Borrowed Horses (32 page)

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I like Russ and Dawn a lot. They’re real easy-going.”

I nodded, pleased.

“Jenny’s cool, too. I thought she’d be worse from your description.”

“Too harsh?”

He shrugged. “One night isn’t enough to judge. Dave, though. I don’t know what to think of him. He looked like a guy who is,” he paused, searching for the right word, “unhinged.” He put his arm over my shoulder, allowing it to rest loosely there, but his gaze stayed fixed forward.

For several paces, he said nothing. I waited. Along the edges of the sidewalk, I saw the tiny rainbows in each frost crystal that Timothy had said would be there, if I looked.

“Joannie, I won’t ask what happened between you and Dave, but where do we stand?
Are
we just friends?”

I hadn’t meant to stop, yet I found I had. His arm dropped away and he turned to face me, his features chiseled into marble by moonlight. Silence hung in the frost-crystal trees. He didn’t know, even now, what he meant to me. Why, for God’s sake, couldn’t I find the words to tell him? He looked upwards toward the moon a moment and back again. “Forget I asked,” he said.

Deep Creek

T
he alarm jarred me from sleep into the sudden cold of the room. My window blinds hung closed and still with secrets. I stuck a granola bar in the pocket of my coat and, no time to brew fresh, reheated a mug of yesterday’s coffee.

The white pre-dawn light showed the cars and trucks that stretched across the parking lot and along the curb, but Dave’s late model Dodge pickup was not among them. Of course. He was with Jenny. Dave was just a man, no more.

Even so, he haunted me. I dashed to my truck and locked the doors once I was inside. The engine was cold and reluctant to turn over, the starter chugging weakly. The world was shadowless in the ubiquitous grey light. “Crank, damn it,” I whispered, and the Chevy roared into life. The heater whirred, and any lingering fear faded into the noise from the early morning farm report. I pulled out, the old shocks bouncing over the uneven pavement. This was what I was born for.

Eddie was waiting for me when I pulled in, though I was early. He’d already loaded my tack, and Foxy had began screaming. “I was going to see if I could get Connie to help us load,” Eddie said, “but I can’t rouse her.”

We both knew what that meant. She’d been on a bender. They were less frequent than they had been, but every few months or so, the memories would be too much. Connie would come late to feed, making her rounds green-faced, her head tucked low into her jacket, wincing against the broad daylight.

Zephyr came to Eddie’s whistle and ate a handful of grain from his hand as he haltered her, but when she saw the trailer, the old Zephyr was back. It took us over twenty minutes to get her within five feet of the trailer. Every forward movement was made with painstaking slowness on our part and frantic spooking, fretting, and skittering on hers. Eddie and I did our best to remain unfazed. Frustration would only add fuel to Zephyr’s fire, and it was blazing away nicely without that.

When she finally put her first hoof in, the sound of her shoe against the wood sent her into convulsions. I expected her to rear or fly back, but she merely stood and shook violently, snorting the air inside. Eddie stood next to her, his left hand on a grain bucket several inches in front of her nose, his right holding the folded end of the lead rope and a dressage whip. He shook the grain bucket now and clucked to her, then gave her some time to think about this. When she didn’t move, he added the lightest touch of the whip. I worried as he did so that she would spook and jump, banging her head on the trailer’s ceiling and undoing all the work of the last half hour, but instead she hurried on, stomping her feet on the floor boards as if to show it who was boss. I swung the door mostly closed behind them while Eddie tied her.

Eddie’s truck was already running. I peeled off my gloves and held my fingers in front of the heating vent. Eddie’s hands rested lightly on the wheel. “We’d better add trailering to our list of things to work on,” he said.

“We’re going to run out of space on that list.”

Out the window, the fields rolled by. Compared to facing Dave again, the solid fences of the cross country course didn’t bother me, which was crazy. Riding is statistically one of the most dangerous sports, and eventing is perhaps its most dangerous discipline. Dave, on the other hand, had no stats against him.
He’s all grimace and growl. I’m making
a problem where one doesn’t exist. Remember the stone wall. Remember that height is mental; you hit the fence only when you stop believing in flight
.

“How are Hobbes and Jenny getting along?” Eddie asked, breaking me out of my thoughts.

“Swimmingly. She says, and I quote, ‘no one ever told her riding could be so easy.’”

“You sound bitter, Joannie.”

“Riding isn’t easy.”

“It was when you had Foxfire.”

“I
still
have Foxfire, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I don’t think Fox will let anyone forget him today. That’s quite a show he puts on.”

“I’d pasture him, except the girls are riding out today, and he’d just run the fence the whole time. The last thing I need is for him to panic and tangle himself in a hot wire.”

Eddie flinched. Years ago, his champion mare, Talullah, had gotten caught in a fence. The wire wrapped around her leg, every thrash drawing it deeper. It cut into the hock, into the tendons and ligaments. I heard the blood was everywhere. Connie said Eddie’s shirt looked like you could wring it out, and the ground where she lay was dark for months afterward. They hauled her to WSU’s vet school, speeding the whole way, but the damage was done. He hadn’t showed another horse since putting Talullah down.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

His eyes were hard on the road. “You’re right. You don’t want that to happen to Foxfire.”

“I haven’t ridden Fox this week,” I confessed. It depressed me to ride him now. Once the weather had turned, he was noticeably stiffer. Riding Zephyr, I could see glimmers of improvement. Riding Foxfire, I felt the gulf between what he was and the champion he had been. “I know he wants me to ride—you’ve seen him when I get Zephyr out—but he moves so stiffly now. I can’t bear to feel it.”

“That’s only natural.”

Is
it?
I didn’t ask. Love is natural, and love should have gotten me in the irons. I changed the subject. “Jenny’s going to kick my ass in January’s show.”

Eddie shrugged. “Anything can happen at a horse show; you know that.”

Back in high school, Mouse used to say the same thing about backgammon, but she still beat me nine times out of ten.

We rattled along in his old green Ford, silent for the rest of the trip, each lost in our own thoughts. The day bloomed blue and cloudless. The sky itself was open with unfettered possibility. I was free and I had a horse to ride—a borrowed horse, but a horse none the less.

Under a blue and endless sky, I tacked up at the trailer’s side and mounted. On opposing horizons, the Bitteroots and Cascades did not look so much like mountain ranges as simply more stone walls we could jump if only we opened our strides enough. Zephyr took her first jumps clean and round, though she struggled deciding where to put her feet before each jump. Distance was something only experience could teach, but she had strength and agility.

We pulled up to get some instructions from Eddie, whose words kept getting lost on the wind. “These must be the New Jersey hands I heard so much about,” he said. “You’re finally starting to let go of that shoulder tension.”

The breeze blew a loose strand of hair across my face. I tucked it behind me ear. The best part of a good ride was how everything apart from your body, your horse, and your obstacles faded from your mind. There was only the moment, and the moment was enough. Zephyr covered the ground with her large, powerful, cadenced strides, relaxing forward into the mote-filled sunlight.

“Do the cross-rail to the log again,” Eddie said. “Only this time, I want it in eight strides instead of seven.”

Zephyr fought me as I checked her, sticking in an awkward stride and jumping flat-backed and hollow. The hard landing jolted up my spine and rang in my ears.

“Again,” Eddie called. He counted our strides, clapping in time from cross-rail to log. “Stop her,” he called when she again sped up instead of collecting. I pulled her to an awkward halt inches from the fence’s base. She tossed her head, snorted and offered a small rear, and I backed her several paces. “O.K.,” Eddie said. “Trot her forward and let her jump it now. Let her know there’s no rush.”

She popped over it this time as if she had springs in her legs; another jarring landing.

“Again,” Eddie called. “And think about your center of gravity. You’re getting defensive again. You’ve got to let that go, Joannie. Allow her to jump. Relax your weight down into your heels.”

Zephyr listened this time as I checked her, only tossing her head once before collecting and giving me the round jump we’d been looking for. She landed clean, then shot out her back leg to give the fence a good kick before moving on. Eddie and I shared a quick smile.

“Again. In seven.” He began calling numbers, how many strides he wanted. Happy with that, he pulled a cavaletti from the bed of his truck and set up some shorter related distances.

For all her inexperience, Zephyr did well. She even seemed proud of herself. “I think she’s found her calling,” Eddie said, patting her neck at the end of the lesson.

“Pretty good day for a waste of pasture space. Wish Dawn had seen it.”

“She’ll have her chance. We’ll do some more jumping this week.”

I dismounted and began to untack. The earth felt strange underfoot after such a ride, like some strange mythic reality you dreamed once but hadn’t truly believed. Zephyr and I were not terrestrial animals. We were creatures of the air, landed.

Zephyr turned quickly and bit my arm, but it was a strange bite. Her teeth held my triceps, but she didn’t bite down. She looked me in the eye with a direct, steady gaze, as if there was something she would have me remember, and then released me before I could wheel and strike back.

I can’t let anyone else have her
. The words came into my head as her teeth gripped my arm, and though I tried to shake the thought, to dismiss it as a moment of weakness after a good ride, the thought had come, and it wouldn’t go. It bloomed into conviction. Her next rider wouldn’t understand her. Not like I did. Her next rider would wreck everything we’ve built, would violate every bit of trust she’d put in me. I owed her this. I owed myself.

Even the forty-five minutes she took to load seemed, now, a point in her favor. She was all unfinished potential. Every roughness, every unknown brought her closer within my price range. “What do you think Zephyr would fetch if you sold her now?” I ventured.

“Tough to say.” Eddie swung the door to the trailer, and to the conversation, shut.

I climbed into the truck. The seats were stained with coffee and everything smelt of straw, but it felt warmly secure after the open fields of Deep Creek. I let the subject drop while we ordered drive-through roast beef sandwiches. The curly fries weren’t quite ready, and Zephyr kicked the trailer sides as we waited. The truck shook with each pounding hoof. If I bought her now, I could stay close to my mother without guilt, without the feeling I was wasting my life. I wouldn’t have to give up her or Timothy. I’d been stupid not to see it before. Zephyr—
Zephyr
of all things—wasn’t a problem but the solution to my problems. She wasn’t perfect because no real solution ever is, but I could finally see a way clear. I tried again. “She’s got a lot of rough spots, still. She’s never going to totally train out of them.”

“Probably not.” Eddie shoved a mouthful of sandwich in and chewed thoughtfully.

We turned onto the road and moved toward the ribbon of highway that would take us back to Idaho. There was no way to ease into this subject. “Would you sell her now, if the right buyer came along?”

Eddie frowned, but did not look at me. His eyes were trained down the road’s yellow stripe. Even now, aging and slightly out of shape, he was a consummate rider, always looking at the course ahead. He squinted slightly. When he shot a glance my direction, I felt the first hope that I might convince him. “Do you have a buyer in mind?” he asked.

“You know I do.”

Eddie’s face relaxed into a smile. “Yes, I know you do,” he said, “but why rush into this? You had a good day today, but as you said yourself, she’s got a long list of problems.”

I didn’t speak.

Eddie’s smile dropped, and he sighed. “If we could work her out of even half of her faults, this mare could be worth a lot of money, Joannie.”
This mare
, I thought. He was reminding me of her potential as a breeding horse as well as a jumper.

“You don’t want to sell her to just anyone,” I said. “She’s got to have the right rider.”

Eddie was slow to respond, and I forced down a few curly fries. “The boys are headed to college in a few years. I need to think of them as well. There are good riders in Seattle and Portland, ones with money and trainers to work with.” He looked at me apologetically. “And can you really afford two horses? Two board bills? Two farriers? Two sets of blankets? Two vet bills?”