Cutter Rex – Lee Tyler Williams

May 14, 2026

In the summer of 1988 I drove a trailer to the border that was carrying the most famous horse in Texas. Even if you never sniffed a rodeo, you still might’ve heard of Cutter Rex. In the span of a few years, he went from last billing at local pageants to selling out coliseums on the gold circuit. A cutter horse, he wasn’t sauntered out for show but judged according to skill, to how he danced in sharp zigzagging lines and kept a calf bewitched until it collapsed from exhaustion and sat paralyzed in the ring. From probably the first time he was witnessed at work, he must’ve seemed a thing risen from the dirt, in wondrous synchronicity with it, and you’d be forgiven for ever doubting that he weighed half a ton and wasn’t more like a creature of flight.
As a rider, you had to flick his reins, so they barely nudged him because if you pulled too hard then he was liable to send you flying or stop altogether and let the calf pass. He’d earned his name not for all the accolades that came later, but for being haughty and too unruly to break—this I heard from his former rider, Muscles, who I cleaned stables with that summer for fifteen dollars a day. The man who owned the stables—let’s call him the boss—he gave me the job because he felt sorry for my old man who lost his arm at the boss’s fertilizer plant the year before. We should’ve considered ourselves lucky, my old man and I, because the boss wasn’t really known for his generosity, that is, except towards his horses. He even arranged that I’d get a ride from town in the morning with the hands that always seemed to be remodeling some wing of his house or digging a trench somewhere. He probably gave me the job because it was the safest one out there and didn’t want me to lose my arm too. The only stipulation was that under no circumstances could I ride one of his horses, which was also probably a safety measure because I’d never ridden one before anyways. I was barely sixteen and all I knew how to do was feed them and comb their backs while Muscles would sometimes take them into the pen and extol their breeding to buyers, like how so-and-so’s lineage was traced back to the Arabian that Pancho Villa rode during his raid on Columbus.
The only horse that wasn’t for sale out there was Rex. He also happened to be the only one every guest wanted to see, but only special guests were allowed in the stable, those who’d sometimes visit the boss up at his house, guests who posed with the king for photos and spoke all kinds of languages, not just Spanish, women in long velvet dresses and one guy who even had a parrot on his shoulder and kneeled and kissed the king’s hoof, but Rex, he never liked all the commotion, and his ornery nature would rear up again, and he’d kick the hay or just turn and bury his snout. For an animal that was such an exceptional performer, he was visibly uneasy with crowds as if he were a recluse at heart, and you wondered if he excelled in the ring precisely because he knew that doing so was the quickest way he’d be led back to his stable, to his mares and his comforts.
No one ever seemed to buy a horse out there, but they sure liked watching Muscles ride Rex, like he belonged more to the element of air than earth, a creature of flight himself, and just as the finest cutter horse never seems to touch ground, he somehow levitated above the saddle while he rode, inspired, serene, earning ten or twenty dollars from guests here or there for a few laps, “the easy gettins,” he called them. He’d broken the horse, raised and trained him and was the last person each night to see him, standing by his stall, murmuring confessions. He said some things needed to be said that only a horse could be trusted to hear and although he was the closest to Rex, he seemed the least bothered when he found out the boss lost him in three card stud to a border rancher named Garza.
The boss, he didn’t seem that bothered by it. There was no last ride or ceremonial pictures taken. He didn’t as much stroke his mane in goodbye. Rumor was he had a shrine in his house with all the medals and plaques and trophies the horse had won him since the day he first conquered the stockyards in Fort Worth. Maybe that’s why there was no fanfare about him leaving—he’d already preserved Rex in his former glory. Or maybe it was the shame of losing him in a bet that tampered down the ceremonies and to a man who was a reputed drug runner no less, part of a cartel that stretched from Tamaulipas to Eagle Pass, one kingdom winning squarely the royal insignia of another.
The question the hands and Muscles asked themselves was what exactly this rancher wanted with a gelding that could barely be ridden. Some speculated he wanted to cast him in bronze and erect a statue of him at the entrance of his hacienda or maybe open some theme park and charge for rides like he was a donkey at a petting zoo. Not only was the horse to be hand- delivered, but the wager also included the saddle that Rex wore during his victorious years, one that was handcrafted a century ago by a Mennonite outfit in Fredericksburg and that bore elaborate stitchwork of cacti burst in flames with radiant moons and falcon wings wrapped around the pommel. The saddle had always been stashed in the house so the first time I saw it was when Muscles led Rex out to the trailer. It seemed almost too heavy for him, too regal, even for a king. Muscles asked if I wanted to go for a ride with him. He needed help driving since he hadn’t slept the night before. According to him, he never got much sleep, but that didn’t stop him from constantly being on the move—he was ranch manager, interpreter, veterinarian, and foreman all rolled into one stocky frame wearing a big belt buckle with the ranch’s logo on it and a pair of jeans so tight they sounded like foil wrapping when he walked.
You could hardly say no to Muscles—he had that same reputation for stubbornness as Rex did. If it weren’t the story of him wrestling a mad Hereford to the ground, it was the one of him coming back from full paralysis after getting thrown by a bronc. The other hands might’ve laughed behind his back at how fast he talked or his bloodshot eyes, but they always did what he said without so much as a snide blink and it was same with me on the highway. While he swerved over the shoulder with the gravel kicking up into the windshield, I wanted to get out at the next gas station, but what do you tell a rodeo rider doing eighty and hellbent on the border by dawn, especially if he won’t ever stop talking, reaching through the back window, slamming the trailer, “You don’t miss this, do ya? You were only getting tougher to drag out each season, almost busted the doors and fell out going to Tulsa. Best at the thing that was killin him, we’re joined at the hip on that one, ain’t we, king of kings, ain’t we, hey you, you awake back there,” his face bright in the dashboard lights and sweat beaded up where his hair used to be, then turning to me and saying that all the hills around there used to be sprawling with mesquite that blossomed and reeked of rotten fruit and how hunters would line up their kill over the bridges and that same highway used to ice over so that trucks would pummel each other like pinballs and the fires from their wreckage would melt the road so tires would slide right over them.
Here is a corridor of all manner of destruction, he said, listing in our blindness what had changed over the years, portraying some primeval landscape that would seem unrecognizable to even the most lucid centenarian: buffalo ranges, lumber homesteads staked across the cliffs, wolves still roaming unchecked and so many horses with riders who appeared like rodeo savants performing the most skilled feats of wrangling, horses bred out of existence because their prowess was too difficult to contain, whole teams that blanketed fields where the billboards and water towers stood:
“This road, it’s vanishing under us, and we got nowhere else to go, kid, and no other way to get there, but faster,” and with his foot pressed down, the dust washed into the lights and drowned us as he started laughing and leaned forward with his shoulders arched, held fast to the wheel, this balled up mass, all sinews and veins, who was only once in his career thrown from the saddle, wielded above the crowd, unheeded as a prophet in flames who could withstand in his forbearance all manner of destruction, pushing harder, the lights ahead rushing at us, another city, San Antonio, the first one we’d seen since we left, and more of the same hills lit up and bristled past the shadows. He pointed across the highway, asking me if I could read the sign up ahead. I told him it was Buxton Road, and he swerved into the other lane and lunged an overpass and dropped us into a gravelly corner of blinking streetlights and warehouses, adjacent an arterial route but empty of other vehicles with a red moon wedged over the rooftops, talking so fast I could barely hear his orders—all I understood was ‘get Rex some water’ and then ‘wait by the trailer,’ and like a true showman, he spruced himself in the mirror and sauntered through the backdoor with his sleeves rolled and a wisp of hair slicked down his nape to a ducktail point.
In the trailer Rex was asleep with his trough spilled over the floor, and when I emptied the rest of the jug into it, he shook his mane. I could hear music inside and so could the king—his white ears twitched towards the back door Muscles had slammed shut. For one who rode over three hundred miles halfway in a ditch, veering in his locked-up throne, he was remarkably calm, having spent most of his life dragged by one outsized truck or another and here was a roof and little exterior light, no ring of fireworks or rows of faces pushed to the gates, waiting for him to stumble, or, and this might be worse, expecting him to cut flawlessly on his way to another championship. If this were his throne, then in front of him, hanging on the wall, was his mantle, a saddle so crisp and smooth, with curves and tooling so defined, it seemed unused. He reacted with more protective unease when I ran my fingers across its virgin adornments than when I touched his own back. On its wide flaps a series of events coalesced to form a story: the moon was born, fire was learned, then flight took shape in a frenzy. The mysticism of heretics in this hill country who concealed their message on the top of a saddle or else risked the same punishment they met in the fatherland for proclaiming it from a pulpit, summoned here again as a totem for lapsed believers. Shuttered in his stable back home, it must’ve been years since he last wore it, and now the two were reunited. He couldn’t help but expect to be dashed across raucous arenas in victory or across parched fields and arroyos, and that must’ve explained the alertness in his eyes, watery, prone to dance even in his cage.
Since he still wouldn’t drink, I tightened his rope and closed the trailer. Near the highway was a diner with a payphone. I hadn’t eaten since the night before and even the hay he’d cast off started to look appetizing; I also should’ve called home so my old man wouldn’t smack me the next day with his one good arm. Before I could make the mistake of leaving him alone in the parking lot, the back door busted open, with Muscles telling me to hurry and start the engine or we’d have a horde of drunks ogling the trailer, trying to put their greasy hands on the king:
“You got some Pentecostals in there. Who knows what they’d do to em? No, he deserves some dignity on his last ride.”
I said the horse was skittish when he asked if he drank anything.
“Ahh…he just don’t like waiting is all,” and he pulled back the buckle of his belt and dipped his finger in it and asked me if I wanted any and said, “You’re gonna have to drive faster than that if we’re gonna make it there by morning,” and then snorted some of his elixir, but he didn’t act any differently afterwards, no, if anything, he was more subdued, hunched deeper in his seat, looking only occasionally in the sideview mirror like he was worried someone at the bar was behind us. Of all the rumors about him on the ranch, I wouldn’t put robbery past him. His stockiness alone could’ve fronted as an object of lethal force. He didn’t need a weapon; those hands had downed a heifer and tamed a king.
“You can push it more, can’t you? Now’s the time to get those legs pumping.”
I was putting all my strength on the pedal, but I still couldn’t get it fast enough for him, the trailer was pulling us back like it was staked in the ground.
“You sure ain’t gonna be a truck driver, and you ain’t gonna stay on a ranch, so what do you plan on doing?”
“I don’t know, maybe join up?”
“For what? Ain’t no war on now, is there?”
“Why do you care all of sudden?” and then he was laughing and slapping me on the shoulder the way he would a horse, “Of course I care, kid, if you leave, that means I gotta train someone else to shovel shit.”
Somewhere behind his seat he pulled out a canteen and waved it in my face, “If you aint gonna get you some blow, boy, then get you some of this here coffee, it’s still warm” he said, but I shook my head again—my veins were already pumping. It was getting easier to say no to him. I should’ve been saying it all along. If I had, I would’ve been in town already where Jep and I could’ve stolen a few games from the college kids at Pockets and then headed out to the overpass with some liquor from Jep’s brother and a case of tools and scrawled our primal wants into the concrete until the deputies came out there with their girls, or just stayed home and done nothing except pictured this entire ride from the comfort of a beanbag on my bedroom floor: the stretch of 75 surging behind the trailer in a twister of glass shards and wire, the long onslaught of night rendering the flatland a chasm to be filled only with the most lingering surface of regret, and the king, in his great mantle of disdain for his bipedal servants, trouncing on high to his final pedestal in some celestial ring of the Sierra Madre.
Between being the boy imagining the drive and the driver imagining the boy alone in his room, the road split into further pathways through halogen scrub, running with cracks all through one-light towns that Muscles either remembered performing in or cursed with a ball of spit out his window, still crouched low, surly, twirling his sideburns, alert but dazed, enthralled by our velocity and at certain junctures signs would flash in the headlights warning of hairpin turns, bridges sunken in a valley, flash floods, murderous hitchhikers, the increasing fines for littering, none of them daring to mention where we were or where we were going as if that were secondary to the road itself and should be intuited by whoever was at the wheel. The only direction was south, and south was drawing closer, an amorphous presence composed of dust, somewhere even Muscles had a hard time recognizing since his days on the circuit.
You can’t piss a drop down here now without a patrolman clocking you.
The roads had been tamed, and the landscape sheared of its primeval force, and he wasn’t nostalgic about what had changed, or even embittered. He met it all with that wild-eyed ferocity, and if we kept speeding through it, the changes would blur and recede, the rows of signs flashing like the painted lines beneath us, the concrete waysides paved by rivers of ice as in his fantasies, as in the stupor that overcame him after the drug emptied through his pores. The farther we fell, the more invisible he became just as I must’ve been invisible to him, like the chasm we crossed had seeped inside the truck, and the only evidence to prove that he was still sitting there was his voice: “I don’t miss it neither, it’s like asking a boxer if he misses getting his ass kicked…Now, if you’re winnin, that’s another thing.”
There was this Cajun poke, a real loose string, he called him, who could never hold on too long, but somehow managed to bounce right back up whenever he fell off, and then this one night, the Cajun had the best ride in his life, and won the whole thing, and for his victory lap he took a barrel horse that must’ve gotten spooked during the festivities (apparently, a pistol went off in the stands) and threw him on his neck.
“That’s why you gotta love it,” he said, “love the ground the way a horse does—a cutter like him’s not pounding the earth, he’s dancing with it.”
“How come you don’t miss it? You were a good rider.”
By now his stubby arm was hanging out the door while he gnawed on something, either his lip or his tongue or some chew he refused to spit.
He said he wasn’t too good, better than some, more reckless than most, but not disciplined enough to do much else besides cutting or barrel racing, and then his words were lost in the wind, and he put his head halfway out, like he was contemplating crawling out right then and letting the night carry him. Why couldn’t he just admit how good he was? Just because he hadn’t won anything at the rodeo beyond some runner up ribbons on the amateur circuit? He was proud enough to slick his hair back and lift weights and polish his belt buckle, but he couldn’t admit how good he was. Instead, he acted like any sodhopper with a decent pair of boots could do the same. He could’ve been a millionaire rider, but since he was getting paid just enough by the boss to score an eighth every month, he was happy sleeping in a converted horse trailer on the ranch and washing his one pair of clothes in the creek.
Soon you could finally hear the king rumbling from his quarters like he was waking up as the sun rose or some long submerged restlessness was driving itself from him, pushing against the trailer, a weary kind of waltz that Muscles tried to drown out by turning on the radio and twirling through mostly static stations until he cursed them all as either pure Bible-thumping or Tejano racket, nothing that would give him the jolt he was looking for, But it don’t matter, he said, because we’re almost there, the same thing he repeated a dozen times since we left because, according to him, we were always just a horsehair’s breadth away from the drop as if his sense of distance had diminished after getting thrown on his head and driving to the border for him seemed like an evening jaunt to pick up some brisket for the boss.
“We’re close, damnit, that means slow down,” he said, leaning forward with a twitch in his neck, then telling me to turn onto a dirt road with trenches on either side and a wide field where you could see all kinds of insect wings rising with the light. He turned back to look at the king again, then looked at his buckle like he was considering doing another bump. I’d learned not to ask him questions about what to do so I waited for him to tell me to stop and only crept a little more into the field between some tractor parts and sheds with their roofs half blown off.
He grabbed the wheel and pointed ahead and said, “The meat truck is here, you see it?” Between the buildings was an open trailer that was so old and rusty that it almost blended in with the piles of machines around it. We sat there idling while he looked around, started talking about how we were close to the river and how giant alligators used to crawl that far upland to snatch white tails and bring them back into the caverns where later the Apache would build their cities. Again, he started talking about fires, how the ridges around us were once full of them, one tribe signaling to another in a gridwork of lights that could burn through great distances even of a morning like this one, radiant and unassuming in its arrival from the valley, and as he was talking, two men wearing mechanic outfits got out of the truck, one of them smoking a cigarette and watching us.
“Now let’s get this over with so you can go back to fingerbangin Sally Freckles.”
I was about to get out of the truck with him, but he told me they were only expecting one of us and slammed the door. Behind me Rex stomped and brushed his body against the trailer. Cutting the engine had panicked him. He was being dropped off at a place he didn’t recognize, not a ranch or ring, but an anonymous stretch of grass bordered by motes with fertilizer-soaked water bubbling to their edges, and while Muscles was leading him out, he stomped and shook the truck, but as he was led across the yard, he dropped his head and gave no resistance. Muscles was doing most of the talking, then turned around and pointed up at the truck. During the whole conversation, you could see the king’s spindly legs trembling while his back seemed to bend down even more with the saddle. One of the guys took hold of the reins and for some reason Muscles tried to grab them from his grip, and the guy pushed him, so Muscles threw a punch that dazed the guy, and then the other came at him and tackled him to the ground, and he and the one who’d been punched both kicked him a few times while he lie there—that’s when I got out, yelling at the men, but not doing anything to stop them while they led the horse away and Muscles tried to stand up like he was going to run after them but winced and fell back, hollering at the truck: “He ain’t a track mule, you bastards,” then coughing on the grass stuck in his mouth.
“Look at that truck,” he said to me, finally getting to his feet. “He’s gonna suffocate in that thing.” With the light higher now, the bugs were gone, and it was so quiet you almost expected some group of face-painted warriors, the kind Muscles was always talking about, to begin their raid and bulrush us from the sheds and ditches, but nothing broke the quietness except for Muscles groaning as he walked back to the truck.
I drove faster than before, following the same roads and running into a little traffic through San Antonio. I asked him if we should go to a hospital and he said doctors couldn’t help him. Once he threw that first punch, I could’ve gotten out, I told him, maybe stopped them from kicking him like that, but he preempted any apology I could’ve made by telling me how there was no use in two of us getting our asses kicked, then he opened the glovebox and showed me his brass knuckles with tiny spikes like spurs poking out of each ring.
“This is what I was missin,” he said. “You couldn’t do a damn thing.”
At the sight of the horse with his head down, shambling towards the trailer like he just wanted to be out of the sun and inside another dark box no matter how strange or rough his new handlers were, you could tell he’d resigned himself to losing his crown. What was I going to do to stop it from happening? Both those guys were twice my size, and I wasn’t even supposed to be out there. Still, looking at Muscles sitting there with his busted face, huddled in the seat, occasionally glancing at the sideview mirror again, I couldn’t talk myself out of the shame I had for staying inside the truck even if he were asking for it by grabbing those reins.
He told me I didn’t have to drive so fast because we’d already done our job. Later I finally caved and did a few bumps off his finger and finished the rest of the coffee he had. Before long, he was sleeping with the shade pulled down and his hat resting over his eyes, sometimes wheezing through the blood in his nose. I hit it hard on the interstate and got us back in half the time it took us to get to the border.
In front of my house, Muscles told me to keep my nose clean and say hi to Sally Freckles. By the next day he was already gone from the ranch. Some hands said he’d left because the one thing keeping him there had gone, and that he’d joined a church rodeo out in the Piney Woods like he’d converted overnight.
I only worked there for another few weeks before I went back to school, so I wasn’t around when the ranch got raided—it happened that winter and was all over town. My parents, Jep, they all asked me if I’d seen the drugs or dealt them myself, and the ranch itself was shut down while the boss was put on trial. His lawyers argued that the foreman, Muscles, was the ringleader, and used the ranch as a base for a smuggling operation that started all the way down in Colombia, passing through the Gulf and stretching north into Chicago.
My old man, he wasn’t too surprised about the charges nor were most people in town. The boss was seen as overly ostentatious, with his pearl cufflinks, his stable of exotic sires and the parties he was reputed to have down near Lake Grapevine whereas the fertilizer plant he owned had been leaking money for years. So much evidence was uncovered during the trial that the boss wouldn’t have been acquitted even with the best team of lawyers in the state, and he was found guilty of racketeering and sentenced to fifteen years at a minimum-security federal prison.
In all the reading I did later about the boss and his ranch, I never found out what exactly happened to Rex. The last years of the boss were pretty well established (retiring to Oklahoma after his release from prison and dying of natural causes in a hospice there), but the animal that brought him all those awards seemed to disappear just like Muscles did, subject to contesting theories and message board hearsay. Maybe he had an end befitting a king, getting pampered on the palatial grounds of a mountain hacienda, not toiling away in some amusement park petting zoo behind a truck stop like Muscles said would happen to him. I did come across a video of him riding in Las Vegas in ’78, another one of the championships he won. With Muscles at the reins, he cut so sharply he could’ve weaved a silk thread through a crocodile’s teeth—the two of them looking like they were dropped into the arena as one conjoined animal, further bolstering what the Greeks must’ve surmised when inscribing the myth of the Centaur: that of all the creatures on Earth, man and horse were inextricably bound, nursing on the same dirt, aspiring to the same speed and force. The saddle, the reins and stirrups, these were superfluous accoutrements employed merely for theatrical effect. If the video weren’t so grainy and his face weren’t shaded by a hat, I could’ve sworn his eyes were closed during that run—like when he drove, he was riding on near blind faith into all manner of destruction. Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t ever admit he was a good rider. It wasn’t out of false modesty or the failure he carried with him for never reaching the upper echelons of bronc riding. For him, cutting wasn’t a conscious skill he’d mastered, but a reflex that had only dimmed with age and hardly warranted even the faintest praise. It was something innate, how he moved inextricably with the king, of royal lineage himself yet humble in his bearing as they waltzed around the throne, their intertwined nature partly explaining why it was so hard for him to part with him when the exchange happened despite acting nonchalantly about it the whole ride there.
For the audience walking back to their vehicles, tethered to earth in a dreary thump thump thump of their footsteps, this dance should be indiscrete in its message: the air not only belongs to gods and birds, it’s also the provenance of beasts. Some commentators on the case claimed that the horse wasn’t lost to Garza in a bet, but as compensation for a drug shipment gone awry, some Baranquilla blow dropped in the swamplands off Baytown by the boss’s mules because the coast guard was trailing them. Whatever the reason for giving up the prized sire, Muscles didn’t try to intervene until the last moment, when it was too late, and the reins were already in someone else’s grip. And even then, when he did resist, he swung half-heartedly, knocking the guy a few steps back, not to the ground. You could say it was because he was outnumbered and twice their age and had retired from the rodeo for years, but he was still corralling on the ranch and getting in scrapes around town. Maybe the resistance, him pulling against the reins, was another reflex, what his pride commanded him to do instinctually whereas in truth he was resigned like the king was to being led away to his refrigerated cage.

2.
What I told Muscles during the ride to the border was right. After high school I joined up and got to see a little bit of the world, but mostly just the worst parts. I shuttled between some half dozen bases over that seven years, drank until I found God, then drank till I lost him, shot all kinds of weapons (but never at an enemy), learned how to kill a man in less time than Muscles could stay on a bronc, fell in love with a Filipina bargirl who was born a man, and lost all the money I earned as a soldier at the casinos in Macau twice over.
At 25 I flew back to Texas to bury my father—otherwise, I might’ve made a career out of wandering—and fell in love again, this time, to the nurse who worked in the same hospital where he was staying. She found a better job as a radiology technician up in Connecticut, and I moved there with her and started going to junior college, taking classes with kids who were about the same age I was when I was working at the ranch. I decided to go for engineering since I was always pretty handy at fixing things in the army. Also, Connecticut was expensive and by the time I had to choose a major my wife had just given birth to our daughter, so engineering seemed like a safe bet.
Before transferring to university, one of the classes I had to take was English composition. The professor was this guy about my age who could barely look me in the eye when he was talking to me.
The other students, they also seemed intimidated or even scared around me. Whenever I gave a presentation, the class would get really quiet, and if I raised my hand, the other students would defer to me even if the teacher called on them first. It could’ve been because of my age, but it also probably had to do with them knowing I was a veteran as if they assumed that my time in the service had made me murderous, unhinged. To them, I could erupt at any moment, throw my chair across the room, screaming at them about the horrors of war. They didn’t know I spent most of those years gambling, drinking with ladyboys and typing up memos for my superiors. Even more than tinkering with motors, I was good at typing—my work was always clean and typo-free—so when I had to write for this composition class, I figured it would be just more of the same, and it was in the beginning. I’d sit in our living room and type away while my daughter was crawling on the floor. The argumentative essay and research paper were easy—it was when I had to write a “personal essay” that I really started struggling. The professor told us to write about an event that “defined” us, that was his word. I asked him in class how exactly an event was supposed to “define” someone. To me, that word was always used in reference to other words, not to people. Without looking me in the eye, he said it was just a prompt to get us to write about ourselves. In place of “define,” he said I could just as easily use “express” or “represent” or even “transform,” which confused me even more since all those words meant completely different things to me. The other students seemed to get it and were more concerned about the word count and what percentage of our overall grade the paper was worth—things they were perfectly in the right to worry about—than they were about the wording of the assignment.
The confusion over the wording was my problem. I didn’t want to think about my past experiences as things that defined me. Does anybody? I’d married a nurse who came from a nice family, moved to Connecticut, and started going to college to study engineering all to escape the past and here I was being asked to analyze it moment by moment and isolate one “defining” incident from a whole shameful mess of them.
Once I sat down to type, I was surprised by how quickly my past began to define itself: it was only supposed to be about 5 pages double spaced, but I ended up writing around 20. I spent so much time working on it that I didn’t study trigonometry and ended up failing the final exam. On top of that, when I got the essay back from the professor, he also gave me a failing grade, but not because of the page count. On the last page of my essay, he wrote that he appreciated “my enthused response to the prompt” and admired the style of it (“some flashes of real lyrical brilliance”), but he couldn’t pass me because, according to him, “the prompt asked for your own experience, not a fictional story. Therefore, it does not meet the prompt’s basic requirements.”
Between those two failing grades, I was in real trouble of getting my G.I. funding revoked and having to drop out. I stopped by his office during the next week to ask him about it. Standing in the doorway of his cramped office, I could see his eyes dart around the room, looking anywhere but at me, like he thought I showed up with my 9mm tucked in my belt ready to demand a passing grade. I sat in front of him, blocking the door, and asked him what made him think my essay was make-believe.
He shifted around in his chair like he had a bad case of hemorrhoids and said, “All the stuff about drug dealers and horses and rodeo riders, maybe it could make for a good adventure story, but that wasn’t the assignment. You were in the army, right? I’m sure you have lots of experiences from that time.”
“But those didn’t define me, not like what I wrote about.”
“I think you’re too hung up on that word ‘define.’ The more important thing is writing about your own experience.”
On his desk was a picture of a woman with a big smile and brown hair tied back in a ponytail. The kind of woman who bakes PTA cookies and likes to garden, the kind of woman who used to teach Sunday school back in Texas.
I pointed to the picture and asked him if getting married to her was something that defined him, and he said, “I guess so, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.”
“What if someone said that you never married her?”
“Well, I’d say we have photos from our wedding to prove it.”
“So, if I found pictures of that horse, Rex, then would you pass me?”
He laughed nervously and said he’d have to think about it, so I went home and climbed up into the attic where I had a box of keepsakes: pictures of my folks, dog tags and discharge papers, a silver bullion coin, a sharktooth given to me by the bargirl I almost married. Also in there was a polaroid of Rex with me standing next to him in the stable that Muscles took with a camera he borrowed from one the boss’s guests, saying to me that since I spent so much time shoveling the king’s shit, I should at least have a picture taken with him.
I showed it to the professor in his office and got him to change my grade. After that I put it back in the box and locked it up. My wife and daughter didn’t need to know what was inside. What would those things mean to them, or anyone, for that matter? That I was a solider of ill-gotten fortune? A gambler and drug runner’s lackey?
The next time I opened that box up was about ten years later, around the time when my daughter started middle school. I was working as a municipal engineer for the county and used to pick her up on the way home. Along the road we always passed a big stable that stood alone in a field. It had a sign facing the road, but I never saw any horses riding out there so I assumed the place was closed until we saw a girl in a riding uniform on a big Palomino cantering around the pen, then over the following weeks my daughter kept asking me to stop so she could watch the rider. From this insistence on us stopping and watching grew an outright equine obsession, more than your typical twelve year old girl’s fascination: she eventually started decorating her room with posters of Triple Crown legends and anatomical illustrations and memorabilia from local competitions, even checking out every horse-related book she could get from the library and reading them in her spare time, asking us to explain some of the Victorian vocabulary of Black Beauty or delivering lectures to us over dinner about what advantages an Appaloosa has over an Arabian in the art of dressage.
To avoid having to answer any questions about my past, I never told her (or my wife) that I worked in a stable when I was sixteen that housed the most famous horse in Texas. It was easy to pretend that my summer on the ranch was someone else’s experience, or that it was purely fictional like my professor originally thought before I showed him the photo. Not only because all the reminders of that life were locked away in the attic but also because Texas seemed like another continent compared to where I’d been living the previous fifteen years. Even when my daughter (inevitably) asked if she could take riding lessons, I almost forgot how dangerous riding was and agreed immediately whereas my wife told her she had to wait until she was a teenager, partly hoping that by that time she would lose her near maniacal fixation, but my wife also hadn’t seen her in the presence of that Palomino.
As agreed, when she turned thirteen, we got her some riding lessons at the stable along with riding clothes, a pith helmet and some kneepads. A horse, however, was something we couldn’t afford and of all the girls riding at that stable she was the only one who didn’t have her own and instead had to rent the knobby-kneed stable mare that was close to being turned out and even with that emaciated-looking roan she still passed through her courses faster than the other girls with their own thoroughbreds and perfectly starched jodhpurs and years of riding lessons already behind them. She became so committed to riding that she would even practice in the backyard on the nights she didn’t have lessons, dressed in full gear, circling under the floodlights with her crop held aloft, whistling and clicking to her invisible companion.
Before she slept, she’d sometimes ask me about her horse, “Do you think she looked sad today, daddy, sadder than last week?” or “Can we bring her some apples next time?” or if I thought the mare would die soon, with me always reassuring her that the horse looked healthier than when she first rode her whereas in truth it was precisely her vigorous riding that was hastening her death.
Because of her dedication she was ready to compete in the county- and eventually statewide tournaments much sooner than her teacher expected, but because of the mare she was never able to earn a place higher than third or fourth. The poor horse couldn’t clear jumps like others or make those hairpin curves on courses as sharply.
Her teacher told us that with any other rider, that mare wouldn’t have scored that high, much less completed the course, but that she was pushing herself to full capacity because of the bond our daughter and her shared. Whether she was saying this just so we’d keep paying the monthly fee for the lessons and rental, it was hard to tell, but before our daughter was riding the mare, the horse (again, according to the instructor) spent most of her days leaning against the stable nibbling grass and swiping flies with her tail.
If what the instructor said was true, then with a top-notch thoroughbred at her disposal, our daughter would’ve theoretically been placing runner up or first in the same competitions every week. She’d be dominating (or damn near it) just like this one rider from Essex County, a real blueblooded phenom—part of that illustrious Danbury wasp nest, the Stadtlers—who was probably raised on a horse and knew how to ride before she could walk.
The Stadtler girl’s skill was undeniable, but then you also had to consider the vehicle that was leading her to those victories: a chestnut Danish of immaculate refinement that soared over the hurdles and cut through courses without turning up a blade of grass, gliding along with that blonde-haired specter of a girl on top who barely goaded the beast and just gave out her shrill calls through clenched refined jaws, sharing the same inseparable dynamic with her horse as my daughter did with her mare or Muscles once had with Rex. All three had reached the pinnacle of equestrianism; the only difference was the condition of the horse. Muscles and this Stadtler girl were tied to sleek, supreme flying machines whereas my daughter was riding around on a busted-up carriage already ready for the scrap heap.
For a whole year I saw the Stadtler girl holding up her various medals and trophies with a pearly smile while my daughter stood off near the judge’s booth next to her instructor who was still trying to correct her riding posture by motioning to her to straighten her back on the saddle or adjust the position of the reins, as if those minor changes would suddenly propel her to victory and overcome the disparity between the two horses. She knew just as well as my wife and I did that no amount of training or knowledge would prevent our daughter from claiming those middling fourth or fifth place finishes, and that she was doomed to stand outside the winner’s circle as long as her saddle sat atop that mare.
One Saturday night, after getting home from another lost competition, I watched our daughter through the kitchen window while she rode her invisible horse in the yard and wondered how well she’d ride if she had that saddle Muscles gave away at the border with its lone cactus erupting in a pall of wretched fire. How she would’ve soared over the hurdles on those falcon wings, an ethereal spirit trailed by a string of ghostly white moons!
A rider is only as good as their horse, as they say, but what’s truer, is that, compared to a rider’s saddle, everything else—physics and diet and weather forecasts—is extraneous. The Mennonite saddlemakers understood this well and imparted to theirs an alchemical force that would propel both horse and rider to their divine object, both emerging into a halo of blinding grace and incinerating any obstacle before them, be it hurdle or ditch or enemy.
If I could’ve crafted a saddle worthy of her determination, I would’ve, and if I could’ve scrounged around the Hill Country for another Mennonite tanner to forge one for her, I would’ve done that too, but money, and most of all, time, were lacking. She was only one week away from the state competition in Hartford.
The following Friday, the night before the tournament, I waited till my wife was asleep and climbed up into the attic, taking out another memento I neglected to mention in my earlier listing of the box’s contents: a combat knife issued when I was barely nineteen and used only to throw into tree trunks for target practice on Mindanao. Other than a flashlight and some dark clothes, that was all I needed to better equalize the competition, give her a fighting chance of earning one of the first three places. How could I let her lose again after watching how much her obsession with riding (and increasingly, winning) had consumed her? She’d handled the losses up until then with the dignity of a true warrior, it’s true, but we were facing states here, not another county turkey run.
With a beanie pulled over my ears and the knife tucked away, I felt like I was on the kind of reconnaissance mission the army never afforded me during my seven years of service. The road to Danbury was about as dark and primeval as any tropical jungle. Only the red leaves piled on the roadside and the sight of the Cherry Grove stables spoiled the fantasy. Across the road from where I parked, the tall building was lit up by stadium lights and covered in a glossy coat of red paint. It might’ve looked like a fortress, but to get inside all I had to do was pick the padlock on the back door like they were inviting me to rob their treasured steeds and if I were an enterprising horse thief, I could’ve pulled up a trailer three times the size of the one Muscles and I drove to the border and got away with half a million in horsemeat.
I didn’t see cameras or alarms anywhere, but I still crouched behind a tree and waited in case a pair of headlights from some security truck drove up the main drive.
Once I was inside it didn’t take long to find the stall where the Stadtler horse was, shaking his mane and neighing the closer I got to his saddle hanging from the gate. Just a little incision on the rear side of the stirrup, enough to hurt the girl’s point total once her foot went flapping in the air but small enough so the saddle would still pass inspection. She could even ride the horse around a few times beforehand and not notice anything. Those jumps would snap it. There was the chance of an accident, but it was a very small one because she would still have the other foot in its stirrup.
The next morning, the darling of Danbury went last since she was the previous year’s champion. Our daughter, unfazed by the local TV station on hand, the large crowds, the banner unfurled over the entrance declaring this the 76th annual competition, and the trophy with its cavernous cup gleaming from the grandstand, scored better than she ever had before, as if the higher stakes only caused her to ride with more precision. That placement meant that if the Stadtler girl scored lower than her, then our daughter would have a good chance of advancing to the Tri-state championship. While she got ready in the holding area, the crowd was already quiet, my wife’s grip tightened, everyone seemed tense as if the outcome was uncertain, as if she hadn’t dominated every tournament for the last three years and amassed a throne room to rival what the boss had upstairs in his mansion. By the stable doors I could see our daughter talking to her mare and combing her, purposefully not looking at the champion about to sweep her away again, but then, she had to believe she had a chance at winning too. Why else would she have trained so hard or shook me awake that morning while it was still dark, not even an hour after I’d gotten back from Danbury and locked my knife away in the attic, saying it was time to go so she could get a few runs in before the tournament started?….And on the Stadtler girl’s first jump I could see the stirrup snapped halfway, but it wasn’t until the second that it fell off completely so she soared over both horse and hurdle, and in a long hush the crowd stood from their benches and soon we all watched the girl’s family and the trainers running out to the course in a panic, and then I looked at my daughter again still standing by the stable doors, now looking back at me, and smiled to her quietly as if to tell her not to worry, never to worry about anything again, that she would get what she wanted, that she would win this time.

3.
Life as a municipal engineer in Connecticut doesn’t exactly offer much excitement. Some nights after my wife goes to sleep, I’ll go up into the attic and open up my box and have flashbacks to our knife-throwing games on Mindanao. I can still see the glint of the blade as it whizzes by me. Risk more than anything else seems to be what separates the miserable from the enchanted, not that I’m miserable. If I only step back and look at what I have, I’d quickly see that the cobra hunting, street fights, gambling binges, all of it, were diversions from the boredom I felt back then. Boredom has been the only constant. The only difference now is that it takes less effort to escape from it, which I guess means I’m more content.
Up in the attic is also where our daughter keeps all her stuff from her riding days—the books and posters and even her crop and uniform. She’s in college now, studying medicine like her mother, although I’m not too sure she’s interested in that either. Other nights I wake up and go downstairs and sit at the kitchen table, looking at the backyard under the floodlight. Once my wife found me down there and said, “She’ll be back home for Thanksgiving,” assuming that I was remembering our daughter running back and forth between the fence lines with her crop, but I wasn’t thinking about that. If she really knew what I was thinking about, she’d file for divorce the next morning. The rider I saw in the backyard wasn’t our daughter, it was the Stadtler girl tumbling from her horse, in mid-air, surrounded by circling moths. I did actually see her once after she fell. In those days I used to pick up groceries on the way home on Fridays since I got off early from work. Once, out in the parking lot of the store, I saw a woman lose control of her cart while she was unloading bags. I hurried after a can rolling away and brought it back to her. It was the girl’s mother. I picked up some of the other items that had fallen out of one of the bags and handed those to her too. She thanked me and looked like she recognized me for a second, or maybe I wanted her to and imagined it. The cart had hit her arm when the bag fell, and I asked her if she was ok. She held the can up and pointed to the dent and said it was a lot worse off than she was.
With the back hatch opened up, I could see her daughter sitting in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead, that unmistakable platinum hair. In the rearview mirror I think I saw her looking back at me, or I could’ve imagined that too.
“Mother!” she called out, her neck still stiff, her seatbelt on. Her mother didn’t say anything, then she repeated it, louder this time.
“Looks like you’re needed,” I said. “I know how it is. I have one about that age too.”
I walked off after she thanked me again and heard it one last time: “Mootthhherr!”
In the back of the car, next to the grocery bags the mother had already put inside, I could see a wheelchair folded up, but it’s possible it belonged to someone else. I never heard about the full extent of her injuries. I just know she also stopped riding after that, like our daughter did. In that final competition, she got third place but failed to qualify for the Tri-state championship. She never cared about keeping the medal she won (or even looking at it). That’s why I put it in the box, along with the knife and the sharktooth and the torn photo of Rex alone in the darkness of the barn.