Chapter 16. Before My Skin Was Broken
Before My Skin Was Broken
The dog was going to bite me. Most probably, the dog was going to kill me. How many times did Robin say, ‘Make friends with the dog. Make friends.’ I was skeptical of the whole arrangement, and the fact that I was given a gun, a thing I was still deathly afraid of—a gun with a silencer, no less—just redoubled my doubts. Every night for a week or so we were to sneak over to the paddocks and stables we had staked out and feed cooked chicken to the so-called watchdog there, gaining his trust, so on the night we took the Lipizzaners, he would not bark. If he did, I was to stop him. Richard and company would get the horses and lead them out, each rustler assigned to take two horses at a time, placing blindfolds over their eyes if necessary, encouraging them forward with soft, loverlike murmurs, and steering them out to the waiting trailers. Two other men would load up a pickup truck with bedding and feed, and leave last, after sweeping away evidence of the endeavor, both human and equine. That was Louis’ cue to arrive for the second act.
And then somewhere along the line a gun was introduced. Although the preferred currency hereabouts, it all seemed preposterous to me. We never started with the idea of a gun; we just started with an idea. And now we were going to kill animals in order to rescue animals. I didn’t know if we were succumbing to the violent environment surrounding us, or if that environment was simply exposing our latent traits. So . . . here I was standing in the back kitchen with a gun with a silencer in my hand. I affected an Emma Peel-like stance in front of the curtainless window when Louis handed it to me that night; smoothing my hair off my forehead before fake aiming the pistol, the foreignness in my hand glimmering in the dark reflection; but the desired effect was not translatable and my sarcasm eluded him. Could we pull it off? Could I? My gaze locked on the mirror-like window: passing chimera shapes materialized there and phased in and out: my stoned Port Authority attacker, my “friend” Freida, my very own personal cad, Howie. Welcome to the NFL. Slowly Enesa appeared, the final apparition. ‘I am not brave,’ her wavering form warbled, the sound coming to me from a great distance away. ‘I am not that brave . . .’ Her voice summoned me back to her village; I stood once again in the middle of the smoldering Marić’s house as if at the gates of hell—the smell, the poison taste in the mouth—and I knew I could do what was necessary. I could. The lost become ghosts who push you on unseen. And the air now was thick with ghosts and weeds, and my mind was full of rocks and my heart was filled with rubble. I would press the pistol against the hound’s head, if need be, and pull the trigger.
* * *
We started the first night just approaching the stables. The dog, some Rottweiler mix with a massive chest, stood up on our approach; he was secured to a lean-to shed with an overhanging roof as his shelter; when he started growling, we threw the food on the ground and retreated. Turning round, we could see him at the limit of his chain eating the chicken. I decided to call him “Parker”. Would the scent of this extracurricular meal be detected? Would our nocturnal forays leave telltale traces? We did this for several nights, each time getting closer and closer, until I could stand next to Parker while the others went in and out of the stables to accustom the stallions and mares to our movements and handling, the dark house reassuringly far off in the distance, just a dim light emanating from the basement windows, giving it the appearance of floating off its foundation; the security detail, if there was one, most likely inside drinking and playing cards. However, on the night of the actual seizure, so painstakingly plotted, we took too long, and Parker grew increasingly restless. The horses were coming out two by two, but too slowly. Parker began to growl. “C’mon, boy. Good boy. Good Parker . . . ” I whispered. A rivulet of sweat from under my arm trickled down my side, and the dog sensed my fear. I turned over my small plastic tub and knocked it against the ground, giving him the remaining cache of food, but the horses were skittish and we were not keeping to schedule; every extra minute of delay put us and them in greater jeopardy. “That’s a boy. Such a good boy. Good boy!” Food gone, Parker began to bark.
“Shut him up,” Richard hissed at me over his shoulder as he steered past with two mares. “Stop him.”
Parker barked louder and louder, unsettling the horses, growling, lunging at me, and I retreated beyond the range of his chain. He barked even louder, suddenly a master defender of his domain, brooking no trespass. In the end, despite my earlier bravura, I could not kill the agitated beast. Panicking, I turned back at him. He leapt up at me and I whacked him across the head as hard as I could with my pistol butt in a cruel and stupid attempt to render him unconscious and thus silent. Of course, this did not silence him; it only injured him and caused him to commence an unearthly howling and yodeling that would wake the dead. After a minute, lights came on in the not-so-far-away farmhouse and you could hear doors slamming and the caretakers streamed out to see what the hell was going on. Most of the horses had already gone ahead, there were just four more: three held by one of the dressagers; the other, the prized stallion, Tulipan Sava, who was not cooperating, shaking his head, dancing in place then rearing up, finally biting at Robin.
Richard ran back and sent the two women on, ordering them to get going, to tell the drivers of the trailers to get the hell out, and grabbed Sava’s and the other lead ropes, motioning me over to the pickup truck where Barton, who had drawn the straw as driver, sat waiting to take off. Richard motioned me to put the tailgate down and pull down the ramp; he pressed the leads of the three other horses into my palm and took back the gun, an awkward exchange, then took Sava around and around in circles and finally got him up on the back of the truck, but there was no time left, and he hauled me up onto the flatbed while he tried to control the agitated stallion and tie down his lead rope. Barton started the engine. His partner, Erik, ran past us, stable broom in hand. Throwing it on the ground, he jerked up the tailgate back into place, grabbed the gun from Richard, jumped into the passenger side of the cab and slammed the door. “Let’s go!” Richard yelled out at Barton, and the truck slowly started up with me holding the leads of the three mares trotting uneasily along behind, a reverse Apollo with his chariot riding backwards into the night. A man appeared out of the darkness and started to run toward the truck, followed not far behind by a group of men with rifles.
“Go, go, go!” I yelled, but the three mares would not cooperate, forming a bumping, dragging, pulling mass of glowing white in the blackness, and we could only go so fast for fear of one of them stumbling, plus the stallion shifting around in the back. Our pursuer was advancing, yelling over his shoulder to his gunmen who veered off into the woods behind him. He stopped and launched the hatchet he had been running with at the truck in an attempt to blow out the back tire, but his weapon fell short and speared the ground, rudely sticking out of the earth like a vulgar gesture. He charged toward it and wrenched it out and resumed his pursuit of us. I didn’t think he could catch us, but with the mares struggling this way and that against their leads, so much so that I was bent over almost ninety-degrees leaning halfway out of the truck, arms fully extended—one good head toss and I’d go flying—we were too slow, and he was gaining on us.
I could hear Richard yelling from somewhere, but with the stallion between us and fear making my heartbeat pound in my ears, I couldn’t grasp his exhortations. The man was now alongside the truck. He threw himself onto the back wheel and was able to hold on. I turned my head and looked into the face of the devil. Richard could not get at him because if he let go of the halter, Sava would have jumped over the sideboards. Holding on with one hand, our assailant tried with his other to chop at the leads of the three mares with his hatchet and cut them loose, but he missed, and his weapon hit the top of the tailgate with a horrible din of metal upon metal. Over and over he did this as I screamed, furiously shaking my head, blinded by my hair stuck in my eyes. Spewing curses at me, he took a big, wretched, wild hack with his hatchet, eerily similar to what I had done with my pistol to Parker. I ducked, squatting down, trying to avoid his blow; the truck swerved severely, we were all thrown to the right, and his blade landed on Sava’s haunch. He whinnied and reared up, almost throwing Richard out of the lurching vehicle, Barton frantically twisting the steering wheel to the left then to the right, trying to throw the demon off, but he was stuck to the fender like a tick. Erik leaned out of the passenger side window waving his gun and screaming at me, but as with Richard, his cries were lost to me in the chaos. Let go, let go was the only voice I could hear, an internal monologue throbbing through my mind, yet I didn’t let go. I couldn’t even though I knew I had to. I couldn’t give in to this devil beside me. I couldn’t let him claim victory, his bastard waters continuingly washing over time and history—but not this time, not here. Not with me.
The devil raised his arm and took another desperate swing with his axe; this time it landed squarely across my right forearm, splitting the skin open down to the bone. I screamed bloody murder and let go of the leads, just as Erik, forcing himself further out the passenger side window, fired the pistol and the man slid off out of sight. The three mares peeled away from the retreating truck, one to the left; one to the right. The middle mare stood still for a moment; realizing her freedom, she shook her head, bobbing it up and down, pranced in a pirouette, turned and headed back in the direction of the stables. I had not prevailed; I had miserably failed: the mares retreated away into the darkness, further and further outward with each peal of my mind’s tolling bell, like the white ghosts they had become, getting smaller and smaller. Lost them. Let them go. Ghosts now. Phantoms. My knees buckled and I collapsed. Flat on my back, I began to shiver violently, my eyes locked on the starless sky; I began to lose control.
It always bothered me that my favorite of the only two bras I’d packed for my journey to Zagreb had managed to disappear, lost somewhere between Split and Travnik. So I wore the lace one continually, and it had turned from white to grey, unable to be cleaned properly. The padding over the hook and eyes in the back had eroded and frayed so that they constantly dug into my back, but I was loath to take it off. No surrender of amour, I liked to think. Your skin has an integrity not normally breached, but when it is, not with a small bruise like the rubbing of hooks and eyes, but with a wholesale breach, with a terrifying wound, the terror itself is the paralyzing thing. It’s what you have to fight. A fear apart from the pain that feeds upon itself. You don’t know how it will end, but you know you’re going beyond where you’ve ever been before.
I had fallen backwards into the hay bales; there was a rusty, metallic smell from the blood—mine and Sava’s—mixing together with the chaff on the pickup’s floor to form some kind of apocalyptic mortar. The truck rattled off into the night, picking up speed, and the white ghost creatures I had released had floated up to become clouds in the troubled sky. I thought I would be trampled by Sava’s hooves as he whinnied and stumbled about with each jerking, swerving change in direction, and it became a jumble of hooves and blood and neighing and clouds and the bumping of the truck over the uneven road that caused Sava to tread against me even more, and those white figures peeling off into the night—those ghosts flying up into the night—and the clouds and a bullet through a devil’s eye, and the blood and the pain, and men yelling and hooves stomping, and it all went black.
Image: The lost become ghosts. Source: “Landscape with Horses," gouache, Franz Marc. Stolen by the Nazis; hidden for decades. Uncovered by German authorities in 2012.