Bulls and white nights

Mark Krueger

A young man on a horse approaches from the side of the hill in the forest, his silhouette intermittently reappearing between the trees. As the sound of the hoofs gets closer and closer, I lean on my cross country ski poles and watch. With his long coat flowing behind with the horse’s tail it’s a majestic scene. Afterwards, I return to my cabin on a small lake and fall asleep near a warm heater:

About a year after we enroll him in modern dance, Daniel takes the stage wearing black running tights. Across his bare chest and arms are wisps of black and red like in a Franz Klein painting. He jumps into the composer’s aching harmonies: an ice skater gliding effortlessly, a Spanish dancer, feet stomping on the ground, chest out, arm circled overhead, a ballet dancer leaping. It’s all there for those who care to see. He’s trying to exorcise the demons from a horrifying childhood. At the end he’s curled on the ground, an exhausted Nijinsky.

My stomach growls for something to eat. I put on my leather jacket and back between the tall white pines. At the stop sign I turn up the heat then turn right. Ahead, two bulls are running in the ditch next to the road. I slow down, pull alongside and role down the window. The sound of their hoofs hitting the snow reminds me of the man on the horse I saw earlier. After the bulls turn into the woods, I continue over the open creek. The Moose Inn is down the road. Joe, the owner, added carpeting and female bartenders, but it is still a country bar by most appearances. The waitress steers me to a table beneath a beer sign where there is enough light to read.

“The usual?” she asks.

I nod then call my neighbor about the bulls, but no one answers. While I read and wait, an older couple at the bar tells a story about a cat that got caught in a chunk of snow behind the wheel of their pickup and was still alive when they got home. No one questions this. The Moose Burger arrives shortly. It’s reliable like the story I’m reading, Brezin Lea, by Ivan Turgenev.

“I told the boys I had lost my way and sat down among them. They asked me where I was from and fell silent for a while in awe of me. We talked about this and that” (In Penguin Classics 1967 edition of Sketches from a Hunters Album, p.103)

I sit and read a while longer then say goodbye to the waitress and the bartender. On the way home my mind drifts out across a white cornfield towards the moon. Suddenly around a bend the two bulls appear in the middle of the road. The car swerves to the left and back across the road where it comes to rest in a ditch. With the red oil light flashing in the dash, the bulls stare at the car. For a moment I think I see the young man on the horse. He’s wearing a Hessian hat and carrying a long spear, which he points at me then he smiles and disappears.

The bulls lumber across the road into the woods. Fortunately it only takes a moment to dig out. I keep my eyes riveted to the road the rest of the way home. The smoke coming from the chimney is a welcome site. I stop to piss in the outhouse. It’s cold, but I get it done, then stand on the hill over the lake a moment, listening to the wind make a sweet crying sound as it moves over the ice.

“... in the darkness we saw a figure coming toward us ... But we were mistaken, it was not he.” (From Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, the third night.)

I call my neighbor again about the bulls. He answers this time, thanks me, and says he will look for the “damn bulls.” After warming myself by the fire, I work some more on my latest sketch about Daniel and the other boys I knew at the residential treatment center. I want to capture a moment of connection but can’t get it right. A bat fooled out of hibernation by the heat, buzzes overhead, then crawls back into a small crack in the ceiling, all its energy spent with nothing to eat. Unable to write anymore, I put on my old military overcoat and take a walk on the frozen surface of the lake. It’s quiet and still. In the faint light of day, I can hear my feet hit the ground like a distant heartbeat.

“Like drizzle on embers,
Footsteps within me
Toward places that turn to air”

(From Octavio Paz A Draft of Shadows)