The Trail Ride

City people just didn’t get it. They didn’t know a damn thing about horses, yet in every group that came to the farm, there was at least one idiot who thought she knew better when it came to horse care. Good farm help was hard to come by, too. Too many of these young college girls didn’t understand that horses were bigger and stronger and could snap their skinny little spines with one swift kick. If Sherrie had to explain that using a chain over the horse’s nose during turnout was not abuse one more time…

Sherrie pressed her hands into her lower back. It didn’t matter that she’d been cleaning stalls all her life. The work still made her back hurt. Her new farm hand was on his way. She could already tell he would be a good worker. It was a well-known fact that, if you wanted work done correctly and efficiently, you couldn’t go wrong with a Mexican. Sherrie couldn’t understand why her nephew kept insisting she was racist just because she had voted for Trump. It was illegals Trump wanted to keep out of the country, not all Mexicans. This one had all of his papers. Sherrie had made certain of that. 

She leaned against the porch rail as she watched for his car. A cup of tea rested on the rail. Steam rose from it but Sherrie didn’t drink it. She brewed black tea every morning out of habit, even though some days it made her nauseous. 

She had already turned the horses out for the day. She could hear one of them kicking the paddock fence. It was probably Capri, a four-year-old palomino mare. Capri was one of the best-looking horses in Sherrie’s herd, but she was full of thoroughbred DNA that made her a bolter. Last summer, Capri crashed through a fence and galloped down the road, kicking up dust and gravel as she made her break from the farm. She was five miles down the road when she finally decided to stop and make friends with the sheriff who loaded her up onto a trailer and brought her home.

“If she breaks one more fence, she’s dog meat,” Sherrie muttered to herself. She didn’t have the energy to give Capri a workout. Sherrie would have her new farm hand, Tino, take her for a ride once he was done with barn chores. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Sherrie caught sight of Capri spreading her back legs and letting go a thick stream of piss. Sherrie heard the distant crunch of gravel and saw a car approaching.  She watched it until it pulled up in front of the house. 

“Good morning,” Tino said as he got out of his car. He wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, jeans and work boots. It was seven a.m. in June and the sun gave his skin a deep golden glow. He was handsome, alright. Girls would love him. It never hurt to have a good-looking farm hand. 

“Morning,” Sherrie replied. “Let me show you around.” 

Tino followed her through the stable where Sherrie pointed out the supply room where she kept brooms and pitchforks. He took note of the horse’s names on plaques that were mounted on the stall doors. All the horses were named after cities: Sacramento, Memphis, Berlin, Brooklyn, Algiers. One was named Morelia, after a city in Michoacan. Tino had been there once before. He’d gone there with his family to see the Monarchs when he was ten years old. The orange-and-black butterflies filled the sky and engulfed the trees like burning bits of paper.

 Sherrie showed him the shaving shed where she stored the cedar shavings for the horses’ bedding. Tino breathed in the scent of fresh cedar. 

“We have three trails here,” Sherrie said. “The beginner trail, for inexperienced riders, is mostly flat. People who have some riding experience can go on the intermediate trail. That one goes through the woods and along the creek a little ways. The advanced trail starts over there.” Sherrie pointed to a patch of chokecherry bushes. “Only experienced riders can go on that trail. That one goes over the creek so the riders have to know how to go over a jump. We don’t use it that much.”

“You don’t get experienced riders here?”

“Not really. We get a lot of families with kids. Spoiled brats, mostly. They don’t listen.”

Tino wasn’t sure what spoiled brat meant but he figured it was better not to ask. He decided to look it up later. 

Four hours later, Tino had cleaned all twelve stalls, put down fresh hay and scrubbed water buckets. Sherrie walked through the barn, inspecting his work. The barn smelled like cedar and sweetgrass. It always smelled like that for a few hours each day, before the horses were brought back in and filled their stalls with shit and piss. 

Sherrie was impressed by how quickly Tino worked. It had been years since she’d been able to clean a stall in just twenty minutes. She’d gotten into the habit of doing it more slowly. After her dad passed away and was no longer around to hurry her along, she figured, why rush?

Tino had wiped down the stall fronts, dusted the rails and swept the floors. Sherrie would never have bothered with those things, but it was fine with her if Tino wanted to do them. 

“That’s enough for today,” Sherrie said. “Just take Capri for a ride. She needs some exercise. Then you can go.” 

Capri was saddled and ready to go when Tino walked into the paddock. Her golden coat shimmered in the hot sun while her ivory tail flicked back and forth. Her ears twitched as Tino approached.

“Hola, hermosa,” he said to her. She brushed her velvety nose against his cheek as he reached up to scratch her behind the ear. She lowered her head and rested it against Tino’s chest. She had a white blaze that ran down the middle of her face and two sparkling blue eyes. She reminded Tino of a horse he’d had when he was young, a colt named Tesoro. 

Tino slipped one foot into the stirrup and swung his other leg over. He guided Capri out of the paddock, through the chokecherry bushes, onto the difficult trail.

The trail was overgrown, with brambles and tree branches encroaching on the dirt path. Tino could tell that Capri was anxious to run, but he held her back. The path was bumpy and uneven. After climbing up a slight incline, they came to a clearing. Tino gave Capri a gentle kick and she exploded into a gallop. Wind raced through Tino’s hair and stung his eyes. He crouched, jockey-style, and leaned forward. He felt his heart pumping. 

Sunlight glittered on the creek ahead. Capri’s hoofbeats made a steady rhythm. As they approached the creek, she showed no signs of wanting to slow down. When they finally came to the creek’s edge, Capri sprang from her back legs and cleared the creek in one easy motion. 

Tino drove home, back to his apartment in Minneapolis. He noticed a state trooper parked by the side of the road and felt his stomach clench. He kept his papers on the dashboard in plain view just in case he ever got pulled over. He was in the United States on a student visa and studying veterinary medicine at the University of Minnesota. His father had found him a crack lawyer in Minnesota and he had another one back in Mexico. Still, Tino didn’t like the rumblings he was hearing about ICE. Wherever he met other Mexicans, they talked about ICE in hushed voices. They warned him about la migra and told him stories about detention centers. He figured it was probably hearsay, but that didn’t mean it was far from the truth. Tino feared running into someone who didn’t care that he had all his papers, who hated him just for having brown skin and black hair. 

Some of the people at the University made him nervous too. They always made it a point to tell him that they supported DACA, but Tino was not a “childhood arrival” and had no intention of staying after he earned his degree. His plan was to return to Mexico and establish a veterinary practice in Mexico City. He didn’t understand why everyone he met was in such a rush to say, “I totally believe in DACA, dude.” 

He had grown up on a farm just on the outskirts of the Federal District. His family had a ranch where they bred and raised horses. As a kid, Tino had hated coming to the United States. He and his father often drove across the border to sell horses at auction, and every single time, border agents searched the horse trailer. Sometimes they even insisted on taking all of the horses out of the trailer so they could look around for hidden compartments containing illegal aliens. On more than one occasion, Tino had to hop on a horse to run after another that had gotten loose. They never lost any horses, but he hated how close they sometimes came.

Tino glanced in his rearview mirror. When he didn’t see lights, he let out a long, slow breath.

A few mornings later, Sherrie loaded up the Gator with hay and drove along the paddock perimeter, tossing flakes over the fence every few feet. A school bus rattled by on the main road on its way to the YMCA camp a few miles north. When her father ran the farm, he used to let the camp counselors bring kids over to ride the horses. Sherrie always had to help out, showing the kids how they could use the reins to guide the horse and leading them on trail rides. Though she was just a few years older than the campers, they always seemed childish to her, complaining about the heat and the smell and spooking the horses by swatting at flies. 

Sherrie tossed the last few flakes of hay into the paddock and returned the Gator to the hay shed. Tino would arrive any minute. Sherrie decided to let him worry about turning the horses out. She wanted to go over her bookings for the day. There wouldn’t be any busloads of YMCA kids. Sherrie had forgotten to sign some paperwork and lost the contract to another stable.

Tino was surprised to see that the paddock was empty when he arrived at the farm. Sherrie had told him she always got the horses out by seven a.m. and it was already seven-thirty. As Tino strolled through the barn, he heard the horses pawing at the ground, a sign that they were anxious to get out and stretch their legs. 

A coal-black gelding named Cairo kicked at his stall door as Tino approached. “Tranquilo,” he whispered to the horse as he stroked his sleek black neck. Tino open the stall door and attached a lead rope to the horse’s halter. Tino noticed several bite marks on the stall door as well as grooves where the wood had been gnawed away completely. 

Tino shook his head. There was no reason to let a horse get that bored. 

Hours later, after Tino had turned out all the horses, cleaned the stalls and saddled up the horses for the afternoon’s rides, Tino heard a strange sound coming from inside the barn. Sherrie was in the paddock getting ready to take the first group out on the trail. Tino noticed that one of the stall doors was closed though he knew he’d left them all open after he’d finished cleaning. He unlatched the door and found a little girl, no more than seven years old, crouched in the corner and crying.

“Hey little one,” he said softly, “What’s the matter?”

She looked up at him with red eyes and a pink, tear-streaked face. “The lady yelled at me,” she said. 

“You mean Esherrie?” As hard as Tino tried, he couldn’t pronounce Sherrie’s name without adding an E to the front of it. The little girl nodded and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“What did she say?”

“I got confused. She said, ‘not over there, over there!’ She didn’t have to --” the girl’s voice caught -- “to yell.”

“No, she didn’t. You just made a little mistake. But you don’t want to miss your ride do you?” 

She shook her head. Tino held out his hand and she took it. As he led her out of the barn, a young woman rushed over to them.

“Jenny! You know better than to run off like that.”

“She was just a little upset,” Tino explained.

The woman smiled. Tino felt her eyes glide from his neck to his waist. Women always looked at him that way. Some men, too. Back home, his friends always teased him over the attention he got from women. They jostled him and called him a marica but Tino knew he wasn’t that, either. He had always preferred horses over people, but he never said as much to his friends. He knew that they would find some way to make it weird. 

Tino watched as the little girl mounted Odessa, Sherrie’s smallest horse, and rode out on the trail. The girl was smiling now. 

A week later, Sherrie decided to let Tino lead the trail rides. The mother of some little brat had written a nasty review of the farm on Yelp! And she wasn’t in the mood to deal with people. The review said the horses were beautiful and the property was well-maintained, but that the owner was “excessively rude.” 

“We drove 40 miles and paid $50 for the hour. After all that I didn’t expect the owner to make my young daughter cry. I don’t think she has the temperament to work with children.”

To make matters worse, someone had replied to the review and written, “Same thing happened to us when we took my son there for his ninth birthday. One wonders what the woman’s damage is.” 

Sherrie snorted as she re-read the reviews. Where did these people get off? Like it was her fault that their kids couldn’t follow simple directions. They were the same parents who’d turn on a dime to sue her if one of their precious rugrats got hurt. 

“Would it be better if your children got kicked, bitten or bucked off? Horses have minds of their own,” she wrote in response to the review. “That’s why I insist that riders follow my instructions. Maybe teach your kids to listen better and they won’t keep getting their fee-fees hurt.”

She couldn’t believe how often she had to remind people that her horses were live ones, capable of causing a good deal of pain if not approached with care. People really seemed to think that her farm was one giant carousel. Hell, maybe I’ll sell the farm and buy a carousel instead, Sherrie thought, imagining wooden horses with lacquered faces twirling in slow motion under the soft glow of naked light bulbs. 

After Tino brought the last trail riders back to the paddock, put away all the tack and groomed the horses, he punched out his time card and asked if he could take Capri for a ride before he went home. 

Sherrie shrugged and told him to knock himself out. The expression sounded strange to him -- she wanted him to hit himself? -- but he inferred that it meant “yes.”

Tino mounted the palomino and steered her toward the overgrown trail. He needed to clear his mind. Early that morning, Tino’s upstairs neighbors had had another fight, and this time one of the other neighbors called the police. A cold sweat broke out all over Tino’s body when the flashing lights turned his window blue. 

An hour after the police left, Tino fell back to sleep and had a dream that he was in the desert behind a fence that stretched for miles and had barbed wire stretched across the top. A man hit him in the shoulder with the butt of a rifle until he entered a long, squat, windowless building. Inside, triple bunk beds with thin mattresses lined the walls. A blind old man cried, asking over and over when he could see his daughter. The room smelled like piss; Tino noticed the rivulets of it running toward a drain in the center of the floor. Tino felt his bladder swell but didn’t want to urinate with all the men around him watching.

“When can I leave?” Tino asked the man with the rifle. 

The man just laughed and walked away. 

As Tino rode, he admired the golden glimmers in Capri’s coat and the way they contrasted with her pearlescent mane. Her smooth gait made him feel like he was floating and the sun was hot enough to remind him of home. When they came to the ravine, Capri’s hooves left Earth.

Replying to the review turned out to be Sherrie’s biggest mistake. Somehow, people took pictures of her response and posted them everywhere, and more reviews came in. The farm lost a whole star. She was sure that some of those people had never even set foot on her farm, but the customer service people at Yelp! Said there was no way to prove that. 

Sherrie sat and smoldered. 

One review, in particular, made her grind her teeth:

I used to live near that place. It was great when the old man ran it. I actually had my first job there when I was 14. The old man hired me to help with stall cleaning so I went over there after school. I remember he told me that their farm had been around for more than a hundred years. It started as a breeding farm back when people needed horses to get around. Eventually, it became a trail riding place. The daughter runs it now. She has never cared about the place. She would leave stalls half cleaned. When she took tack off of horses, she’d toss it into the barn aisles and just leave it there for others to trip over. She never showed the horses any affection. I don’t understand why she hangs on to the place, considering what she’s allowed it to become. No real ambition on her part, I guess. Oh well, there are lots of other trail ride places around. Try Golden Hills Stables. Great horses, great staff. 

Sherrie stared into her empty coffee cup. Then, she lifted it high in the air and smashed it on the edge of her desk. 

Tino knew something wasn’t right when he arrived at the farm. To start with, there was a large section of the paddock fence missing, and bits of white plastic strewn everywhere. Inside the paddock, the Gator was turned on its side.

“I lost control of it,” was all Sherrie said when he asked her what had happened.

When he walked through the barn, he noticed that only some of them had hay. He quickly loaded a cart and walked through the aisles distributing flakes of hay. The horses greeted him with nickers, a low rumbling sound that reminded Tino of distant thunder.

After he finished feeding, Tino found some rusted metal fence panels and hauled them out to the paddock. He went back into the tool shed to find something to secure the metal fencing to the existing paddock fencing. As he searched in the dim shed, he heard Sherrie in the barn, followed by the sounds of hooves on concrete. 

Several minutes later, Tino found some large plastic zip ties. Not a perfect solution, but they’d have to do. 

As he walked back to the paddock, he noticed a car pulling into the driveway. Cairo, Brooklyn and Odessa were all saddled and waiting in the paddock. A girl and her mother disappeared into the house and emerged minutes later behind Sherrie. The three of them mounted the horses and disappeared behind the chokecherry bushes. 

Tino wondered why Sherrie was taking them on the advance trail. As they came out of the house, he heard the woman say the first time riding a horse for both her and her daughter. Did Sherrie really think they could handle that jump?

Tino managed to secure the fencing. It was a stopgap solution but it was better than a fence with a giant hole in it. Tino walked back toward the barn. He planned to turn the horses out so he could get their stalls clean. As he snapped a lead rope onto Capri’s halter, Tino heard a sound in the distance that chilled his spine. A scream that seemed to echo for miles. 

Tino shivered. The jump. The horses had gone over the jump and the little girl had fallen into the ravine. He brought Capri to the paddock and tied her lead rope to the fence. Then, he ran into the house and dialed 911 from the kitchen phone. 

When the operator picked up, Tino gave their location and explained that there had been an accident. After they disconnected the call, Tino rushed into the barn and found Capri’s bridle. He didn’t bother with a saddle. He mounted the palomino and ran her at full speed until they reached the ravine. The little girl was lying still in the shallow creek, her skin cloud-white and her lips slightly blue. 

Tino cradled the girl in his arms. He placed her on Capri’s back, draping her so that her arms hung around the horse’s neck. He got on the horse behind the girl and raced back toward the barn. 

He heard sirens in the distance. As he looked up, he saw the ambulance turning down the farm’s gravel driveway just as Capri galloped up to the house. Tino handed the girl to a paramedic who strapped her to a stretcher, loaded her into the ambulance, and drove away. 

Tino sighed as his heart thundered. He leaned forward and buried his face in Capri’s white mane, breathing in the scent of her golden coat. He closed his eyes. 

An hour later, Sherrie still had not returned from the trail. All of the horses -- including the one Sherrie had been riding -- returned to the paddock, still saddled but riderless. Tino was putting tack away when the Sheriff arrived. 

“Is Sherrie around?” The Sheriff asked, one hand resting on the handle of his gun. 

“I don’t know where she is,” Tino replied. “She left on a trail ride and didn’t come back.” It was then that Tino realized that when he found the little girl in the ravine, Sherrie wasn’t there then, either.

“I’m going to need you to come with me and give a statement.”

“Estatement?” A chill rattled Tino’s spine. 

The Sheriff nodded. As he spoke, he looked away. “That little girl didn’t make it.”

“Se murio?” Tino asked, then, as if to erase the words he’d just uttered, quickly added, “she died?” 

“In the ambulance. The mother blames Sherrie. You say she’s gone?”

“Yes. Her horse came back but she didn’t.” Tino’s mouth felt dry. He suddenly desperately wanted a beer. 

The Sheriff spoke into the radio on his shoulder, requesting additional squads to come and search the woods behind the farm. Tino finished putting the tack away and stroked Capri’s nose one last time before retrieving his papers from his car and climbing into the Sheriff’s SUV. 

When they reached the station, the Sheriff led Tino to a small room for questioning. Tino set his papers on the table in front of him. 

“So you’re from Mexico, is that right?” the Sheriff asked as he looked over Tino’s documents. “J-1 Student Visa,” he muttered. He set the papers down and looked at Tino over the top of his glasses. “I didn’t think you kids were allowed to work while you’re in school here.”

Tino felt a ringing in his ears. His throat tightened, choked by an invisible hand. Tino’s visa did allow him to work, but the Sheriff clearly didn’t know that. Tino remembered his dream of being held in a long, windowless building in the desert. Tino tightened his abdominal muscles to keep his body from shaking. 

“Whatever,” the Sheriff said, tossing the papers back onto the table. “That’s not my area. Tell me everything that happened today. Every detail you can remember.”

As he dropped Tino off at the farm, the Sheriff thanked him for his statement. Tino climbed into his car and turned on the ignition. As the engine turned over, Tino felt his entire body begin to tremble. He rested his head against the steering wheel and cried.