Borrowed Horses (17 page)

Cheryl typed away, back toward me, the tilt of her head dour and disapproving, as I made my overtly and unabashedly personal call. Eddie’s “hello” was as warm and comforting as the smell of the pipe smoke that clung to his clothing. I said, “I want the very first lesson you’ve got open.” He laughed and gave me a Thursday.

“Eddie,” I said, hesitating. “Foxy’s not jumping anymore.”

His
hmmm
offered neither sympathy nor surprise. “I picked up a new horse in California that might suit you,” he said. “For the time being, anyway. She’s a bit rough yet; I’d been planning on working with her for a while myself before I put anyone on her, but what with trying to get the boys to school and soccer, I’m not sure I can give her all the time she needs.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. I held my breath to give space for his decision. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll bring her Thursday and you can have your lesson on her, then tell me what you think.”

Cheryl didn’t turn to look at me. She hadn’t spoken to me since Dr. Rivers chewed her out. I offered her my brightest smile; I didn’t miss the conversation.

Timothy smirked at me when I came through the checkout that night. “Man, haven’t you had enough of me yet?”

“Now, that’s a charming greeting.”

“I’m a charming guy.”

I was glad for the return of light banter, glad to know we could get back there from yesterday. No trace of anger or woundedness hovered around him. He looked genuinely happy to see me.

“Do you always shop for just one meal at a time?” he asked.

“I never know what I might feel like eating,” I said, only partially honest. The truth was, it was something to do when I wasn’t riding or working.

“And this stuff is for…”

“Fried rice. Why? You want some?”

It was meant as more banter, but the air felt suddenly stiff. The reserve he hadn’t had tempered his smile and he seemed to suck back into himself. “I would, but I’ve got an essay due tomorrow,” he said. The words weren’t especially formal, but they felt so.

The boyfriend I didn’t have might as well have been standing at my side, waving a fist at him.
It’s better this way
, I thought.
No one gets hurt
.

Riding the Zephyr

E
ddie’s battered blue Ford was already in the parking lot when I arrived, the rusty door of his mismatched stock trailer left open and swinging in the breeze. Odd: the open door. Carelessness wasn’t like him. Latching it, I noticed fresh scratches marred the paint, the angry glare of silver.

Eddie’s voice drifted out the barn door. “Sit back, back.” The words were slow and decisive and commanding. He was giving a lesson.

I stood a moment, eyes adjusting to the barn’s darkness. “A little leg,” Eddie said.

“I don’t have any leg left.” Jenny giggled, plodding along on Zip.

“Come on. No rest for the wicked.” How many times had Eddie said that line to me?

Zip picked up the pace. He was moving better than he’d ever moved for Jenny. His hind legs stretched forward underneath him, almost tracking up. Jenny squeezed her leg again, and it all came together. His hind feet filled the hoof prints left by the front. Zip was moving like a dressage horse again. I heard my words again in my head,
I want the first lesson you’ve got
. Yet here was Jenny.

“There it is,” Eddie said. “Do you feel that?”

“Feel what?” Jenny bounced lightly in the saddle, though Zip’s trot was smooth. She had to unlock her lower back to absorb the motion, but she couldn’t do that until she released the tension in her legs. “I feel like we’re trotting a million miles an hour—is that what I’m supposed to feel?”

“Fast, yes, but not quick. You’re moving forward because he’s engaged behind and pushing off like he should instead of giving you that little pony trot you were doing before. We’ve got nice, long strides now.”

Jenny beamed, but the rest of the lesson went downhill quickly. Her hip remained rigid and her lower leg flopped as she tired. Again, she began to tilt forward in the saddle, out of balance.

“That’s enough for now,” Eddie said. He watched Jenny circle for a moment, Zip on a long rein. “Your homework is more of this—much more. Next week, I don’t want you pooping out on me. I think I’ll probably take your stirrups away.”

“Take my stirrups?” Jenny blanched, but Eddie only smiled. She took heart and asked, “When do I get to jump?”

“Your leg is too loose right now, and you’re struggling with balance, but don’t worry. We’ll get there. You do your homework; it won’t take long. Just keep working. There’s no substitute for work.”

I smiled, thinking back to Dawn’s response to the same advice. He hadn’t let her canter either. “You want thirty bucks for that?” she’d said. “For trotting me in circles and telling me to keep my leg on?” Eddie had only shrugged. He never argued his methods. You worked his program, or you didn’t train with him. That was all.

He turned. “Well, hey there, stranger.”

“Hey back.” Hearing my voice, Foxfire nickered from his stall, pressing the pink tip of his velvety nose between the bars, nostrils flaring to catch my scent.

“We’d about given up on you coming back. It’s good to see you. You learn anything new in Jersey?”

“Learned I couldn’t afford the board there and that it pays to be rich.”

“Ah,” Eddie waved these words from the air. “No bitterness. That’ll get you nowhere.”

I smiled weakly and fiddled with the strap on my helmet, its old, sun-bleached velvet worn through at the edges. “Just answering the question. Jack Stewart helped me with my hands a bit, too.”

“Good. They needed helping.”

I didn’t take offense. My hands had never been bad, per se, but I tended to carry tension in my elbows and shoulders, stiffening at times, especially in shows. Decent hands, but not great.

Eddie looked me over, appraising me as he might a horse, checking my conformation and fitness. The skin around his eyes was slightly more wrinkled in spite of the ever-present ball cap. He wore the same damned cap as when I left, a freebie that came with a grain purchase lord knows how many years ago. The tee shirt, too, looked familiar, though who could tell one faded Mariners shirt from another? Perhaps it was the way his slight paunch hung over his jeans that made all shirts look the same. Yet like me, he had a good build for a rider: long, straight legs and a shorter waist than most men. Even aged and paunched, he was a force to be reckoned with, but he’d always preferred working with green horses to winning competitions.

“You look good,” he said. “You’re keeping in shape.”

“Trying to.”

“Good. You’re going to need all you’ve got today.”

“Lazy?”

Eddie barked a laugh. “No, if there’s one thing she’s not, it’s lazy. The reverse, if anything. She’s ex-track with a bit of a mean streak.”

I looked him in the eye. “Define ‘a bit.’”

He looked away, and I remembered the gouges in the trailer door. “Maybe it’s better if you just meet her,” he said.

“Shit.”

“You might say that.”

I cast one last look at Jenny, but she just brushed Zip, apparently too exhausted to listen to our conversation. “Where is she?” I asked Eddie.

“Back pasture.”

I matched my stride to his as we walked. Rounding the barn, she came into view. The mare’s coat was a dull, lackluster grey. To say she was thin was an understatement. Her ribs were pronounced as fence rails, her hips angular and jutting, no neck to speak of. Everywhere, her un-muscled, un-fattened skeleton was visible. She was a living anatomy lesson. “Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Eddie tugged at the greying hair that curled over his ear at the edge of his cap, a gesture I recognized from past moments of tension: jump-offs, injuries. “I ran across her one day just as we were packing to come home. Tiny paddock grazed down to dust. She lost weight being shipped, of course, but she was rough to begin with. More than rough. I think the previous owners tried to starve the spunk out of her.” His hand stilled, and he smiled. “It didn’t work.”

My sympathy for the mare was short-lived. We hadn’t gotten the pasture gate closed when she lunged at us with sudden fury, teeth snapping. “Whoa! Easy, girl,” I said, ready to jump back out of the pasture. Eddie stopped and stood, and we watched her put on her show. With a whole pasture to run in, she wasn’t running. She was stomping, rearing, tossing her head, and through it all, she was watching us and gauging our reaction.

Eddie stood, the calm before her storm. He held out his hand sideways, two fingers raised, a signal for me to hang back. I needed no prompting. He never took his eyes off the mare, approaching slowly and cautiously, pausing frequently. The air was warm and dry around us; only her antics broke the stillness.

He stood at her shoulder for nearly a minute before slipping his arm around to catch her with the halter. They were testing each other, and I wondered how long it had taken to get this response, how many times a day Eddie had caught her in her pasture to show that no harm would come of it.

“She’s a mare all right,” I said.

“An alpha mare,” Eddie said the words softly, like he was wooing her.

“Fantastic.”

He handed me the lead and I walked her into the barn and cross-tied her quickly, eyes never leaving her mouth. As I brushed her, she swung her body alternatively away from me and suddenly toward me, trying to pin me against the wall. When I approached to pick her feet, she cow-kicked at my head. “Quit,” I growled, drawing the single syllable long and low in my mouth. Her joints showed excellent flexibility—I’d give her that. Even starved, she was an athlete.

Foxfire was growing ever more anxious at the end of the barn. Upset that I hadn’t come for him, his welcoming nicker had changed into a more insistent whinny and was fast becoming a scream. The shuffle of his hooves filled the barn with noise and dust as he paced the front of his stall, increasingly frantic. I should have moved him—that was clear now. I would have, if I’d realized how upset this would make him.

How many times had I hurt him? How many times had he hidden the lancing pain of a jump’s landing just because I’d pointed him at a fence and asked him to go? If he’d stop for a moment, I could clear my head. Everything was loud and swirling. The mare kicked again, barely missing.

“Just go slow,” Eddie said. The horse rammed her flanks against me, scrambling and tossing her head against the ties. The bolts shuddered in the wall as Foxy screamed on. Noise filled the barn, echoing from the rafters.

I had wasted my life, wasted it! How had I fallen from jumping Foxfire over five foot fences to this—a broken-down mare who wanted to kill me? There was no future offered here, and I’d turned Timothy away. There had never been such an idealistic fool, such a girl of insupportable pretention, as I was.

The mare kicked again as I layered on saddle pads—stacking them to make up for her thinness. She shrank from the saddle itself, first crouching low, un-horselike, then springing sideways and slamming me again into the wall, her bones crushing against mine through the too thin flesh. “Jesus, stop!”

She was Eddie’s project, not mine. Foxfire screamed and screamed his rage, pawing at his stall door. My betrayal, my infidelity turned him into a crazed animal. He reared and struck the stall door, the metal bars singing with the hoof strike.

The mare kicked again as I passed the girth under her belly. Her hoof clipped the side of my hand, leaving a circular indent that bruised instantly. Stifling a yelp, I shook my hand as if pain was a spider that could be shaken off. The barn was full with Foxy’s screaming, crowding out any rational thought. He had to stop. If I was going to stay uninjured, I had to
think
my way around this mare.

Eddie just nodded me on. I gritted my teeth and tightened the girth, stepping out of the way of the hind hoof as once again it flew. “Stop, God damn it.”

The larger accident had all come to this moment: fate in the form of an angry grey bitch of a horse. Every muscle of me tensed—a surge of adrenaline that prompted no instinct to flee. I wanted to hurt something.

Eddie held a bridle to me—an old-fashioned hunting-style headstall with broad, flat leather pieces long out of fashion in the show ring. He wasn’t risking nicer leather, but he’d fitted it with a fat loose-ring snaffle, an optimistically gentle bit for this horse. As I came to her side, she snapped at me five times in quick succession. The halter and the cross ties gave her no real range, but I would have to free her to bridle her.

The bird bones of my hand throbbed where the iron shoe hit. I tried to think, tried to find a way to slip the headstall on. One moment of silence, and I could bridle this mare, but Foxfire grew more panicked. My head was a ringing bell. Every muscle rigid with his screaming, every bone vibrating like the metal bars he struck. Foxy the rock and this mare the hard place, like Dave and Timothy, like Cheryl and Dr. Rivers, like all the things I was trapped between.

God damn it all: This horse wasn’t going to take me anywhere. With this behavior, she deserved to be junked. I had no hope, not even the sliver of a hope, of ever riding for Jack Stewart again, and yet I turned Timothy away. A bridle in one hand, and nothing in the other. All the eggs in my basket broke under these iron-shod hooves.