Colt (3 page)

“You serious?”

She reached for Brad's hand, and her warm, funny smile was answer enough. But she tried to say more. “Colt, he—he's the one.”

Looking back a year or two later, he wondered why he had been so surprised. It was just that, well, there had been other boyfriends. Boyfriends came and went, but Colt stayed. He had kind of thought it would always be just him and her.

Now it was going to be him and her and Brad and …

Rosie stood up, moved a few steps closer to his father. “Dad.” His voice sounded tight. “Dad, Lauri and I aren't going to have to go back with Mom, are we?”

“Heck, no!” Brad Flowers looked as shocked as his children. “You'll be with me. It's just that we'll be moving here, that's all.”

It was going to be Colt and his mother and Brad
and
Rosie
and
Lauri. All in a place not much bigger than a shoe box!

Lauri sat up straight and looked around the chaotic house with a show of alarm.

“I know it's a mess,” Audrey apologized, “and I know it's small. But, you see, it has the railings and wide doors and things Colt needs.”

Great. Now it's all
my
fault
.

“And I can try harder to get myself organized. I've already started clearing the junk out of the spare bedroom—”

Lauri pounced. “Will that be my room?”

“Depends,” her father told her. “We have three kids to go into two bedrooms. We figure you can have the one bedroom and Colt and Rosie can share the other. Or you can have the one bedroom and Rosie can sleep on the sofa. Or Rosie can have the spare bedroom and you can sleep on the sofa.”

Lauri put up a wail. Rosie looked dazed. Colt burst out, “I don't want somebody else in my room!” Especially not a tall teenage boy like Rosie. Everybody knew (everybody except parents, it seemed) that teenagers were mean and dangerous to younger kids, and that tall boys beat up on smaller boys—held them down by the hair and banged their heads on the ground, even. And Colt would not be able to run away. Who knew what Rosie might do to him in the privacy of a shared bedroom? Rosie might hold him down and twist his arms. Rosie might take away his crutches and braces in the night. Rosie might knock him down and make him break bones and hit his shunt and tear open his lump and
die
.

“I want my room to myself!”

Audrey said, “
Colt
—”

“We don't have to settle it all tonight,” Brad put in quietly.

“I don't want to sleep on the sofa!” Lauri wailed.

“Hush up,” Mr. Flowers told her, and she hushed. He went on, “Whatever arrangement we come up with, it'll be temporary. Audrey and I are hoping that we'll be able to save enough money by all living together to make a down payment on a bigger house in a year or two.”

“A year or two!” Colt yelled. He might be killed by Rosie seventeen times in a year or two.

“COLT!” His mother seldom shouted at him, and even now she didn't look so much angry as ready to cry. “You apologize to Brad!”

“Never mind,” Brad said.

And Rosie spoke up in a quiet voice very much like his father's. “Let's just say I'll sleep on the sofa.”

Brad told him, “Now, Son, you might not need to. We have plenty of time, I know we can work this out—”

“It's all right. I'm the oldest. I'll sleep on the sofa.” Moving with awkward short steps, Rosie went and stood in front of his father and Audrey Vittorio. “I just want you to be happy,” he mumbled, and he leaned over and gave them each a hasty hug.

“Me too,” Lauri said, shamefaced. She hurried over to give her dad a long hug. More gingerly she hugged Audrey.

Colt had a miserable feeling that he did not in fact want Brad Flowers and his mother to be happy. He wanted them to be unhappy, so that Brad and his kids would leave and he would have his mother to himself again. Meanwhile, he felt awful, as if he was left out of something important, and it was all his mother's fault.

Keeping his voice very calm, very virtuous, he said to her, “Mom, I can't get over there because of all the junk on the floor.”

“Aaaak!” Audrey Vittorio jumped up to clear a path. “I am such a mess.”

The next week, when he went to Horseback Riding for the Handicapped, Colt fed Liverwurst a carrot. This was better and less scary than an apple, he found, because he could poke it at Liverwurst while keeping his distance. And Liverwurst did not break it open in so terrifying a way, but merely sucked the long object up into his long mouth, where he chomped it with loud crunching sounds and some orange slobber.

Mrs. Berry made Colt offer the carrot, of course, and Colt fought her all the way. But later, when he was riding Liverwurst with an aide on each side, and Mrs. Reynolds said, “Would you like me to show you how to use the reins?” Colt said, “Yes.”

That summer evening he learned to stop the horse with pressure on the reins, to start Liverwurst forward again with a voice command and a tilt of his body, to steer Liverwurst in circles with a signal on the reins and a twist of his head and shoulders, even to ride Liverwurst over a low obstacle. All at a walk, of course. He learned to follow the nodding of the horse's head with his hands, so that the bit at the other end of the taut reins would not hurt Liverwurst's mouth. He even managed once to nudge Liverwurst into a walk with his legs.

“Wonderful, Colt!” Mrs. Berry beamed at him. “Excellent posture!”

He was sitting up straight because it felt good and because it helped him ride the horse properly, not because she said so. She should know that. The horse took cues from the position of his body, Mrs. Reynolds had explained, as well as from the reins. Didn't Mrs. Berry understand these things? Her compliment annoyed him because good posture was not the point, at least not to him. Riding the horse was.

Riding the horse was really something.

His mother and Brad were waiting for him after the hour of horseback riding was over. He ignored them as Mrs. Berry pushed him in his wheelchair up the lumpy driveway to them, looking instead over his shoulder at the horse being led into the barn.

So his mother was getting married to this guy he barely knew. So he was going to have three strangers living in his house, all of them healthy and stronger than he. So he was a poor wimp of a handicapped kid in a wheelchair. So what. At least there was one thing in his life—a big, powerful thing—he could control.

“See ya later, Liverwurst,” he called.

Chapter Three

“Are there bears?” Colt demanded.

“Not likely,” Mrs. Reynolds answered him, in her usual level way. She was walking along beside him as one of his aides. Colt no longer needed anyone at Liverwurst's head. He took care of guiding and controlling the horse these days. He could make Liverwurst walk on, stop, back up, do circles and serpentines and figure eights, go over a low jump, and run relay races. Or walk relay races, rather. So far all the handicapped kids were riding just at a walk.

The next week, Mrs. Reynolds had just told him, he was going to get to ride Liverwurst outside the ring. The handicapped class was going out on the trails in the wooded state park nearby.

“But there are
some
bears,” Colt insisted. He was scared of large wild animals. “There are bears in the woods in Pennsylvania. People hunt them.”

“That's up in the mountains, mostly,” Mrs. Reynolds told him.

“Some of them could come down here. What'll happen if we run into a bear?”

Almost offhand Mrs. Reynolds said, “If Liverwurst even so much as smelled a bear he would rear up and throw you off and run home like a racehorse.”

Oddly, this blunt statement of truth made Colt feel much better than any assurance could have. He said, “You're not worried?”

“I've been riding around here for twenty years and never run into a bear yet.”

“But there
could
be bears.”

“Probably not. You have to think in terms of probabilities, Colt.”

“Huh?” Mrs. Reynolds always talked to him as if he were her equal, and he liked that. But sometimes he had to ask her to repeat or explain. Like now. “Think in terms of what?”

“Probabilities,” she told him. “Nothing's ever absolutely safe or certain. You have to go with what's probably going to happen. It's like that when you're dealing with horses, and it's like that when you're dealing with life.”

He guided Liverwurst into a circle, swiveling his shoulders and hips toward the direction he wanted the horse to go, hinting with the reins and squeezing as much as he could (which wasn't much) with the leg toward the center of the circle. Liverwurst turned his neck in an arc that matched the line Colt wanted and clopped on.

“So there's probably no bears out there,” Colt said to Mrs. Reynolds.

“The chances are very, very small that we will meet a bear.”

He considered, then offered a small joke. “What about mountain lions?”

She laughed. “
Right
, Colt.”

But part of him really was worrying about mountain lions. Even though he knew it made no sense, he couldn't seem to help being scared of things.

He worried about bears, and sometimes mountain lions, off and on throughout the next week. Not too much, because he had plenty of other things to worry about. The bad grades he was getting in his summer tutoring, for one. His mother always had him tutored over the summer, because the way fluid buildup had affected his central nervous system made him have trouble with schoolwork, especially with math. And when he got bad grades in the summer she really got mad, because she was paying the tutor.

And the wedding, for another thing. He worried that he would stumble going up the carpeted aisle, when everybody would be looking at him. Or a crutch would slip. Or he would get too tired, standing in his braces. He was supposed to be up front with his mother and hand her the ring she was going to put on Brad, and he worried that he would drop it. It wasn't going to be a big fancy wedding, but still he worried that he would embarrass himself somehow.

He worried about the wedding on the way to the stable the next week, and then getting ready for the trail ride he started to worry about large wild animals. But meanwhile he felt quite glad to see a certain large tame animal.

“Hi, Liverwurst!” he greeted the horse when an aide wheeled him into the stable. “Hey, boy!” The horse stuck his splotchy head out over the stall door, and Colt reached up and patted him, rubbing hard at the itchy place just under Liverwurst's forelock. Liverwurst thrust his head down as far as he could get it, his big rubbery nose almost against Colt's chest and the good horse smell of him strong in Colt's face. Colt fed him his apple. It no longer bothered him that Liverwurst chomped and slobbered. Colt chomped and slobbered himself sometimes, especially when he was faced with spaghetti, and he guessed there were some people who thought he was ugly because he had a shunt in his head and the top part of him was big compared to the bottom. But Liverwurst no longer looked ugly to Colt.

Mrs. Reynolds came in with that long, strong, blue-jeaned stride of hers. “Ready to ride, Colt?”

“I guess.”

He worried about finishing his homework while the volunteers got him on his horse, and he worried about the wedding while he picked up the reins, and he worried about bears and wolves and mountain lions as he rode Liverwurst up the farm lane and along a country road to the state forest. And then he was on the trail, and somehow (he never quite understood how it happened) he wasn't scared and he wasn't worrying about anything.

Out there the whole world was made of tall pines and green light and spicy-sweet air and the long, tan, wandering trail. And it was all shining new. Colt had never been in such a place before because crutches or a wheelchair would not take him there, but now he was part of it. Hushed shade, the soft clop of hooves, the rhythm of the walk, his own body, swaying, swaying—he no longer felt separate from these things, no longer felt somehow outside of his life looking in. He just—was. Liverwurst was Liverwurst, and Colt was Colt.

Behind him he could hear cutesy-pie little Julie giggling on her pony. Jay Gee and Neely were singing off-key somewhere up ahead, and the women on each side of him were conversing about Mexican food, and it was all good, all part of tall green shade and hoof clop, and Colt's life felt big enough to include it all. Big as forest and cool pine sky.

And lake. There was a lake up ahead.

The trail dipped down toward it, and there was no need to worry, no need even to think, just shift weight in the saddle and give Liverwurst a little more rein and let him manage the slope, nodding all the while as if he understood. Colt noticed without fear that his side walkers no longer bothered to hold on to the handles of his safety belt. When the trail narrowed and grew even steeper the women dropped behind, first one and then the other, while the aides who had to stay beside their handicapped riders struggled through brush and poison ivy.

I'm riding on my own
.…

And he was looking down a sheer drop into deep water on one side, and on the other side he was looking up a steep hillside pierced with pines so tall they seemed to topple, they would all fall into the lake—he would fall. But even as he thought it, somehow he knew he would not. He and Liverwurst could manage this situation. Something warm and strong and vital seemed to flow up to him out of his horse, maybe out of the earth itself through the horse's solid striding hooves.

Right down to his bones Colt knew two things:

I am alive
.

I am a horseback rider
.

The trail climbed the sheer lakeside slope to the hilltop, where there was a clearing. Mrs. Reynolds and one of the helpers set Colt down on the ground, where he ate watermelon as messily as Liverwurst had ever eaten anything (and fed the rind to his horse), and Mrs. Berry made a speech thanking Mrs. Reynolds for the use of Deep Meadows Farm and her horses and ponies. It was July, time for the volunteers to go off on their vacations. It was the last day of the summer's horseback riding program.