Catch Rider (9780544034303) (14 page)

“Yep. I was sad. Real sad. Those two Broaddus boys came over here to help me clean out the trailer—their mama sent them, I guess. They were being real loud and obnoxious, and my horse had just died, and I didn't want to hear it. They was carrying on, laughing, jumping around in the trailer, shooting each other with the hose. Finally I went out there and I said, ‘You boys might want to be careful. The horse that was in there yesterday shit himself to death, and I wouldn't want to catch that disease if it was me.'”

We laughed.

“I thought it wasn't contagious,” I said.

“No”—she laughed harder—“it's not. You should have seen their faces! They about died of fright. They were scrubbing their whole bodies with Betadine!”

Ask her. Ask her,
I thought.

“What are you doing, Sidney? You riding much?”

“She's helping me out over at Oak Hill,” Wayne offered.

“Oh, really? How is old Dutch? He loosened up any? He's so tight, he squeaks when he walks.”

This meant that she'd tried to sell him a horse and he'd either gotten her down too low or hadn't met her price. Being Beezie, she'd been trying to take Dutch to the cleaners, and he wasn't having it.

We were off the subject . . . again. If he didn't bring it up soon, I was going to do it for him.

“We need an equitation horse. Sid qualified for the Maclay Regionals,” Wayne said. “She won a Maclay class on that jumper Idle Dice, Martha Wakefield's horse.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Beezie said quietly, sitting back in her chair and nearly boring holes through my head with her blue eyes.

“I figure I should go to the regionals,” I said.

She stared at me for what felt like a long, long time. “I went to the Medal Finals in 1975,” she said.

“I didn't know that!”

She shot a look at Wayne.

“I told her—she just forgot,” he lied.

“They're doing the Maclay Finals at the Garden this year. I saw it in the
Chronicle,
” she said. “So tell me about old Martha and that horse, Idle Dice.”

“I got to ride him in a show, and I decided to take him in an eq class, and we won. But now Martha's granddaughter is taking him to the regionals.”

“What's that horse like?”

“Big stride. Totally broke.”

“When you say ‘broke,' how broke?”

“Pushbutton.”

“Well, I don't have anything pushbutton,” she said sternly.

“Sid can ride anything, Beezie,” Wayne jumped in. “She just needs the closest thing you got to an eq horse.”

“I got a gray mare who is broke and sweet, loves to jump, supple, gets all her leads, rocking-horse canter. Snaps her knees right up under her chin and turns on a dime. But she's got a stop in her.”

A nightmare for an equitation rider.

“There's nothing you can do about it. She'll just decide to stop. All the schooling in the world hasn't broken her of this habit, so don't stay up all night trying to fix it. You'd just wear yourself out.”

I knew this wouldn't work. I couldn't get all the way to a horse show and have the horse refuse a fence.

“But that's all I got.”

“She sound?” Wayne asked.

“Of course she's sound. She trailers fine, cribs a little.” Meaning she chewed on the fence while sucking air—cribbing is the horse version of biting your fingernails, except horses can practically chew a barn down, so they wear a cribbing strap around their necks to stop it. “She's a good girl. But she's got a stop. She might get around twenty courses without refusing, or she might slam on the brakes at your first fence. It's a genuine stop, not a dirty stop.” She meant that the horse would stop because she was spooked, not because she was being dishonest and trying to throw the rider. “You could try to use her to qualify, but I wouldn't take her to the Garden. Might waste a lot of money that way.”

I took a deep breath and looked at Wayne. “How much for a three-week lease?” he asked.

Beezie laughed. “I'll let you borrow her for free. Maybe Sidney could come over and ride some sale horses for me this winter.”

“Sure,” I said.

We went outside and walked over the hill on the gravel road. Beezie opened the metal gate and banged on a feed bucket. Three horses came walking over the hill, and I saw the mare. She was dapple gray, dark mane and tail, a nice expression. Sure enough, she started cribbing on the fence.

Her name was Ruby.

We went back with a trailer and picked her up that night.

 

I told Edgar what I was doing, and he found me a new helmet, boots, and a coat. I didn't know whose they were. The coat was too big, but it was the best we could do. The boots were my first Ariat Monaco's, and boy, were they nice. Soft black leather, hidden zipper up the back so I didn't have to use boot pulls to get them on or a bootjack to pull them off. The person they belonged to must have had one leg larger than the other, because the right one gaped open a little at the top and I had to keep hiking it up. But I didn't mind.

I got on Ruby the first day after school. I trotted her over poles—no problem—and then we cantered a vertical —fine—and then I turned to do an outside line of two oxers. I thought about her stop, and sure enough, she stopped. She slammed on the brakes so hard, I fell onto her neck and did a flip over her head, landing on my knees in the dirt.

“Well, there it is,” said Wayne. I got up, tightened the girth, and got back on.

“Just over a plain old white oxer,” I said. “Wait until she gets in the ring and there are kids and dogs and all kinds of shadows.”

“Beezie said there wasn't no rhyme or reason,” he said. “Here's what I think: I think you forget that horse has a stop and you just take your chances. If you get it in your hea that she might stop, she'll sense it and she'll stop. She can tell you're worried.”

“She can't tell what I'm thinking.”

“The hell she can't. You tell me: were you thinking about the stop when she stopped?”

“No.”

“You're lying. I'm not saying the damn horse can read your mind, I'm saying you tense up just a tiny bit and it'll make her nervous. If she's one whisker nervous, she might stop. You look at that fence, and you think
jump!
”

I nodded.

“I wish Beezie had kept her big mouth shut about the stop,” he said.

A
T FOUR O'CLOCK
on a Saturday morning, less than two weeks after we'd gotten her, we loaded up Ruby and trailered her three hours to Warrenton. When we got there, the grooms were unloading the Oak Hill horses.

I started braiding Ruby's mane and realized that it looked horrible. I'd braided a few times before, but I had never gotten good at it. Show braids were supposed to look perfectly uniform and tight. The braids I had done were too fat, the yarn was too pale, and little hairs were sticking out all over the place. Plus every braid was a different size. I had tried to do it just like it said in
Practical Horseman;
I had separated the mane into perfectly uniform sections and clipped each one with a hair clip. But the mane was slippery so I couldn't get hold of it and so thick that each section was less than an inch wide. I knew I'd be doing it all day.

Wayne thought braiding was ridiculous, and he was no help. Edgar looked at Ruby and told me two things: one, I shouldn't have washed her mane—they're easier to braid when they're dirty—and two, I shouldn't have put ShowSheen in it. I hated that silicone spray but thought I had to use it, since it repels dirt. He said you use it after the horse is braided, but not on the mane. So I rewashed Ruby and tried again. It still looked horrible.

The lady who braided for hire was standing on a stool the next aisle over, wearing a tool belt with yarn, scissors, thread, and needles and working on a horse. I asked her how much braiding cost. She said it was a hundred and twenty dollars, which I didn't have, for the mane and tail. Wayne looked at his watch, said I had two hours and hadn't even schooled the horse, and told me I was second in the order of fifty riders. The lady said she'd do it for eighty this time. Wayne pursed his lips and reached for his wallet, peeling off four twenties. I was so relieved that I wanted to hug him, but he was too annoyed. I took the lady to Ruby, and she pulled up her stool and got to work, her fingers moving so fast that I couldn't see what she was doing. She sewed up each braid with thread and a needle, like a surgeon.

“Braiding a doggone horse's mane and tail for eighty dollars. I'm in the wrong business,” Wayne said. “This is the last time I ever pay for someone to braid your horse.”

I almost died when I saw the course. It was an indoor arena, and it was small, with terrible lights. If Ruby ever stopped, she'd stop there. The standards on one of the jumps were big fake Sauer's vanilla extract bottles left over from the Grand Prix class, sponsored by Sauer's. Wayne sucked on his dentures, walked around the ring a bunch of times. “I'm going to stand by that jump,” he said, pointing at the bottles. “When you come around, I'll cluck if she needs it.”

“As if that's going to make any difference. You heard Beezie—there's no rhyme or reason.”

“Just listen to me,” he said. “You go deep into that turn, and you collect her. You get her ass up under her, use a spur or leg or your stick—whatever. Get her collected and tight, ready to go.”

Forty minutes later, I was on course, for real. The first six fences were great, and then I came off the coop and had to cut around hard to the crazy fence with the bottles by the end of the ring. Ruby wouldn't have time to look at it. I thought
jump
like Wayne had said, and I sat up. Then I felt the horse suck back and look at the fence with her ears up. She was thinking about stopping. Wayne was standing by the rail, waiting to see what would happen.

I growled under my breath, “Git up, you bitch!” and I dug my outside spur into her right side as hard as I could, since I knew that was the direction she'd run out. She swished her tail, angry, and she galloped to the jump so hard, she nearly tore one Sauer's bottle down. But she jumped it, and she didn't even rub a rail. When I came out of the ring, Wayne grinned.

We watched all the other riders go. I couldn't find too many faults. One horse ran out and refused, a few rails were pulled here and there, another half a dozen or so were rubbed.

I had no idea how we'd done.

Wayne said he thought the judge had liked how I'd “cowboyed” Ruby over the jump. Some judges appreciated that, once in a while. He said they got tired of watching kids who were passengers instead of riders, and they wanted to see someone ride the damn horse, not just sit there and pose. That had never been a problem for me. Wayne thought I would place.

When it was over, they started reading our jog order, and they called me twentieth. Kelly placed fifth and was jumping up and down and shrieking. You had to get nineteeth or higher to qualify for the finals.

I'd missed it by one place.

I
LIKED OLD
R
UBY.
I rode her a few more times, and then we returned her to Beezie and I said goodbye. Beezie invited me to come ride again, and I knew I would.

It was the beginning of October, and it was really feeling like fall. I was already behind at school; I didn't feel too good about that. I had been reading the books Ms. Cash told me to read, but my midterm paper was late. She told me she wanted it done in two weeks or I was going to fail. I stayed up and wrote it in one night and then turned it in the next day.

I hadn't been speaking to Donald or Melinda at all. I was hardly ever home. One night when I was there, they called me into the living room and sat me down. Donald said he was planning to take that job in Bakersfield once it was official. My mother looked excited, and she let him do all the talking.

“Sidney, there are opportunities there for all of us,” he said.

I laughed. “I ain't going to California,” I said.

“You will if your mother tells you to. You're fourteen years old and you do as she says.”

“I ain't going.”

My mother looked upset. “I ain't leaving you here,” she said.

Donald cut a look her way when she said this, and I realized that
he
wanted to leave me here but she wouldn't. Well, Christ Almighty—maybe she did have a backbone. Maybe I could get her to stay.

“You can't make me move to California,” I told her.

“Where are you gonna live? Wayne's?”

“You're damn right,” I said.

“I won't allow it,” she said.

Donald stood up. “I'm taking that job, Melinda, so if you don't come with me, then you can just stay here by yourself.”

“Would you let us sort this out?” she snapped.

“Don't you raise your voice at me.”

“It would be nice if I could have a goddamn conversation with Sid without—”

He grabbed her by the arm and forced her backwards into the kitchen. She cried out, and I could tell it hurt.

“I sacrifice everything for you, and you sit here without a job doing nothing,” Donald roared. “Not even raising your kid. You just take my money and sit on your ass. Don't you swear at me.”

I thought about getting out that pistol and putting one between his eyes right then and there. I'd count to ten, and if he hadn't let go of her, then that was that. When I got to seven, he let her go and walked out the front door.

I could hear her crying. I went into the kitchen, and she was standing there like a scared dog.

“Get that man out of our house,” I said. I prayed, actually prayed, that she would say, “Yes, I know.” I prayed to God in my head,
Please, please, please . . .

But she didn't say anything. I stood there waiting for her to settle down so we could figure this out the way we used to figure things out.