Sonny didn’t go to the bar often, but when he did it was a circus.  He was a real character, always had some new thing to showboat about, something he bought or something he had planned.  He liked to drink, but the attention, that’s what he lived for, and boy he could get it.  There were so many nights like that, where he marched in with a big smile and yelled out something absurd and had the whole place in his palm, but the night you mean is the one with the horse, right?  That wasn’t just one night.  That stretched on for weeks.  But that’s all right if you want to hear it.

I don’t know horses well so I don’t know what kind it was, but before Sonny’s, it was Joey’s.  I’ve mentioned Joey.  For most of his life he lived in a field, inside this hollowed-out pile of manure he fitted with a living room and a chimney and a wife, some supposedly quiet woman I never met.  They also had this big barn they lived beside.  It had cats and chickens and cows and all kinds of animals altogether, and every cent they earned went toward giving those animals a good life.  Then one day she up and found herself a lawyer in the city and tried to take him for everything he was worth, even though he wasn’t worth much more than a barn full of animals.  And he didn’t much like that.

Sonny was driving his dad’s old hay truck down the road when he saw them.  There was a row of animals tied up on the side of the road, starting with the cats and getting bigger and bigger until there was the horse, and then Joey at the very end sitting on a lawn chair.  Sonny stopped and asked what he was doing, and Joey said he was giving the animals away so his wife wouldn’t get nothing.  So Sonny untied the horse and they loaded it onto the bed of the hay truck and he drove it home.  He set up a mattress for it in the backyard.  I don’t know what happened to the other animals, but when Joey’s wife came to take the manure pile, he snuck into the woods with an armful of cats and kept them out there, killing and eating them from time to time, and that was how he lived until he died.  It was a good thing they didn’t have kids.

From then on, whenever Sonny came to the bar, he rode the horse.  He was no trained rider, you could tell that from one glance at his stained-up muscle shirts and cargo shorts.  He looked tiny on that thing and he didn’t have a saddle either.  He’d show up all bearded and raggedy-looking, and when he stepped inside he’d be like a celebrity almost.  People patted him on the shoulder and called across the room to him and sometimes he got a free drink if Larry was feeling generous, which he usually wasn’t, since Sonny usually showed up half-drunk anyway.  He showed up and parked the horse between two vehicles and roped it to their side mirrors, either to keep it from wandering off or to make sure that if either of the vehicles’ owners came out after a long night of drinking they’d have to stumble back in and ask “Whose horse is that?” and Sonny could stand up and proudly say “It’s my horse,” and everybody would know it was Sonny’s horse.  And pretty soon everybody did know.  One night Calvin even played a song for him called “The Rider on His Black Horse,” and Sonny loved that.  I guess he didn’t know his Bible too well.

It didn’t take long for people around town to start calling Sonny “the horse guy,” or “Sonny Horse,” or “the guy who rides a horse around town.”  He’d show up everywhere on that poor thing, the bar, the store for a loaf of bread or a bottle of whiskey, the fishing hole, the farmer’s market, sometimes a doctor’s appointment in the city.   That’s how the animal kept so lean, I suppose.  I don’t know what Sonny fed it, but with the distance that thing walked every day it could have been nothing but cheeseburgers and it would’ve been built like a brick shithouse.  Even so, I wouldn’t be surprised if it lived on parking lot critters and ditch grass.  Sonny used to have kids, you see, and even for them he never bought food.  They ran out on him as teens, thankfully. There’s only so many chances you can give someone.  Like my mom for instance.  She gave my dad way too many chances if you ask me, but she had her limit too.  It was when I was eight.  He ripped the telephone off the wall and broke her nose with it, and that night she grabbed me and we ran through the forest to her sister’s.  He let us go, though, and never tried to haul us back.  Sonny handled it differently.  Maybe it’s not the same with daughters.

He was lonely I think.  He lived alone, anyway.  He lived in this rotted old shack he built a few roads over from Joey’s, so small that when he parked his hay truck in front of it you couldn’t see the place.  Sometimes he visited Joey in the woods, to tell him how the horse was doing or just vent with Joey about how unappreciative women were and how if only there was a way to make them care.  Sonny prattled on like that at the bar too, sometimes taking a punch from Big Laura or Daisy or one of the guys there with his wife, or a lone guy with a sense of decency.  Sonny didn’t care.  He had no teeth to begin with, so there was nothing one more punch could steal from him.  Plus he could take a hit like nobody I’ve ever seen.  He’d eat a fist or two and then go right on babbling about how his daughters were “ungrateful bitches” and “hussies” and “whores” and how he’d love to see them one day if they’d only call.

I don’t know how the horse survived the winter, but it did.  He still rode it to the bar, even if there was a snowstorm.  That Christmas he dressed it up – but I don’t want to talk much about Christmas, on account of what happened when I was three, when my parents left me inside with the fire going and my dad blamed me when the house burned down.  He told me after that I was lucky he went in for me.  He said he should have left me behind like he did my sister.

Anyway, that spring Sonny’s hay truck broke down and nobody found out why.  After that he was forced to ride the horse everywhere, it wasn’t just for attention, and at that point, I think he started to get sick of it.  That was probably when he first got the idea.

On the night you mean, Sonny came in all sweaty and dirty and red-eyed, like he couldn’t sleep.  He walked into the bar and announced to everyone there that in one week’s time he would be riding to Woodhull, eight towns over, to see his oldest daughter Virginia.  And then, he said, he was going to ride on all the way to Hale, halfway across the country, to see his second oldest daughter Georgia, and then he was going to get them in a room together and make them tell him where his other daughters were and why they wouldn’t reply to his letters or phone calls.  The bar cheered and someone in the crowd said someone should call the local paper.  When Sonny heard that, he didn’t make a sound.  But it was obvious he loved the idea.

Oh, and by the way, he named the horse the African Queen, because it was dark.  Even though I’m pretty sure it was male.

The next day the paper came to see the cross-country rider, and Sonny made sure he was interviewed in the bar while everyone was there.  It was a small paper, and the only people who read it were from the surrounding towns, but still, Sonny took measures to make himself look respectable.  He washed his face and wore sleeves, and even styled his hair in a swoop with some nice-smelling gel.  He still wore his shorts though, and he had nicks around his mouth and on his cheeks like he’d started shaving but got too frustrated to finish the job.

The article was published a few days later and lots of people read it.  A news station in the city even talked about it for a bit.  Of course, Sonny was angry, because he wanted a television interview and nobody ever contacted him for one.  I heard some writer tried to reach Virginia for a comment, but she wouldn’t go on the record.

The night before Sonny left Larry gave him a dozen free rounds and some money for meals along the way.  At midnight he shouted out to everyone and waved and stumbled out the door and onto the African Queen’s back and rode off in the direction of Woodhull.  He didn’t have a map with him.  Maybe he used the stars as a guide, but I doubt it.  I doubt Sonny knew how to read the stars.  Anyway, we all watched him go and then got right back to drinking.  Nobody expected to hear from him in weeks.

Larry got the call the next morning.  “Yeah, I know Sonny.  The African Queen, yeah.  Oh, for God’s sake.”  He hung up and told everyone that Sonny had made it as far as Roe, the next town over.  He stopped at a bar to drink, and he did, for the entire night.  He was only woken up when someone noticed the horse had fallen over and was having trouble breathing.  When the person told him to go check on his horse, Sonny waved him away and went to sleep.  So the guy called the cops.

Sonny didn’t come close to seeing Virginia or Georgia or any of his daughters.  He was kept in a cell in Roe for a few nights and then they kicked him out and told him to walk home.  The horse was dehydrated so they moved it to a municipal hospital for treatment.  Needless to say, it was never returned to Sonny or Joey, but the hospital apparently tried to contact both of them.

I only spoke to Sonny once after that, for obvious reasons.  We were sitting at the bar on a quiet night, drinking, though he was drinking much faster than me.  Maybe he was celebrating.  He asked for another and looked over at me.  He asked if my name was Isaac.

“Sure is,” I said.  “And you’re Sonny Foster.”

“You read the paper, I guess,” he said.

I said, “No, I’m just in here a lot.”

He shrugged and said, “If you say so.”

I asked if any of his daughters had tried to reach him.  I already knew the answer.

He said, “Yeah, right.  That’d mean they’re good women, and good women don’t run out on their old man.”  He took a long drink and said, “They’re all evil, you know that?  Not just mine.  Every single one.”

He waited for me to say something, but I didn’t.

“Whatever,” he said.  “Hell, take ‘em all.  They’re not the ones who got their words in the paper.  They’re not the ones with their face on the morning news.  They could be dead for all I care.  They’re not the ones everyone knows.”

He waited for Larry to be distracted, then ran out without paying.  I never saw him again.

I remember there was a lightning storm that night.  I went home, thinking about what Sonny said, and looked at you in your crib.  I remember thinking, “My little girl.”  I picked you up and watched the lightning in the sky.

– Owen Schalk