Ivy Takes Care (12 page)

“What’s going on?” Dr. Rinaldi stood in the doorway, sounding a little alarmed and taking in the scene — the big snake’s body, still twitching slightly in the corner and the snake’s head about a foot away.

Ivy lit up the instant she saw the vet, then looked at Billy Joe. Billy Joe looked so pathetic, Ivy could not bring herself to rat on him.

“Somehow,” Ivy said to Dr. Rinaldi, “another snake got into the barn. Must have been asleep since summertime. We took care of it.”

Dr. Rinaldi knelt at Texas’s side. “Son, get down here and hold your horse’s head steady while I inject the antivenom,” he instructed Billy Joe.

Dr. Rinaldi prepared two large syringes. At the sight of the needles, Billy Joe passed out, so it was Ivy who held Texas’s head. Dr. Rinaldi eased the first shot into the horse’s withers. Texas began to breathe better, his sides expanding and contracting like a moving mountain.

“Lucky I had enough antivenom this time of year,” said Dr. Rinaldi. “Get the smelling salts out of the tack-room cupboard, Ivy, and hold ’em under that infernal boy’s nose.”

It wasn’t long before Andromeda quieted in her stall and Texas began to try to stand up. “Needs another shot,” said Dr. Rinaldi. “Got to keep him quiet for a few hours.” This time he allowed Ivy to fill the syringe and plunge it into Texas’s rump. Billy Joe watched, for once completely speechless.

Ivy helped Billy Joe make up an itchy, dirty horse blanket bed for him to sleep in while he waited out a night vigil in the stable, watching Texas.

“In my truck’s a thermos of hot soup for you, boy,” said Dr. Rinaldi. “I guess this was the night for it.” The doctor checked Texas over one more time. “He’ll be okay, but he won’t get up until morning. We’ll send your dad out with the horse van at sunup,” he added.

Ivy looked at Billy Joe. His face was not a picture of happiness.

“Don’t tell my dad I was snake hunting, Ivy,” whispered Billy Joe. “Swear to God?”

Ivy didn’t answer. She didn’t know what she would do. She just wanted to get home. It was past nine o’clock. Her mother would be waiting, watching at the window.

“Hop in the cab, Ivy. I’ll give you a ride,” said Dr. Rinaldi.

The warmed-up cab of Dr. Rinaldi’s truck felt like a day in June to Ivy.

“Danged if I ever did see anything like that in my life,” Dr. Rinaldi said. He lit his pipe and puffed on it. “That Billy Joe musta run into a rattler ball.”

“Rattler ball?”

“Yup. Spooner Summit’s got lots of rattlers. See, in summertime a west-facing mountain has a hundred flat-rock southern-sun exposures. Snakes love it. Then, in the winter they hibernate. Some go it alone, some wrap themselves up in balls of ten or twenty snakes. Makes your blood run cold! Somehow Billy Joe must have disturbed a rattler ball. How he could have done that is beyond me!”

Ivy decided not mention Billy Joe’s ax, bag, and shovel to Dr. Rinaldi. She knew that birdbrained boy would already catch enough fire and brimstone in the morning.

“What time does Ruben get back from the old folks’ home?” asked Dr. Rinaldi.

“He says he leaves when they serve up breakfast,” answered Ivy. “He gets the first bus in the morning back to Spooner Lake.”

“Good. That’ll be just about the time Jim Butterworth drives up with the horse van to get Texas and his boy. Texas’ll be back on his feet by that time; he’s as tough as a bag of nails. When Ruben comes home,” Dr. Rinaldi said dryly, “you can be sure he’ll go over that filly of his for three hours, looking for nicks and scratches.”

“I hope he doesn’t find any!” said Ivy.

“I checked her before we left,” said Dr. Rinaldi. “She’s fine.” He pulled again on his pipe. “Billy Joe is just trouble on two feet.”

Ivy had no words for Billy Joe this time.

“You should be proud of yourself, Ivy,” Dr. Rinaldi continued. “Not everybody can run a garden hose up a horse’s snout. You’ve got nerves of steel. Think of this: Someday you’ll run into a mare with a breech foal. You’ll have to stick your whole arm in and pull her foal out of the womb or both’ll die. Think you could do that, too?”

Ivy tried to picture it. “Well, if the mare was in pain, I guess I’d just have to do it,” she said.

“Yup,” agreed the doctor. “You do what you have to, even when it’s the last thing you want to do. But on the other hand, when there’s a little wet foal on the hay under his mother, and he stands up, it’s like the world was made brand-new, right then and there.”

It was at this moment in Dr. Rinaldi’s pickup truck, with all its rattles and squeals, that quite out of nowhere, the emblem of the lamp in the hand came back to Ivy. Maybe it was the long, dark, cold night she’d just spent. Maybe it was the mention of a world made brand-new. Maybe it was both. Whatever triggered it, she remembered now where she had seen that emblem before. It was chiseled into the entrance gate of a Reno estate that she had passed many times in her father’s pickup truck. The Mountain School. The Mountain School was a private prep school. The papers scattered in the back of Annie’s car had been an application form for the following year.

“Oh . . . of course,” Ivy found herself saying aloud.

“Come again?” asked Dr. Rinaldi.

“It’s nothing, Dr. Rinaldi,” said Ivy.

On Christmas morning, Ivy unwrapped her presents, all of them expected. There were the hand-knit sweaters, one from each of her grannies; a box of orange chocolates; and a new blouse and skirt made by her mother. Ivy had bought her mother a pair of cloud socks and her father a new set of leather work gloves from Strunk’s General Store. Hanging on the tree, however, was a package Ivy had not expected. It was from Annie.

“Someone put it in our mailbox,” Ivy’s mother said.

Inside the gold and red paper was a silver Tru-Friendship ring set with Ivy’s birthstone, an amethyst. She turned it in her fingers. Annie must have received the tourmaline ring at camp after all. Ivy slipped the ring onto her finger and held out her hand so that the colored lights on the tree shone through the amethyst.

“Your dad and I miss seeing Annie around,” said Ivy’s mother. “Hope that ring means we’ll be seeing her again.”

“It’s a good-bye present, Mom,” Ivy said. “Annie’s going to go to that private school her mom went to. The Mountain School.”

“She tell you that?” asked her mother.

“No, but I know anyway,” said Ivy.

“I guess public school’s not good enough for those people,” her mother said with a sniff. And this was true.

Ivy stood and roped her scarf around her neck. “I better rouse that Billy Joe and get on over the mountain to Andromeda,” Ivy said.

“Hop in the truck, honey,” said her dad.

“You driving me to the Montgomery place?” asked Ivy.

“Naw. You’ll have to go tend your racehorse after noontime,” said her dad. “Right now we gotta go to the airport. Somebody’s coming in.”

“But Billy Joe’s dad always makes the airport run,” said Ivy.

Her dad chuckled. “Jim Butterworth’s out on their south hundred, honey, making sure Billy Joe don’t slack off. Billy Joe’s got two hundred fence posts to straighten and miles of bob wire to untangle.”

“What happened, Dad?” Ivy asked as her father pulled onto the highway north to Reno. She thought Billy Joe had gotten away with his rattler ball adventure.

“Well,” he said, “at first Jim Butterworth just wrote off the whole snakebite business to bad luck: sleeping snake wakes up in the middle of winter. Snakes are snakes, and they’ll bite your horse, never mind if you’re a saint in heaven, even in the dead of winter.”

Ivy waited for her dad to wind this story out. She was still not going to tell on Billy Joe. He was in enough trouble.

“Well, nothing more was made of it until last night,” her dad continued. “Jim Butterworth had filled the wood bag with firewood, brought it into the house, and emptied it. Tumbling out after the firewood was a rattler head, neatly chopped off at the neck. Anyone who had the bad luck to brush a finger or two over one of those fangs, still full of venom, coulda been countin’ sheep in heaven this very minute.”

“Oh, Billy Joe,” said Ivy.

“Yup,” agreed her Dad. “Seems he was on purpose looking for hibernating rattler balls up there on Spooner Summit. Wanted to sell the skins to some boot maker in Reno. So he’s got a winter of nasty outdoor work ahead. Cora says it’ll learn him. I don’t reckon anything’ll learn that boy till he maybe blows a hand off with his danged fireworks. If they’d lost the horse, Billy Joe’d be strung up by his thumbs. But Texas is going to be okay.”

Through the truck window, Ivy watched the bleached winter landscape fly by.

“What kind of guest is flying out here on Christmas Day, Dad?” asked Ivy.

But either her dad had no idea or he wasn’t telling. Could it be a movie star from California? Ivy wondered. No. Movie stars didn’t stay at the Red Star Ranch, with its one little radiator in each cottage. They went to Reno or Las Vegas and relaxed at the big ranches with heated indoor pools and people who gave you massages.

Ivy and her dad could hear the eleven o’clock plane a ways off in the sky. Because of the short landing strip, flights into Reno had to circle like paper airplanes in a stairwell.

They pulled up to the tarmac, got out of the truck, and watched the plane land.

Ivy looked at the travelers’ faces one by one as they emerged into the bright Nevada sunshine. Her dad didn’t flag anyone and no one stopped.

“Where’s the Red Star Ranch sign, Dad?” Ivy asked. “Shouldn’t we be holding it up so the person knows who we are?”

“Don’t need one,” said her father mysteriously.

“Why? Who’s coming?” asked Ivy again.

“Here he is!” said Ivy’s dad.

Ivy recognized the man immediately. She didn’t think she’d ever forget his crew cut and the American Airlines uniform. He was holding a leash. At the end of the leash was a much bigger shepherd than she remembered, the tip of one ear gone now. Inca knew her at once.

Late Christmas afternoon, Ivy decided she’d pay Billy Joe a visit in the south pasture, where he was deep in drifts of snow.

“Billy Joe!” Ivy called. He saw her. A big smile lit up his face.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I was in my living room, where it was nice and warm,” she explained. “I thought of you out here, with your fingers freezing off. So I figured, no matter what stupid thing you’d done, I should bring you a thermos of cocoa.”

Billy Joe stood up from the hole he was clearing out, brushed the snow off his jacket, and reached for the thermos as if it were the Holy Grail itself.

“Who’s that dog?” he asked.

“It’s Inca!” said Ivy.

And before Billy Joe could react, the dog pushed him over into the snow and kissed him. Billy Joe laughed.

Ivy poured hot chocolate into the thermos cup and gave it to Billy Joe. “What happened to his ear?” he asked.

“Mr. Burgess says he got into fights with Siegfried and Tristan,” Ivy explained. “They nearly killed him. So Mr. Burgess decided to send him back to me. He arrived on the eleven o’clock flight just this morning, with a year’s worth of dog food right in the baggage compartment.”

Inca leaned against Ivy. Her fingers found his bitten-off velvet ear. Inca was twenty pounds heavier than when he’d left, but he had forgotten nothing. In his eyes Ivy could see that she was his “one” for all time.

Billy Joe took a slug of the hot chocolate.

“You’d better come in, Billy Joe,” Ivy said. “It’s getting dark.”

The two walked home with Inca dancing and prancing between them.

“This afternoon, I got a telephone call,” Ivy told Billy Joe. “Somebody’s ranch man down in Sandstone Canyon broke an ankle. Three paddock horses. Ice breaking, water carrying, three flakes a day. You wanna help out when you’re finished here?”

“You’re kidding, right?” said Billy Joe. “I’m nothing but trouble.”

“I’ll watch you like a hawk,” Ivy said.

“Fifty-fifty?” he asked.

“No snakes, no firecrackers, and no trouble,” said Ivy.

“Deal!” said Billy Joe. He held out his dirty work glove, full of icy holes and fence post splinters.

Ivy slapped it. “Deal,” she said.