RODNEY THE DESTROYER
Stephen Hundley
In 2023, Roughly 200 feral horses persist on Cumberland Island, Georgia, where they live short, difficult lives without support from the humans who abandoned them there and who, perversely, celebrate and profit from their marooning.
The horses eke out living under the strain of parasites, inhospitable terrain, unstable water supply, and scare edible browse. In their scavenging, they erode the delicate systems of dunes and marshes.
Efforts to remove the horses by humane means, such as adoption or contraceptive programs, have been suggested for years, but have yet to be implemented.
Because their impact and struggles are not appreciable to most tourists, because of expense, because of institutional apathy, and likely because they retain a strained beauty in their desperation, the horses remain on the island.
The destruction of Cumberland Island increases our own—human—risk, but it is only a byproduct of the negligence we have shown the Cumberland horses, who were imported at expense for work and pleasure, then “rewilded” with a shift of the wind.
RODNEY 2120
I am the killing kind, but my heart is true. I want to ride these hardy stallions, but the state demands their life. From a chair on deck, I watch the channel dredgers suck the soft tongue of the river bottom through a metal straw and pile it in the shallows. At night, the engineers sit in little hippy drum circles and vape candy apple clouds on deck. Must be nice. First, they’ll build the beach. Next, they’ll dig canals.
I’m wired to the trigger, flying in the dark. I want to hear the angels sing, but can’t find the needle or the eye to pass it through.
You got a funny way of talking, the ship’s cook says. I try to make myself clear.
I live on a workman’s barge, but none of the workman will speak to me. I’m a shoe-in for heaven, but killing is my work. While the others are sleeping, I’ve got my head strapped into the drone rig, looking for the glowing shapes of horses in the infrared night and dusting them with the reticule’s hairs. I’m lonely.
After the ageless, drifting hurricane, there’s no water on this island. I see the horses searching end-to-end. Some die drinking sea water, some on dry land. They’re desperate, violent, frustrated. A pair of pregnant mares hide in a brush pile, sniffing the soil for the memory of a spring. How can I explain this to the animal lovers on the continent—the ones who really need to hear?
I look without judgement on the new houses of the wealthy and peer into their sitting rooms with my glass and metal eyes. I see the shapes of horses huddled beneath the floor, lipping the moisture off the exhaust pipe of the big A/C or bent over a five-gallon bucket that someone left out.
There is no coffee, only warm sweet tea. The lavatory is a maneater. The microwave has a spirit trapped inside, and the steel floor of the barge vibrates under my feet. I want to exorcise the demons, but the truth is I need them on my side.
In daylight, three dozen men row to shore to pack the sand with heavy machinery and rubber snakes. They’re seeding deep-root shrubs to hold the land in place, and the horses risk it all to tear them out.
I wish I had a friend to throw the match, but I’m the only one to push the muscled tangle of limbs into a ditch with the tractor arm, burning what’s been shot in the night. The way the workmen watch without watching—everyone acts like it was my big idea. I like to roll the windows on the Bobcat all the way up, then light my smoke. I have a little girl in Arkansas. I can’t go home until the job is done. Keep flat, you winds.
Two emotionless drones are all I have for company. They puff up like black rubber Cheerios and float alongside our ship. The black panels on their backs drink the sun. With a fob, I can wake them, but no one can stomach the sight of them in the sky. A humming black duck with a gun barrel for a headpiece and four hissing blades to take off and land. From a thousand feet up, there isn’t much I can’t see.
LANDSCAPE
The island is an eighteen-mile mule with its head blown off. The depression of Lake Whitney is an open mouth that won’t catch rain. When the king tide washed over the island, it washed under it too. The frogs squirmed in their holes. Salamanders like to catch fire in the salt. In hidden chambers, the alligators held on.
The bioengineer who runs the dredger wears a medal under his shirt and likes to talk about the ideal time to grow a reef. He’s building paradise and has no love for feral horses and dragnet shrimpers from Darien, come to wreck it all. You are a soldier, he says. I could kiss you. One day, he takes me for a helicopter ride.
What once was an island is now a scattered patch of flattened sand with a few stands of shaky oak. I can see the trees torn out by the storm piled off-shore, a tangle of blackjacks. We spook a band of brown horses that tear over the shallows, kicking up a spray. They never look back.
Do you feel sorry for the ones you kill? The B-E asks.
In a way.
Most of the forest tales you grew up on were written by ecoholics. Hung up on the wrong things. All that gingerbread and grandma’s house in the forest chapel of the beleaguered, European wolf. Very interesting, I say.
The shrimp boats are legion offshore the paper mill, where they drop their trawling nets. Miniature people in white rubber boots and broad billed hats winch the haul over deck and let the prize catch drop. I can see the backs of dolphins breaching in the wake. Is this the enemy?
Chopper shots. Heli-sips. The bioengineer holds a hit of weed in his lungs and expertly diverts his crème liquor the other way. It goes on like this for hours. To a city of blue-tarps and back. I’m as limber as a newt when sunset arrives with fiery streamers in her hair. Like everyone else, I feel a little flicker when I see the nimble horses playing in the surf, but my finger itches for the trigger of the drone.
GOOD GOD, the B-E says, staring at the sun. He gets weepy watching dozers park on the beach. The names of everything he’s building start to pour out of his mouth: Fabular, Little Venice, Cable’s Tables, Cable’s Dive. The Blue Royale. The amenities. Seawalls, sea towers, sea dragon roller coasters with rows of seats along their back. This might mean nothing to you, he says, but I’m looking straight into the tits of time.
On the helipad, they’re roasting small, hairy pigs on a rebar spit. The B-E is the man to meet. It’s quitting time. It’s time for work.
HORSEY HEAVEN
I been to Southeast Arkansas, Memphis, some of Mississippi, the bottom of Georgia, and Florida (from the air). I’ve seen long, quiet movies set in Arizona, where these horses are from. On a snowy day in Arkansas, I liked to come home from work and take my head off with one of those with my wife asleep on top of me and getting too hot under the quilt.
In the foothills, clear little waterfalls and dark, fat deer hide behind the vines. We liked that, tucked away. The woods knit together. Every second a spider in your hair. On a wet night, no fire, we sat around a gallon of water lit with a bright white light. After an hour of flying ants and lesser crickets, a glorious, green locust walked from the dark. My wife held my leg while the leviathan pressed its mouth parts to the plastic skin of the jug. We certainly had our time.
Somewhere out here, two stallions walk with the last nine mares in the Fabular Beach zone. I’ve killed hundreds without leaving the control room, but these have slipped by. I thought it was mud masking their signatures, like in the movies. They elude me. These are the kind that grazed in the salt marsh but never lost their legs.
In Arizona, there is Idaho Fescue Grass, Needle Grass, Squirrel Tail Grass. There is Great Basin Wild Rye. Big Sage and Little Sage. There are forbs. While I am sweating in the drone room, I romanticize the grazing, having never seen it myself. It’s hot in the rig. The goggles press my eyes. I stare out from the heavy duck drone, holding at five-hundred feet, waiting to see the light. Come to Arizona, I say.
TULA MONEYTREE
Tula from Texas. Tula says, This ain’t no zoo. I’m burning horses when she catches the sleeve of my shirt. She says, I owe you about a hundred drinks. On the front porch of a stilted mansion, she serves martinis from a pressurized hose. She’s on the cutting edge. Rodney, honey. I know you’re on contract, but can you do something for me?
There’s a place she thinks the last horses could go. The tip of the old island, cut off from the rest. That way they can keep their sand on Fabular, and I’ll save the horses. It could be done.
There’s no water on that parcel. Tula, hose me down.
Things get funny when she sits on the piano bench and starts singing my name. What if I was to buy those horses? Well, I’d have to take care of them forever. I’d like to make them my spiritual pets. Have you even been on a hovercraft, Rod?
Tonight, I enter the world that Tula made. A sanctuary for the things that Tula likes, who exist at Tula’s pleasure. Ugly pigs are picked off with ease. Beautiful wild horses are alive and free in the recesses of Tula’s backyard, like the recesses of Tula’s warm hand.
An armadillo in the flood lights, passing Tula’s beach where we repose. With air in its belly, it could float for miles. Tula said, It’s cute. Let it be so. I make a grab, but it rolls like an otter and I’ve lost it. Then we see it—the articulating shell bobbing in the moonlight, drifting out of this world.
Tula’s sandbar is my haven. I used to dream of going home, but now I don’t sleep. A hot night like this, I’d pop the top on a peach can, microwave for thirty-seconds, and pour over some vanilla ice cream with my daughter, but we are drunk in the last hump of sand dunes and seeing turtles every day.
It takes them thirty years to make it back here. The muffled jets of the hovercraft hold us on the water, and the turtles stop their circling to poke their beaks out and take the lay of the new beach. Looking for a hole to dig. To each his own. Step into my office. Step out of a stranger’s robe.
I trade ten days to Tula because she makes me feel alright. She takes the horse stink off my bones with her double-headed shower and tonics and gemstones of soap. The moon turns on like a bulb in June. The tide rises to its upper limit. Tula wines me on the porch and makes my portrait in acrylic. Two black eyes. One brown mole. A bit of yellow in the hair.
This is the furthest I have ever been from home. Waves are breaking over Tula’s back steps, and I see it is as far as I will go. The island is under again. Where would your horses go?
Rodney, she says, putting down her pallet and brush. Stop asking questions. These horses have been here a hundred years.
Aren’t things different now?
I wake up heartsick in the featherbed. Tula is out flying with the bioengineer, and I wade back to Fabular across a narrow bridge of land. The beach is crowded with birds tearing open turtle eggs, and the shallows fill with rays.
Tattoos from my childhood resurface in times like these. Like titanomachea beneath my uncle’s belly hair. Black bolts of lightning and Japanese-style waves crashing over each of his hips. Beneath his sternum, some kind of horse with a marlin’s tail was tearing loose.
SILENCE
I make a cave drawing on the metal wall of my control room with a black oil pen and a little blood from a skin tag on my thigh. I never hear the waves lapping on the other side of the hull. The room is made to cut me off when I screw its door shut.
The new moon makes the scanners sharp. I get the drones synched up OK and chase the last band of renegades onto the open sand.
At least the killing part is done. The workmen of Fabular can plant sea oats and ride their wacky packers in peace. Could there be a contract to make something new? I consider dredging the bottom like the bioengineer.
What kind of marsh can I grow? When will my reef bloom? How can I make the condo of tomorrow, that is itself a barrier island, protecting the condos of the shore? How much grass can grow on the sand we’re got left. The way the water comes in, you start to get tight in the throat.
I begin to worry about my skillset. I do not want to always be the one collecting after a storm, but I know there will be a need for killing drones. It wasn’t my idea.
I started flying the drones after Tornado Summer, 2055. Not much survived. I was culling for the county, running things out of my car. The animal shelter couldn’t afford the keep things running and simply let the dogs out in the woods. I thought it would be cathartic.
In Arkansas, I tried harder to communicate the strain, but I’ve been shuttled into the industry of decline and it’s taking its toll. I learned from my wife that the Gross Domestic Product of disaster times is higher because of our unrest.
What’s wrong with the way I talk? I hammer the cook’s door with my fist. He opens up with spaghetti in his beard and asks if I’d come inside.
GOODNIGHT, HORSES
Green skies at night. White skies in morning. Sailor, what warning can you offer to Arkansas in May? What do you know about telling the future? Release your visions where I live, on Earth, and tell me what I should do on site at this crumbling restoration.
Somebody said, get to praying. I say I’m doing my part, but the wind is snapping us up. I’m afraid to go home, but I find it no better on the coast. The gyre yawns like a visible mouth, and we are spilling out.
Goodbye, smoky horses. I’m sorry for the ones Tula stole away. She has a good, musical soul, and she means no harm. I pray she cares for her pets. That she won’t abandon them. She is the kind that brings the horses. I add a layer to my blood horse. I have to commute some of what I took away.
Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2023) and Bomb Island (Hub City Press, 2024). His stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Carve, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Stephen serves as a fiction editor for Driftwood Press and book reviews editor for The Southeast Review. He holds an MA from Clemson, an MFA from the University of Mississippi, and is currently completing a PhD in English at Florida State University, where he teaches fiction and poetry and is writing a book about the feral horses of Cumberland Island.