Fox River (14 page)

“We gotta stop and ask somebody. We’re already late.”

“No such thing as late in horse country. I was on time, they’d wonder about me.”

Christian kept a careful eye on his father’s driving. He knew Gabe had sneaked a few drinks before he got behind the wheel of their prehistoric pickup that morning, but there’d been none since. If they did find Claymore Park, Gabe had a chance at a job. For as long as he could keep it.

Christian wished he had a real map. He vowed to wheedle one out of an attendant at the next service station. And from the looks of the gas gauge, that should be soon.

“There’s the road. You think you’re so smart.” Gabe made a wide turn onto a gravel lane and downshifted as they started to climb a low hill.

Christian had no illusions that they were really nearing their destination, but he bit his bottom lip and waited until they reached the top, just in case. He was glad he hadn’t said anything when his father finally pulled to a temporary halt and pointed. “Claymore Park. Read the sign.”

Christian already had. “How’d you know?”

“Told you.” Gabe tapped his head again. “And we’re hardly late at all.”

Christian looked down at the magnificent estate spread out in front of them, and his heart sank. For the past four years he and Gabe had made their way east from the small Wyoming ranch Gabe had sold to finance his wife’s final hospital stay. At the beginning the jobs had been decent enough, but as Gabe’s reputation as a drinking man preceded him, they had grown progressively worse. Now, one look at Claymore Park told Christian that any job here would be a long shot. This was no hardscrabble ranch, and the horses grazing down below them had never carried a cowboy.

“Just look at this place, boy.” Gabe shook his head. His eyes filled with tears. “Just look at it. Can you believe it?”

Christian hoped his father wouldn’t cry. Sometimes Gabe’s crying jags lasted for hours. “It’s just a horse farm, Daddy. And you know more about horses than anybody in the whole world.”

Gabe sighed and pulled his straw hat lower on his forehead. “Let’s go see if I can convince them.” But he already sounded defeated.

Christian had seen enough of America to suit him, and his head wasn’t turned by grass or mountains. He’d passed through the Rockies and lived, at least temporarily, in Kentucky’s famed bluegrass country. From the side of the road he’d seen farms to rival this one, but none set quite so perfectly. Even at ten, he recognized quality.

Mares with new foals dotted the paddocks, sleek Thoroughbred mares with legs as long as a racetrack homestretch. Buildings harmonized with the landscape and their neighbors, all of the same gray cedar and brick as the house peeking through the trees up ahead. He heard the peculiar yelping of hunting dogs, and somewhere below he heard men shouting.

The main barn loomed like a castle and might well have cost as much, at least in Christian’s mind. They parked beside a row of sleek pickups with Claymore Park’s logo—a horse soaring between heaven and earth—stenciled on the sides. Gabe slicked back his hair with his palm and re-angled his straw hat on top of his head.

“You got a clean shirt in the suitcase,” Christian told him. Christian knew, because he’d done the laundry at their last campground.

“Won’t matter one bit.” Gabe sounded sad, but at least he wasn’t crying.

Christian got out and brushed off his jeans. He was glad it was late May and nobody would ask Gabe why his son wasn’t in school. He wasn’t good at school, and he didn’t see why it mattered if he went regularly. He was never going to be anybody. He could hardly read.

“You ready?” he asked Gabe when his father came around the truck.

“Shoot, yeah.” Gabe put on a big grin. “Let’s go tell ‘em how to run this place.”

Inside the barn Christian felt his jaw go slack. He’d seen some pretty slick operations, but nothing quite like this one. The horses behind the half doors were magnificent, and the facility itself was as clean as an old lady’s kitchen.

“Well, would you look at that?” Gabe said. “Looks like they had one of those interior decorators. About as much like our place in Douglas as a mule and a racehorse.”

Christian didn’t like to think of Wyoming, where he’d had a mother who loved him and a father who had held himself together. “Where is everybody?”

“Dunno. Maybe they’re out looking for us. Maybe they figured we was a little lost.” Gabe punched Christian on the arm.

Christian doubted that the stable staff even remembered Gabe was coming. “We’d better look around.”

They walked down the center aisle toward the opposite door. Christian felt the way he did every time he walked through the door of a new school. Afraid to touch anything, afraid to be noticed.

Outside again, they looked over a confusing array of outbuildings, barns and pasture. A weather beaten man in a blue polo shirt emblazoned with the Claymore Park logo came out of one of the outbuildings and started past them.

Gabe stepped in front of him. “We’re looking for Jinx Callahan. Know where he is?”

The man managed to look Gabe over without appearing to move his eyes. He shrugged and started around Gabe.

Christian blocked his exit. “I bet Mr. Callahan doesn’t like to wait around.”

The man grimaced. “The breeding shed.” He jerked his head to the right, then hustled down the path.

“That’s probably the breeding shed,” Gabe said, gesturing toward one of the smaller low-slung brick buildings in the distance. “Let’s try there.”

Despite his long legs, Christian had to lope to keep up with his father. Gabe seemed determined to get this over with and move on.

Judging from the noise as they neared the building, they had discovered the right place. “Noisy bastard, that one,” Gabe said. “Sounds like he’s enjoying himself, don’t it?”

Christian, as used to the sounds of horses breeding as he was to the smell of manure, wasn’t paying attention. He’d spotted a boy his own age peeking through the open doorway. The dark-haired boy was smaller than he was, wearing shorts with about a hundred pockets and a black-and-white striped shirt that made Christian dizzy just to look at it.

The boy turned at their approach, just as all hell broke loose inside the shed.

“What the—” Gabe stopped in his tracks.

Gabe was quick to see the problem, but Christian was quicker. Stallions were notoriously excitable beasts, and the stallion in the breeding shed had gotten completely out of control after covering the mare. The two men who’d been supervising had dropped the loosely held twitch and were scurrying to get out of the way of his hoofs. The mare, whose back legs were hobbled together, was flailing from side to side as if she, too, had a point to make. With the two horses thrashing inside the pen, it was only a moment before their combined weight and lethal hoofs brought down one side.

As Christian watched, the stallion, a great chestnut brute, reared and turned, starting directly toward the boy in the doorway.

“Christ in an inner tube!” Gabe sprang forward, but Christian had seen the danger first. He was already on his way toward the mesmerized boy, reaching him just a heartbeat before the stallion ran him down. Christian threw himself against the boy’s slight body, just knocking him to the ground and out of the way as the horse thundered past.

He waited for hoofs to strike, for the snapping of bones or the searing of flesh, but his timing had been good enough.

“No, you don’t!” Gabe shouted.

Christian looked up to see his father swinging on the horse’s halter. In horror, he watched as the stallion dragged Gabe fifty yards or more. Finally he came to a restless halt, with Gabe still holding firm.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Somebody ran past the prostrate Christian, and another man followed.

Christian got up slowly, then held out his hand to the boy, who was still on the ground. “Hey, come on. Let’s see what happened.”

“Who are you?” The boy got gingerly to his feet. He had a narrow face, with thin features and dark brown eyes that were too big for both.

“Christian Carver. My daddy’s looking for a job here.”

Tears filled the boy’s eyes. “You tried to kill me!”

Christian frowned. “No, your horse did that. You just stood there. Who are you, anyway?”

The boy stuck out a trembling lower lip. “Robby!”

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you to get out of the way of a charging horse?”

“I just wanted to see!”

One of the men left the stallion in the care of the other man and Gabe and came back to the boys. He was as old as the mountains and every bit as rugged. “Robby Claymore. I swear, you weren’t the boss’s kid, I’d whack your fuckin’ behind. You been told to stay away from the stallions before.” He turned to Christian. “You saved his lily-livered ass. Who are you?”

“Christian.” Christian looked over at his father. “Gabe’s son.”

“Never saw nobody grab a charging horse and hang on the way your daddy did, boy. About as stupid a thing as I ever did see. He could have lost both arms.” Clearly he was impressed. “You got some of the old man inside you, looks like.”

It had been a long time since Christian had felt proud of his father. “Yes, sir.”

“D’you say thank you?” the man asked Robby. “We’d be scraping pieces of you out of the dirt back there if this kid hadn’t saved your hide.”

Robby clamped his lips together.

“Jinx?”

Christian looked up to see a handsome middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair bearing down on them.

“Look, boss, I told you once, I told you a dozen times, Gypsy’s Son needs a longer break between mares. You push him too hard and he goes crazy. I—”

“What happened?” The man addressed Robby in a soft voice that still held notes of steel. “I want to know exactly what happened, son, and I want to know now.”

“I…I…” The boy couldn’t seem to get past that one vowel. Christian realized he was about to dissolve into tears.

“It was my fault,” he said quickly. “I think I scared Gypsy’s Son. Robby here tried to get out of the way, but I tripped over him. If it hadn’t been for me—”

“Robby?” The man waved Christian to silence.

“It—it—it happened real fast,” Robby said.

“I think this young man just tried to save your neck for the
second
time today.”

“I’m—I’m—sorry, Daddy.”

“Who are you?” The man turned to Christian. “I’m Peter Claymore, owner of Claymore Park.”

Christian wiped his hand on his jeans before he extended it. “Pleased to meet you, sir. I’m Christian Carver. That’s my dad over there.”

“You and your daddy are going to be working here?” Peter raised a brow and looked directly at Jinx.

“Looks like he’s got any job he wants.” Jinx grinned. “Him and his dad.”

“Put them on the payroll as of last Monday.” Peter smiled. The smile died when he looked at his own son. He shook his head and walked away.

Jinx drifted back to the stallion who, under Gabe’s expert touch, was behaving as docilely as a lamb.

“Why’d—why’d you try to help me?” Robby demanded.

Christian thought about that. “Because, well, just because. And besides, I know about fathers.” He nodded at his own wisdom.

“Yours, too?”

Christian rolled his eyes. “Mine for sure.”

“You’re going to be—be staying here?”

“Looks like it.” For as long as Gabe could hold the job, anyway.

“I could show you stuff.”

Christian liked the sound of that. “What kind of stuff?”

“I have a fort. Want to see?”

“A fort?” His own childhood had disappeared so long before that he felt like Robby’s grandfather. “Sure. I’d like that.”

Gabe came to join them. Gypsy’s Son was under Jinx Callahan’s control now. “Well, I got the job. And they’re going to pay you to help feed and exercise the mares, if you want. Looks like we’re in fat city, boy.”

Robby didn’t seem impressed with the Carvers’ good fortune. “We’re going to see my fort.”

“Can I?” Christian asked Gabe.

“Yeah, you go on. You two kids get acquainted. Maybe you can be friends.”

Christian wondered exactly what that meant, but he was more than willing to give this new life, every bit of it, a try.

Robby grabbed his arm. “Let’s go.”

And they had gone everywhere together after that. The two boys had been like pieces of a puzzle that was easiest to decipher when they were together. Robby had been good in school, and the moment he realized Christian couldn’t read, he set about changing that. Neither boy knew the meaning of “learning disability,” but Robby, inventive and highly intelligent, found new ways to help Christian put sounds together in his head so that reading finally began to make sense and an entire world of knowledge opened up to him.

In exchange, Christian taught Robby how to handle horses. Although Peter Claymore had hired the best riding instructors, only Christian realized that Robby, with his expansive, questioning mind, needed to “think” his way on horseback. As they worked on Christian’s reading skills, they studied breeds and conformation, saddles and tack, theories of horsemanship and equine history. Robby, who was only comfortable with what he thoroughly understood, became a competent rider.