"The Horse Man" by Steve Chang

It was some old guy who came around the neighborhood with his horse and asked the kids if they wanted their pictures taken on it. The horse was brown. Or red. A big crayon color. The man would help us up onto the horse and then snap away.

Look over there. Not at me. Don’t smile.

He had outfits for us too, in all these plastic bags. Little cowboy hats and tasseled vests. If we wanted to get dressed up.

He never told us that we had to.

We were the second to last house on my street. And then there were the empty lots and all those trees. The kids from across the street and I would play there sometimes. Joe was my age, and Jackie a little younger.

I imagine when The Horse Man came, our parents checked with each other.

“Are you gonna…?”

“I guess we will if you do.”

Or maybe somebody called him.

So this stranger showed up at our house with a horse. And a cowgirl outfit. I put it on and he put me on the horse and they let the man take pictures of me.

Do I have that right?

Then he took pictures of Joe and Jackie.

I was probably excited. It was weird and different and I got attention—also, there was an animal. What’s not to like?

I must have been 3 or 4.

Maybe older.

He rode us around on the horse and took pictures in our yards. Then he took us away, toward the end of the street.

There were more trees there, so it was a better background I think.

I feel like my dad was watching us go.

I don’t know what happened to the other kids.

I’ve asked a lot of people from other places in the U.S. if they had a Horse Man. And all of them laugh and say no. I’ve been told, emphatically, No. So it was a Burbank thing, I guess. In and around. For at least 30 years.

I don’t know why they’d laugh.

Can you imagine?

I don’t remember me on the horse in a hat and a vest but I think my dad had his gun. He always had it. While he was mowing the lawn. Or sleeping it off on the couch.

So, no, it wouldn’t have “alarmed” me.

I’m sure anything I remember about that day is not a real memory anyways but what I would imagine from somebody telling me about it.

Like if my dad took his gun to look for us in the woods.

I did visit LA recently—for a week, I thought—but not for his retirement ceremony, no. On my first morning back, I took us to the driving range. It was hot and sunny, and we, my dad and I, shared a bucket of balls.

I’m a lefty so I like going with right-handers. Like he is. I like to talk and I could look into his face the whole time.

And he could look at mine.

While we were hitting balls, I started asking about his childhood. Oh, it was fine, he said. I was kind of a prick. Then I asked him how long he’d lived at our house. He drove a ball maybe 250 yards and watched it land. Then he hooked another ball from the tray. He said, I grew up there. Like you did. I taught you the same way that I’d been taught. 

I was a girl, I said.

He lined up his shot. 

There’s nothing you can’t handle.

Then I said, very calmly, Did you know him?

He knocked this ball almost as far as the last. He said, Who. He hooked another ball from the tray.

I thought, I will always be on edge around him.

Then, looking downrange, he mumbled, Stupid. He broke stance and stood upright again. He pointed his club into the distance and said, You see that?

I looked.

Out by the 200-yard markers, a deer had appeared from the treeline. It had its neck curved into the grass, taking tottering steps. It had white spots on its hind parts. Dappled. Defenseless.

I stopped talking and sort of watched my dad, feeling far away.

And my dad, of course, decided he was going to try to hit it.

So, my dad kept hitting balls at the deer. It seemed like he really needed to hit it. Like this was something that he had to do.

In the past, the old me would probably have looked away.

But, that day, I watched.

And what I saw was that my dad kept missing. The balls would drop like hailstones and the deer would take a step this way or that. And slowly I started breathing again. I thought that maybe he wasn’t trying to hit the deer. That maybe he was trying to chase it away.

In any case, the deer was like—completely unbothered. Very chill.

I wished my dad would look at me again.

It was the right amount of time to spend with him that day. It didn’t aggravate me or make me sad.

I drove him home after he’d had too many drinks in the clubhouse. I pulled up our old driveway and parked there, idling, and he showed me photos on his phone. His retirement gifts.

This is from so-and-so, he said, then showed me a coffee mug that read, SO LONG TENSION, HELLO PENSION!

He swiped.

And this is from so-and-so, he said, then showed me a shot glass almost pierced through by a bullet. The curvy glass had reformed around it.

He swiped. He looked proud.

I imagined him as a boy—a little boy—and how this block might’ve looked back then. There were probably more trees. The whole street covered with trees. When most of these lots were still some kind of woods.

Did you like growing up here? I asked

He stopped swiping. Then he clicked off his phone and it was like the light had clicked off in his face too. 

You have to understand, he said. Things were different back then. We trusted people.

I looked in the mirror at the house across the street, where Joe and Jackie had lived. At the gray fake shutters. I missed them.

I said, Was that what the guns were for?

We didn’t have weirdos, he said, louder. We had a community!

I said, When you were little—did he take your pictures too?

Oh come on, my dad said and stepped out of the car. He stood there, tall and headless, holding the door, and I could feel my body ready to flinch, tensed to react to the slam.

But he only closed it like normal. Like nothing had happened.

The motion detector turned the porch light on. He walked up the driveway, his long shadow dragging behind him, until the timer offed the porch light while he unlocked the front door.

Then it was like he’d been swallowed up whole. The way kids could be swallowed up in the woods.

In the dark.

In a scary story.

The old neighborhood. It’s all houses there now. Not many trees. It’s barren. There’s nowhere to hide.

It’s weird, isn’t it, trying to imagine a scary story without trees. Go ahead and try. Take a moment.

Without the woods, where would all the monsters be?

Before, we could stay out past dark without worrying.

Now, there’s all kinds of strange people around.

30 years. Can you imagine? 30 years and nobody thought to ask who the Horse Man was or what he was doing with those kids. The photos. The film.

These days people would be Googling all kinds of things about him. Digging up the past. And making podcasts.

After it’s too late to matter.

Oh no! I didn’t mean it that way. Not you! Not really.

I like to stay positive. I’m a positive person.

I’m happy to give you his number. If you still want to ask him about things. He might remember. He’s coming close to the end. If you asked, he would probably answer whatever questions you have.

He loves telling a good story.

I still wonder where my pictures are.

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Steve Chang is from the San Gabriel Valley, California. His work has appeared in Guernica, Hobart, J Journal, The Normal School, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Find him at stevehasawebsite.com and @stevexisxok