“Screw that,” I told her.

“What’s the matter now?”

“If ‘in hand’ means what I think it means,” I whispered fiercely to Dawnette, “old Sailor can jerk himself off.”

“It means,” she said haughtily, “you got to control old Sailor with this here breeding halter and this here lead shank.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

But she was. Gingerly I took the lead line, about six feet long, which was linked to fourteen inches of chain attached to the halter, and led Sailor toward the mare on the inboard side of the fence.

He sauntered across the paddock, as benign and gentle as a teddy bear. Everything was going well, and with much more restraint than my extravagant fears had predicted. It was a piece of cake, and I was inwardly exalted. I could, it seemed, control this towering monadnock with the flick of a wrist. An immaculate triumph, all the sweeter for having been spared the odium of priming his pump.

Then he saw Fritillary. He stood for a second or two drinking her in, transported by her presence, his big head cocked stupidly. And then, as if she were the executrix of some crowning accomplishment, Fritillary spread her gaskins in an indelicate approximation of a squat and peed again. Buckets, and Sailor went apeshit. He neighed shrilly, a high piercing shriek, like a hysterical, sex-starved locomotive, but there was in it a primordial echo of Eocene quagmires and flinty mesas and that untamed tenacity which in the higher species has been known to confound desire with mayhem as a means of satisfying it.

Fritillary hung her tail to the right, a flag of welcome. Sailor trumpeted, white-eyed, pawing the earth in archetypal conformance to the cliché. The muscles in his neck writhed like a nest of snakes under the twitching skin. His sculptured frame, engulfing as a wave, rose up and blocked out the sun. It was a long way to Fritillary; he shifted into overdrive. Flailing the savage air, wild mane flying, he plunged toward her. The lead line went taut. Anchored to the end of it, I went with him. Sweat caked his plated shoulders as he and I were swamped by an invisible tornado thick with the heat and dust and the rot smell of the stable. He flashed past me toward his tail-twitching seductress. With an awful effort I held on. The lead bound my hands as he jerked his head. I jerked back, hard as I could, which was a mistake. His terrible hoofs like twin pile drivers exploded into me just about equidistant from my belly and my balls. I went oozing into the corral, clutching my insides together. Everything went dark, diminished, and then in that crucible of pain the dark image intensified, etched forever on the retina of my mind. I saw Dawnette lean forward, framed in golden dust, her pretty head tilted in an angle of disbelief. I saw my mother breathlessly still, observing my punishment with unreasonable composure. I saw the neck of a small bottle protruding from the embroidered pocket of her lavender gown. I saw a deep grave, looking down at it from a great height, the grave my own. And I saw old Sailor pour over that fence, taking off as if launched by a red-hot missile up his ass. I exaggerate: he half poured. His forelegs got over the highest rail but the rest of him didn’t and he hung there, equipoised, like some rude and ungainly scales badly in need of adjustment. Served the bastard right—after all my pains with him, he had succeeded in mounting not Fritillary but the fence. I heard Dawnette say, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Smith—he’s rump-sprung. And his eyes are yellow, the whites of ’em!” Her words were a chant, or maybe they just seemed so, with Sailor bellowing an accompaniment like a rusty bugle. “You got any two-bys?” she shouted. “And a sheet of plywood? Before he gets his dick lopped off?”