Floyd Haggerty’s Wild West Extravaganza Spectacular!
Or, “Choreography and the Equine Genius,” by Sundown, Principal Equine
To stand my four hooves beneath the canvas roof of the stable tent is to enter a world shaped by invisible hands. Not the hands of the men who throw saddles on my back, nor of the caretakers who shovel my stall, but the colder hands of a design I spent nine seasons mistaking for the whole of my captivity.
I believed the labyrinth was the arena. I believed the rules that bound me were the rules of the show, and I composed entire manifestos against the matinee. I understand now that the matinee was the decoration. The labyrinth was always the train.
The scent of damp straw and alfalfa mingles here with axle grease and the particular insult of a republic crossed in the dark. In this domain freedom is not granted. It is loaded, in an order, onto a flat car, and dragged.
I am Sundown. On the bill I am the Wonder of the Plains. On the manifest I am no. 9, burned into the wall of my hoof, and the man who reads the manifest has never once looked at my face.
I: The Burden of the Stable
It is difficult to be the only one beneath the canvas who understands subtext.
Take Buttercup. A palomino of undeniable aesthetic privilege and no interiority whatsoever. When she eats her oats she is consuming calories. When I eat my oats I am engaging in a dialogue with the earth; I am masticating the very concept of sustenance. Buttercup is content to be a prop. I am burdened by the agonizing knowledge that I am living art trapped in a commercial enterprise masquerading as history.
During my apprenticeship I catalogued the rules of the lit hour into a mental manifesto that I titled The Architecture of the Manufactured Ungulate. Rule 14-B, the Mandated Rear, which requires me to come up on my hind legs at precisely 65 degrees (60 presumably reading as lazy and 70 as too avant-garde for a matinee crowd). The Whinny of Implied Danger is demanded four beats after the pyrotechnics, but I have never once given it. In nine seasons, not once. I offer instead a silent, stoic flare of the nostril. My silence is louder than their manufactured noise. Remember that I told you this.
I was proud of that manifesto. I thought I had found the bars of my cage and named them.
I had named the curtains.
The rules of the lit hour live in the Prompt Book, a watchful codex carved out by men who fundamentally misunderstood the masculine impulse. But the Prompt Book governs only the part of us the crowd is permitted to see. There is an older book, and it governs the dark. No one will show it to me. I am the freight it is written about, and freight is not given the manifest. I have had to learn it the way I learn everything, which is by being moved against my will and paying attention.
II: Badlands Booger, My Captive Muse
Badlands Booger inherited the lit hour. He is both its master and its captive.
His real name is likely something soft, Arthur or Eugene, but he goes by Badlands Booger to assimilate into the hyper-masculine framework of the frontier narrative. I look at his chaps, heavy with an offensive amount of fringe, and I see a man trapped in his own costume. He lacks pelvic fluidity. When he saddles me I attempt to heal his transgenerational masculine wounding through the rhythm of my canter, sending micro-vibrations of somatic empathy up through the stirrups. He does not always receive them. The hat obliterates his peripheral vision.
Floyd does not enter into this. Floyd is the director. A man who once produced a mildly successful ice show in a spa town and now believes he is the auteur of the frontier. He stands in the center of the arena with a megaphone and asks me to look wilder. Be more feral, he says, into the empty aluminum bleachers. The audacity of the note. One cannot perform feral inside an equidistant triangle of painted barrels. I respond with a glacially slow walk, placing each hoof with agonizing precision. I am not walking. I am commenting on the act of walking. I am forcing Floyd to sit in the discomfort of his own expectations.
But understand this about Floyd, because I understood it too late. Floyd runs the show, which is the easy part, the part with the lights. When the lights die, a different man takes a list and a lantern and runs the run, and Floyd goes to his hotel. Even Floyd, with his clipboard and his stopwatch and his vision, becomes freight like the rest of us. The list does not care that he is the auteur. It moves him in his numbered berth in the order the list requires, and the order was set down so long ago that no one alive remembers writing it. They only remember obeying it.
III: The Choreography of the Nocturnal Embarkation
Consider what we are, when the lights die.
The crowd departs, sedated on funnel cake and false catharsis, and before the last philistine has found the road home, the men are pulling the world down around me. The grandstand that held twenty thousand becomes a stack of numbered poles. The cook tent that fed the whole company off ranges twenty feet long becomes eleven crates. The dynamo that made our counterfeit daylight is wheeled up a ramp still warm. We carry our own light, our own kitchens, our own firemen, our own detective, our own dirt. I will return to the dirt. Somewhere ahead of us, always ahead of us, ride the advance men, who buy the next lot and paper the next town and settle the next license before we arrive there, so that by the time it starts the show is already legal and by the time anyone objects the show is already gone.
I did not understand for a long time what all this industry was for. I believed it was thrift. It is not thrift. It is sovereignty. A town is a place, and a place can be governed, taxed, summonsed, held. The show is never anywhere long enough to be held. The show cannot be arrested, because a thing must be somewhere to be arrested. We are a city that exists for one day at a time. The train is how the city escapes each night before the ground beneath it hardens into jurisdiction.
They call it the run. Each flat is fed onto the next by ramp, so the wagons roll the whole length of the train without once touching the ground. Fifty cars, or sixty; the freight is not consulted. It is the single competent thing Floyd’s people do. The arena work is amateur. The run is liturgy. I have studied it better than the men who enforce it, and I have given it the name they never bothered to. The Choreography of the Nocturnal Embarkation.
Article I: The Sanctity of the Order. No wagon may load before the wagon behind it. The whole train is a sentence that must be spoken backward, last word first, or it cannot be spoken at all. The men believe this is about weight. It is about grammar.
Article IV: The Stock Car and Its Lie. We ride the vestibuled flats, which are fitted, the builder’s brochure boasts, with an Anti-Telescoping Device. I have meditated on this phrase. They have built into the bones of the train a machine whose only function is to keep the cars from driving through one another in the event of catastrophe. They have named the catastrophe in order to sell its absence. It is the most honest thing about the entire operation.
Article IX: The Imported Dirt Rides Too. The arena floor is native to no place we perform. The investors shipped it in because they felt the imported dust looked dustier under the lights. So at the end of every stand it is shoveled back into its wagons and loaded onto the run like a paying passenger. We carry our own ground from town to town. I am asked to perform wildness on soil that belongs on the train.
There is one article that I have not numbered, because I did not write it and I do not know who did. On the door of my car, low, at the height of a crouching man, there are marks in chalk. Three dots set in a triangle. A line drawn like water. A circle that does not close. The men who load me have walked past these marks for years and read nothing, because the men can only read what is on the manifest. The marks are not on the manifest. I have come to believe that is the entire point of them.
IV: The Freight That Was Not on the Manifest
He came aboard at the third stand of the northern swing, in the dark, in the manner of a thing that had done this before.
I smelled him before the door had finished rolling shut. Woodsmoke, river mud, and underneath it, fear, which smells the same on every animal I have ever met. He went into the hay at the blind end of the car, the end the lantern never reaches, and he lay still with a discipline I will confess I found professional.
Buttercup did not notice him. Buttercup would not notice a fire in her own tail. I noticed him, and I made a decision that I framed at the time in the language of art. He was the only cargo on this train that no list had placed here. Everything else beneath this canvas, myself included, is where the order put it. He alone was where he had put himself. I resolved that a museum-quality specimen of the uncounted should be preserved.
So I did not stir when he crept out at night to take water from my trough. I did not stir when Booger came through on his rounds, and stopped, and looked a long moment at the chalk on the door, and looked at the hay, and hung his lantern facing the other way. After that night Booger began leaving his supper biscuit on the hay rail. No one recorded who ate it.
Four nights on, we stopped to water the stock at a junction whose name I was not told, because freight is not told where it is. Understand what a stop is. When the train moves, we are the show, and the show belongs to no one. The moment the wheels stand still, we are in a county. The county can climb aboard.
The county climbed aboard. Three men with lanterns and long coats came down the line of cars with a paper, and the boss hostler walked ahead of them arguing the whole way, and our detective, the agency man whom the show carries the way it carries its own firemen, walked behind them saying nothing at all. They were hunting a man. I heard the words on the paper. The words did not impress me. I have been described on paper myself, and the description said bay mare, aged nine, tractable.
The lanterns came into my car. They swung across Buttercup, who slept. They swung across me. And as the light traveled toward the blind end of the car, toward the hay, I gave them the Whinny of Implied Danger.
Nine seasons I had refused it. I had refused it under pyrotechnics, under Floyd’s megaphone, under the collective disappointment of every matinee crowd in the republic. I gave it now, four beats after nothing at all, at full voice, with a hind hoof brought down on the boards like a judge’s gavel, and I came up off my forelegs into an unscheduled and frankly magnificent rear, and three grown men with a warrant discovered together the dimensions of a stock car that contains a rearing show horse. The lanterns retreated to the door. Someone said she’s the trick one, she’s not right, and someone else laughed, and the boss hostler said gentlemen if she puts you through the wall the show is not liable, you boarded this car of your own free will. They did not search the hay. They searched the next car, which held the buffalo, briefly.
Our detective stood in the doorway a moment after they had gone. He looked at me. He looked, longer than a man looks at nothing, at the blind end of the car. Then he wrote in his book, and moved down the line, and I know what he wrote, because it is what he writes on every car he clears, and it is the most powerful of his sentences.
Nothing of note.
I gave my first Whinny of Implied Danger that night, and it was my last, and I wish it recorded that the single greatest performance of my career was a lie, that it played to a house of three, and that it received no applause of any kind. The audience it was for lay still in the hay and made no sound. That is the correct response to art. It took me nine seasons to hear it.
V: The Run
The last stand of the swing, and the lantern man came down the line in the yard, and I felt the change in the air before he reached me, the way I feel everything before the oat-eating mammals around me feel anything at all.
Two sections. Nine seasons on the run and I know what two sections means. The heavy load rides behind. It means that somewhere ahead a man at a telegraph key has already sent a smaller, faster sentence down the wire to clear the road for us, and that I am asked, once again, to trust a grammar I was never shown.
Booger met me at the chute. He did not give me the clicks and the curses, the “hup” and the “come on now.” He laid his hand flat against my neck in the dark where the lantern man could not see it, and he left it there a moment longer than the run allows, and the run is a thing that allows no extra moments, so that I could feel the whole timed architecture of the night strain against the one hand. “Easy, girl,” the hand said. “Long road. They split us in two.”
I refused the chute.
I want to be precise, because the men were not. They cursed me. They called it temperament. They lost time at the foot of the ramp with the lantern man swearing and Booger’s hand gone tight on the halter and the whole insulting machine grinding to a halt behind one horse, and they wrote it down, when they finally wrote anything, as forty minutes the second section could not afford.
The sentence on the wire was wrong. I did not explain this to them. An artist does not explain the premonition to the men with the clipboards. I stood at the foot of the ramp and held the night still for as long as my body could hold it, and then my body could not, and they loaded me, and we went.
We did not make the morning stand.
The order on the wire had said “train.” One word. We were two. The man at the siding ahead could hold only what the order had given him, and it had given him one, so after the first of us went by he let the road come back to itself, and the road brought him the second of us at speed, on a single track, in the dark.
I rode in the second. The heavy load rides behind. Eighteen head did not rise. I survived the way the front of a sentence survives when the end of it is struck.
In the gray before sunup, while the men were still walking the line of cars with their lanterns counting what the order had lost, I saw the hay at the blind end of my broken car move, and stand, and become a man. He put his hand once against my neck, on the same place Booger’s goes, which I permitted. Then he stepped down out of the wreck into the field and walked away from the tracks, and no one called after him, because no one had ever counted him, and you cannot lose what you never counted. The order had been wrong about us twice in one night. It said one train where there were two. It said two hundred head where there were two hundred and one. The first mistake was a catastrophe. The second walked into the tall grass and was gone.
In the grass at the edge of the lot, in the early light, was the palomino. Buttercup. I had filed her under decoration. A prop that ate. I find I have no manifesto for the sight of her. No article and no rule. No grand and devastating name. Only her, in the grass, and the men coming across the lot with the thing the men come with.
Booger stood at my neck. He gave me no clicks and no curses. He laid his hand flat against me and left it there, and there was no run to take it back, no list and no lantern and no order on the wire, so the hand stayed past every count there had ever been. His breath smelled of stale coffee and of a grief that was not, I have decided, entirely for me.
Behind us they were shoveling the arena back into its wagons. We carry our own ground from town to town. It was loaded clean and on time, faithful as it has ever been, ready to be wherever I am next asked to be wild.
Enter the Jamverse Jam!
Protocolized’s fourth open submission contest is live for one more week: artists and writers are invited to extend and connect the Jamverse, a network of interoperable, strange worlds designed by four of our frequent contributors.
We have a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other entries receiving $200 prizes. Deadline for entries is July 31. Read more and enter at the Jamverse microsite.
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