The Last Summer of the Camperdowns (17 page)

His attention was on me, the fierce unblinking intensity of his gaze holding me in place like an unspoken threat.

“Gula, you remember Harry, Michael Devlin’s son,” Gin said. “You met him the night of the fundraiser. We watched him ride at . . .”

“Yes,” he said, extending his hand, cutting off Gin. “I remember you. A wonderful way with a horse.”

“I understand we have you to thank for this guy,” Harry said, jumping from the top of the fence down to the ground, indicating with a nod the Gypsy stallion, as their hands briefly locked. “Well done.”

I drew solace from the familiar formal melody of his private-school boy’s lilting patois even as I suppressed the urge to make fun.

“Yes, well . . .” Gula said, averting his gaze, his eyes shooting about and finally settling on my mother and me. He nodded and withdrew his hand from Harry’s friendly clasp. Was I the only one to notice that he wiped a flattened palm on his pants?

“Hello, Gula,” my mother said, avoiding any sort of direct contact.

“Yes, yes.” He just kept nodding. “Then there’s you,” he said, pointing to me. “Hello, little partner.”

“Hi,” I said, choking out a greeting. Partner? The tension between us was so palpable it provoked comment from my mother.

“What’s all this about?” she asked, looking as puzzled as her nature would permit.

Gula’s mouth contorted into a grotesque impersonation of delight. “Should I tell her?” he said.

I could hardly hear him over the din and clatter of all my internal organs in screaming collision with one another. Staring back at him, practically blithering, I scrambled to regain my equilibrium. My voice box went into spasm as I felt my throat close up.

“Tell her what?” my mother demanded.

“Nothing. It was nothing. Young people. I found her in the stable with a boy. It was the day of the fire. I told her I would keep her little secret.”

What was he doing? I looked down at my feet and watched as an invisible snake wrapped itself around my legs, my waist, my torso, squeezing the life out of me.

“I think it would be fun to let it out. No harm now. Well, she has probably told you herself. Girls this age cannot keep secrets.”

“Riddle? What boy? What is he talking about?” My mother started firing off questions in brisk, purposeful succession as if she was skeet shooting and I was a plate that needed shattering.

“I . . .” I looked at all those pairs of eyes focused on my face and I could not speak.

“Didn’t you say he was a boy you went to school with? You showed him the foals. He wanted to see the babies and so you showed him. Then he left. Wasn’t that the story?” Gula asked me.

I looked into his eyes and I nodded.

“Oh, my God! What’s this? You never mentioned anything about some boy. Now we have some strange boy on the premises doing heaven knows what?” Gin said.

Was it my imagination or was Harry looking at me funny?

“Hair like his,” Gula said, pointing to a stray pile of desiccated leaves trapped at the bottom of a rotting fence post. “Same color. A bit like Harry’s. Like autumn or like smoldering fire.”

“Like fire? Jesus, there’s a Freudian twist if ever I’ve heard one!” Gin proclaimed.

“Poor choice of words,” Gula said. “Anyway, this is the girl with the fire-colored hair,” he said, pointing to me. “This hair could cause a conflagration.” He laughed. I examined the faces around me. Was I the only one drowning in all that slyness?

“What’s his name, Riddle? I demand to know,” my mother said.

“I forget his name,” I said, speaking so softly that everyone leaned in to hear me. “He was just some boy.”

“Just some boy,” Gula echoed. “Not important. That’s right. That’s how it seemed to me. A boy who didn’t matter at all.”

“Everyone matters,” Gin corrected, master of the meaningless.

“Thank you, Pope Paul,” my mother said.

“Yes, of course,” Gula said, simultaneously solemn and ridiculous. “I meant only that he was harmless. A nice boy. The situation was benign.” Gula laughed.

“So you were alone in a stable with a boy you either can’t—or refuse to—identify, a boy you met in secret, a boy who appeared and disappeared on the same day as the fire,” my mother said, looking me over as if she was meeting me for the first time. She paused to consider for a moment, the three men watching her intently as she smoked and thought. “All right, then,” she said, abruptly dismissing the whole matter, her expression visibly lightening. Even to the least astute observer—that would be Gin—it was obvious that she’d never been more proud.

“Like mother, like daughter,” Gin said, striking out in lame fashion. It was a ludicrous thought, or so I assumed. My mother had led me to believe that our toaster had a more interesting sexual history than she did.

“Sexual preoccupation is endemic to adolescence. Among adults, it’s symptomatic of mental retardation,” she used to say. As for me, the closest I had ever come to a romantic entanglement occurred when one of the basset hounds pinned me down on the sofa and licked ice cream from my face.

“Funny, I used the identical expression just the other day to describe you and Mirabel,” she shot back at Gin as Harry unsuccessfully tried to conceal a laugh.

“All right, Greer. It was just a joke. You know how to laugh, don’t you? Anyway, I don’t know how happy I am about this news concerning some mysterious boy,” Gin said, continuing to pout.

“Now we know,” my mother said, briskly uncaring. “As for me, I can think of nothing less interesting than the activities of children, secret or otherwise.” She prodded Gin in another direction: “So what’s this Gypsy horse’s name?”

“Zindelo,” Gin said. “A traditional Romany name. Don’t you just love it?”

“No, I dislike it intensely. Too blatantly ethnic. It makes him sound positively Polish. If you’re going for a Gypsy theme, there are other more apt choices. What about Pickpocket? Grifter?”

“Jesus,” Harry said, looking at Gula and trying to discern his reaction.

“Greer, you are incorrigible,” Gin said.

“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” she said. “Gula’s not a child. He’s an adult. Adults have no business being offended.”

“It’s bad luck to change a horse’s name,” Gula said, ignoring my mother’s obvious insults.

“I’d risk it,” she said. “Zindelo creates the impression that he just cleared inspection at Ellis Island.”

Gin looked worried. “Oh dear, Greer may have a point.”

Gula’s eyes darkened. He smiled. “Why not let young Mr. Devlin name him? Maybe that will remove the curse of ethnicity.”

“See? Not offended in the least. I applaud your sophistication, Gula.” My mother’s condescension was her art. She applied it in thick oily dabs, everyone she met a potential canvas.

“Oh, I like that idea. What say you, Harry?” Gin was mere decibels from squealing.

Harry, simple snaffle bridle in hand, bemused and polite, looking as if he had inadvertently stumbled down the rabbit hole, shook his head slightly and shot me a glance, both amused and empathetic, before answering.

“Thanks, but I think Greer should do the honors. It was her idea.” He bent over to adjust his boot and whispered to me on the way down, “. . . and I don’t give a flying fuck.”

“Yes, fine. Greer, what do you suggest?” Gin’s voice sounded strained. He yawned and licked his lips. I knew what was coming next. “I’m exhausted,” he said.

“You were born exhausted,” my mother said, making us wait as she lit a cigarette and considered her options. “Boomslang,” she said. “What about Boomslang?”

“I love it . . . I think . . .” Gin said, stealing a glance at my mother, using all of his limited powers of deduction to determine her true intent. The simultaneous shift of her shoulder and eyebrow was enough to persuade him that she wasn’t testing him just so she could subsequently ridicule him.

“It’s fun to say,” Harry said. “I like it. What does it mean? Where did you come up with that?”

“The boomslang is a venomous snake,” my mother said. “Deadly. Secretive. Hard to detect. Patient. Lies in wait. Mercifully unsentimental.”

“Oh, my,” Gin said. “I’m not sure I like that.”

“I do,” my mother said, as if her approval was all that counted. “You want him to be taken seriously, don’t you? He’s beautiful, Gin, but there is such a thing as being too beautiful, you know. You don’t want him to be self-parodying.”

“Boomslang it is, then,” Gin proclaimed, trying to make it sound as if it was his decision.

“Good,” Harry said. “Now maybe I can do what I came here to do and ride this fantastic horse of yours.”

“Where’s your saddle?” I asked him.

He waved me off, dismissing the idea. “Saddles are for girls,” he said as I bristled. We all watched him pop over the fence and introduce himself to Boomslang with a carrot he pulled from his jeans pocket. He took his time fitting the bridle, all the while talking to the horse as its ears flicked responsively. With reins in one hand, the other hand gripping that Veronica Lake–style mane, Harry hoisted himself onto the stallion’s short, thick back and spent several minutes hacking around the paddock’s outside perimeter, circling several jumps that were set up in the middle of the large ring.

Horses are not natural jumpers; left to their own devices they prefer a flight pattern free of obstacles. Horses run on the straightaway; they leap over objects that get in their way only because they have no choice. I was still sitting on the top rung of the paddock, Gin standing next to me, the two of us riveted by Harry and Boomslang as they smoothly looped in and around the ring. Gula and my mother were talking together, an incongruous coupling—Satan and Morgan le Fay in terrifying conference—the two of them watching from beneath the big oak tree a few yards away.

A rider like Harry makes other riders jealous. He sure as hell made my mother jealous. It was so obvious she might as well have hired a plane and written her invidious feelings across the sky in green smoke. She was smiling too much, for one thing, and humming, for another. My mother always hummed when she was most annoyed.

“Snakes rattle, dogs growl, your mother hums,” Camp said of her propensity for offering up a musical prelude before launching a full-scale attack.

Boomslang was approaching a small jump in a controlled but brisk canter. Just as he hit the conventional takeoff point, he hesitated and appeared to stop; at the same time, Gula, watching from the sidelines, suddenly, forcibly called out Harry’s name. Unprepared for the horse’s peculiar stalling tactic, Harry, who looked up spontaneously at the call of his name, went sailing straight into the jump, made crashing contact and landed with a loud thud on his hip, then tumbled onto his knees.

“Oh, sorry,” Gula said, walking quickly toward me, my mother following. “I just wanted to warn him about the horse.”

“I’m okay,” Harry said, dusting himself off as he reached for my hand and I helped pull him to his feet.

“Ouch,” he said, trying to put his full weight on both feet. “That hurts.”

He unself-consciously unzipped his jeans and, letting them fall to his knees, turned his neck and inclined his head to check out the damage. The side of his leg, his knee and his left hip were badly scraped and had already begun to change color. For that matter, so had I.

“Harry, pull up your pants,” my mother said. “For heaven’s sake, consider Riddle.”

“You’re lucky that you don’t have more than the sight of my ass to complain about,” Harry said, surprising everyone with his authority.

My mother checked herself. “I’m sorry, Harry. Gula was just telling me that Boomslang has an eccentric approach . . .”

“Yes, this is my fault. I didn’t know you were going to attempt a jump. I should have mentioned his, what do you call it, tic?” Gula’s apology was spectacularly unconvincing.

“I think I could’ve figured that out on my own, thanks. Jesus, what were you thinking?” Harry wasn’t fooling around. Where was the mannerly, manageable private-school boy?

“Forgive me, Harry. I assure you that I had your best interests at heart. I was trying to warn you. It was a stupid thing to do. Right reason, wrong deed,” Gula offered up with a shrug, turning the familiar maxim on its head.

“Yeah, it was stupid, all right,” Harry said. He reached down and hitched his pants back up. He seemed to relent a little. “Forget it. I’m okay.”

“I want you to see the doctor. Gula, get Fiona Roberts on the phone,” Gin said. “Your father will have my head over this.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Harry said. “It’s only a bruise. No big deal. What do you think I’m going to do, run home and tell my old man I fell on the playground? You’re not my babysitter.”

“Anyone who rides can expect to fall occasionally,” my mother said. “It’s what we sign on for, after all.” She wrapped her arm around Harry’s waist. “Here, let me help you into the house. It’s the least I can do.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need any help,” Harry said, taking a step forward.

But he did need help and Gula stepped up to offer his shoulder for Harry to lean on.

“Are you coming, Riddle?” My mother, who had been following the men, stopped and looked back at me as I watched them from beneath the oak tree.

“In a minute,” I said.

“Suit yourself.”

T
HE SOLES OF MY
boots chipped away at the ground, a pattern of scrapes leaving their mark in the clay. Boomslang cantered alongside the paddock fence, mane and tail blowing, the only sound the thud of his hooves beating out a rhythm on the hard clay track.

The screen door opened and banged shut. I looked up. Gula was standing on the porch watching me, not speaking. We stared at each other, both of us silent and expressionless, sepulchral stillness filling the air like incense, conjoining us, seeping into my brain, this taciturn partnership of ours a kind of ceremonial dirge.

A groundhog popped out of his hole. He was shouting, a series of discordant cries shattering the silence, taut and strained, his ordinary vocalizations breaking down, degenerating into a long litany of fearful calling. He was sending out a warning to the other animals: predator. I looked around and saw the gray outline of a coyote on the edge of the forest. Boomslang snorted and whinnied. The birds overhead shrieked.