Read The Same River Twice for Free Online

When I asked where he was from, he said, “Roun’ de co’nuh.”
    Tony led his motley posse along a dirt path through the park. The horses walked a lazy single file. Half an hour later they still strolled with heads down, performing their function like machines. I was embarrassed for the animals, domesticated to disgrace.
    Tony left the path for a wide paved road that curved around a pond. The horses began a brief trot. Following instinct, I snapped the reins across the horse’s neck and hunkered down. A gallop was much easier to ride. The old mare lifted her head and, for the first time since retiring to Brooklyn, heaved into a run. Her hooves sounded odd pounding the tar. I guided her to the outside and around the others. Jahi whooped behind me.
    Tony shouted for me to stop, his face red and snarling, finally looking as if he was from the neighborhood instead of Montana. I floated above the pavement, well seated and moving with the mare’s rhythm, I looked for Jahi and saw a horse following at full speed. Someone screamed. I reined in and a horse shot past me, its rider slowly tilting sideways like a centaur splitting at the seam. The horse swerved toward the edge of the road. The rider slid from the saddle. His head slammed against a streetlight, spinning his body in a pinwheel, slinging blood that spattered the street.
    A few hundred people formed a tight circle around the kid. Teenage boys dared each other to step in the blood. An ambulance arrived. Tony was mad and wanted to fight but Jahi pulled me away, screaming that she’d sue. She held very tightly to my arm, pushing her groin against my leg. Her palms were hot.
    We took a cab to her apartment. She hurried upstairs and when I walked in, she was waiting, bent over the back of the couch with the jodhpurs at her ankles.
    â€œPlease, Chris,” begged her disembodied voice.
    Mechanically I unbuckled my pants. As I lowered them, I heard again the sound of the boy’s head hitting the steel pole, like a boot dropped into a fifty-gallon drum. Swallowing bile, I turned and ran down the steps. The public sacrifice had been too great, too unexpected. I was unable to merge with the priestess for recovery of life.
    I wandered Flatbush in a muddled stupor. The day’s event unfurled in my head at varying speeds. I watched the scene from above in slow motion, seeing myself on a tiny horse. I became the kid sliding for miles from the saddle, waiting for impact. I became Tony, drop-jawed and aghast, primed for a fight. I was the horse; I was Jahi; I was the bored medic. I was anyone but myself.
    I missed work for a week, staying in bed like a hog wrapped in the warm, wet mud of misery. When I finally went to the warehouse, Jahi called, petulant and forgiving. I hung up on her laughter and never saw her again.
    A week later, on my twentieth birthday, I joined some guys playing football in Riverside Park. Quick and lean with good hands, I made a spectacular catch on a thirty-yard pass. The ball was spiraling high, thrown too hard and over my head. I leaped, twisting in the air to snag it from the sky, seeing at my zenith the New Jersey smokestacks reflected in the river’s glare. My left foot landed one way while my momentum carried me the other. A tackier smashed me a third direction altogether.
    The next day I limped to a hospital and emerged with my left leg encased in plaster. The knee ligaments were destroyed but I was happy. The cast gave me a legitimate reason for going home. I rode an airplane for the first time and my mother picked me up in Lexington. She drove me two hours into the eastern hills, where the community accepted my return as a wounded hero. My family’s attitude was one of justice having been done; the cosmos had exacted its price for the sheer audacity of leaving the land. Dad and I drank beer together, a rite we’d never performed before. He repeated again and again, “They shoot horses in your