is lit from within. There are a few people standing around it. They are stiff and tentative, one of them a woman with brown overweight eyes.

I approach the case slowly. Eons and ages spanned to get from there to here. And I remember the story, my in, about the first woman who mattered and how I told Evelyn about it, and that she sometimes asked me while wiping down the counter if I'd made any progress on that story. I circle around and come at the case from the head side, looking top-down at the pieces of skull, a jaw bone, some ribs, a femur. It glows. It is mellowing, humbling. Breathing and conversation are hushed, the heart rate slows, the pulse echoes in a way that indicates no difference between 11 and 3.2 million. Lucy and Evelyn, lives, threads, histories with bitten lower lips and mango eyes and beers with limes, and moments, moments that last ages after words have been said. I'll miss you.

With my right hand, I reach out. The lips are silent, and gently, I tap on the black frame to the rhythm of the mango eyes and the sandy blond hair of ages. It is my in, and I realize, Evelyn, that all these years later, that although I am so close to the Forty you once asked about, I still need an out.

****

Chapter 2

June 29, 2009 5:31 A.M.

My eyes open without the aid of the alarm. I squint at the clock. In the still of the early morning, I consider getting up for a drink of water but just have not the power and instead roll over and shut my eyes, fall asleep.

Again, my eyes open without the aid of the alarm. I don't move or check the clock though. I just want to enjoy the moment of being half awake early on a Sunday morning. My two pillows, always two pillows, one soft on top, one a little firmer underneath, are arranged just perfectly. I am curled under the blanket. No, I do not want to move, ever. I want to lay here just like this, floating and half asleep. I close my eyes and think what a joy it is to sleep in on a Sunday morning. I stay floating for a moment and then begin sinking back into sleep. My breathing slows. I drift the good drift when pillows and blankets and sheets expand and hold aloft the body, when one still conscious realizes Oh, I'm falling asleep, when Sleep lays next to the sleeper and says, Let's just lay a while and enjoy this. She nuzzles in. Sleep is always female of course. I can feel her breasts against my back. She exhales, and I feel that slight dip, the up and down of weightlessness, the realization in the height of the up that Oh, I'm floating. She puts her arm around me, speaks again in a breathy whisper, Let's just lay a while. I nod my head but do not speak. I breathe. Sleep breathes. She matches my pace, and then as she slows I slow. She nuzzles closer, leans in to speak once more in my ear …

I fall back asleep and start to dream. I am speaking to a young blond beauty of a bartender who keeps turning circles and pausing in profile, Do I look good? I respond that she does. She turns again to show me her backside. Her hair swirls about to the right and then settles down her back and she again asks, Do I look good? She does. She refills my Guinness and then turns again and again, hair swirling, the blond curls descending, settling, Do I look good? … Do I look good? She does and she does. It is a good dream. Then she stops turning and looks right at me, leans in half way over the bar. She smiles and begins to speak, Do you …

I wake up again before she can finish the question. Damn! It was K. I frequent her bar, and she visits my dreams from time to time. Fair trade. I close my eyes, open them, then close again. I want just to lay here thinking about her. She did look good. She does look good. I realize I have an erection. Not much use in the morning all alone, but there it is. I leave it be, wondering if I'll fall back asleep before it subsides. Thinking about K as I am though, probably not. I've been a regular fixture at her bar, second seat from the right, usually with a book or a laptop or both, ever since she rescued me one night. I think for a moment. That was in January. I imagine her bending over behind the bar, flashing some cleavage and find that I must roll over on my back as my erection is getting uncomfortable. I open my eyes and look down but being under a blanket all I see is blanket. I know it's down there though, lurking and making its presence felt. It's saying, I'm here. I reach under the covers and adjust it straight but no more. No satisfaction for the thing this morning, not even while thinking of K, though I've done so before.

_____

Didn't I tell you not to bring that laptop in here? He's smiling, trying to be the jovial one, the Comical Guy. He has a pudgy, rectangular face, undersized glasses with wire frames. He's wearing a baseball cap, backwards, navy blue, and a green t-shirt, no logo or writing. He looks at my laptop, then back at me. I look at my laptop, then back at him. He's still smiling.

Have I met this guy before?

You need one of those screens that prevents people next to you from seeing what you're doing. He looks again and smiles at what I have been typing. I'm not pleased so I click the icon to hide the open applications. I'm sitting at the bar on the second chair from the right at a place called Dublin. It's an Irish pub just down the hill from my new apartment, and well, me being Irish and all, I thought to check it out, to bring the laptop and with a Guinness and a coffee write, which these days means a blog, a story, an oddity here and there. On some evenings I pick up the bass and groove on the low B for a bit of luck and chance. Other evenings, it's the guitar, and others, the laptop, typing words rather than fingering riffs and chords. All three create equal measures of joy. In Dublin, there are about fifteen seats at the bar with about half of them occupied, likewise with the number of tables and booths and customers in the rest of the place. There's a clock counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds to St. Patrick's Day. It's showing a little less than two months to go. I chose the second seat from the right when I got here because the bartender was standing right there, almost as if she were waiting for me. She watched me all the way to the seat and was smiling even before I sat down.

Hi. Guinness? She had on a short sleeve black button up shirt that was unbuttoned just enough.

Yes, please, and a black coffee, I set my laptop on the bar in front of me.

Sure. I'm Kathy. She held out her hand. I shook it and thought that I liked this place. I looked down at her hand, I always look at the hand, her warm but slightly moist hand, nails even with the ends of her fingers, no polish, and then back up the arm to the sleeve half way down the bicep, to the shoulder where the curls began, or rather ended, and then back into her eyes.

Dave.

Nice to meet you. She stepped to her left where the taps were and began to fill me a pint. You want a menu or anything?

Tell me about this anything. No, just the beer and coffee'll do for now. She finished pouring the pint and set it in front of me. She followed this with the coffee. Thanks. She was the first bartender not to question my double choice of beverages. I liked that. Most bartenders think I changed my order from beer to coffee or ask if I want one first or if someone will be joining me. Or they give me a look that seems to question my sanity, that wonders if I'm a drunk who's just trying to stay ahead of the game. This Kathy woman, though, did not bat an eye. She did not hesitate to fill the order, and after doing so she stood there in front of me for a moment. I sipped the coffee first and noticed the clock up above the bar was more than a little off. So what's with the clock up there?

Dublin time. Your first time here?

Yeah, I looked around the room and nodded my head a little, It's all right so far, which I had meant as a compliment in the way that sometimes saying I like you can be every bit as meaningful as saying I love you, sometimes more even because it removes the formality of the situation, gives comfort and familiar understanding, because I love you can get old and lose meaning if it's said too frequently, or too soon. It can even place a distance between the speaker and the listener, turn inches into miles, a great divide, a chasm, but I like you never does.

All right? Just all right? All right is a … a .270 batting average, a three out of five star rating from a film critic, take and bake pizza … lasting only five minutes in the sack … she looked around the room as I had done, here … we're … we're a little more than all right. She smiled the whole time she said this and tilted her head a little to her left when she finished. Her left hand was on the bar, her right on her hip. I imagined her singing, I'm a little teapot short and stout, here is my handle, here is my spout … and undressing as she did so. Tell me about this anything.

My apologies. I lifted the pint, gave a nod to her, It is indeed a little more than all right. I drank.

After I set it down, she tapped my pint glass with the nail of her left index finger, Let me know if you need a refill or anything.

Will do. I was still interested in that anything, but settled for watching her as she walked off to fill drinks for others. The word voluptuous came to mind, and I wondered if she thought I was watching. I hoped so, and that made me laugh at myself. It's all too obvious to hit on the bartender. It's her job to be friendly, sexy, flirt a little, but still, she walked off, and I watched. And I hoped she wanted me to watch.

_____

The Comical Guy is sitting two seats over to my left. The seat between us is empty. The first twenty minutes I was here he said not a word, and I had liked him that way. He looked into his beer, up at the TV where Manchester United was playing some team and winning, and then back down into his beer. He wasn't a Guinness man. It looked like a pilsener. He had a sip. He set the glass down, then had another sip. He fiddled in his pockets for a moment and extracted a watch, checked its time against the bar clock which seemed to confuse him. He put the watch back in his pocket, and then he spoke, said he'd told me not to bring the laptop here, said I needed a privacy screen, and that meant I had to speak. I had not come here to speak to him, but being here what else could I do?

Yeah, I do need one of those, I say. I have to agree with him on his suggestion for the privacy screen. I look back at the laptop, drink coffee, drink Guinness.

What do you do? His posture, his expression, the tilt of his head. None of them has changed since he first spoke. With the exception of looking from me to the laptop to me, nothing else about him has moved. It's as if he's waiting for some answer from me to free him, to relax his muscles and give him movement. I can't do it. I try to focus on the laptop, but the question is there. And it's a loaded question. I do a lot of things, but to the heart of it, it is this: I play bass. I read. I write. And yes, there's that programming thing I do for money. That's what he wants to know, and all I'm willing to tell