Half Broke

by Ginger Gaffney

  “Are you going to ride her first or am I?” her owner asked.

  I laughed so hard that my microphone squealed. The crowd joined in the laughter. Coco’s owner was confused. She had asked a serious question, the only one she knew to ask.

  “Can someone bring me my rope halter and lunge rope, please?” I directed toward the crowd, then I went to work trying to keep Coco’s feet on the ground. She seemed like a joyful mare when she first entered, but as soon as I asked her to put her left front leg there and her right hind leg here, her ears fired flat back, her lips peeled open, and she charged me with her teeth. I jumped to the side avoiding a strike and kept up my business of putting her hooves where I wanted them to be. It was clear why Coco had drawn a crowd. She wasn’t going to give me anything for free.

  I whistled, carefree, into the mic ignoring the hostile look on her face. I spun my lead rope around her flank, up toward her ribcage, near her shoulder. Each time asking her to put her hooves in a specific place, a thing so simple most horses agree and abide quite quickly. Not Coco. Those were her feet. Her only chance to protect her authority. They were her main tool for flight, for safety and food, and for all the other necessary things in a horse’s life. No, I could not have her feet. If I was in front of her, she would lunge at me with her mouth. If I was behind or beside her, she’d fire and try to land a kick. I worked her for almost two hours each day until she attempted to give me at least half of what I was asking.

  By the third afternoon of the clinic, I had Coco standing still to be mounted, jumping three-foot fences, and walking quietly through a grassy field. Three things she had never done in her life. Her owner was giddy with excitement over the progress.

  “I still don’t know how you did it,” she said to me on our last day.

  “I made a deal with her,” I explained. “I told her where I wanted her to go, then let her choose how fast she wished to get there. I only took half of her freedom away.”

  JOEY CLIMBS THROUGH the rails of the round pen. He has his white high-top sneakers on, black jeans two sizes too big with a rope tied around the waistband, and a bright yellow hoodie rolled over his head. Luna spins away when he enters and sets herself against the opposite wall, parallel to Joey. I watch them from outside the pen. The wind picks up a dust devil and spins itself around us. Dust, manure, and small pebbles clink against the rails. Luna startles. Joey, nothing. Not even the slightest flinch. I close my eyes. The dust stuffs itself up my already dried-out sinuses. I scratch away the dirt stuck inside the corner of my eyes and wipe my lips clean of grit. When I open my eyes, Joey looks like a stone.

  I am going to wait. Not say a word. Joey will ask for what he needs when he’s ready. I know that about him now. Luna lengthens her neck toward the ground, it arches defiantly. She is not interested in eating. She throws her left front hoof into the air, smacks it onto the ground, and starts pawing. Is she mad? Does she want him out of there? Snort. A gruff, blunt blow from Luna’s nostrils, and her neck straightens. Her head raises. She twists toward Joey, expectant. She wants him to move. She wants him to be alive. She picks up her left hock and bends it underneath her body, turning her left hip off to the right. Perpendicular now to the rail, she faces Joey straight on. She has that worried look again. She’s concerned about the lifeless man in front of her. She takes a step forward, right at him. They are thirty feet apart. Joey backs up; his butt hits the rail. He stumbles. Luna stops. He moved. He’s alive.

  “What does she want?” Joey asks.

  “She wants you to move,” I say.

  Luna has on her purple-and-red halter. She has had it on for a little over a year. She won’t let us take it off, and I decided maybe that was best. Who knows, if we take it off, we may never get it back on.

  “Go somewhere. She doesn’t know what you are. You have to move!”

  Joey walks off to the left, staring at the ground. With his yellow hoodie and black pants, he looks like a giant yellow-headed blackbird inching his way around the pen. His white sneakers scuff to orange as he shuffles, not much bend to his knees. He drags his legs along like ancient walking sticks. Luna turns on her haunches. Her ears are darts that follow Joey around the pen. She is fine with Joey doing all the work. She pivots easily. Like a coach studying her player, critical and assessing each mechanical movement: his breath becoming short and fast, his right toe stubbing the dirt harder than his left, his left arm swinging half the distance of his right. As he passes me, I can see he feels ridiculous. He rolls his eyes up to his brow and pinches his lips downward. He wants to touch her, to hold the intimacy he feels when he grooms her. He wants her close, but if he advances, she will run. Her first instinct to flee from humans still works in her favor. Joey looks up from under the hoodie. Three of his dormmates are cruising by, and it’s obvious he feels embarrassed. He looks back down.

  “Hey, E, what you doing dude, playing Ring Around the Rosie?” They laugh.

  Joey doesn’t look up. Says nothing. He’s getting anxious. Holding his breath. Wagging his torso back and forth as he walks away from the guys. I can hear him mumbling under his breath. From around the corner, by the cottonwood tree, the ranch dogs come sprinting. Barking and chasing four wild kittens underneath the old chicken coop. Luna flies across the pen. Joey darts away from her. Tony and Randy run over and pull the dogs off. They take them back to the dining hall to pen them up. Joey walks up to the rail that faces the dilapidated coop, just a few feet away from the round pen, and calls for the kittens. We have been trying to catch them for weeks, their mother no longer around.

  “Kitty, kitty,” Joey sings.

  He has forgotten all about Luna for a moment as he calls out to the kittens.

  “Here, kitty, kitty.”

  I walk around the outside of the pen, close to the chicken coop. Luna takes a few steps toward Joey as he continues his song. “Kitty, kitty, kitty.”

  The kittens come out from under the coop. Four black and one white with black socks. Luna has moved in closer to see them. She is about five feet behind Joey, with her neck pushed forward and her haunches bunched up underneath, ready to spring back in reverse if necessary. She takes a few last steps and settles alongside Joey’s shoulder. She reaches her neck over the top rail and stretches down to touch the kittens. Joey turns his neck halfway. The corner of his eye meets hers. He turns back to the kittens. They are curling their backs upward and scratching themselves on the fence posts down by his feet.

  “Ginger, can you go get the cat carrier from the barn?” he asks me.

  I head to the barn to find the carrier. It is stuck behind two dusty, old saddles. Heading back toward the round pen, I see the backside of Luna and Joey, standing right next to each other, staring down at the kittens.

  Joey bends and reaches through the rail to pick up one of the kittens, who is rubbing his little arching back on his leg. Joey turns and walks across the pen toward me. I have the carrier in my arms. Luna walks behind him. Her nostrils are back to work. Poking her nose into Joey’s arms, trying to get a good sniff. He hands me the kitten and chuckles. A sheepish grin covers his face as he turns and goes back for the other three kittens, with Luna in tow.

  All four kittens are in the carrier: purring, scratching, and crying. Joey goes to the center of the pen and Luna follows. He takes his time. Turns and faces her. Reaches out to scratch her, and she stays. She drops her head. He removes his hoodie. He grooms her across the neck and up to her withers, using his nails to scratch the itch beneath her dirty coat.

  His face opens to a smile. His back is straight. He moves his arms up and over Luna’s body without hesitation, like he’s done this all his life.

  “Can I take her halter off?” Joey asks me.

  I hesitate with surprise. No, he can’t take off the halter. We’ll never get it back on, I say to myself. Any time we move too fast toward Luna’s face she shies and whips her head around, often knocking a resident backward and off their feet. I’ve been worried that one day she’s going to rea
lly hurt someone. She has not forgotten her injury, guarding herself at all cost. Over the last year, we haven’t come very far with Luna. Looking at her now, I wonder if this is the time to try something new. I don’t want to rope her again. I look at Joey and Luna, standing as a pair now.

  “Well, maybe. Unbuckle the halter, slide it off her nose—only partway—then put it back on. I want to see how she’ll do.”

  Joey scratches Luna under the halter and behind her ears where the hair is matted down into thick clumps. He lifts the noseband and scratches the bald space where the halter has rubbed the hair away. White flakes of dry, crusty skin flick into the air. Luna is rolling her tongue around in her mouth like a lollipop. She swallows. She yawns. She drops her head some more. Joey reaches for the brass buckle and pulls out the metal pin that locks it in place. He slides the noseband halfway off her face and then raises it again. Buckles it. He looks at me. I nod to go ahead. He releases the buckle again, slides the noseband off Luna’s face, and places the halter on the ground. The scar is now visible. Six inches in a zigzag crack that goes from the middle of her nose to the corner of her left eye. Some hair has grown back but it’s spotty, scar tissue fills in the blank spaces. Joey rubs her face with the blunt end of his fingertips.

  Luna leans in, her head almost touching his chest.

  ROOTBEER

  April / 2014

  “We haven’t had her out in a good while,” the tall cowboy who meets me at the horse shelter gate tells me. He squashes his flapping cowboy hat to his head, then reaches into the rear pocket of his tight-fitting jeans for a pinch of chewing tobacco. He opens his mouth to press the lump into his already balled-up cheek. I can see his teeth are stained the color of dark coffee. “I’d train her myself if I could, she’s my favorite,” he murmurs through the wad in his mouth.

  “What’s her name?” I ask him.

  “We call her Rootbeer. I’ve been trying to get the boss to let me work her.” He tucks the tin back into his pocket. “They tell me I’m too tall. But I like ’em short and agile, like her. She’ll work out for you. You’ll just have to get her mind.”

  He’s half my age, with half my experience, and still he’s free to give me advice.

  Two weeks earlier my veterinarian had called to ask if I wanted to participate in the first one-hundred-day horse challenge for the Santa Fe Horse Shelter. The shelter is a nonprofit that takes in unwanted horses. Each trainer will train a shelter horse for one hundred days. There will be a competition to choose the winner, and an auction afterward to place the horses into good homes.

  I wasn’t interested at first. My summer schedule was already filling up, and it was only the middle of March. When I saw her photo on the horse shelter’s website, I changed my mind. It could be a good challenge for the residents, I thought. Eliza and Tony would love to have another horse to work. Except for Luna, all the ranch horses are going well under saddle. I printed the photograph and took it over to the ranch. Everyone gathered around to get a closer look.

  “She is cute,” Tony spoke up first. “I’d love to work with her. Look at those eyes.”

  In March, Tony, Randy, and I had our one-year anniversary, with Eliza coming in a few months later. Tony is a different man. He greets me with long hugs and fills my ear about how well the horses and residents are doing. His hair, which was a patchwork of haphazard fuzz, has grown in thick and shiny. He parts it to the side now. He has a new set of upper and lower teeth that at first pushed his lips away from his face, making him look like he was ready for a permanent kiss. His lips finally relaxed and rested back against his teeth. Where once there were only gums and a few broken, gray snags of enamel, there are now big, white, friendly incisors.

  “You think we can do it?” Randy asked, and before I could say a word, Eliza jumped in.

  “Of course, Randy. I mean, look what we’ve done with Estrella, Hawk, Scout, and Billy this last year.”

  I KNEW I did not want to do this alone. The thought of us working as a team excited me. If we could do this together, train Rootbeer in one hundred days, we could find her a new home and get her out of the shelter. We could give her a new beginning, a fresh new start.

  She came from east of Albuquerque, I was told by the shelter staff, skinny as a rail, alongside her mother and brother. Each of them two to three hundred pounds underweight. They were found in an abandoned corral, no food or water for who knows how long. Her brother didn’t make it. He died a few days after their arrival at the shelter.

  She is small yet put together like some of the best cutting horses I’ve seen. Her head, her neck, her back and loin all look of equal length and size. Nothing is out of place. Like the body of a perfectly balanced dancer. Without even watching her take a step, I can already see how beautifully her body will move.

  She watches me as I stand on the other side of her water tank. She seems honest and interested, but there’s something else, too—something certain, something claimed, something she’ll have to let go. When I walk toward her with a lead rope, she lopes off like a deer to the far corner of her corral.

  “Here, let me help you, miss.” The skinny cowboy walks up behind me with his lariat coiled in his hand.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got it. I’m good.” I turn halfway around and give him a big western nod. He stops in his tracks.

  Rootbeer bends around to face me as I come near. I stop thirty feet in front of her, feeling like just a few feet closer and she might run. Instead she walks off to her right. Her stride is equal and cadenced. The length and strength of her hindquarters helps her cover a good deal of ground for a small horse. She’ll be great on the trails, I think to myself. I follow her, walking parallel with her line of travel, lining my body with the middle of her ribcage. She stops, then bends around again, watching me, then turns and walks to the left. I pivot and mimic her movement. We do this back-and-forth thing for a few short minutes before she faces me, pauses, takes four strides toward me, and stands quietly. She seems to think I know what I’m doing.

  The competition will be in early July. There are nine very good trainers in the event. Ten total, including us. It doesn’t matter if we win. What matters is that we help Rootbeer leave the shelter and get a new home.

  I reach over Rootbeer’s neck and tie a knot in my rope halter next to her cheek. She follows me out of the corral and down a sandy alley that passes a dozen or more shelter horses. All the horses run to the top of their corrals to watch her pass. She squeals at them. She pins her ears. She lifts one hind leg up in a gesture of get back. Already, I know she’s the right horse for us.

  “She ain’t been in no trailer since she came here, miss.” The cowboy returns with his lariat. He spits a thin stream of chew from the corner of his lip. “I can put a rope behind her if she needs it,” he tells me.

  “She’s leading pretty good,” I point out. “Let’s just see how it goes.” Rootbeer and I walk past him. I swing the trailer door open. Moo is tied inside, waiting patiently to escort her out of the shelter. Rootbeer jumps right into my trailer. She arches her neck and pins her ears at Moo, who takes one quick sniff of her, then backs away. Her perfectly made, tiny brown body stands quietly, facing the trailer window, watching the other shelter horses rip around their corrals, kicking up dust. I throw the lead line over her back, shut the trailer door, and hustle around to the driver’s side.

  “Thanks a bunch,” I say and wave back to the cowboy who is standing windswept to the east, with his lariat tapping uselessly against his thigh.

  WITH HORSES, it is best to do everything right the first time. Otherwise, you spend all your time undoing the unwanted behavior. That first night, I take Rootbeer and Moo home to my barn. Early the next morning, I go to get her from her stall. She moves away and into a corner, turns and faces me, then raises up on her hind legs like a circus elephant doing a trick. She stays up in the air so long, with her front legs tucked in like a grand-prix jumper, that I begin to chuckle, enjoying the show. She comes back down, then rear
s in the air again, with her ears bright and pointy. I think I see a smile on her face. Every horse has a signature move. They’ll do it for fun out in the pasture, or in their corrals when playing with fellow horse mates. Watching Rootbeer in the air, with her belly exposed to the sun, I understand that she wants to play, that she wants me to know something about her. She’s not trying to hurt me. This is the best of me, she seems to be saying. And who are you?

  “Okay, lady, I hear you,” I say and move off to her side and behind her left hip. I swing my rope in the direction of her haunch, not to hit her, but to encourage her to move out at a walk, instead of raising her front legs clear into the sky. She steps out around the twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot stall where she’s been resting all night. My rope swings and swings, calm and lofty, trying to unlock her feet and move her along. She’s not happy about my rope swinging, my directions, my leadership. She gives me the ugly face. Her eyes squint and harden, their corners look sharp, like the tips of arrows.

  “Don’t you worry, little one, I know how special you are,” I tell her. I stop swinging my rope, then move to her left side to put on the halter. I groom my hand along the top of her mane and down to her withers. “Special. Special,” I sing, and she loosens her ears back to their upright position.

  I lead her to the hitching rail and loosely loop the lead rope around the pipe. I’m sure she’s never been tied hard to anything. She feels the light tug of the lead and pulls backward, checking to see if she is still free. As I poke through the brush box looking for the softest brush I can find, I look over and see all four of her hooves settle and balance on the ground. She watches me as I search for the right brush. Her head drops to the level of the rail and she lets out a long sigh. There are at least three sides to this tiny mare: playful, fierce, and lovable, I think to myself as I slide the soft horsehair brush across her topline.