She stopped and found the boy looking at her.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. He got out his cigarettes and lit one.

She watched him and he said, holding up the cigarette, “Does it bother you?”

She shook her head. “I don’t like it but I like the smell of it.” Her nostrils widened very slightly and she turned to watch the horses. “My father was a smoker, maybe that’s why. I haven’t seen him since I was seven,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t care to see him again?”

“Why would I want to see a man who doesn’t want to see me?”

He tipped the ash from his cigarette. He said that he hadn’t seen his mother in over a year and he knew exactly where she was.

“Why haven’t you?”

He shrugged. He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them the other way and the movement set off the pain in his knee again—wires of outrage from the deep nerveball where bone met bone.

After a while Carmen stood and went to the mares. “Know what I saw, one time?”

“What.”

“I saw that dog, Lola, walk under these horses and just stand there, for the shade.”

She turned and stared at him, waiting for him to understand what she was saying. Which was that she knew it wasn’t one of the mares that had cracked the old dog’s ribs.

THEY RODE BACK NOT as they’d come but along what remained of a backwoods road in a deep seam of pines where the boughs forced the mares to walk with their hindquarters bumping, the stirrups clacking together, his left and her right. The sun was well into the west and they rode slowly where there were no tracks other than those of mule deer and the snowed-in hooftracks of the horses themselves from the last time she’d ridden here. They rode and she talked about the colleges she’d applied to, speaking soberly of their virtues and shortcomings, of what she reasonably expected to hear from them, but also of what she hoped to hear. They’d ridden perhaps a mile along the path when the mare the boy rode snorted and began to step more briskly. He attempted to rein her back but she only slung her head petulantly and trekked on. The other mare sped up and when the animals were abreast again the boy said, “She’s just plain ignoring me.”

“Smell of the barn.”

“What?”

“She’s drunk on the smell of the barn. Don’t take it personally.”

“Don’t take it personally she says,” he said to the horse. “After all the apples you’ve eaten right out of this hand.”

“If you turned her around she’d behave herself again. Of course you’d have to get her turned around.”

“I might do that.”

“Show her who’s boss?”

“That’s right.”

“Let’s see it, cowboy.”

The boy glanced about him. “This is no place to turn a horse around.”

“You ever been to the rodeo?”

“No. Why?”

“A horse can wrap around a barrel like a snake.”

“Some other horse. Not this horse.”

“It’s a poor carpenter blames his tools.”

He looked at her. “Where’d you hear that?”

“I heard a man say it once.”

“What man?”

“What man?” She pushed out her lower lip. “A man going by the name of Grant Courtland.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You know him?”

“I’ve heard of him. And guess what?”

“What?”

“He doesn’t know shit about horses.”

She tossed back her head and laughed.

They were coming to a bend in the road and well before they reached it both mares trimmed their ears and began snorting, swinging their heads into each other’s neck and careening bodily together, pinning the riders’ legs between them. Carmen worked her reins and said Whoa, whoa and the boy merely held on. Then they heard what the horses had already heard—the high, thin warbling of electric guitar, the deep air-throb of bass. The sound grew, and the animals pressed on, at war with themselves and with their riders until at last they all came around the bend and saw the car, and the mares drew up snorting.

He’d pulled onto the old road from the county blacktop, and he’d pulled in just far enough to make going around him difficult. Nor could they detour through the woods for the density of the trees. He’d left the car running and the window down, and leaning against the forward black fender in his black leather jacket he appeared a dark extension of the car itself, just as inanimate but for the motion of his thumb over the keypad of his phone.

Carmen looked at the boy, and then she sat forward in her saddle and said, “Hey,” and then louder, “Hey,” until without taking his eyes from the phone Billy raised his free hand in a silent appeal for patience. At last he lowered the phone and pocketed it and faced them benignly, ready now to learn what he might do for them.

Beneath the scales and bassbeats of the music was the low throb of the idling engine.

“We can’t get by,” said Carmen.

Billy cupped a hand to his ear and she repeated herself and he raised one finger and reached into the window and the music stopped, the engine stopped, and all was silent again but for the snorting of the horses and the restless stepping of their hooves.

“Afternoon,” Billy said. He smiled at them and the smile was friendly. “You two look like a postcard sitting on those horses.”

“We can’t get by,” said Carmen.

He glanced behind him and turned back to her and said, “Sure you can. There’s just room on this side here.”

“The horses won’t go around the car.”

“What do you mean they won’t go around the car?”

“I mean they won’t go around the car.”

“They’re horses, darlin. They do what you tell them to do.” He smiled at her and he looked at the boy who had so far said nothing. “It sure is nice to see everybody getting along so well, I have to say. Everybody so friendly. Know what I heard the other day?”

They said nothing. The horses tossed their heads.

“Heard that old man of mine humming a tune.” He shook his head. “Can you beat that?”

Carmen smiled thinly. She looked at the boy. Turned to Billy again.

“Are you going to back up and let us go by?” she said.

Billy held her eyes. Smiling still, but the smile nowhere now but in his lips. “Where you all been to, anyway?” He squinted at them. “You been up to that cabin, haven’t you. Old man Santiago’s cabin?” Mirth and lewdness playing in his face. “I knew this old boy one time went to the doc with a load of number five birdshot in his ass cheeks. Doc takes one look at the boy’s jeans all blood-soaked but not a hole in them and says, Damn, I thought old man Santiago passed on years ago.”

To the boy he said: “The way you sit that horse, I’d say maybe that old cuss has done kicked off after all.”

The boy said nothing.

Carmen said, “Are you going to move that car or not?”

Billy studied her. He tested the little patch of hair under his lip with the tip of his tongue and smiled again. “Why you gotta take that tone with me? Isn’t that my horse you’re sitting on?”

“It’s Emmet’s horse.”

“Wrong. That’s my horse between your legs, darlin.” He stepped toward them and the mares shied and stamped and he stopped. “Not that I’m proud of owning such a pair of contrarian nags.”

Carmen reined the horse and said, “Okay, this has been fun. Really. But I’m turning around and going back.”

“Going back?” said Billy. “With him?”

She was trying to back-step the horse so she could get it turned around but the horse only squatted and tossed its head and would not back-step.

Billy shook his head. “Pitiful.”

At last she curbed the horse violently and it reared and slammed against its sister and came down on its forehooves facing the way they’d come and she reined it to a standstill and looked at the boy and said, “Are you coming? She’ll turn around now.”

The boy sat watching Billy.

“Sean,” she said.

He slipped his off-boot from the stirrup and swung his leg over and stood down into the snow and looped the reins over the mare’s neck and held her by the cheek strap as she shook her head. When she was calm, he walked away from her toward Billy.