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HEARTLAND
Â
Gustav
Hasford
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There
are few things in marriage that mutual toleration and good humor will not cure.
One of them, however, is being a horse.
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Wherever
man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization,
we will find the footprint of the horse beside it.
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â€"John
Trotwood Moore, in
The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Marshall
Frankfort comes home from work and does not notice that for some unknown reason
his wife has become a large grey horse.
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In the living room, Cecilia
relaxes on a fat pink sofa with a True Confessions magazine on her
chest.
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â€Ĺ›Hello, dear.” Her voice is dry.
She eats candy orange slices.
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Marshall bombardiers his black
leatherette briefcase into the formica German wasteland of his new dining table
and opens his fat white Frigidaire. â€Ĺ›Hello, dear.”
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His wife asks: â€Ĺ›Have a good day,
dear?”
Â
â€Ĺ›And how was â€ĹšI Dream of Jeannie’
today, dear?”
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â€Ĺ›That’s awful, dear. You really
should tell them at the office that they’re working you too hard.”
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Pouring Bavarian beer, Marshall
pays scant attention to a thick grey horsehair frozen to the lip of the ceramic
stein he has extracted from the freezer compartment of his Frigidaire. Boldly, his
right forefinger flicks the ugly horsehair off the stein and it falls forever
out of his life.
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The sports page. Too portly to
participate in athletic contests in person, Marshall secretly admires Joe
Willie Namath and will create a baby son of such sturdy timber when Cecilia
grows weary of the easy life and flushes her pills.
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The late show.
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* * * *
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And
Christmas.
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â€Ĺ›Marshall? Marshall! Do I look
tired? Run down? Does my skin look crooked?”
Â
Marshall (talking to Johnny
Carson, exploring for Christmas presents in TV Guide): â€Ĺ›You look real
good, dear.” An aside: â€Ĺ›Would I pull your leg?”
Â
She touches her face. â€Ĺ›Still . .
.”
Â
* * * *
Â
â€Ĺ›So
for sure I couldn’t fix it myself, so . . .”
Â
â€Ĺ›â€"that damn Andrews kid, the
little bum. Pirates my new accounts with my ink wet on the contracts. Why, I’ll
betâ€"”
Â
â€Ĺ›â€"plumber took off that shiny
thingy and promised it won’t cost more thanâ€"”
Â
â€Ĺ›â€"and the boss walks in, right?
Just as I’m trying toâ€"”
Â
â€Ĺ›â€"but sometimes I don’t feel
well, Marshall. I get these pains . . .”
Â
â€Ĺ›â€"told him just what he could do
withâ€"”
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â€Ĺ›Marshall, I feel . . . heavy . .
. I . . .”
Â
â€Ĺ›â€"but noâ€"no way. Said there was
just no way I wasâ€"”
Â
â€Ĺ›Marshall!”
Â
â€Ĺ›What? What did you say?”
Â
â€Ĺ›Marshall ...”
Â
â€Ĺ›What? What’s wrong with
you?”
Â
â€Ĺ›I’m scared.”
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Marshall walks into the living
room, locks the door.
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* * * *
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Cecilia
flumps around on all fours in ways much (lumpier than the casual lifestyle
cultivated by her past.
Â
Marshall notices subtle
signalsâ€"sobs, complaints about sore legs, snorts, whinnies. Irrefutable
evidence manifests itself: wet hoofprints all over the bathroom floor,
breakfasts of dry oats and grass in a bowl with a heavy side order of
horseradishes, and a damp and gooey emptiness in the â€Ĺ›Souvenir of Grand Canyon”
sugar bowl.
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â€Ĺ›We never fight,” says Cecilia as
though she were a key witness at a trial.
Â
* * * *
Â
Breaking
coffee at the office water cooler, Marshall (the archaeologist) excavates a
stack of little emotional newspaper clippings about a Mexican standoff he had
with Cecilia on their first date way back when. She wanted to see Don
Rickles Bites a Cow in 3-D Technicolor, but Marshall had tickets to see Pat
Boone’s white shoes in Bernadine. Marshall devised a compromise: they
saw a double featureâ€"Self Abuse and Oral Communications.
Prehistoric dirty pictures were featured in a short cartoon, The Paintings
of Reindeer and Bison on the Cave Walls in Southern France. Marshall was
happy to sacrifice Pat Boone for the woman he loved. In those shiny days he’d
let her live it up all the time. Now, picking the crunchy goodness of
historical popcorn from his teeth, Marshall decides to remind Cecilia of the
old days to cheer her up.
Â
Home life gives birth to a silent
event: Marshall finds Cecilia sitting alone in the kitchen in the dark. On a
cracked saucer before her lies an incredibly old souvenir slice from their
wedding cakeâ€"half eaten. In ten years of waiting, the cakeâ€"very much at home
with the ice cubes in the freezerâ€" has hardened into a yellowish sugar-coated
fossil, as dead now as the curling full-color photographs of happy Cecilia and
happy Marshall cutting the long-digested living pastry with a silver knife.
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* * * *
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Marshall
remains humble about his ability to tolerate Cecilia’s crazy moods. The
household disarmament treaty remains as solid as the Siegfried Line. No cruel
tanks allowed in the living room, no hand grenades in the goldfish bowl, no
Nambu machineguns or pastel-colored Fokker biplanesâ€"and none of the
thermonuclear devices which utilize the erotic potential of atomic fission.
Â
Not even while Cecilia screams â€Ĺ›Look
at me! Look at me!” does Marshall break his cool. Rather, his response is
calculated to suggest a more agreeable topic: â€Ĺ›And so Jeannie turned Major
Healy into a big chicken. What happened then, dear?”
Â
* * * *
Â
Cecilia
gallops into the living room, makes noise, mumbles clumsily, â€Ĺ›I’m a horse,
Marshall. I’m a horse. I’m a real horse. Really. I can see myself in the
bathroom mirror.”
Â
â€Ĺ›Oh, stop horsing around,” says
Marshall, chuckling behind his Sports Illustrated. â€Ĺ›Use your horse
sense, dear.”
Â
â€Ĺ›I’m a horse, Marshall.”
Â
â€Ĺ›Then you must eat a big bowl of
fresh grass, dear. A person needs horse food to get enough horse vitamins,
right? And frankly, dear, you haven’t looked well lately.”
Â
â€Ĺ›Marshall?”
Â
â€Ĺ›Yes?”
Â
â€Ĺ›I hurt. When I try to walk it
feels like my guts are floating around inside my body. Sometimes I can’t
breathe.”
Â
â€Ĺ›Horsefeathers. You’ll be fine.
Probably just a bug of some kindâ€"the flu.” He laughs. â€Ĺ›Why, there’s still a
lot of horsepower left in you!”
Â
* * * *
Â
In
a drugstore, Marshall skims through a paperback copy of Handy Horse Lore.
He learns that a horse will not step on a man. He reads that if a horse stays
off its feet for a few hours, it dies. He finds these facts interesting. He
decides to tell Cecilia that she’d better keep moving.
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* * * *
Â
Roller
Derby.
Â
Cecilia does not produce TV
dinners. Hours pass. Marshall waits patiently for the two small aluminum trays
of cryogenically petrified food to be brought back to life with heat.
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He makes a joke about putting
Cecilia out to pasture for this, but he is alone and does not laugh.
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The bedroom smells sick and hot
with horsehairs and defecation, and Marshall’s queen-size bed is sprinkled with
decaying hay. A real elderly workhorse, sway-backed, shedding, bone-angled and
dead, crumples in all kinds of directions, crushes fat pink pillowsâ€"half a ton
of gristle and cold meat and big piano-key teeth and worn steel horseshoes
staring out obsidian-hard over the hand-sewn watercolors of a butterfly quilt.
Â
Calmly, Marshall calculates the
extent of Cecilia’s horseplay. This, he quips, is the last straw. It is bad
enough that Cecilia refuses to talk to him. It’s bad enough that she trots all
over the house drowning in maudlin squalor, and won’t cook. His heart is big
for her. But this? This sloppy housekeeping?
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â€Ĺ›I can take a joke,” Marshall
announces in a loud voice, â€Ĺ›but I’ll be god damned if I’m going to sleep
with a dead horse!”
Â
Period.
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Dirty sheets.
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Marshall goes to see if maybe
Cecilia is hiding somewhere in the living room.
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On TV,
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby sit in a big cooking pot and talk about love. They are
surrounded by cannibals of the wildest design.
Â
Marshall
thinks: Have I seen this?
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