Catch Rider (9780544034303) (21 page)

We brought Sonny into the tiny warm-up ring, where about six horses were being schooled. A man stopped us and asked for our official warm-up time. I didn't know what he was talking about.

“You mean to tell me we have to sign up to school the damn horse?” Wayne said.

The man looked at his clipboard, flipped through some papers. “We're full.”

Full?

“But I might have a spot . . .”

I let out my breath.

“Three o'clock tomorrow morning.”

“You gotta be kidding me!” said Wayne.

“That's all we got.”

That poor horse wasn't going to know what hit him when I tacked him up at two thirty in the morning. He'd probably sleepwalk through the whole thing and kill us both.

The official started talking to someone else, and we decided to let the horse look around.

That was when I really started worrying.

The schooling area was about a third the size of a normal one, with metal columns that the riders had to maneuver around. It was plain crazy to ride a horse in a place like that. And the worst part was the noise—every time a horse whinnied, the sound bounced around so you didn't know where it was coming from.

Sonny was jigging on and off and not responding to my legs. I patted him behind the saddle and on the neck and told him it was okay. Then I sat up and tried to get him forward on the bit, but it only made him jig harder.

“Easy,” I said, trying to sound calm. But I sounded shaken up, and I was.

The horse was as tight as a drum, and there was no place to ride him down, no field to turn him out in. He felt like he was about to explode, and my mind jumped around, trying to come up with a way to make him feel better. If we were at home, I'd take him for a ride in the woods. Not here.

A trainer was watching from the side of the ring. “Is this the first time he's been to a show?” he said.

The trainer looked like a mannequin in a department store. His collar was crisply folded over his down vest. His jeans were clean and pressed. His dark brown paddock boots didn't have even a scuff on the toe.

I didn't know what to say to him. He probably wasn't asking because he cared. It seemed as though everywhere I looked, people were sizing me up.

“Put him back in his stall,” said Wayne, ignoring the trainer. “He needs to quiet down and get used to the place. Just give him some hay and leave him alone today.”

“The show starts tomorrow!”

“You can't ride him until three o'clock in the morning, honey.” He yawned.

“People are looking at us,” I said.

“Screw them,” he said, and he meant it.

Sometimes I loved that nasty old man.

“I'm going back to get some rest,” he said. “Didn't sleep a wink all night, with those people jabbering outside.”

That was the beginning of the day before the championship: the longest day of my life.

I
PUT
S
ONNY BACK
in his stall and hung up his tack. He was looking at everything, pacing, wearing a ditch in the shavings. He ignored his hay, stuck his head over the door, raised his nose, and sniffed the air, trying to smell the other horses. He was a herd animal stuck in a box underground, a nightmare for him. The other horses had spent years learning how to do this, accompanying seasoned horses to shows, slowly building up to it. But not Sonny. I decided to leave him alone.

In the next stall was a beautiful chestnut gelding with big eyes. Two girls were taking pictures of him, feeding him snacks, and sweet-talking him. One girl, the chatty one, was tall and had long curly brown hair; the other one was little and quiet, with a tight blond ponytail and bright eyes.

“He'll eat anything. Watch this,” said the chatty one to the other. She gave the horse a granola bar, and he took it in his mouth and chewed. A wave of drool spilled out the sides.

They laughed. The horse nodded for more.

“I can't wait until we go to Florida.”

“When's the first show?”

“I'll ask my mom.”

The chestnut horse kept nodding for food, and the girls stroked his face.

“Ernie, you are so silly,” the taller one gushed.

I wasn't used to seeing people enjoy themselves like this at a show, not after all the time I'd spent around Kelly.

The brown-haired girl hugged the horse around the neck while he chewed. “I want to keep him forever,” she said.

It had to be one of those hundred-thousand-dollar lease horses.

“Will you braid my hair?” she asked her friend.

“Sure.”

The blond one hopped up onto a step stool and started combing the other one's hair.

“Use the purple yarn to match Ernie's braids.”

“Okay!”

I stood there by Sonny's stall watching them. They weren't like the girls at Oak Hill. These girls seemed carefree and happy, as if nothing in the world mattered.

I walked over to the arena.
I'm in Madison Square Garden,
I told myself. There were flags from other countries hanging down, and there were electronic letters on a ticker floating by underneath them: “
ASPCA MACLAY FINALS,
” over and over.

I sat in the stands. It was nine o'clock in the morning, and there were about two dozen other people sitting in the seats while the crew dragged the arena, smoothing it out and getting ready to start building the course.

I saw one girl standing by the in-gate nervously tapping her foot. A man who I guessed was her father walked over to her, and she snapped at him to leave her alone.

Two women sat down in front of me. They were pretty, with nice sweaters, jewelry, and clean dark blue jeans.

“I know four girls applying for a spot in the ninth grade,” said one.

“How many of them are Greystone material?”

“Seriously.”

“When you talk to that admissions person, show total respect. Whatever it takes. Cry if you have to. Beg.”

“Whatever it takes,” the other agreed.

“You know what they say—if you don't want to play by the rules, don't play.”

“Of course. We're playing.”

“And then the girls will be in the same class!”

“Knock on wood.”

“Knock on wood.”

“I don't know what I'll do if she has to go to public school.”

She turned and caught me looking at her. Very quickly, her eyes moved from my face down to my feet and then away.

Something told me these ladies weren't there because they loved horses.

I left and walked through the stable area. Grooms were washing, feeding, cleaning stalls, soaking and wrapping legs, clipping. Hardly any riders in sight. A big black horse leaned on his canvas webbing and pawed loudly on the concrete. His groom whistled and swept along, swatting the horse's feet out of the aisle.

I saw a sticker on a tack trunk that said “Live your dreams.” Everywhere I looked these days, I saw stickers and mugs and posters that told people to live their dreams, as if the only way to be alive was to go for it. That was true if you didn't fail. If you failed, people thought you were a fool. I wondered if the people who said to live your dreams were going to pay my rent when living my dreams didn't work out.

I looked at the groom sweeping and whistling. I had more in common with him than with those ladies talking by the ring, and it wasn't because they had money. They thought they were winning at a game that the rest of us were losing. This groom sweeping the floor in a neat pattern, getting his work done early, loving his job—he wasn't losing anything. He was playing a different game.

I was waiting for the officials to post the course and the “order of go.” Then I'd know how much time I had to braid. If I braided today, the day before, Sonny might rub the braids out. And somehow I had to find time to sleep, because my schooling time was at three o'clock in the morning.

When I went back to the stalls, there was Sub, standing loose in the aisle, eating hay. He could have run out the damn doors and right down Thirty-Fourth Street if he'd wanted to. One of the girls I'd been watching before, the one with dark hair, was putting a halter on him.

“He's an escape artist!” she said when she saw me coming. “I'm Caroline,” she said, patting Sub. “And this is Laura.”

“Hi. I'm Sid.”

We smiled at each other, and I put Sub back in his stall. This time I clipped all three snaps of the webbing to the eyehooks so he wouldn't get out.

“He's sweet.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you bring him for company?” Caroline asked.

I nodded. “Is that your horse?” I asked, pointing at the chestnut.

“I borrowed him from a lady I ride for,” she said. “Just for the show. Dollar lease. I can't afford an eq horse.” She smiled a little and shrugged. I didn't realize kids at this level dollar-leased, too.

“I did that once,” I said, thinking about Ruby, although I'd never given Beezie a dollar and we'd never written up a lease. We'd just put a halter on Ruby and loaded her up.

Caroline gestured toward Sonny. “Is he your horse?” she asked.

“My uncle's,” I said.

“He's cute. A little nervous, but he'll settle down,” Laura said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You guys don't seem nervous.”

“Oh, we're freaking out. But what can you do?” she said. “You come here, you ride, you try not to kill yourself, and you go home and get ready for the next show.”

I had always thought I'd never make friends with girls who showed horses. They were usually all kinds of mean and snobby. But girls like these two could be my friends. They were happy. I didn't think you were allowed to be happy until you were at least twenty-two.

A trainer appeared, and she seemed in a hurry. I'd seen her in
Practical Horseman
but I didn't know her name. She was big and round with a long blond braid—preppy, with an alligator on her shirt and a pink leather belt with gold shells that connected in the middle.

She stopped in front of Caroline and Laura and took a dramatic breath.

“Girls, they posted the course.”

The girls followed her down the aisle.

I couldn't move.

Laura turned around and waved for me to join them. “Come on!” she said, and I did.

Near the ring, coaches and riders were gathered around a bulletin board. Right in front of it was Wayne.

Before I could get over to him, I heard Wes's voice. “Sid, you drew second.”

I turned around, so glad to see him. “Hi!” I said. “When is your schooling time? Where are your stalls?”

Kelly came up next to him. “Hi, Sid,” she said. “You hear what Wes said?”

My brain was frozen.

“You're second,” she said.

I was going second. Out of two hundred.

Wes grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me toward Wayne. “Go look at the course.”

Wayne was rubbing his whiskers and looking at the course diagram, his brow wrinkled. I wanted to see but there were riders in my way. I finally squeezed through and tried to concentrate on the course.

It started with an oxer, then a hard turn to a skinny vertical. Then a tight 270-degree turn to an in-and-out. Then a rollback to an airy fan jump, then a combination of three fences: oxer, vertical, oxer. Then a deep turn into the corner, and the killer: a combination of two fences so close to the corner of the ring that they would seem to pop up out of nowhere to the horse and rider on course. Finally, for the eleventh and twelfth jumps, a right-angle turn coming off the tenth to another airy vertical, and a complete 180-degree turn before a hard right into the final fence, a big wall.

I heard a girl suck in her breath as she studied the diagram. “It's okay, honey—everyone has to do the same course,” her mom said.

The ring crew was putting up the jumps in front of us. The fences looked huge.

Dutch dismounted and talked intently to Kelly, pointing at the course. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I could see him gesturing for her to ride forward, ride strong. Then I heard him say the word
bold.

“Riders, you may walk the course,” said the announcer.

The trainers got in there first, and their riders fell into line behind them. The trainers reminded me of generals storming a battlefield. They took long, confident strides in their black leather boots as they walked, fence by fence.

Wayne and I walked the course side by side. “One fence at a time, honey, one fence at a time,” he said.

We counted strides. I had never done this seriously before. I usually just used my eye to pick a takeoff spot. We started at the base of the fence and took two normal steps. That was for landing. Then we took long steps toward the next fence, three of our steps equaling one of Sonny's. Then the last two normal steps were for takeoff. I could hear coaches and riders debating the length of each line. Boy, was this complicated.

Sonny had a big stride, but not enormous. He could play things long, like pull a five-stride distance into four, but I could also get five strides out of him. That meant I needed to use my eye and not count too much. As if reading my mind, Wayne said, “Use your eye. No counting in the ring.” I nodded. We counted only to figure out if we needed to collect our horses or lengthen their strides.

“Riders, please leave the ring,” the announcer said.

“You need to sleep,” Wayne said.

As if I could.

We checked the horses, and then Wayne walked me back to the hotel. When we got to our room, Wayne turned on the television, and I lay down and passed out until two o'clock in the morning.

R
IDE HIM DOWN
, just ride him down,” Wayne said. I'd need a ring the size of a racetrack to ride him down. Sonny had tried to bolt when I tacked him up and got on, a little before three o'clock. I stayed off his back and let him trot around as fast as he wanted. When he pulled on my arms, I let him have as much rein as I could so he wouldn't start fighting me. Now he was looking at everything, everywhere. His back was so tight, I was afraid he'd pull something. I felt trapped in that underground cave with a crazy horse and no relief in sight. The biggest competition of my life.