The Tow Girl and the Icy Ditch

What I saw

The sun was well up when I came over the last rise.

It was one of those hard, bright January mornings where the sky is so blue it looks painted and the ice on the grass throws light back in your eyes.

Earl’s old blue pickup was pulled off on the shoulder ahead of the rig with its flashers going.

He was down in the ditch already, up to his shins in snow, standing by the trailer slats with one bare hand flat against the aluminum, talking low.

Tiffany’s black pickup was down in the bottom of the bar ditch, nose toward the fence, front wheels in a foot of snow.

It was mostly level. The trailer was what scared me. It had followed the truck in at an angle and caught the slope wrong.

It was leaning toward the fence side, maybe thirty degrees off level, the low wheels buried and the high wheels barely touching.

The gooseneck was still hooked in the truck bed, twisted hard against the ball, and I could see the hitch straining.

That was when Tiffany said it. “Not her. Anybody but her.” And then, louder, to Earl, “I said I’d wait. Who called her? I didn’t call her.”

“I did,” Earl said, without turning around. “You can be mad at me later, honey. Right now you’ve got a gelding down on one knee in the second stall and he’s trying to get up on a floor that’s tipped.”

That shut her up. I watched her face go from angry to white in about one second.

She uncrossed her arms and put a hand over her mouth, and for the first time since I’d known her she looked like what she was, which was scared.

Setting up

I didn’t say anything to her at first. I walked the rig.

You always walk the rig before you touch it, both sides and both ends, and you look at everything twice. Hurrying the walk is how people get hurt.

The trailer was a steel-frame gooseneck with an aluminum skin, a four-horse slant with a dressing room in the nose.

Loaded, I figured close to eleven thousand pounds, counting four horses at around eleven hundred apiece and the tack she’d packed for the weekend.

Through the slats I could see them. The palomino was in the first stall, on the low side, standing braced with his legs splayed.

Behind him a bay mare, then the gelding Earl had talked about, then a little sorrel at the back.

The gelding had gotten back up while I was walking. He was standing now, but he was grunting every time the trailer shifted a quarter inch, and the sound of it went right through me.

A horse makes a sound when it’s hurting, and that wasn’t it yet.

“Has anybody opened a door?” I asked.

“No,” Earl said. “I didn’t want them trying to come out downhill into the fence.”