Willow Field

Early Horses Horses, a junior high teacher told rossie's class, were an ancient symbol of friendship. "Horses are the amiable creature." This was the spring Rossie became preoccupied with an incessant, secret urge to jack off that disturbed and frightened him. At his mother's kitchen table, as she weeded in her backyard garden, he sat nicking his left index finger over and over with her sharp cutlery and tried to ease his nerves by imagining the selfless companionability of old horses nuzzling at one another. It was a way to think the world was easy to live in. Training horses to ride and to pull chariots, he read in his mother'sEncyclopedia Britannica, was vital to the power of a civilization called Assyria. "Power," his mother said, wrinkling her nose. "Imagine. Your father would say it was the freedom to ride off." When Rossie turned fifteengangling and black-haired and shaving every morning at the insistence of his fatherhe gave up on Reno Public High School and drifted off to sit on high-board fences at the Western Pacific stockyards. He helped out with the gates as men jammed and cursed the bawling cattle until a whiskery man named Fritzy Brewster gave him a chance horseback. "Kid," he said, "a sensible boy don't work in the dirt. That's for farmers. A sensible boy stays on his horse." Up on a bay gelding Rossie jostled steers and heifers into chutes as Brewster uncapped a beer, sat on a fence, and watched. Rossie's mother, Katrina, when she discovered he hadn't been to school since March, sat him down at the worktable in her clean, tile-floored kitchen. "What is it you most like about shit?" she asked. Rossie went defiantly blank-eyed, and she shook her head. "I wonder," she said, "if your father is going to let you do as you please." Nito Benasco supervised casino gambling at the elegant new Riverside, George Wingfield's modern gambling and resort hotel on the banks of the Truckee River, just a five-minute walk north on Virginia Street from the Washoe County Court House. Women waiting out their weeks in residence before divorce paraded the hotel lobby in spangled cowgirl outfits, heading out for rides with buckaroos. Divorcees at the Riverside, Katrina said, were fools who loved dressing up in gowns, to sip at martinis and watch roulette. Women with college degrees brought books in their suitcases and were likely to stay in a house like hers, where they could be at home with other civilized creatures. "So," Nito said, when Katrina told him about the stockyards. "What's wrong with school? A man with no education is dead in the brain." "Algebra," Rossie said. "X equalsb. They teach you to be nobody." "You think the stockyards is somebody?" This, Rossie knew, was a moment to be faced carefully. Nito dressed in dark suits and spent his hours standing back, watching the cards and the roll of the dice and ivory balls spinning on the wheels. He would say a quiet thing to a white-shirted dealer, then smile as he went over to the drunk at a blackjack table, or the loud fellow from Pennsylvania or Idaho who was running out of money. "We don't worry," Nito would say, "do we?" his eyes shining and his accurate hands riffling the cards as if he loved them or suspected irregularity. "Making trouble. That would be a shame. We're a luxury liner, on the banks of the Truckee." This was his joke. The game never stops, not even for trouble. It's always here. "I read books." Rossie drifted through summer evenings on his mother's screened-in veranda above the Truckee, deep in Zane Grey and the Charlie Russell book about life on the Montana frontier. He read the books the wKittredge, William is the author of 'Willow Field', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400040971 and ISBN 1400040973.