About the Contest
The winner of James River Writers’ and Richmond magazine’s seventh annual Best Unpublished Novel contest is “Four Dead Horses” by KT Sparks. A panel of volunteer judges, led by crime fiction author Brad Parks, chose Sparks’ manuscript from 60 entries.
“If John Irving had chronicled the upper Midwest, he might have written this boisterous, satirical gem of a novel,” Parks said in his comments. “It is rare to come across such a remarkably assured work by any writer, much less one who has never been published before. ‘Four Dead Horses’ is a joy to read, and the prose seems almost effortless in its grace.”
Sparks will receive a $500 prize as the winner of the contest, and her first chapter is published here.
The contest also had two finalists: James Bacon (“The Mystery of the Empty Tomb”) and Bill Blume (“A Badge and a Boomerang.”)
CHAPTER 1
The First Horse: Buster
Martin Oliphant had always hated horses. Their staggering stupidity. Their unexplained, unexpected, and ever-explosive snorting. The way they twitched distinct patches of their skin to dislodge flies. The way they shied madly at the most innocuous occurrences: a golf umbrella at fifty feet; a leaf falling from, of all places, a tree; a bale of hay stacked exactly where it’s supposed to be stacked and had been stacked for the last month.
Martin Oliphant hated horses, but he didn’t, it must be said, wish horses dead. It must be said, because horses died around him. Died or almost died. At Martin’s hand or almost at Martin’s hand. And it was horses, dead ones mostly, that blazed the trail to his life-forging passion. Horses brought Martin to cowboy poetry, and horses, live ones mostly, were cowboy poetry’s central theme.
Martin saw his first dying, then dead, horse on May 1, 1982, on the beach at Twin Bluffs, the only resort in his lakeside home of Pierre, Michigan.
He headed to Twin Bluffs that Saturday morning with his mom and dad, Dottie and Carroll Oliphant, and younger brother, Frank, in his dad’s week-old Lincoln Continental Mark IV Signature Series Sedan. Martin sat in the back seat across from his mom. Between them, encased in plastic film embossed with the Jostens logo, was Martin’s special order, plus-size high school graduation gown, a swath of tissue-thin canary polyester bristling with static. The ceremony wasn’t until the end of the month, but the XXXL robe had to be delivered early to ensure it fit. Martin poked at the bag, and the garment puckered and creased, like a time-lapse film of a lemon drying out. When he had seen the gown in the catalogue, he had thought that, draped in yards of shimmering gold, he might dazzle as he performed his one duty as the Pierre Public High School’s 1982 salutatorian: the introduction of Camilla Lutz, the valedictorian. Though his waistline neared sixty inches, it was, Martin told himself, in harmonious balance with his 6-foot-4-inch frame. Some might call him fat, but he, like the Sears department in charge of labeling outsized children’s clothing, preferred “husky.” Sitting now with the reality of the robe, its bunchy seams and clinging rayon, he realized the thing would grasp at his buttocks, wedge between his belly and breasts, adhere to his wobbling upper arms. He would dazzle no one. If he could make it to the podium with no rips or visible sweat stains, he would count it as a win.
Martin saw his first dying, then dead horse on May 1, 1982, on the beach at Twin Bluffs.
“It would be so bogus to forfeit to Garth,” said Frank. The nominal reason for this rare all-family outing was to cheer on 14-year-old Frank in the semi-final match of the Kiwanis Youth Tennis Round Robin. In truth, none of them, including Frank, who had dispatched this particular opponent the month before, 6-0, 6-1, 6-0, in the Rotary Classic, had any interest in watching the rout. Frank had been complaining since they’d taken the detour to pick up Martin’s gown.
“Why couldn’t you have gotten it while you were at school?” Frank asked for the twentieth time.
“I forgot,” said Martin, which was a lie. He could have done so yesterday, but he hadn’t wanted to cart his enormous saffron cloak of shame through the halls to his locker.
“If I have to forfeit, it will probably be the first and last time Garth ever wins a match. He plays with a wooden racquet,” Frank said and tapped his own metal T2000, Jimmy Connors’s weapon of choice. Frank’s other hand inched his dad’s martini toward his lips, as if he thought being slow were equivalent to being invisible. The antiseptic stink of gin overwhelmed the smell of the new leather interior.
“Put it on the dashboard, dear,” said Dottie. “And don’t be a snob.”
Not a trace of irony crossed Dottie’s mask of Erno Lazlo cosmetics, applied in the au naturel style favored by the wives who lived out by Pierre Woods Country Club. Led by their high priestess, Bitsy Newport, these women and their husbands — doctors, lawyers, white-collar executives, heirs of the founders of The American Glass Co., the town’s one remaining industry — were what passed for society in Pierre. For years, Dottie had circled and buzzed around them, as if she were an angry fly launching an assault on a sealed jar of honey. Most of the group’s communal activity revolved around tennis, so they called themselves the Fuzzy Balls. They played even when lake-effect snow enveloped Pierre in 5-foot drifts. They would gather at Twin Bluffs’s courts, protected by an overheated and under-oxygenated canvas bubble, for mixed doubles then fondue after at the nearby Swiss Shack.
Several years ago, while waiting for Frank to finish a lesson at the bubble, Dottie had been invited by Bitsy Newport to make a fourth for doubles. Dottie had not brought her racquet and was dressed in what she described as a “poop-brown corduroy jumpsuit from Penney’s,” her go-to outfit for errands involving her children. Still, she’d been ecstatic about the encounter and, at that evening’s celebratory coq au vin family supper, declaimed again and again: “They were so nice to ask.”
Since that day, Dottie had sought every opportunity to accompany Frank to the bubble. She always wore full tennis whites and carried two Prince Pros, lest a string break on one. So far, Bitsy Newport’s invitation had not been repeated.
Dottie snapped open a compact and scraped with her pinky nail at some microscopic imperfection in her buff lipstick. Martin watched her and wondered why they weren’t closer. Who better to understand him? He’d survived a Midwestern public education as an overweight bookworm with neck acne, one who could recite pages of Locke from memory but name only three of the teams in the Big Ten. Both he and his mom were stuck on the lowest rung of this small town’s social hierarchy.
Martin had always wanted to speak to his mom about their common exile. Not even speak. A knowing glance. A wry smile. A shared sigh from the front seat of her Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon as they watched the Fuzzy Ball families spill onto the Stainbrook-Borden Public Beach for another exclusive bonfire singalong. They both longed for a bigger life, a yearning neither his dad, with his business, nor Frank, with his tennis, could comprehend. Perhaps the problem was she thought she could find it in Pierre. Martin knew he had to get out.
And come September, he would. He’d been accepted into the University of Chicago Class of 1986. Come September, his course would carry him across Lake Michigan and into the faux-Gothic sanctuary established in 1890 by John D. Rockefeller and the American Baptist Education Society to meet the new millennium’s demand for classically educated Nobel Prize winners, millionaire Adam Smith aficionados, and economic advisors to Latin American kleptocrats. This was Martin’s tribe, one that might take him to Wall Street or Michigan Avenue or the LSE graduate program in international relations or Harvard Law, but never back to Pierre.
His mom, on the other hand, would die here. And all the way to the graveyard, she’d worry about whether Bitsy Newport had sent flowers.
Carroll, who was now juggling his martini, almost missed the crooked and faded wooden sign indicating “Twin Bluffs, Surf and Tennis and Petting Zoo Family Fun, 1 mile.” He banged onto the gravel drive, muttering about “dinging up the undercarriage.”
On either side of the one-lane road to the bubble and beyond to the Twin Bluffs cottages and beach, uncut grass fluttered around piles of dune sand and the detritus from failed Twin Bluffs attractions: A tipped-over chicken wire cage that once held a dancing rabbit and a boa constrictor, and then just a boa constrictor; the broken wooden fence through which a probably rabid deer had crashed and led his mangy flock to freedom through a sea of screaming 8-year-olds from the YMCA summer vacation day camp; several tilting Styrofoam monoliths that were to form the heart of the never-finished Chicago Skyline Putt-Putt course.
These and the other piles of jungle gym parts, ripped badminton nets, and unmatched lawn bowling pins, represented the efforts of the owners of Twin Bluffs, three generations of Pierre’s only Italian family, the Dozzis, to keep their resort afloat. They did a decent summer tourist trade for the two, maybe two and a half months of Pierre’s annual respite from the subzero winds blasting in off Lake Michigan. But they struggled to bring in any business the rest of the year. The mini-golf, the playgrounds, the animals, and the bubble were all attempts to attract paying merry-makers during the off-season.
Of these, only the bubble survived and drew a steady stream of tennis enthusiasts. It couldn’t be enough to keep Twin Bluffs solvent, and Martin knew his dad was moving in for a kill. Carroll Oliphant was a small-time corporate raider, a sort of Main Street Michael Milken. He specialized in foreclosing on family businesses. The local bike shop or the independent lighting-fixture showroom. Places run into the ground by the sons and the grandsons of the original owners. Twin Bluffs had been in his sights for over a year.
Carroll set the emergency brake, threw back the last of his martini, and turned to the back seat.
“I gotta go talk to the Dozzis,” he said.
“I think I’ll stay in the car,” said Martin. The smell inside the bubble, compressed air and aged sweat, nauseated him.
“He should have to watch me,” said Frank. He popped open a can of tennis balls and huffed into the cylinder, the kerosene odor his drug of choice this year. “We went with him to pick up his dress.”
“Gown,” said Martin.
“Nightgown,” said Frank.
“Why that’s Bitsy’s jeep.” Dottie grabbed Martin’s hand, squeezed hard, then pulled away quickly, as if she’d picked up the wrong purse off the pew at church. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just, really. What a coincidence.” She shifted her weight left and right and drummed her feet. She patted his hand once, then pushed open the door and trotted up the path to the bubble. Frank followed, yelling over his shoulder, “Make Martin watch me!”
Carroll stepped out of the Lincoln and rapped on Martin’s window. Martin sighed and joined his dad on the gravel pavement. “I’ll go with you, then.”
Carroll didn’t say no right away, and that thrilled Martin, who had always thought he might have an aptitude for the M&A game. He’d even considered talking to his dad about a future joint enterprise. Maybe after an MBA from University of Chicago, a little microeconomics from Milton Friedman, a little finance from Eugene Fama, he could help take Oliphant Investments global. Oliphant and Oliphant. Oliphant and Son.
“I don’t think so, Martin. It’s hard to close a deal with a fat guy in the room. Not enough air.”
Martin shut his eyes a moment and then chose to take that as a compliment. His dad had at least considered it. Weight could be lost.
Martin’s mom jogged back from the bubble, swinging her head side to side.
“Have either of you two seen Bitsy? That’s definitely her car.”
“Maybe she’s riding,” said Carroll. “The Dozzis brought in trail horses. Not that there are any trails around here. Dozzi Junior saw something like it in Honolulu. Horses on the beach. What he was doing in Hawaii when his old man is about to lose the farm is another…”
The wind died for a moment, and a squawk floated over the dunes and down onto their confab, then another.
“What’s that?” said Dottie, on the toes of her white Keds, eyes blinking like castanets.
“Seagull,” said Martin.
“Bitsy,” rasped Dottie.
“Horses on the goddamn beach,” continued Carroll. “What next? A luau?”
“Bitsy,” said Dottie again. “She needs me. I’m going to the beach.” She headed at a speed walk toward a cut-through between two boarded-up A-frame cabins.
“Go see what your mother thinks she’s doing,” said Carroll to Martin. “I’ll be hula-hula-ing with the Dozzis if you need me.”
t was the alewives that Martin first noticed as he crested the dune that separated the Twin Bluffs beach from the rest of the resort. The smell of them. It hit him with the same force as the frigid wind off the lake, stippled with splinters of stinging sleet. Since the 1950s, the alewives, a North American shad native to the western Atlantic Ocean, had made their way through the Welland Canal into Lake Michigan, where they expired in massive numbers after a half-hearted attempt at breeding. They died of osmosis, lake water seeping into their every cell and their kidneys too small to process it out, like freshwater fish do. From spring to autumn, on beaches public and private from Michigan to Wisconsin, rotting alewives served as an unavoidable reminder of the mortal danger of being a fish, if not out of water, then in water of the wrong sort.
So Martin knew what the shoreline would look like before he could spot it through the beach grass: The tiny expired shad would form a boundary between the mud-brown sand and the slate-gray waters that, were there sun, would glitter like heaps of well-polished filigree.
Rotting alewives served as an unavoidable reminder of the mortal danger of being a fish, if not out of water, then in water of the wrong sort.
But there was no sun, and when Martin could finally make them out, the alewives resembled only their unromantic essence, a whole lot of dead fish. In any case, he hardly noted them, transfixed by the rest of the scene spread out below him. There was his mom, moving up the beach and toward him with great strides but little speed, her feet sinking to the ankle in snow-melt-wetted sand. With every lunge forward, she would keen, “Bitsy’s been thrown, Bitsy’s hurt, we must help Bitsy.” A riderless roan horse followed her at a stroll, dragging its reins. Beyond her, just above the line of dead shad, stood Bitsy Newport, in hip boots, water-soaked jodhpurs, and a tight azure blazer, her left foot lifted just an inch or two off the ground. She didn’t look hurt. More like a great blue heron deciding if it were worth it to bend down and eat an alewife. And beyond her, in the roiling Lake Michigan waters, a slight teenager, Bitsy’s youngest, Julie, danced dangerously close to the flailing hooves of a second horse, this one tar black. As she waved her arms and screeched commands to the beast to rise, it rolled in the shallow surf, throwing up sand and fish bodies and banging its head into the waves.
Martin lurched down the dune toward his mom, who reached out to him and panted, “It’s so terrible. An awful accident.”
“What happened?” Martin asked, putting his hands on his mom’s heaving shoulders. She seemed near hysteria, and he considered shaking her, just once, to stop her compulsive gulping.
“She was thrown. The horse is wild. It should never have been rented out by those stupid, stupid Dozzis.”
Martin looked at the roan horse, now trying to snap at the razor-sharp beach grass along the bottom of the dune, drawing back its black lips to reveal teeth like cracked hunks of yellow quartz. It didn’t look wild. It looked hungry. And a little bored.
“It fell, and she wrenched her leg dismounting. She just avoided being crushed. Crushed! You can see in its eyes, it’s evil,” said Dottie.
The roan sighed into a prolonged fart, then stretched its neck back and pointed its snout to the sky, as if it expected oats to rain down like manna from horse heaven.
“What about Julie?” said Martin. “Looks like her horse is pretty crazy, too.” He gestured toward the water, and the roan startled, pivoted, and trotted back toward Bitsy.
“That’s Bitsy’s horse in the water,” Dottie sobbed. “That’s the black beast that threw her. And Julie won’t stop fussing with it. Bitsy might have broken something. Come, please, Martin.” Dottie wrapped both hands around his arm and tugged at him. Martin felt a thump at his chest, as if he’d swallowed a slug of Diet Rite too quickly. His mom needed him. Bitsy Newport needed him. Perhaps there was a chance to exit Pierre on a note of, if not heroism, then at least competency.
He followed Dottie down to the shoreline, watching Julie all the while. She was a powerful swimmer. Already, in her sophomore year at PPHS, she had shattered the girls’ record for the 100-yard butterfly. She was on her knees at the horse’s thrashing head. Waves regularly doused her, and once the horse’s muzzle caught her in the jaw and she went under.
When Martin and Dottie reached Bitsy, she looked up and said, “I’m fine, but aren’t you nice? Maybe just a stick to lean on?”
“You are so brave.” Dottie looked as though she were about to fall to her knees and bawl, a cripple at the feet of a bemused Jesus Christ. Instead, she slung her shoulders back and said, “I will get that stick. Martin, find your dad and tell him to bring the Lincoln as close as he can.” Dottie turned and ran to a driftwood pile, dove toward a branch, then tilted further forward, windmilling both arms. Her feet flew back, kicking up silver slivers of shad.
“That is exactly how my horse fell,” said Bitsy, in the quiet tone of someone talking to herself about the weather.
Martin jogged after his mom, who jumped to her feet. Her legs, from the pink border of her socks to the edge of her Fila tennis skirt, were covered in sand and fish guts. Her Lacoste polo had ripped at the front, and blood seeped through the fabric under her right breast.
“Mom, you’re hurt,” he said.
She ignored him, bent down, and grabbed a piece of driftwood from the ground, carefully wiping the fish scales from it.
“I’ve got to get back to Bitsy. Go get your dad. Go,” she said.
Dottie scuttled sideways, right arm pressed to her side, left fist raised, brandishing the walking stick, Lady Liberty with her tricolor. Martin considered staying with her until it was clearer how bad her injuries were. But she wouldn’t want that, or anything that might interfere with her opportunity to be of service to Bitsy Newport.
Julie yelled from the water, “Goddamn it, Martin, help me. This horse is drowning.”
Martin looked to see if his mom had noticed. She should be pleased. Julie Newport knew his name. And sought his counsel. Unfortunately, he wasn’t much of a swimmer. Given his size, people expected buoyancy of him, but he had never floated. Even at the YMCA beginners’ class, where every minnow was allowed to cling to a kickboard, he would still sink. He remembered there had been a kind of peace there underwater, listening to the gargled bellows of the instructor, Mrs. Thurk. Peace, but not aquatic competence. He thought of relaying that history to Julie, but held back, sensing the time was not right. Anyway, it didn’t look like more than a couple of feet deep, when the waves weren’t crashing over the horse and the girl. And he did truly want to be the sort of man who would bound to the rescue in this sort of situation, without overthinking exactly what this sort of situation was. He made his way through the alewives and into the lake. He hadn’t worn the right shoes.
Damn it all, he needed a hero’s playbook here.
“Hurry! I can’t hold his head anymore.”
The horse rolled onto its back and churned its legs, one hoof dangling at an odd angle from the fetlock. Its massive jaw gaped, and its nose spewed green foam. An eye spun around then fixed on Martin, and the upended animal froze. Martin used the moment to strategize his approach.
Before his plan gelled, though, the horse groaned and smashed onto its side, its back hooves kicking into the space into which Martin had been about to step. Damn it all, he needed a hero’s playbook here. Who was he supposed to save? Julie? The horse? Himself?
He went with himself. He retreated back to dry land.
“Don’t go,” Julie sobbed. “We’ve got to keep his head up.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Bitsy, walking to where Martin stood. Dottie hobbled behind, still clutching the driftwood branch. “They’ll have to shoot the nasty thing anyway. Martin, I believe your mother is injured. Perhaps time to go for your father?”
“Buster, his name is Buster,” screamed Julie, hugging the horse’s stilling head. “Martin, please. He’s dying.”
He so wanted to dive in, prop the horse with one arm and Julie with the other, take in the yelps of surprise and admiration from his mom and Bitsy Newport. And Julie. But not this time. Not yet. Martin turned and trudged up the dune toward the Twin Bluffs offices.
hen Martin returned with his father and two Dozzis, Buster’s corpse was beached. A bedraggled and weeping Julie sat, legs splayed among the alewives, cradling the horse’s head.
“I’m afraid we’ve had a little accident here,” said Bitsy, as if she were the queen apologizing for her corgi lifting a leg on a potted plant. Dottie, propped on the driftwood stick, croaked, “Bitsy needs to see a doctor.”
Carroll’s eyes swept over the tableau, and he smiled at the quaking Dozzis. “Don’t suppose you’ve got liability coverage,” he said.
Bitsy Newport sustained only a minor sprain and was able to host her annual Kentucky Derby party that afternoon, a sprig of mint tucked rakishly in the folds of the Ace bandage around her left ankle. Dottie Oliphant watched 21-1 long shot, Gato del Sol, win the 108th Run for the Roses from her bed at Swinehurst Hospital. The gash at her sternum took eleven stitches to close, and she broke a rib on her right side.
There were two fatalities on the beach that day: Buster, of course, and the Dozzis’s dreams for their resort. By the next Friday, Carroll Oliphant had purchased Twin Bluffs at bargain-basement prices, agreeing to assume legal responsibility for the riding accident. He bet that the aggressively genteel Newports wouldn’t think of suing over something as trivial as a sprained ankle, and he was right.
By August, Carroll had stripped the place of every rental Sailfish and nautical-themed decorative item and sold it all to a couple starting an inn on Florida’s Long Boat Key. The only asset he couldn’t monetize was the bubble.
No one seemed to know how to take the thing down. So he gave it to his wife, who spun it into social gold. Soon she was hosting the Fuzzy Balls’s Mixed Doubles tourneys, carpooling with Bitsy and her husband to the Swiss Shack on Thursday evenings, and partnering with Bitsy in the bubble’s regular Tuesday-morning ladies’ league. For a brief time, Dottie soared, riding the social updraft she had always known she was meant to catch. Even after her crash, Martin in equal part envied and took comfort in the fact that she, at least for a couple years, had been able to inhabit her own version of the American dream.
Frank won his semi-final match 6-2, 6-0, 6-1.
KT Sparks (Photo courtesy the author)
About the Author
First off, KT Sparks wants to set the record straight: “I really like horses,” she says, laughing. That, despite the fact the protagonist in her novel “Four Dead Horses” is not a fan. “It’s one of those wonderful things about writing, at least in my case — the author is the last one to know what’s going to show up in their book,” she says. “I did not set out to write a book structured around four dead horses.”
“Four Dead Horses” is Sparks’ first novel and was adapted from her short story, “The Last Great Cowboy Poet,” which was recently published by Jersey Devil Press.
She started writing the story three years ago during her family’s annual trip to a Colorado dude ranch. Sparks had broken her knee and couldn’t ride a horse and was feeling sorry for herself. Another ranch guest, an overweight man “who looked as miserable as I felt,” inspired her to start writing “about this guy going on a family vacation to a dude ranch and feeling out of place,” she says.
Sparks is a former speechwriter and policy analyst who worked in the U.S. Senate for 25 years before leaving Washington in 2007 to run a sustainable, organic farm, Green Fence Farm, in Greenville near Staunton.
She is thrilled that her novel was chosen as JRW’s Best Unpublished Novel for 2017 and says, “Just having somebody like Brad [Parks] pick it out and be enthusiastic about it is such a boost. When you’re working on a novel … it’s such a long and involved process and it’s so isolated that you completely lose perspective. The biggest thing is to have some feedback that’s positive.”
—Jessica Ronky Haddad
