Whitehorse Read Online Free PDF Page A

tough time of it, Mr. Whitehorse. I'd appreciate it a lot if you take it easy on her."
    "I just came to see my mare, then I'm outta here."
    "That's what I'm afraid of," she replied with a thin smile, then turned for the house, allowing the screen door to slam behind her.
    A Neil Diamond tune played on a radio cassette player set on a table near the entrance of the barn. Johnny picked up the empty cassette holder and flipped it over. A young Neil Diamond with wild hair and wearing a skin-tight jumpsuit stared up at him just as "Red Red Wine" rolled out of the speakers and filled up the silence with memories that he had stored away long ago—he and Leah at Lover's Peak drinking warm Sangria straight from the bottle, sitting on the tailgate of his father's truck, this very cassette playing in the background as he educated her on Apache spirituality. She had freely offered him her virginity that night, and he had accepted it like a starving man coveting a crumb of bread. Afterward, they vowed to love one another always—to stay together forever. They would marry soon after graduation and support each other's goals to go to college and attain their degrees—hers as a veterinarian, his as a lawyer.
    Fantasies of the young and ignorant, and deliriously in love.
    Johnny frowned and gently put aside the cassette box.
    There was a bull with a grotesquely swollen scrotum chewing hay in the first stall. A donkey resided in the next, its back right leg stitched closed from its fetlock to its hock. A pair of pygmy goats, no more than eighteen inches high, stood like sentinels at the far end of the barn aisle, regarding him suspiciously and chewing alfalfa leaves. They twitched their curled tails from side to side before shaking their horned heads in an apparent warning—as if anything other than a jackrabbit would take their threat seriously.
    Dr. Starr backed out of a stall in that moment. She did not see him, but focused instead on the spindly colt wobbling after her.
    The rain the night before had obliterated her features as she stood in the dark on the side of the road. In his mind, as he lay in bed hours later, listening to Dolores breathe deeply in sleep, he had imagined that Leah had looked just as she had in high school. But seeing her now, dressed in baggy khaki pants and a man's denim shirt with sleeves rolled up to her elbows, he realized that there was little girlishness left in her. Her brown hair was in disarray, haphazardly secured with a rubber band at her nape. It was longer than he remembered her wearing it in high school. The color had not lost its richness, however. It suited her complexion, which was fair and prone to burn in the sun. He recalled rubbing sunblock on her back and breasts when they skinny-dipped at Copper Springs. With their bodies slick and smelling like coconut they had made love openly under the hot sun again and again, only to discover much later that the sunblock had done nothing to protect the sensitive, tender skin of their naked buttocks. Putting on their jeans at the end of the day had been excruciating. She had not been able to sit in hot bathwater for a week—even after he had sneaked into her bedroom one night and anointed her butt with ice-cold skin cream. Her idea, not his. He would have made up a paste of mescal and aloe. He would have chanted her one of his grandfather's medicine songs and made her sleep with a fetish tucked under her pillow.
    The mare nickered with worry as the colt unsteadily rocked on its tiny feet and nearly fell. Leah jumped to its aid, wrapped her arms around its chest and rump and laughed as it did its best to buck her away.
    She looked up unexpectedly, catching him off guard. There was a purple knot on her head above her eyebrow and dark circles under her eyes. The hair around her temples was slightly damp with sweat, and there was a smudge of mud on her chin.
    "Oh," she said. "I didn't hear you walk up."
    "Nice colt."
    "Yes." She nodded and nudged the foal