Half Broke Read online

  For Glenda

  “All of us go onto the ranch—spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, and financially—broken. But we each have a sliver of hope. The aliveness within us has a soft voice. Otherwise, none of us would have come here in the first place.”

  —Eliza

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Emotional Camouflage

  Stray Dogs

  Moon and Star

  Skinless

  Learning to Walk

  Strength

  Green Acres

  Centaur

  She’s Not Ready

  Crooked Line

  Cut Me Out

  Walmart

  Hundreds More

  Olivia

  Hidden Language

  Broken

  Rootbeer

  Follow Me

  To the River

  Just a Few

  Waves

  Belle

  Soft Creatures

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book represents my best recollection of the events I relate. During the year and a half these events took place, I worked with over fifty residents. Some characters are composites. The dialogue comes from memory and from conversations I had with residents after they left the ranch. These conversations often led to differing accounts of the same events which I have tried to integrate.

  HALF BROKE

  PROLOGUE

  At first it seemed like just another ranch asking me to help. Training horses and educating their owners has been my job for the last twenty years. I hear many stories of horse trouble. In those stories a lot of things go unsaid and, most likely, unnoticed. But I know that the slightest movement—a flick of an ear, a shortening of breath—is how a horse will try to communicate. If the owners had noticed this subtle language early on, the whole bad experience might have gone differently. But this call was different. Not once in my life had I heard of horses acting like this: scavenging, marauding, war parties of horses. I didn’t think it could be true, and if it was, I certainly needed to see it.

  This particular ranch is a prison. Most of the residents living here are multiple offenders, felons. They applied to come to the ranch from prison and have gone before a judge to have the term of their sentence finished here on the ranch. The whole operation is run by the residents themselves: no hired CEO, no lawyers, no counselors, no outside plumbers, no doctors. No jail guards. Statewide and county judges, probation and parole officers, court-appointed lawyers—all interact and count on the older residents of this ranch to fulfill the legal sentencing requirements for each resident.

  This ranch has run like this for almost fifty years. The oldest residents take the lead and teach each new arrival the essential skills to keep the operation of the ranch ongoing. Only a few of the residents have come in off the streets voluntarily, strung out on heroin, meth, or alcohol. They live at the ranch after hitting rock bottom. This ranch is here to save their lives.

  Horses have always been part of the ranch. They live together with the residents on this seventeen-acre property, which sits along the banks of the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. The herd roams free in the pastures. They gather in the automotive shop when it rains and snows, and in the woodshop when the flies get too bad. They forage through the ranch dumpsters for cookies, leftover baked goods, and Wonder Bread. At night they are chased by six to eight men, running behind them, into sizeable pens where they have shelter, water, and alfalfa hay. During the day they wander the property like giant gods with dominion over all things.

  No one on the ranch knows very much about horses. They don’t know that Wonder Bread and Tastykakes are not good forage for an animal that has browsed on grasses, flowers, and tree bark for thousands of years. Before I got the call, the horses had begun running in packs like dogs, chasing the residents when they brought the trash out from the cafeteria after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The residents gathered in a tight circle next to the trash containers. They carved wooden poles in their woodshop that they carried to fend off each attack. Residents had been bitten, they’d been tripped and stepped on. A few had injuries to their ankles, arms, and wrists. Men and women, toughened by prison and living on the streets, ran as fast as they could for safety when the horses began their charge.

  My first trip to the ranch was on a Sunday. Sunday is the one day of the week the residents have off from a grueling weekly work schedule. At the ranch, they have a livestock division. The residents working on livestock are required to feed and care for the horses, ducks, dogs, and cats that live on the property. There are two heads of the livestock division and about six other members who split duties of caring for the animals.

  I learned on that first Sunday that the livestock division was run by two women, Flor and Sarah. Flor was in her thirties, a longtime heroin addict for fifteen years. She was in prison for a multitude of crimes, with the last term for robbing her mother’s home. Her mother turned her in, feeling certain that prison was the safest place for Flor. Flor is a small woman with a big presence. When I first met her, she stood with her legs parted wide, her chest and shoulders open, arms draped by her side, as she looked me straight in the eye. Sarah was in her forties, a mother, a meth and heroin addict, and a prostitute since she was thirteen. When she spoke to me, her body wiggled like she was dancing. Her mouth held wrinkles that pointed the corners of her lips toward the ground.

  Everything at the ranch, all the knowledge and skill it takes to keep the property in good order and the residents cared for and well fed, is supervised by the residents who have lived here the longest. The elder residents are the officials in charge. It is a long chain of knowledge handed down, one person at a time, ensuring that the strong traditions and standards of the ranch will continue. At one time there had been a chain of knowledge regarding how to care for the horses. That chain of knowledge had broken. Neither Flor nor Sarah had much experience with horses, yet they understood something was seriously wrong.

  They went before the elders of the ranch and asked permission to reach into the community for help. Asking for and receiving help from outside the ranch is rarely needed. Most of the residents come from families with a long history of addiction, poverty, and gang crime. Some of them have never worked a job in their entire life. Each one, teach one—this is the way the ranch operates. Every four months the residents change jobs to learn a new skill: plumbing, cooking, auto mechanics. The older residents pass on their knowledge. Over one hundred residents live on the ranch at any one time. Drug addicts and criminals adjusting to life outside a conventional prison but still contained by twelve-foot adobe walls.

  That’s when I got the call. I am a small-framed woman, weighing just over 120 pounds. I can be quiet and reserved when I first meet people and rarely make dramatic first impressions. My calm, restrained demeanor may not impress people, but horses take to it easily. In my work over the past twenty years, I have witnessed a wide variation of behavior when it comes to the horse-human relationship. On that first Sunday, I found myself in the middle of the most dangerous horse situation I had ever encountered.

  EMOTIONAL CAMOUFLAGE

  March / 2013

  The men and women from the livestock team are sitting on tables and benches placed under the shelter of a small tack room, positioned a few yards away from the nighttime corrals. It is four in the afternoon, feeding time. Recently they have experienced bad accidents during the feeding routine. Arguments about whose fault it was and the question of how to fix the problems are on their minds. I introduce myself to everyone, as each member of the team rises to shake my hand and tell me their name. They begin to talk. The most recent accident, with Paul, keeps coming up. Paul was trampled by Hawk two
days ago. His left wrist is wrapped in a support bandage, and he limps along dragging his right leg.

  “How can we keep them from running us over? I mean, they don’t listen,” Paul explains. Paul is a tall man, with a thick neck and broad shoulders. “They run right through us, like we aren’t even here,” he tells me. His ear lobes have wide open holes at their end. I see straight through them like I’m looking through tiny windows.

  “And this is always at dinnertime, or other times, too?” I ask.

  “Always at dinner and anytime there’s food.”

  A tall, thin man rises off the bench to shake my hand. His name is Rex. He grins as he unbuttons his collared shirt to show me a perfect hoof-shaped bruise on his chest.

  “Scout knocked me good yesterday during the morning feed,” he tells me as he gestures out into the pasture to a brown-and-white spotted horse standing away from the rest of the herd. “I was dropping the hay into his trough when he spun around and got me.” Rex is taller than Paul, six-foot-three at least. Lean and lanky, he towers over me with his shirt unbuttoned, looking down at me with his hazel green eyes.

  I hesitate. “I want to see how it goes,” I tell the group. “Let’s bring them in and feed.”

  A young man named Marcus rises from the bench. He has the body of a guy who spends too much time in the gym. His muscles bulge under his tight T-shirt and make his upper torso move like a large stone. He looks a little angry, yet he speaks carefully. I wonder if my presence makes him nervous. I get the feeling that not everyone on livestock is happy to have my help.

  “Let’s get ’em, guys.”

  The other men rise off the bench at his command. Marcus walks over, unlatches the hay barn door, swings it open, and starts throwing small portions of alfalfa hay into the arms of the waiting men. The horses stand at the far end of the pasture, heads down and quietly chewing. With the sound of the latch and the barn door swinging open, they snap their heads from the ground, readying themselves to race in our direction. Each man grabs two cuts of alfalfa, tucks them tight against his body, and launches into a run toward the night corrals. They toss the hay into the feed troughs and tear back to the shelter of the tack-room shed, intent and out of breath. A few of the men make a second trip back to the corrals to ensure that each horse has enough hay for the night. Flor, Sarah, and the others cram themselves into the front of the hay barn, shouting like they are participating in an important sporting event.

  “Hurry up. Here they come. Get in here!”

  The residents’ screaming paralyzes me. And then, here they come—the horses galloping, ears back, kicking up and thundering toward us. I am standing alongside the large cottonwood tree that shades the barn and night corrals. A herd of horses racing across a field has a mesmerizing effect. Most of my days are filled with teaching horses how to feel comfortable in the world of humans. But my secret truth is that I love their world more. All they need is their bodies. As they gallop toward us I see their legs churn under the wide girths of their rib cages.

  The shouting and screaming grows louder, and a few of the men run out and grab me, dragging me back inside the hay barn. Marcus slams the gate behind us. We are all tucked into an eight-foot-wide space in front of the hay. The horses roar up to the wooden gate at a gallop, a band of snaked bodies, twisting and kicking dirt into the air. They level their heads and necks down to the height of their shoulders, flat and thin, ready to strike.

  It sounds like a hiss, but it’s more like spit. Hawk opens his mouth and his teeth jut forward at us. He snaps his jaw shut and curls back his lips. The force of it shoots a mist of saliva all over our faces. He can see us—they all can—but they cannot get to us. Their dark hollow eyes are unrecognizable to me. Watching them bare their teeth at us like predators, as if we were their meal, makes me think: these are not horses.

  We are their captives, herded into our cell like lesser animals. They stand in front of the gate swinging their necks back and forth, ears flat back. Clumped together, we step back from the gate and wait, not saying a word. I feel the touch of our bodies pinned against one another. The intimacy of our fear, the smell of adrenaline and sweat steams up from our cluster.

  Once we are thoroughly dominated, the horses walk into their corrals for their evening meal. We wait in silence, listening for the horses to settle. Five or ten minutes pass. We can hear the horses chewing on their alfalfa. A few of the men sneak out of our shelter. Hunkered low and moving like thieves, they run to the corrals and shut the gates. I hear the latches slap tight. Now we can reenter our world; the giant beasts are content and contained for the night.

  PEOPLE SAY THAT horses mirror their owners. To protect themselves, they become you. They blend themselves to the inside of a person: emotional camouflage. The ranch horses have seen a lot of damaged people over the years. They carry their life stories on their faces, in their postures, and within their unique styles of movement. This physical expression is a language the horses are well equipped to understand. Fear and its family members—anger, frustration, pain—are all carried in the residents’ steps, in their shoulders and necks, the way their backs round forward, forcing them to look out through the tips of their eyes, hiding in the shadows just beneath their eyebrows.

  Some of the residents move with an artificial confidence, their arms gesturing wildly as they shout orders at their work crew. Others have no life left in their bodies. They are soft and amorphous, like small sea creatures clinging to a reef. Movement, and the lack thereof, is an emotional story. It tells all. Over the many years this contained engagement between hurting humans and these once-wild animals has created a disaster. Strong men and women beaten down by poverty, by family history, by the prison system, all walk the ranch daily, unknowingly communicating their pain to the horses.

  With their ears and eyes, even while grazing head down, the horses see all, feel all. Horses survive by acknowledging risk and by assigning leadership. Flight, not fight, is how horses naturally resolve troubling situations. Leaders become leaders by keeping the herd out of harm’s way, by noticing peril and using their inherited gift of speed to reduce the danger posed. Flight or fight. Inside the tall adobe walls of this contained ranch, thousands of years of inherited instinct have been reversed. Lacking the space to truly flee, living among one hundred men and women who broadcast danger with every movement, the horses have chosen to fight.

  IT IS MY second trip to the ranch and all the horses are resting inside the woodshop. Six of us go into the woodshop banging on the trash-can lids. The horses panic and run out the double doors. They shoot past the enclosed garden where the radishes and peas spike through the soil, and through the twelve-acre pasture kept for the horses in the middle of the property. Marcus and Rex grab four cuts of alfalfa and head toward the round pen, a recently built structure, seventy feet in diameter. They peel the cuts of alfalfa apart and spread them across the pen. Marcus pulls the gate to the round pen wide open. He’s dressed in his running sneakers and sweatpants, with a short-sleeved T-shirt that has Carolina Panthers written across it. Once the hay is spread, Marcus and Rex run behind the cottonwood tree for safety. The horses thunder across the pasture and run straight into the pen, devouring the alfalfa as quick as they can. Rex runs from behind the cottonwood and slams the gate shut.

  The horses circle the pen, walking from pile to pile, like wild animals sniffing scat. They watch us, their ears flicking back and forth. The livestock crew gathers. Their eyes are dim with what looks like fatigue. They shuffle from task to task wearing oversized jeans that drape over their work boots. Sarah and Flor huddle away from the men. They, too, look tired, a slate-black tinge under their eyes. I wonder what it must be like to live here on this ranch of mostly men. So far, I’ve encountered only three other women. I met them briefly in the driveway as I drove in today.

  As they lean against the top rail of the pen, the six men from livestock start talking and joking, berating each other over something that happened at breakfast. I watch them from
my truck where I gather my rope and a thin bamboo pole. Their attention is not on the horses, it is only on themselves. I realize, as I take a sip of water, that I’ll be working alone today.

  What I see in these horses worries me. Vigilant and dismissive. Defensive and certain. They know they are contained, but they are far from domesticated.

  Without saying a word, I climb over the top rail and begin to work. I choose the big bay named Hawk. Hawk, I was told, was the worst of the herd. He would lead the charge after lunchtime when the residents brought out the trash. Hawk was well versed in trampling and intimidation. Baring his teeth, flattening his ears, and reeling around with his hind legs, he threatened to kick anyone who lingered near his garbage.

  When Hawk walks, I walk. When he stops, I stop. He hears me. His ear and the corner of his eye are sternly on me. The other horses rummage around the pen from one flake of alfalfa to another, while Hawk and I walk the perimeter. I pick up my bamboo cane in my left hand and start tapping it on the ground as I walk. Hawk’s ears flatten. Still walking away from me, he becomes more and more agitated. He swings his head and neck toward me like a lion, warning me to back away. The men fall to a hush, but I keep tapping.

  I won’t get back, I say in my mind. No, I will not back up. Tap. Tap. Tap. I know what is coming. I have seen it before, but only rarely. Hawk is about to attack me, and I’m armed with only a bamboo cane and a thin rope.

  First, he charges me halfway. Swinging his shoulders, neck, and head in my direction. Baring his teeth, ears flat. I stab the bamboo cane into the center of his chest, then follow with a quick slap against his bulging pectoral muscles. He flashes himself backward in surprise. I tap against the ground, then swing the pole around his side, tapping the dirt close to his hind legs, to let him know I want him to walk forward again. I spread my legs and crouch a little, readying myself for the next charge. The rest of the herd shies away from us, then continues chomping on their alfalfa.