Kindle Edition
Amazon
Author Alfred Cool
Category:
Humor
Publisher: Amazon.com
ISBN-10: 1500553328
Pages: 137
Copyright: June 2014
ISBN-13: 9781500553326
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
Conflict in a small BC town. Who wins the battles that ensue?
The seemingly pastoral bliss of Noble, a small interior BC town, explodes into scandal and outrage when the arrival of the Lipizzaner stallion show disrupts the quaint style and day-to-day living of the local Pony club membership. No one, it seems, from the highest office in the city to the local motorcycle gang, the business community or the mothers and wives of the club members are immune to the rabble of protest when a single man, two cups over his limit, causes a demanding club president to try to exact her vengeance on his effrontery. The intervention of police and lawyers ensure hostilities build to a climax as the thin veil of reputations fall like bowling pins as a result of the peeling back of social layers in front of the Supreme Court Judge's bench. This narrative is a portrait that leaves the reader to decide whether it is truth or innuendo, lies and half-truths that draw this raw, often hysterically funny, always compelling sketch of life in small-town BC.
Excerpt
Smitty looked over the documents I just handed him. Our young waitress placed two pints on the table, expecting payment from me without even asking, not intending to wipe up the beer she had just spilled onto our table.
"Hi. Do you want to run a tab?"
Smitty said, "Yes, we do."
His enthusiasm was not infectious. When he responded, he did not bother to look up from the important task of pretending he was reading.
"No. Definitely not." I said. The waitress left after I paid her, tipping her a toonie. The round cost fourteen dollars. "You're turning into a pretty expensive date, Smitty."
He clinked my pint glass and said, "What's this word, 'reprehensible' mean? And why do you think 'Human Rights' might be involved?"
"Human Rights will get involved because you are, at least, semi-retarded and the club is guilty of treating you in contravention of the Human Rights Act of British Columbia." I used the qualifier semi- in order not to hurt his feelings.
"I am not retarded."
"How do you know?"
"Well, because, jeez," he scratched his chin, "...I guess I don't know." He laughed at his own doubt, wiping beer foam from his beard.
"You make my point," I laughed with him, sipping my pint and watching him, hoping for a light to come on, "and with all this crap you’ve started, it will serve you well to get used to saying that in public. A lot."
Though I believe we must study history or we are doomed to repeat it, I also believe that too intense a study will probably lead to the conclusion that each of us deserves what we get.
My reflections on the past came at me in parody, a midsummer's nightmare of circumstances that found me sitting in the Trail Blazer bar, across the beer soaked table from Smitty. He was crying into his hands - lamenting his lot in life - brought on solely as consequences of his own actions. He was playing the sympathy card to reach both my solace and my wallet, but this time it wasn’t going to work. When he peeked up at me, he could see my immunity to his suffering. I was unimpressed, considering my own sorry lot. To save my ailing horse, I allowed myself to be dragged into his world of horse knowledge, and regretted a little more each day Smitty’s self-promoting diagnosis, “Say what you want about me, but your horse is doing way better now.”
In one of his brief and rare moments of sobriety, Smitty once pontificated, "It's not what ya got but who ya are that shows if you can see right from wrong." If one bothered to sift through the bad grammar, one might find Smitty’s myopic - perhaps even valid - colloquialism failed the further insight that, for many of us, there is simply no choice in the matter. But then, his experiences throughout his life led him to believe that all things came easier for everyone else. The notion afforded him insulation from his embarrassment of having his empty hands out, on most occasions palms up, expecting a boon from the nearest philanthropist. He took a lot about other people for granted.
I considered my own surprising and catastrophic slide from my previously euphoric state of grace which, until recently, I enjoyed within my carefully crafted anonymity. I pined for the days, only a few short months ago, when my impression of Noble was idyllic: a tiny, perfect western town of friendly faces and open arms. Noble flourished in a swale, mushrooming beside a delightful, clear blue lake. Near the dividing line between the Cariboo and the Chilcotin high plains, the town nestled among expansive, rolling golden fields of lush hay waving in currents of crystal clear air. I imagined an eternal symbiosis of grass-fed, robust cattle and grazing herds of horses populating the glens throughout the verdant, green infinity of forests reaching west to the lee of the impressive, snow-capped Coastal Mountains. Paradise.
But now? I somehow managed to stumble into a snake pit of vipers – finding myself hissed at on the streets and struck at by a diamond-back clique from hell. And over nothing more than a horse and the inflated egos of people I hardly knew! Believe me, the last thing I give a hoot about is the Baron boinking the Blonde. She is the president of our Pony Club. Once the supreme court lawsuit and counter suits were launched, Smitty and I called her ‘the Blonde’ in public because you never knew who was listening – and these days, everyone was always listening.
How did I descend to such a dismal place in my life? Smitty, that’s how. Even with the best of intentions to help our horse back to health, I turned an invisible, unforeseen corner in my odd life, circumstantially embroiling us into webs of lives that appeared passive enough until the outer layers were peeled back. Then, in a storm that in Cicero’s day might have filled a ladle, did the consequences of a single bad decision I made erupt into what could only be labeled today as a tempest.
As you may have already gathered, this tale is not about locals, for they are a discretionary community and often not as surprising or interesting as the newcomers or interlopers. Neither are the hop-skip-and-jumpers worthy of much notice. These linger in temporary employment or lack of employment, sometimes disturbing the local tableau for a few short years, then vanishing forever. Excepting your narrator, the unprincipled, main characters of this tale are of the ilk of those who hang around, striving to become locals. Always trying and never quite fitting in, this social-climbing rabble sifted themselves from the bulk supply of wayward outsiders simply by use of their skill at lingering. Perhaps some were enraptured by the romantic beauty of the landscape or perhaps destiny guided them hither. More than likely for most, a flat tire dried up the remaining funds of a shallow financial pool before they could make it all the way to their planned destination.
Regardless of how they arrived, with what expectations or in what financial circumstances, collecting and fermenting in the petri dish of Noble, they are all guilty of willingly climbing over each other’s backs, seeking a higher station or a new quality in their lives. It is your narrator’s observation this is a false hope each of them share - to expect mere proximity might afford them importance and notice. The events in this narrative are un-filtered, exposing through the unflinching, revealing scrutiny of a small community, the elevated folly of low drama, lower opinion and bargain-basement scandal of those who would be high and mighty.
This is also the story of a horse who some tried to blame as the culprit who started the whole mess. To the credit of the banal equine in question - Cowboy is his name – he was able to remain above the riotous din created by those around him. The bi-pedal characters trying to affect his character and well-being, displayed none of the amazing qualities or the disposition of the horse, save for his rear end. Finally, this story is about what it takes to lose all hope of ever becoming one of the mythical ranks of locals in the Shangri-la we call the Heartland of BC. This is not the fault of the interlopers - that bar was always out of their reach anyway.
In another volume, the stories and characters of both locals and interlopers which make clear statements about human nature, might be compared for the reader. But your narrator is a member of the lesser group - a paradox - and is not qualified to speak at length about the true heart of the land. I am reminded of a quote from Joseph Conrad, “And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth.”
So I leave a consideration for the reader - for there is good and bad in the hearts of interlopers wherever they go about their business. Read and if it suits your nature, decide whether it is up to us all to see the world before us for what it is or what we wish it to be.
1. A Couple of Pints
I’m tempted to say the beginning of this cluster started, like too many others involving Smitty, in the Trail Blazers bar. However, I see now that this day was the flash-point of colliding destinies, an irreversible smash-up begun months, even years earlier. Sweating from the heat of the day, we sat across from one another beneath an array of flat TV screens. In the background, talking heads on plasma screens reviewed professional bowling classics from two decades ago.
Smitty is a small, mean man. He and I were breaking the law by having a beer together. He was under a court order. I found out too late that he was not to have alcohol – not ever. Socially, I knew this anyway. Most everyone in Noble knows it. He is always a potentially violent man, wringing his worn, leather cowboy hat in his hands, lisping from broken dentures. He often smells of a mix of sweat, stale tobacco and a peppermint horse liniment similar to Ice Tight. Like his addiction to beer and cigarettes, he cannot afford either unless he does without something else in life. I often thought he sacrificed soap to his addiction. He is pronounced in his opinions and angry about the unfairness of his life. As if on an endless loop, he relives and retells his past as an orphan, including the abuse he suffered and continues to suffer through his painful, murky memories. He is prone to punctuating his verbal outbursts by throwing whatever he holds in his hands at his audience or assailant. Recently, he landed in hot water again when he threw hot coffee at an innocent store clerk who was only politely asking for payment.
Years ago, our Liberal provincial government decided it would be to our advantage to go into generational debt to hold a party the world knows as Vancouver’s Expo ‘86. The politicians, deciding the already over-taxed citizenry would pay for hosting their shindig, broke unions and government contracts, shut down schools, and reduced government services, such as available hospital beds. Of particular importance to this story is our government gutted the foundation of provincial medical care by chasing off locally educated and funded Canadian nurses to the US. As a follow-up, they also stopped funding successful community out-reach programs for emotionally and mentally disturbed day patients. This unleashed Smitty, and thousands of other un-medicated, lost, and in some cases, angry patients onto the streets over-night and without proper care. It was like we were transported to the U.S.A. Since that gob-smack at social conscience, who in Noble had not yet been treated to a Smitty goldie-oldie, like, "Your problem is you can't separate your needs from your wants. Can I borrow a cigarette?"
We were quaffing our third pints at happy hour, though there was little evidence at our table to suggest anything approaching 'happy' was occurring. I paid, remaining in pecuniary rhythm with the first two rounds, which also came from my pocket.
When our waitress trotted away, Smitty asked, "Do you think it's right that the Lippizaner stallions should kick your horse out of his stall?"
This comment revealed the source of his edgy irritation. The famous show horses were in town as part of a lengthy North American tour. Our riding facilities and half our stalls were ‘loaned out’ to the travelling herd by order of our generous, gracious Blonde. She could not help but fall to her knees in reverence before the Austrian upper class. She fawned over the spectacle of horses dancing on their hind legs. Dressed like gargantuan, spangled, circus chihuahuas each of them, in my opinion, the equine equivalent of a crack-addicted transvestite hooker disguised in a twenty-five dollar dress, a platinum Dolly wig, and a handful or two of pancake makeup. The review was on the road for two grueling years, extending the painful traditions of centuries of old world animal abuse. Now the iconic pageantry, which once pleased the syphilis-infected, incestuous Habsburg aristocracy, was titillating our very own club president.
Her fascination might have been the fact these riders stayed on when their acrobatic, massive stallions were doing anything more than standing or walking. In contrast, both the Blonde and her horse, Sadie, were slender; neither were either of them tall. Standing beside almost any other horse in the paddock area, Sadie appeared more of a pony - a doll beside adults. The animal's withers were no higher than her owner’s armpits. Though Sadie looked like anyone would expect a horse to appear: head in front, tail in back, four legs reaching all the way to the ground, neither was she a wide horse. Her saddle was three-quarters the size of a small woman's saddle. When the Blonde mounted her - she sat very straight and regal to enhance her stature – the soles of her riding boots were mere inches off the ground. Her boot polish in constant jeopardy of scuffing from the prevalent bunch grass growing along the gently rising trails they traversed, a single flex of the her knees out of the stirrups, and Sadie would out from under her, leaving the Blonde standing on the ground. Over the months of watching the Blonde ride was to feel the growing frustration of wanting to hear, at least, one encouraging 'giddy-up'.
Our assigned stalls were within earshot. I practically participated in her riding preparations - a solemn ritual for the Blonde. Before attempting any equestrian maneuver, such as slinging a leg over Sadie, the Blonde would spend half an hour chastising and grooming her already immaculately brushed, docile and securely tethered mount.
"Whoa Sadie, whoa now. You don't want to scare mommy, do you? Whoa, Sadie, whoa."
Many times, I have observed the Blonde carry on like this until her Sadie was falling almost asleep. Lashed securely to a hitching rail, Sadie had no chance to escape even a Grizzly attack, let alone turn her head away from her owner. Not that either had the slightest chance of happening.
Once mounted, the Blonde walked Sadie to the endless cant of "Easy Sadie, easy". Coerced under tight reins past the stalls and barns, the training ring, through the track, they would inevitably cut onto the gently sloping trail leading to the ridge roadway above the fairgrounds. There, some one hundred and fifty yards from the stalls, they remained unmoving, sometimes for an hour or more, looking down at the stables. Caught in silhouette by the waning sun struggling to remain in the sky, an orange flood of light ever so slowly ebbed to violet dusk, dropping behind the ridge west of Noble, before they regained ambulation.
Locals, often lubricated and communing in small groups, offered unsolicited advice of how to cause a horse to move. Smitty told me the Baron, also on his own under-sized horse, became her steady riding partner for the past two years. Joining the Blonde on her evening sojourns, gallantly requesting the locals move away from them. Then, as all four of them adopted a statuesque repose, as the sun set while logging trucks and pickups roared up and down the highway hill throughout the lingering twilight.
Their return was always a very controlled descent back down the same gentle trails to the stalls. The Baron and the Blonde, spent from the exercise, held an hour in ritual quite unnecessarily cooling their horses down. This exaggerated grooming occurred before feeding, watering, then bunking down their horses for the night. How either of them stayed awake through the boredom of it all puzzled me. Perhaps the disappointment of the walk was enough of an emotional disruption to keep both animals, at least, semi-conscious and hoping for more?
I first met the Blonde as part of my introduction to the Noble Pony Club four years ago. As the president of our not-for-profit society - and from the look of things, not-for-speed either - the Blonde expressed the most striking anguish. While I was leafing through the application’s many pages, initializing and signing each page of both the membership contract and the required Code of Conduct pledge, the Blonde told me her personal torment was her fear of rape. She expressed this extraordinary, unsolicited comment as a deeper concern than I could imagine any widow of a Johannesburg Boer, terrorized during a moonless night, fearful of attack in her bed by a gang of naked, marauding Zulu warriors armed with assegais and white, rolling eyes! Apparently, she expected at any time, the many town drunks were about to spring on her and ravage her in the grass. She expressed the dismaying inevitability that it was ‘only a matter of time’.
“They’re always watching me from the tall grass behind the paddocks, waiting for the right moment to attack. Tell your daughter to be on her guard. Always.”
My daughter, a recalcitrant teenager, would not be such easy prey for any drunken lout hardly able to remain erect propped up against a corral fence. Far more likely she might be a deciding factor to his chronic limp after side-kicking him to the ground. But, out of politeness and because it seemed the fastest way to end the awkward conversation, I said I would remind her.
Our president’s second fear appeared to be of her fair-haired horse. This very incarnation of 'pet docility', she apparently dreaded, might one day of abandon break into a trot. It took seconds for the first subject of her paranoia to arise, and months of observation before I would identity the second.
I also confirmed, during the same term of observation, the Baron and the Blonde had begun some sort of frustrated, extra-marital affair. Comfortable as they were for two hours or more spent together each night, a casual observer might notice they enjoyed rhythmically and vigorously stroking their horses for extended periods after their rides. Standing near each other after their lengthy walk-a-thons, their habitual quasi-masturbation was on-going, with no foreseeable climax on the horizon. It appeared to me the coats of their horses were thinning alarmingly. This excited brushing occurred each of the many nights the Blonde’s husband was out of town, long-hauling freight around North America.
Like Sadie, we club members were expected to follow the Blonde’s lead in all things. Two days previous, she had corralled me after dinner. I was mucking out my horse's stall when she appeared, handing me a letter and yet another copy of the club rules.
She asked, "Do you mind giving up your stall for just one night or maybe two? Everyone else has agreed."
Batting her pretty, blue eyes at me from behind her blonde bangs, this forty something, Wonder-Bra miracle of a hustler was pressuring me. This meant that my horse, a magnificent spirited thoroughbred, a full seventeen hands at the withers, who could run like the wind and fly over four-foot rails would have to break his routine. This is no small request. He would spend, at least, one night away from his stall. For what? To make way for some high-maintenance, prancing show horse from Florida to crap in his stall? However, she hornswoggled me into agreement by proxy, peer pressure and my admiring her tight body in well-selected blue jeans. The Baron was due to arrive, so I had no illusions exactly for whom her garb was chosen.
Though very reluctant, I agreed to sign.
Choosing wisely which row of stalls to evict, the executive of the club omitted themselves from this substantial, unexpected, overnight trespass. Across the courtyard, their stalls were not adjacent to mine, so they were unbothered by the invasion.
Our horse, Austin, had papers tracing his lineage back to the mighty Northern Dancer, and we didn't want him raped in his paddock either. It was well known, after polishing off a few cans of oven-cleaner, the drunks from town would sneak onto the grounds later at night and climb on the horses in their paddocks. I didn't want Austin running about, avoiding the idiots and possibly hurting himself for nothing.
Smitty pointed out Sadie had lineage back to a local horse auction, the last stop for many horses before the depressing one-way trip to the reduction plant. Her previous owner saw greatness where others saw dog food, so she rescued Sadie. Two years ago, the Blonde bought Sadie, elevating her immediately to 'special'. My horse, along with many others in the eyes of the Blonde, was not. In a rare display of infidelity and independence, the Baron's horse was to remain out as well. Cowboy, Smitty's well-mannered horse - certainly better than Smitty ever was – enjoyed distance from the executive’s stalls. His stall was attached to the near side of the covered riding arena and so not affected by the Austrian invasion. Smitty had to make a specific effort, which he often committed, to intrude upon the Blonde and the Baron while tending to their horses.
The Blonde cut off communication with Smitty after he accosted her at a well-attended Mother’s Day Gymkhana a year earlier by calling her a "trumped up blonde bitch who didn't know shit about horses.” This confrontation resulted in the hasty calling of a meeting of the club executive, attended only by the Baron and the Blonde. Though they did not achieve quorum, the two virtual lovers ratified their lust and a hasty, unanimous agreement to implement an action plan.
That same night, Smitty received notice his status changed to that of non-member of the club and that he was to move his horse immediately. Calmer heads did not prevail the next morning. Smitty spent three moody hours alone in the Legion, playing Keno, drinking and smoking. Then he went to the Blonde's place of work, at the Mental Outpatient Clinic, where he ranted at her in the foyer until she withered under his pressure. To defuse the public scandal that Smitty initiated in front of her staff, the Blonde let him back in the Pony Club. It would not do for the administrator to hear of the clinic staff abusing the clients. There was a strict policy that sort of thing was only to happen behind closed doors.
Subsequently, the board chairwoman commenced the next staff meeting with a very awkward two-hour review of the Blonde and her participation in the incident. After much groveling, the board chair reminded the Blonde she was always first a councilor to the mentally challenged. The chairwoman also added a letter of reprimand to the Blonde’s personnel file, but allowed her to continue as Administrator.
Iacta alea est and enemies formed battle lines. Never really out of the club, the upshot of the Blonde and the Baron’s conspiracy was that Smitty gained reinstatement. He could not have cared less because he was at the TB begging smokes and beers while she was being raked over the coals. That night, Cowboy watched interested and hopeful food might be forthcoming, as the Baron nailed yet another ineffectual copy of the club rules to his stall door.
The rocky relationship between Smitty and the Blonde declined steadily, as did all relationships with Smitty - mine included. He didn’t stalk the Blonde so much as he pestered her. Hailing her at the shopping mall, in Tim Horton’s, at the TB, even appearing again at her work several times. She never acknowledged his interruptions, vowing under her breath to find a way to rid herself of the annoying man.
I knew this history because I was involved with Smitty, and he loved telling the story. Our thoroughbred’s health was in obvious decline; he sufferred from a weak back and bad muscle tone, stemming from a kidney disorder initiated from my having purchased the wrong hay for him. Too much alfalfa in his food was damaging his kidneys. Smitty, from years of being around racehorses - whom he treated with more kindness and understanding than any woman he ever knew - spotted the problem in my horse’s urine. He showed me how to feed, care for and exercise my horse back to health. At first, I was reluctant to accept his help, but after a year of my horse’s lingering ill health despite a string of expensive veterinary visits, I was desperate and leaned on Smitty’s experience.
For years, Smitty owned a string of warm-bloods which he raced on the lesser fairground circuits throughout the interior of BC. Unfortunately, since those days, the only other aspect of professionalism I saw him display was his very capable mooching. He told me, during the '70s, he was known for juicing his inferior horses and running them to death on tracks in Kamloops, Noble, Williams Lake, Osoyoos, and Vernon.
By way of self-absolution, he said, “It’s no big deal. We all did it. I was just better at it than most.” By the time my horse was on the mend, it was impossible to disengage from Smitty.
For this bastion of horse knowledge, I was forking out for beer, cigarettes and homage listening to many hours of his drunken babble. Also because of our association, I was suffering alienation from the diminishing numbers of Pony Club members still remaining. Rounds at the TB usually ended with me giving Smitty a long drive back to his apartment in the subsidized housing facility, running the gauntlet of aggressive cops out for his blood. Smitty, of course, was already near the top of the prominent 'well known to police' list, which contained the names of Noble’s trouble-makers and vagabonds.
Finishing my fourth pint, I said, "I've had it. I'm leaving. If you want a ride, let’s go. Or you can find your own way home." I’d learned to be firm with him when he was drinking, or he’d wheedle on for more beer for hours.
Smitty’s status in the TB fluctuated. When he could pull money out of his jeans and show the staff he had cash, he was not barred. If he could find someone dumb enough to buy him beer, he was not barred. Other than those two situations, neither happening regularly until I came along, Smitty remained barred from the beer parlor. Due to his tenuous status and because his gout-induced limp caused him much pain when walking uphill, but mostly because it was sweltering hot, he accepted my offer of a ride. I had to resist his insistence he allow me to purchase for him a six-pack and a deck of smokes on his way home. Smitty existed in the interminable cash-strapped state of 'waiting for his pension'. This period of the month lasted from the day after his stipend arrived - when his antics surely reacquired him the status of ‘barred’ from most drinking establishments in town - until it arrived again near the end of the following month.
Smitty pestered me about money as I strained my eyes into the blinding Cariboo sun, hanging low over the ridge west of town. The glare was causing me some difficulty as I escaped past the Beer & Wine store and away from the TB parking lot. His plaintive bleating continued even as I turned left at the lights to go down the hill. Dashing his hopes his whining would cause me enough guilt that I might turn my SUV around in another misguided gesture of charity, he finally adopted a simpering silence.
Dropping down the long hill to the flat near the fairgrounds, Smitty yelled, "Turn in here!"
2. The Lipizzaners
Startled by his outburst, I reacted instantly, thinking I had struck a cop, a person on a bike or a vehicle in the road. But no, a greater disaster loomed. Smitty wanted to see the Lipizzan Stallions for himself. We had already exercised, groomed, watered and fed both our horses, so there was no need at all to return to the stables.
Don’t get me wrong – Smitty showed me lots about horses. The years before I met Smitty, I relied on farriers who were afraid of our horse and butchered his shoeing and on veterinarians who saw only a cash machine and never actually helped Austin. I bought the kind of hay that was making my horse sick. When I walked up to our horse, I was afraid of what I didn’t know, looking him always in the eyes, searching for answers or aggression – a fatal mistake. He reacted to me like I was a predator because I was triggering his flight instinct. It’s not easy to make friends that way.
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