Hoss

by Christine Boylan

 

Her gun was empty. The Suited Man had no way of knowing that, though. Berke leveled the revolver at his forehead; atop her piebald mare and accounting for heights, this meant shooting from the hip.

 

"Stand up and pay up," said Paul, gently nudging his black Arabian forward.

 

"Yeah, pay up and shut up," said Jack, whose own horse now blocked the road the suited man had walked in on.

 

The Suited Man twitched, as if his nerves couldn't decide whether to break laughing or crying. "Let me get this straight," he said, his right eye screwing itself inward. He rubbed the stubble on his face, to calm the eye spasm. Unsuccessful. "You're robbing me?"

 

Before Berke could answer, Jack leaned forward, feigning boredom, and grunted. "Yup. Give us everything you've got, or Berke here shoots you."

 

Berke flinched, just slightly, at the sound of her name.

 

The Suited Man handed his one bag up to Jack, who began rifling through it. The Suited Man waited. Paul sat uneasily back in the saddle, took a second to steady himself, and shook his head at the Suit. "Keep going. Everything."

 

Now the Suited Man was digging into his pants pockets. Berke noticed the frayed cuffs, the hard instep creases on his dress shoes. Three days he'd been walking, most likely. Almost through the canyon and set upon by three robbers on horseback. Unlikely but not impossible. He crouched in the center of the circle of horses, turning out his empty pockets like a vaudeville bum. He shrugged. But as the sun dipped down behind him, Paul spotted a glint of chrome in the man's vest pocket—

"Give us the phone."

 

Suit pulled out a battered iPhone. "It doesn't have a signal—please. I need the address I'm trying to get to—"

 

"Don't need no address," Jack chimed in, looking up from the Suit's last possessions. "The place you're looking for is either under water, or not."

 

At that, not so much a joke but a statement of the obvious, Jack the Ass cackled for a solid six seconds. It reverberated off the trees. Berke figured they lost two targets for every one of Jack's outbursts.

 

The Suit cradled the phone in his palm and caressed it with his thumb to find what he needed. He took a last look at the screen and sighed, as if at the pain of remembering how to memorize. He handed the phone up to Jack and said: "It isn't worth very much. Look, there's a Red Cross station two miles up. I saw a sign for it. That's why I walked up this way. We could go together. You could give me my stuff back and rob them instead."

 

Berke nudged the reins with her left hand, and Misty daintily stepped left, opening up the circle to grant Suit passage. "Get gone," said Paul. The Man in the Suit could have run away, but he walked ahead even more slowly than he had approached.

Paul stuck out a booted foot and kicked his pinstriped ass as he went. Jack started up his cackling again, really letting loose and closing his eyes in the warm glow of the late-afternoon sun. Paul smirked. "Good job putting that sign up, the Red Cross thing."

Berke nodded. "Helps foot traffic." The real Red Cross couldn't get where they were, trapped between a huge desert and a vengeful ocean. Five days on and there was no sign of any real aid.

 

"We'll take what we can get," said Paul. He grimaced and steadied himself in the saddle.

 

Berke grinned, even if it didn't reach her lips. That bastard is saddle sore.

 

Paul covered his discomfort by beckoning at Jack: "Give 'er."

 

Jack tossed the Suit's bag over. "Nothing much. Coupla' Zone bars. T-shirts. Men's small, though."

 

"I'll take them," said Berke. Jack and Paul hadn't worn a men's small since age eight.

 

They steered their horses off the main path, into a clearing. "Getting slim out here," said Paul, peering at the sinking sun.

"This hyena's scaring away the quarry," said Berke, thumbing at Jack.

 

Jack gave her the finger. Paul shook his huge bald head. "No one passing this way now. They're either wet and dead, or dry and..."

 

"Fled," said Jack, the Ass, shaking and cackling again.

 

Berke kept quiet. She'd spied a sizeable survivors' camp halfway down in the foothills on her way up here this morning. They looked shell-shocked, newly arrived, wearing jewelry and designer clothes, layered on when they had to abandon their homes. They carried impractical bags containing wallets stuffed with paper money, bank cards, IDs, things that made them rich only weeks ago. They huddled together. They thought their ordeal was over.

 

"We should move. This spot's done."

 

"We should hold," said Berke. "We control this switchback. Can't get a car through here, right? People have to pass through on foot, and they have to pass. Unless you want to go back to chasing cars?"

 

Paul shook his head, smiling with his mouth only. His suspicious eyes were all over Berke. "The lady's right."

 

 

The lady was right. You had to cross the hills in order to travel anywhere now. And Paul and Jack seemed relieved to take orders, even obvious ones. Even from a woman who had appeared out of nowhere. She had only known the other members of her crew for about forty-five minutes before she pulled the gun on the Man in the Suit and acted like she'd been stealing all her life. When they first crossed paths at the switchback Berke caught a glimpse of Paul's black Arabian and pulled her revolver.

 

Paul laughed. "Honey, I can see that gun is empty. You better aim over a man's eyes if you want to fool him into being afraid of you."

 

Berke nodded, caught. "It's just a deterrent," she said, holstering the gun.

 

Paul and Jack were hungry and hesitant to part ways, since Berke was well supplied with protein bars, bottles of water and even some donuts she'd taken from an earlier encounter.

 

"No hard feelings, then." She tensed her knees and Misty started forward a step.

 

"I'm Paul," he said, to stop her. "That's Jack...Jack the Ass, we call him."

 

"We?" "The guys at the office," said Jack, shrugging. He was a sunken man between broad shoulders. He chuckled nervously.

 

"No more office, now. We out on the range. Ain't we," said Paul.

 

Berke nodded slowly, guessing this put-on twang was not their office patois. She watched Paul's horse duck his black-and-white head. Watched Paul shift in the saddle.

 

"Hey, look," said Paul, eying her calm demeanor and bulging backpack, trying to be friendly, "you and me have the same license plate." He pointed to his horse, who flicked its mane at him. He was right. The brands on the horses' left shoulders were the same: Two crossed x's, one short and one long and arranged like the center lines of a compass.

 

"That's funny," she said. "Where'd you get that horse?" Berke asked.

 

"Oh, had it forever. Where'd you get yours?"

 

"He's the wrong size for you."

 

Jack started cackling. Paul took the cue to lighten his tone again: "Horses come in sizes?"

 

Misty moved closer to the horse Paul was riding and nuzzled him. Berke reached down and patted her neck. Easy girl. Easy.

 

"They like each other," Paul said. "Good sign. Maybe we should work together. Probably not safe for a woman up here alone."

"Probably not," she said. She looked at him. She had a bag of food, a strong horse and a gun. And now she had a question. So she nodded. "My name is Berke."

 

Paul and Jack the Ass had been walking and starving for the entire five days since the earthquake and waves hit. Somehow they found a horse, the docile chestnut gelding Jack now rode, saddled but riderless, chewing grass off on the wild side of Mulholland. The chestnut was a good boy, and Jack, though loud and ignorant, also knew how to ride, having grown up on a farm in Nebraska. Paul had acquired the horse he rode sometime later, and it was clear to Berke from the way he gripped the reins in his fat fists and jammed his toes downward in the stirrups that he had never ridden a horse before that day. Berke pressed him on the horse's provenance.

 

"Why, you gonna write about it in your little pony book? Man's gotta have secrets, don't he?" Paul spit on the ground for punctuation.

 

"It's not much of a story," said Jack.

 

Paul shut him up with a look, then turned to Berke: "Tell you what: You hold up whoever we catch next. If we get a good haul, I'll build a campfire and tell you all about Black Beauty. Good?"

 

Once Paul and Jack had spent half a day on horseback, the bright idea must then have occurred that the added height gave them power and surprise, so they got it into their heads to chase cars and steal food or supplies from the ones they could catch. Fuel was probably scarce; terrain was difficult for city cars to manage. They won a few chases, probably hurt more people than was necessary.

 

Berke didn't work that way. She patiently explained to them why it was easier to hold one position and rob passersby. Anyone who wanted to escape the flooding or search for loved ones on the other side of the hill had to cross this road.

 

"If this is the only freeway left, then we control the freeway," said Paul. "That's a nice place to be. We're, like, Freewaymen."

 

"Highwaymen." Berke couldn't help herself.

 

"Not on the west coast."

 

"They have a catch phrase, when they rob people. 'Get up and give it!' That's not right..."

 

"It's 'Put 'em up, step aside,'" said Paul. "That's what they say."

 

"Freewaymen!" repeated Jack, with gusto. "And women," he said, batting his eyelashes at Berke.

 

"Shut the fuck up," she said.

 

 

Just then, Misty quivered and then the ground shook and then the entire mountain rocked, and Jack did indeed shut the fuck up. He looked at Paul. Paul looked through the trees. Berke just breathed, slowly, patting Misty's neck. These aftershocks were reassuring, somehow. The stillness that followed the quake and the waves gave over into movement. Nature's way of saying that things would go forward.

 

Berke had no trouble guiding Misty up and down the terrain of the canyons and hills of Los Angeles. Before five days ago, before Berke was Berke, she learned to ride from a rich man named Scottie in the rocky cliffs and salt air around Malibu. She worked as a stable muck at a ranch that sat between the edge of the ocean and the crust of the mountains.

 

She savored her job, because it had a strict process and dedicated tools. She became adept with a shavings fork and pink rubber gloves. She learned the hard way that a stall floor needs to be completely dry before new shavings can be laid on, to make a bed for the horse. She used a broom and a pitchfork, and found each and every one of the horses knew her by smell, and became docile to her touch. She made their beds. They were grateful.

 

But she didn't know how to ride. Not then, not at first.

 

Scottie and his sister Leigh were bored that summer, and that was a mercy to Berke. They were English, the children of some West End producer who relocated to Burbank to make a TV show. Scottie and Leigh never talked about Daddy or TV or What Had Happened to Mum. They just rode their horses.

 

Scottie rode for fun, but Leigh was an equestrian. She rode dressage at the Grand Prix level, and drove her white filly out at five every morning for drills. Both took a liking to Berke soon after she started working at the stables. "None of these American louts is going to appreciate the quality of your work," Leigh said. "No offense."

 

 

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