HOW TO LOSE A FROZEN HORSE-TURD FIGHT, Part One

This is the first installment (of two) of "How to Lose A Frozen Horse-Turd Fight", which is the 4th chapter of the "Oscar" series. Previous chapters are (1) Oscar and Someplace You Don't Want to Go - posted April 13th; (2) Moose and Molly and the Double Wide Bird of Paradise - posted April 29th; (3) Paint It, Wayne - posted June 6th. I recommend reading the segments in order. Thanks

When you were with Oscar you could usually tell by looking at his face if something had just happened somewhere. Or, that is to say, if something was going to happen somewhere for somebody else but it had already happened for Oscar. He was the only person I ever knew who had a reverse Eidetic memory - meaning, he had a hard time remembering anything after it happened but he sometimes had a pretty clear and detailed picture of something that hadn't happened yet. It's hard to say if a more ordinary person would have found such an ability to be a gift or a curse. Oscar said he deserved to have it. As far as how he felt about it, that didn't tell me the answer either way. I do know that one of his sayings was, "the events which haven't happened yet are the ones that are shaping our lives." I usually listened to stuff like this and then kind of stored it away, thinking someday it might make sense to me. Or not.

One day we were sitting in the cab of a broken down pickup truck behind Oslo Norway's auto repair slash junkyard. This old rusted out Chevy truck had no wheels, no engine, just raw springs for a seat, and the aroma of mouse poop as an air freshener. The inside door panels were long gone and the skeletal workings of the door latch and window crank were prominently displayed so you could jam your finger in them and damn near cut the tip off if you weren't careful. Not to mention the jagged pieces of broken out window glass. Usually if I was looking for Oscar and I couldn't find him in any of his other haunts, I knew there was a good chance he would be back here in this pickup cab in the midst of the Norway "yard". Even at this time of year.

Old Oslo pretended Oscar wasn't there for the most part; Oscar made him kind of jumpy with his quirky behavior and unorthodox viewpoints. So Oslo had no choice but to let Oscar sit in the old truck, since usually Oslo wasn't even admitting Oscar existed in the first place. I think the trouble had all stemmed from the day when Oscar told Oslo the reason that he had been given such an unusual name. And the truth about the midgets. But that's a story for another time I guess.

I was sitting there next to Oscar, trying not to freeze to death or gag on the smoke of his God-awful cigarettes, when all of a sudden he gave out a grunt and got a big grimace on his face. Oscar was kind of a tall skinny guy and he sort of spasmed over forwards, folding himself in half so fast his head might have hit the dash, except most of the dash panel had been removed so he just got stuck in the ear a little bit by a stray piece of wire.

Presently he sat back up in the seat, picked up his cigarette off the floorboards, returned to his previous posture and, I guess you could call it, previous "state of mind". His face was relaxed again and the wrinkles on his faded purple sweater had repositioned themselves into the exact same configuration they had been in before he had lurched forward.

"What's going on?" I asked. As I have said, I knew Oscar pretty well, probably as well as anybody still both alive and in these parts, so I knew he had experienced some sort of occurrence that us regular type folks didn't really get to be privy to. Jury was still out as to whether I should even be asking about it.

"Billy Brylcreem," he said. "Billy is going to have to get some work but Bartholomew will need to ferry him over to the other side if the burning river melts the ice. Milo has a bag of mermaids and the second son of Zipporah is there to help."

Billy Brylcreem was a rawboned kid of about twelve or thirteen who lived down by the river; his father ran a one-horse car ferry that crossed the Missouri so that folks could get from our town over to Wynona. Almost nobody ever really needed to go from one jerkwater town to another when eighty miles of dirt road - and a river crossing - separated them, so basically old Bart Brylcreem only had to make a couple crossings a day. He was a farmer in addition to his ferry boat captaining, and sometimes somebody would have to go drag him off the tractor or out of the barn in order to get him to haul them across. If you were on the Wynona side opposite his farm and wanted to cross you had to just honk your horn over and over and over, or stand on the riverbank and curse at the top of your lungs, until he or one of his family members heard you. For years there had been talk of building a bridge - but there was one county on one side of the river and another county on the other side and everybody thought somebody else should pay for the bridge. So, no bridge; just a lot of honking and cursing and farming and the occasional angry individual making the crossing on horseback with great difficulty.

I really didn't know if this information about the Brylcreem kid warranted me asking more questions or not. Right now it was actually winter, so cold out the river was impassable by the ferry some of the time (and it was way too damned cold to be sitting in some busted-ass pickup cab behind some stumpy Norwegian's garage, to tell you the truth). Milo Matrovik was another old boy who farmed upriver from Brylcreem - well technically he didn't do much farming, mostly he drank and war-whooped and tore up and down the river in a souped-up speedboat while wearing a big black cowboy hat. Generally his wife did most of the field work. She also grew a patch of marijuana in her garden in the summertime and got Milo to make speedboat runs back and forth to the Wynona side of the river with the fruits of the special garden project hidden in a flour sack, to sell some pot to the high school kids while they were on summer break. And of course she smoked plenty herself, in order to stay mellowed out sufficiently so she wouldn't take a pry bar and pound her wild and useless husband into the middle of next Tuesday.

In spite of his, shall we say, unfocused efforts as potential breadwinner for the family, Milo was fond of saying, "I put food on the table." This was true in the sense that when he wasn't roaring up and down the river Milo would sometimes do what he considered "fishing". Power fishing he called it. This consisted of setting up in the middle of the river at some point where the current was slow and lazy, then dropping some quarter sticks of dynamite into the water. Real quick he would zoom downriver a hundred yards and wait for the fireworks. After his "depth charges" went off, lo and behold, the surface of the river was bobbing with dead fish. As they slowly drifted downstream Milo would zip back and forth with his boat, using a net to pull out the choice catches - mostly Northern Pike and pallid sturgeon (he let the carp and goldeye just float by). Sturgeon are a bizarre animal, with an exoskeleton (actually a series of large plates) that gives them the look of some sort of alien or prehistoric creature. Milo called them "Missoura river dinosaurs" and claimed they were good eating because the exterior plates meant less bones inside - and they weren't blown all to hell when his unorthodox fishing technique was employed.

Not only did Milo's indulgence in this so-called sport bring food to the Matrovik table, but Milo was able to trade off some of the fish to a gin-soaked bar owner from Wynona, a fellow by the name of Boyd Baner - a sloppily dressed old boy whose most defining feature was his big bald head rimmed with a crown of impossibly wild and unkempt hair. Boyd had a bar in Wynona named simply, "Bar". He was always borderline between making a modest profit and running it into the ground due to his own drinking habits (around here this sort of behavior is known as "drinking up the farm", even if no actual farm is involved).

Boyd was a bit of a simpleton anyway and folks around Wynona usually referred to him as Bird Brain rather than Boyd Baner, and his bar was known generally as "Bird Brain's Roost" or sometimes just "Bird Nest". Baner was always happy to meet Milo on the riverbank along with the high school kids, and when Milo delivered the dope to the boys for cash he could swap off a big bag of fish to Boyd for a case of whiskey. Everybody seemed happy with this arrangement. Except for the fish of course.

It kind of boggled the mind to find yourself spending time sorting through all this stuff

about various local characters and weirdos from across the river, just because of some

incomprehensible sentence or two that Oscar spouted out of nowhere when you happened

to be within earshot. But I was kind of used to doing it I guess.

When Oscar treated you to one of his "revelations" you never knew exactly how it was going to play out, or when. Since it was winter and Oscar mentioned the ice, I figured this one couldn't be too far off in the future. Unless it was going to happen next winter or something. Or already happened fifty years ago. But I decided to just file it away like usual and see what came of it. Usually these things didn't impact on me directly but once in awhile they did, and I made a mental note to stay away from the river crossing for awhile.

* * * * * * * *

Up the river past Milo's place, maybe three or four miles from the ferry, was the Stallion Valley Ranch. This was a great big spread that bordered the river for several miles and also stretched back into the river breaks and beyond, encompassing some farmland but mostly pasture. It was several thousand acres, mostly consisting of land that only the hardiest of grasses would grow on, and then not very well. There was lots of sagebrush and cactus plants but those didn't do anybody a lot of good. And lots of sand dunes, where some folks liked to go hunting for Indian arrowheads. I never had the patience for it personally. And the one time I went with Oscar he found some artifacts and then stood around conversing with a bunch of dead Indian spirits that he said inhabited them, and it got pretty tedious before long. First things got all moral and mystical and philosophical and religious and then on top of that there was a general mapping of which buffalo jumps had been the most useful and which had not. Somehow knowing which ancient Crow buffalo jumps really didn't work worth a crap didn't strike me as information that I could get much benefit out of personally. But that's Oscar for you.

Most ranches had horses in order to work the herds of cattle. In such cases the cattle greatly outnumbered the horse population on a given ranch, as the horses were basically a four-legged tool that was useful in herding and moving the cattle. Nowadays some guys use four-wheeler ATV's instead of horses for this but that sort of thing doesn't go over real well with the old timers.

The Stallion Valley Ranch was a bit different. They had a few cattle but mostly they had horses; several hundred in fact. The ranch had been owned by the Toole family for several generations - most of the land had originally been populated by herds of wild horses going back to the Indian days, back before anything was fenced or privately owned by a bunch of white men. These wild stallions ran free on the land and continued to inhabit it after the land was parceled out and then fenced. A lot of the herds died out eventually, or were wiped out by various diseases, predators, dog food manufacturers, and so on. The Toole family now owned the remainder of these horses, the descendants of the wild stallions who had been there before the land was settled. These horses were eventually "broken" and transformed (for the most part) into tame horses that the Tooles sold to others as riding, working or breeding stock. Everyone in the Toole family, regardless of age or gender, seemed to know every which way around a horse and was able to relate very directly to the equus caballus mindset - they could all ride from practically Day One, they could all rope, they could sniff the wind, and without fail they could think like the horses they dealt with nearly every waking hour of every day. In fact, in terms of behavior, the line between being a human and being a horse had gotten kind of blurred, especially with regard to the current Toole family that lived on the Stallion Valley Ranch. They definitely considered the horses to be their equals in most ways. Take personal hygiene, for example. More about that in a bit.

Financially the Tooles had fallen on hard times in recent years. The market for their horses was dwindling; at least, the part of the market that would pay a decent price. Some said the Tooles didn't really manage their financial affairs all that well either. There was a lot of land involved and that meant you could get yourself into a lot of debt borrowing against it from the bank. Members of the family often traveled far and wide to participate in rodeo events, O-Mok-Sees and whatnot, and the cost of hauling horses and people all over the state and beyond could add up in a hurry. There was supposed to be some farming involved in the Stallion Valley Ranch setup, but that got pretty much neglected. It did not directly involve horses.

Somehow, once in awhile, the Tooles managed to take in boarders for a few days or a week at a time, as a bit of a supplement to their income. The current Toole family consisted of Nessie, the mother; Grady, the father; about five or six daughters (head count could vary depending on what rodeo events were going on across the state), and two sons. The sons were the youngest two in the family, though one of the daughters, named Myrna, was somewhere around the same age. I didn't know exactly how old they were, but the older son, Vernon, was about the same age as the Brylcreem boy and the younger son, Eliezer, was a year or two behind. So these boys were young teenagers or thereabouts. The girl Myrna, who like the two boys could be described as "strapping", hung around the place more than most of her sisters because she was sweet on Billy Brylcreem and sometimes he would come for a visit with her brothers.

When you saw these boys you didn't dream they were as young as they were. To say that they were unnaturally physically mature for their age would be an understatement. These fellas were tall and straight and sturdy as granite - but at the same time there was something there that I guess you would call grace. Power and grace. They were smooth but they were angular too, as if a new kind of geometry had been invented just for them. their physical strength was obvious. Muscles rippling as they walked, they looked like every move they made was made in slow motion, just to make it look like normal speed to the rest of us. Vernon in particular kind of dropped his shoulder and moved with something that was more of a lope than a stride. This stride was not a normal man's stride. These boys did everything but snort and paw the earth.

Their dad was short and gnarly; their mother was big-boned, tall and heavy -- something in the cross of these bloodlines had produced two young fellas that were kind of off the charts, as far as standard theories of genetics or evolution went. In the course of a regular day every living thing on the Stallion Valley Ranch banged and shoved and butted and slammed each other around - all the girls, all the boys, all the dogs and horses and even a couple ornery chickens - so for all these folks life was kind of a rowdy contact sport and generally they weren't scared of anything. The boys in particular seemed to be indestructible.

One time at the grain elevator in town, the hydraulics went out on a just-emptied truck box when young Vernon was standing under it - the huge metal structure went into free fall and slammed him right on top of the head. It knocked him to the ground and everybody was sure he was dead. But in a minute he sat up, shook his head, and crawled slowly back to his feet. He had sort of a sheepish look on his face and some blood was trickling out of one ear. He never bothered to wipe it off.

So sometime after my chilly experience with Oscar in the cab of that old Chevy pickup, some folks from out Southeast near Lonely Dog Bench found they had to go across the state for a funeral. The Johnson family didn't want to take their two young boys out of school to attend this event, and the boys had been full of piss and vinegar lately anyway and kept getting into trouble. Their folks thought maybe they needed something to settle them down. So Ron and Latona Johnson arranged to leave John and Honky Johnson out at the Toole's while they were out of town. The trip was expected to take about a week. Ron Johnson knew pretty well how things worked out at the Toole place and he figured his rowdy boys would be taken down a peg or two by the time the family was reunited on the Bench.

The boys got dropped off in time for lunch on a Sunday and they weren't there for ten minutes before Grady rode his horse into the kitchen. The horse just kind of ducked his head and came right in through the porch door - obviously he had done it dozens of times before. Honky was right wide-eyed standing there by a horse's ass in the suddenly crowded room. The horse shook his head around and huffed, and then swatted the boy right across the face with his tail, which of course smelled more than a little of horse shit. Meanwhile Vernon was eating mashed potatoes from a pile plopped directly on the table, and he was eating from the eraser end of a pencil instead of a fork. This made it slow going but nobody on the Toole ranch was ever in much of a hurry. The day, in fact the week, was off to a fine start. Even though it was going to drag on more than a bit for John and Honky Johnson.

END OF PART ONE