6
“You don’t say much.”
Smoke turned to face him just long enough to growl, “I say enough.”
“What the hell was he doing with a race horse? Too damn hot for this part of the country.”
“Breeding. It’s what he said.”
“Folks round here want a horse with a little cow sense . . . “
Wendell fingered his glasses. All the sitting and thinking was getting him worked up.
“You really think you’d like to go for a ride in a car?”
“They’re sure fast,”
“Loud sons of bitches,” Wendell said with authority. He pictured the automobile as it had been just a few hours earlier roaring through the opening Jake had had carved into the barn. The sound had spooked the stallion, and the horse had exploded like a stick of dynamite and driven straight into a wheelbarrow made heavy with manure—a pitchfork poking from the top of the pile. The collision had shattered the horse’s cannon bone in two places—an irreparable injury—which made putting it down necessary. Recalling the events made Wendell irate all over again. He’d like to take a sledgehammer to the goddamn piece of shit car, pound it into a piece of sheet metal. The car killed the horse, that’s how he saw it. The car owed him and Smoke.
As Wendell sat thinking, it occurred to him that he ran the livery, and the car sat in that converted stall in the livery most days when Jake and Stanley weren’t parading it around town like a couple of dandies.
“I can get you a ride,” Wendell said, a bit tentatively, because maybe he could.
“You can do that?”