Read Online Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk - Free Book Online

which was only right because it had belonged to his family ever since the land had belonged to anyone. He’d gotten the acreage, the barn and corrals. He had Lisa on weekends. And until last week, he’d had Sour Kraut to look after. Randall would’ve paid thirty grand to see his child this giddy. Lisa glanced from the horse to him and back, back and forth, speechless. She was so clearly smitten.
    Randall wrote the broker a check while Lisa was already leading the horse into their trailer. Red Sultan’s Big Boy was theirs. Hers. The stallion followed her with the tame obedience of a loyal dog.
    This was the first time in a long time Randall had felt like a good father.
    If the stallion was drugged or sick, they’d find out soon enough.
    That first weekend, Lisa was happier than he’d seen her since before the divorce. She’d signed up for dressage lessons at the Merriwethers’ stable down the road. Randall’s neighbors lived in houses barely visible to one another across vast, dark green fields of alfalfa. School was out, and cliques of teenage girls rode their horses together along the gravel shoulders of the quiet county roads. Meadowlarks sang atop fence posts. Dogs trotted along at the horses’ heels, and the irrigation sprinklers tick-ticked long rainbows of water through the sunshine. When such a group arrived at his door, Randall stood on the porch and watched his daughter join up. Red Sultan was beautiful, and Lisa was obviously proud, preening. She’d braided the stallion’s mane, and it had stood, patient and steady, while she’d threaded a blue-satin ribbon through the braids.
    The girls clustered around the stallion, in hushed awe, lightly touching him as if to prove to themselves that he was for real. The scene reminded Randall of his own childhood. In those days, every couple of years a traveling sideshow outfit would roll into town towing an enclosed auto trailer. Painted down both sides of the trailer in old cowboy writing like twisted ropes were the words “See it! The Bonnie and Clyde Death Car!” They’d set up in the parking lot of Western Auto, or they’d off-load the car near the carnival midway at the county fair. It was a rusted two-door coupe riddled with little holes, streaked with rust, the windows busted out. The flat tires shot to shit. Headlights exploded. For the price of two bits, Randall would go shiver at the sight of bloodstains on the seats and stick his fingers in the bullet holes. That grim relic from the darkness of history. Somewhere, he still had a photograph of himself standing next to the car with Stu Gilcrest, both of them the age Lisa was now. Him and Stu, they’d argued over which caliber each of the little punched-in holes represented.
    The car was evil. But it was okay because it was a piece of American history. That part of the big, real world had come into his life to prove the lessons he’d been taught were true. The wages of sin were death. Crime does not pay.
    Today, the girls swarmed the horse just as Randall and his pals had swarmed the Death Car. One year had brought the James Dean Death Car or the Jayne Mansfield Death Car. Another time, it was the JFK Death Car. People flocked to touch them. To snap pictures. To prove to their friends they’d touched something terrible.
    While the local girls came to crowd around her, Lisa pulled her phone from her back pocket, saying, “Of course it’s him. I’ll prove it.” She keyed something. From the porch, Randall could hear a few tinny sounds from the phone. The girls watching with Lisa exploded in groans and laughter.
    Whatever they’d just witnessed, now they were petting the red-brown muzzle and flanks. They sighed and cooed. They held their own telephones at arm’s length and snapped selfies of their faces, their lips puckered, kissing the horse’s cheeks.
    The group wasn’t gone two hours before his phone rang. He was in the kitchen checking email, watching the progress bar on his monitor not