It was an old, quiet horse, the color of gray corduroy, or child's clay, those elephant slabs wrapped in wax paper that Reston remembered from classrooms in his childhood. Six months earlier the horse had been delivered to the pasture out back of Reston's trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from the truck. She didn't kick or fuss, but simply refused to budge. Reston had paid 100 dollars for the horse to save it from being put down. He had inherited his ex-girlfriend's pathological weakness for downtrodden animals of all kinds, and he had a dog that was crazy about horses.
One of the delivery fellows had kept referring to the horse as ‘daft,' which Reston thought was an unusual word choice for a young man who couldn't have been more than 20 years of age. He didn't think the horse was daft, at any rate, just depressed. She tended to stand, with her head down, in one place for long stretches of time, but there were signs that she was coming around. She and the dog seemed to get along just fine, and it gave Reston real pleasure to see them trot around the pasture together.
Reston had never in his life spent Christmas alone, and he wasn't quite sure what to do with himself. The day before Christmas eve he drove into the nearest decent-sized city, a college town of maybe 70,000 people, just under a half hour's drive from his trailer. The city was crowded with last minute shoppers from the small towns that were clustered in the long valleys throughout the mountains. He stopped at some chain steak place for lunch, and later splurged on a bunch of new CDs, as well as nearly fifty bucks worth of treats for his dog. Heavy snow was falling as he made his way back out of town, and by the time he pulled into the half-mile gravel road that led to his trailer, visibility had been reduced to next to nothing; Reston couldn't even see the gray horse in her pasture. The snow was really swirling in the valley, and the Christmas lights of Reston's nearest neighbor a half-mile across the way had disappeared as well. He couldn't find the trailer in his headlights until he was within maybe fifteen or twenty feet.
He sat out in his truck for perhaps a half hour, maybe longer, listening to Christmas carols on the radio and drinking beer. Somehow he seemed to be pulling in a radio station from the Midwest; he noticed that when they gave the time there was an hour difference from the clock on the truck's dashboard. By the time Reston vacated the truck in the driveway he was well along the way to drunk and had already switched over from beer to whiskey. He stumbled through the blowing snow to the door of the trailer. His dog, a herding mongrel so strained as to look exotic, was waiting for him in a state of pitched agitation, and Reston opened the door and watched the dog disappear into the whiteout beyond the trailer.
That night he drank enough to feel genuinely sorry for himself, and almost managed to talk himself into flying out to spend Christmas with his sister's family in Colorado.
The next morning, Reston woke up on the couch, as hung over as he'd been in years. The trailer was completely drifted in, and the wind was still tossing snow around and obscuring the range down the valley to the north. Every light in the place was still on. The only radio station he could pick up in the valley was wheedling with Christmas carols, the signal drifting in and out --some choir somewhere, with a big echo effect that suggested a live feed from a cathedral. Reston was determined to force down some Alka-Seltzer and go back to bed, but he realized with a start that his dog was still someplace out in the storm. It was rare that the dog would spend the night outside in any weather, and Reston was alarmed and appalled that he had left him out in the storm all night.
He went to the door and called out into the blowing snow. There was no response, and he still could not even make out the gray horse in the pasture less than 100 yards away. Reston pulled on a pair of boots, parka, mittens, and a hat with earflaps, and ventured out into the drifts that had developed all around the trailer. His truck was almost completely buried. He tried to call out into the snow for the dog, but his voice was swallowed in the swirling wind. Wading knee- and sometimes hip-deep through the drifts, Reston made his way around the side of the trailer and managed somehow to locate one of the fence posts from the horse pasture. He couldn't see much, or far, but there was no sign of either the dog or the horse. The wind was blowing so hard that when he turned back his footsteps were already almost completely blown over. Reston tried again to call the dog's name, but realized it was pointless and returned to the trailer.
He crawled back into bed, bundled himself in blankets, and tried to nap. His head was throbbing, and as Reston lay there he kept imagining that he heard the dog barking somewhere out in the storm. He got up twice and went to the door, but there was no sign of the dog and no sound other than the howling of the wind. At some point Reston managed to find his way back into sleep while listening to Christmas carols on the radio. It seemed to be a loop of the same program --the same choir-- he'd heard the night before; every single song was reduced to a melancholy, echo-chamber lament. It sounded like a death row choir, complete with all the mournful sonic effects you might expect from an institution constructed entirely of concrete and steel. It was breaking Reston's heart and blowing all sorts of painful memories around in his head. Even as he slept fitfully he was aware of his heart pinging in his chest like sonar in an abandoned submarine.
It was Christmas Eve.
Reston had traveled so far from the man he'd once been that the people he had allowed himself to be close to, as well as those to whom he was conjoined by blood, had become mostly uncomfortable strangers to him. Or at least that was the way he had come to think of the situation. There was now too much time and too much silence and distance between himself and what for lack of a more strictly truthful term he thought of as his loved ones. He had no axe to grind, no extravagant grievance or baggage, and it now seemed sad and even a bit shameful to think that his mother did not even know where he was now living or how to get in touch with him. He hadn't spoken with her in over ten months. When Reston's girlfriend had grown tired of the west and had moved back to Boston --it had been nearly two years-- he'd given up the apartment in Bozeman and taken the trailer in the valley. He was supposed to be finishing a set of illustrations for a children's book --the sort of clunky and typically lazy and manipulative story that people were always writing for kids-- and he hadn't made any progress in weeks.
In the years since his girlfriend's departure, Reston had almost gotten used to the loneliness and its odd, romanticized solace and pleasures. His girlfriend had been in possession of a more polished set of social instincts. She'd been an English professor at a local college, and liked to host small gatherings, enjoyed going out for dinner and shopping. Left to his own devices, Reston seldom did anything that might be considered social. He had made few real friends in the years he'd been living in the west, and still hadn't even bothered to have the trailer wired for a telephone. The dog was a perfect companion; it was all the things people who were nuts about dogs claimed dogs to be: a good listener, an enforcer of reasonable routine and satisfying daily order. It was also absolutely companionable: patient, even-tempered, and eager to please. That Man's Best Friend business really was not overstating, not in this instance. This dog was an ideal, Reston believed, a study in refined, dignified behavior that seldom strayed into true stoicism. It could muster real, contagious enthusiasm in a heartbeat, yet also seemed to have mastered serenity.
Reston was projecting, of course; he could see that. The dog was exactly what he needed and wanted it to be. It was unconscionable that he'd allowed himself to get so drunk that he'd left the dog outside in a raging blizzard all night. The poor animal could have trudged miles in search of shelter by this time. The odd thing about the whole affair was that Reston had seldom even gone into town without taking the dog along, and he virtually never simply let him roam freely, as he had the night before. He'd been made careless by melancholy and liquor, by the crippling, almost narcotic nostalgia of the holidays, and he knew that he would chew himself up forever with grief if anything had happened to the dog. In the two preceding years the only real highlights of the holiday season had been the long walks they'd taken together on Christmas Eve.
As he lay there hung over and drifting miserably along the blurriest edges of sleep, Reston imagined being hounded to the end of his days by a canine ghost. By mid-afternoon, as he forced himself to listen to an old Jackie Gleason Christmas album --the ultimate expression of the Christmas carol as suicide note-- he believed he felt as wretched as he ever had, and found himself actually attempting to squeeze out tears for the first time in years.
He finally bundled himself up again and ventured out in what was left of the afternoon light to look for the dog. The storm was lifting. A bank of dark clouds was rolling steadily down the valley. The odd and alarming new development was that not only was Reston's dog missing, but there was no sign of the gray horse anywhere in the pasture. The sky had cleared to the point that the entirety of the fenced pasture was once again visible, and the horse was nowhere to be seen. Reston waddled along the drifts that were built up along the fence line and inspected the gate. It was not only firmly latched, but drifted completely shut. He walked the length of the road leading to his trailer, all the way out to where it intersected the main gravel road that led to the state highway. He saw no evidence of any traffic whatsoever, no animal or vehicle tracks other than those from his own truck the previous evening, and even those were mostly blown over.
Reston managed to get the truck started and backed out to the turnaround. The four-wheel drive got him through the drifted snow to the gravel county road, which was in pretty good shape. From there to the blacktop state highway, a distance of just under two miles, he saw no signs of either the dog or the horse. Once he hit the stop sign at the highway he decided to make another trip into town. He had no idea what he expected to accomplish there on Christmas Eve; it was almost four o'clock and already growing murky. The highway had been plowed and road conditions were fine. There were still carols looping on the radio station, and Reston made up his mind to attend Christmas Eve services at some church in town. He hadn't been in a church in many years, but he had fond memories of holiday services from his childhood, and felt very much like a man who needed somehow to be forgiven. If God was ever going to grab him, he figured, this was probably a good opportunity. He'd certainly never felt so susceptible.
In town Reston found a phone book and tried to call the local animal shelter, but got the answering machine and a deadpan voice wishing him a merry Christmas and encouraging him to neuter his pets. He walked around downtown checking telephone poles and bulletin boards where he thought he might find notices of lost and found animals, but turned up nothing that fit the description of his dog. In the empty Greyhound station he picked up a copy of the local newspaper and found an advertisement for Christmas Eve services at area churches. There was a six o'clock service at a big Lutheran church right in town, so Reston left his truck on the street and went off in search of the place.
The church was packed with families, and there were dozens of scrubbed and squirming children. Reston had a tough time staying awake through some of the readings and much of the sermon, but afterwards, walking back to his truck, he felt somehow better for having gone. His heart felt lighter and heavier at the same time, a strangely emotional state that he had always associated with the holidays.
Before driving back to the trailer Reston stopped off at a 24-hour place for breakfast. Sitting in the church it had occurred to him that he hadn't had a bite to eat all day. The restaurant was located in the middle of a strip mall parking lot, and the lot was packed. Reston ended up parking several hundred yards from the restaurant, and as he walked from the truck he was greeted warmly by at least a half dozen strangers. He remembered his late father coming in from a last-minute errand on Christmas eve long ago; the old man was rosy-cheeked, half in the bag, and happy as a clam. He was a man who loved special occasions, and as he came in with his arms loaded with shopping bags he had bellowed, "The whole damn town is lousy with Christmas spirit!" Reston tried to remember how many years now his father had been dead. He'd been killed in a car accident on the Fourth of July, the car he was driving having collided with a train while he and a couple buddies were returning --drunk as skunks-- from an early morning round of golf. It had to have been at least fifteen years.
All the way out to the trailer Reston tried to put back together the years, to line up memories and freeze them back there when there had still seemed to be so much time, time passing and carrying him past dark off-ramps, dimly-lit intersections, and all the forks in the road where he had chosen --or, unconsciously, not chosen-- the direction that had led him to the road along which he was driving alone now on Christmas eve, as lost and uncertain of his ultimate destination as he had ever felt in his life. Reston couldn't even say for certain what he was, or what he might have been but wasn't, or even what he might one day be. He'd basically let each day shove him wherever it wanted, and when it stopped shoving he stayed put. He missed the old man, a guy who'd been a shover, a dictator in the best and most intoxicating way; he'd always gone his own way and dragged others along who were helpless to resist him, right to the end. After his death, Reston's mother had admitted that she'd been little more than one more of his tag-alongs. "He told me he was going to marry me," she said, "and I believed him."
Back at the trailer Reston stood out in the middle of the drifted-in driveway and called out to the dog. The storm had blown over, and there was a bright quarter moon. There was no sign of the dog. Reston craned his neck and watched a jet make its way right through Orion's belt in the east. He was so tired. It was already close to ten o'clock, and he went back into the trailer, mixed himself a glass of eggnog, and cued up the Jackie Gleason record on the stereo. He fell asleep on the couch and was awakened by what he thought were bells. Reston sat up in the dark of the trailer and listened. All was silent, and then he heard voices. He pulled on his boots and stepped outside the trailer. It was a gorgeous night, and though Reston knew that voices could carry a great distance on cold nights in that place, these voices had sounded like they were right outside his windows. He could see the Christmas lights twinkling from his neighbor's yard across the valley, and could hear laughter from what sounded like a party. The trees at the farthest edge of his fence line seemed to be nested with glowing corposants. Reston walked around the trailer and there, a hundred yards away in the pasture, was his dog, sitting attentively before the gray horse.
The horse's big head was hanging directly above the dog's, steam streaming from its nostrils. The horse and the dog were right in the middle of the pasture. It was an absolutely clear night, and it sounded like the voices were coming from the pasture. Reston approached the fence and swore he heard the dog emit what sounded like a hoarse, incredulous chuckle. The stars were stretched out above the valley, precise, detailed constellations embroidered across the clear, dusty clutter of the Milky Way. Reston heard a pop and was astonished to see modest fireworks of some sort bloom above the valley in the direction of his neighbor's house, and he was inexplicably moved to see the dog and the horse raise their heads at once to marvel at the display.
Reston let out a whoop that snapped out into the cold air and was quickly swallowed up. And just then the dog looked in Reston's direction, threw its head back, and stretched out its front legs and executed a sort of bow of acknowledgement. Reston watched the dog roll over on its back and begin to writhe happily in the snow, kicking up a cloud that briefly enveloped both dog and horse. Reston stood still for what felt like a long time. He closed his eyes briefly and when he opened them again the whirling snow in the pasture was dissipating in a slow shower of fine particles that shivered almost like sparks in the moonlight.