The Bones beneath the Barn

He pressed his face against the barn and squinted through a gap in the weathered boards.

"There's a door on your left. You know that don't you?"

He fell back, slicking grass stains across the seat of his jeans. He looked to his right, and then to his left, and saw the door.

"You Corey?" The old man leaned against a stall. He wore a kicked-around straw Stetson and a long-sleeved, red plaid shirt with white snaps where buttons should be. He tugged on a Marlboro and let the smoke leak out of his nose.

"Yes, sir, I am."

They studied each other awhile, and Corey blinked first. "Who are you?"

"Hitchins," he said, in a voice as deep as a cave, taking another toke. "But you can call me Luke."

"Okay."

"Your daddy hired me to tear this place down. Hate to do it, what with the history, but a job's a job. It'd come down by itself before long, anyway."

"That's what my mom said." Corey's folks had just purchased the land -- twenty acres of pastures and wood, a cabin and this decrepit barn -- for a getaway.

Luke nodded. "She's a very astute woman."

Corey realized he was looking like the kid in the horror movie who had the first inkling that everything wasn't quite right. But he didn't feel afraid exactly, and this time, Luke blinked first.

"Came out tonight to figure how much help I need."

"Are you going to blow it up?"

Luke snorted a plume of smoke and coughed. "Hellfire, I'm just going to kick it in the shins and pick up the pieces. I need the help to haul off the wood."

"Why don't you just burn it down?"

"I know a feller who'll take the wood and make picture frames and coffee tables and whatnot. You wouldn't believe what people will pay for a piece of something old." He tapped his boot against a stall door. "You know, this used to be the home to some of the greatest cutting horses in the world," he went on. "But that was a long time ago. You ever hear of a cutting horse, Corey?"

He thought a long moment, with images flipping through his mind like a slide show. "No, sir, I guess I haven't."

Old Luke took a deep draw and told him, "You've got your Swiss Army knife horses that can ride twenty mile, jump a fence and look as pretty as a hooker at a Baptist convention. That's not a cutting horse.

"A cutting horse is a special kind of horse. He's a kind of horse that walks up to a herd of cattle like he's Moses at the Red Sea. He'll snake through those cows and charm one of them away from its buddies until it's all alone, and that herd of cows is bawlin' to get her to come back, but for the life of it, that lonely cow can't figure out how to get past that one determined horse.

"You know, cows ain't that smart, and they're fraternal to a fault. They'd rather get packed into a box car on the way to the slaughter house than run through the meadow, if the price of that meadow was bein' alone."

Luke ground the smoke out under his boot and looked up in the corner of the rafters. Corey turned to look, too, but didn't see anything. At last, he said "Uh huh."

"Uh huh?" Luke squinted at him. "What's this 'Uh huh'? Sounds like something a cow would say."

"Yes, sir. I only meant I understood that part . . . and I wanted to know more."

"See, that cutting horse is a specialist, and his specialty is freezin' that cow in its tracks. He'll jump like a cat if that cow tries to get around him. He'll puff up like your daddy when you need a lickin' if it wants to run over him. He'll eyeball her with those Svengali eyes of his until that cow is just fixin' to lie down in the dirt, wavin' its legs in the air.

"You understand what I'm saying about these cutting horses?"

"Yes, sir," Corey fibbed.

"Well these horses go straight back to the Old West. You needed a horse like that to get those cows on the train to Kansas City. Without cutting horses, you never would have had a hamburger in Chicago, or a filet on Fifth Avenue. They built this whole big country and filled your belly, one and the same."

"Yes, sir." Corey felt his eyes growing wide, but he struggled not to show it.

Luke told him how the good hands started matching their horses, one against the other, to see who was the best dang cutter in the whole dang world. Folks came from miles, hundreds and thousands of miles, just to see two horses work it off in the dirt.

"They'd throw out big prizes, and they'd wager a comfortable man's fortune. And you know what they say about money?"

Corey drew a blank. "No, sir."

"It's the root of all evil. And that's just the start of the story about this barn."

Luke spat in the dirt. He took off his hat and shook off the dust and put it back on.

"But it's getting late. You best get back to your folks."

"It's not dark yet," Corey protested. "They aren't missing me."

So Luke spun the tale of the rich man, Jurgenson, who everyone called 'Big Leo.'

"Wasn't but five-foot-four, but he carried around the attitude of a six-foot man. They've chopped his place up now, for folks like your daddy and your new neighbors to claim a piece. Big Leo, he had a bankroll big enough to stuff every mattress in the bunkhouse. He could have afforded the best hand in Texas to tend his horses, but when you overspend on everything, you wind up with a horse trainer like Lefty Duggans."

Corey was dying for more story and less smoking, but Luke kept dragging it out.

"One way or another, they got their filthy hands on this big-time gray stud. His papers had him down as 'Docs A Poco Lips.' but everyone just called him 'The Smoke.' He was a bolt of lightning wrapped in horsehide. He could sweet-talk a cow out of the crowd and spin her blind in a cloud of dust.

"Big Leo wanted a World Champion for himself, so he sent Duggans and The Smoke down the road, from San Angelo to Vegas, all the way up to Calgary, loopin' back through Columbus and down to the Gulf Coast, pulling in checks at every cutting horse show on the map."

By September, The Smoke had banked record earnings and looked like he had a lock on the World Championship. But Luke said there was a sorrel gelding named Smart As U Want making a name for himself. His barn name was 'Smarty' and he came out of the bayou country and started turning heads.

"This feller was Babe Ruth, if Babe Ruth had been a cutting horse," Luke said. "He could stop on a dime and give you a nickel's change. If he had the time, and you had the need, you could teach him to read a book. Hell, he could write the sequel, he was that smart."

Smarty was a plain-bred gelding with a Roman nose and a patch of white in the shape of Louisiana on his belly. But those flaws didn't factor when Herman Duschene rode him into the arena. They crouched so low to challenge a cow that Baton Rouge suffered a dust storm.

Duschene tacked wooden railings to the bed of his rusty old pick-up and hauled Smarty from show to show, until they were within hollerin' distance of The Smoke. Whoever had the biggest bankroll at the end of the year would be the champion.

"Some old boy put up a ton of cash for a three-round showdown, winner take all," Luke said, shaking his head at the idea, after all these years. He lit another cigarette.

"Folks packed the rafters to watch. They made bets and side bets and hedge bets. Men hocked their houses and sold their sisters for a piece of it. They said a train came up from Old Mexico with gold bars the size of your forearm."

Luke glanced at Corey and let the smoke pour out his nostrils. "The size of my forearm."

On Thursday night, a retired Texas Ranger escorted the judges in, his steely eyes sweeping the coliseum.

There was music and booze as lesser horses warmed up the crowd for the main event. Then The Smoke and Smarty battled it out. The throng exploded. This would be the show to end all shows. The judges checked their scores and checked them again before declaring The Smoke a narrow winner.

The next night, each horse bared its heart in the dust as they taunted the cows. Cheers rocked the walls, first for one, and then the other. In the end, Smarty's decisive victory fueled brawls and celebrations and fresh betting ahead of Saturday night's finale.

A temperate man, Duschene cooled off Smarty and put him up for the night. He slept on a cot in the stall next to the horse he revered, but on Friday night, a Cajun came by with a couple of beers and talked to him about the bayou and food and music and horses. Eventually Duschene fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.

He never saw Smarty again. The wonder horse had disappeared in the night. Police were called in, but nothing ever came of it. Saturday's contest was cancelled and the prize money withdrawn. The Smoke lived on to be World Champion.

"What happened to Smarty?" Corey asked, eyes wide as moons.

Luke studied Corey's face as carefully as Corey had studied Luke's earlier.

"He's under the barn," Luke said. "Big Leo, Lefty, they had to win. That's how the world is, you understand?"

Corey had no answer, so he countered the question. "What are you going to do after you tear down the barn?"

"Head down the road, I reckon." He squinted at Corey. "Any other damn thing you can do?"

One thing happened, and then another, and two months slipped by before Corey and his family returned to the land. By now, the barn had been transmogrified into picture frames and coffee tables in cabins and homes across the state. The earth had been scraped smooth, with piles of dirt, rock and trash marking the area where the barn once stood, like the chalk outline that shows the victim's final position in a murder mystery.

When he finally got to check it out, Corey knew that some heavy equipment had come into play. He sifted through some of the piles, and found chunks of boards and beams that had been hacked apart by the machines.

And he found a length of bone, as smooth and white as the stripe down the center of the highway. And he kind of hoped that his parents wouldn't call him back too soon.