Poked

by Naomi Niles

  I took the piece of bread she offered me; it was warm and buttery and melted in my mouth. “I’m not against dating; I’m just not interested in him.”

  “Well, do you know any guys besides him?”

  “I’ve tried, believe me. But Sulphur Springs isn’t exactly crawling with eligible young men. Most of the guys I meet down at the clinic are old farmers.”

  “It’s about the same at the high school. The ratio of male teachers to females is depressing. I tried joining a church singles group, an art club, and a dance club. Surprise! There wasn’t a single boy in any of them.”

  “Where have all the men gone?” I asked. “Have they given up on clubs and art? Do they just sit around in their beanbag chairs playing Halo and Call of Duty?” Lindsay laughed, and it made me laugh. “I don’t know what boys do!”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” she said with a shrug. “I keep hoping I’ll meet a handsome young man in the teen fiction section at Half-Price, and that he’ll immediately realize we’re meant to be together. But alas, I never do.”

  “Well, here’s to men,” I said, holding up my half-empty water glass.

  “To men,” said Lindsay, raising her own glass. “Wherever they are!”

  Chapter Five

  Curtis

  On Tuesday morning, Dad and I went out riding again with Brent Stuart and his brothers and some of the other ranch hands from around town. This time, none of the girlfriends tagged along, I guess because they had better places to be. Fine with me. It was a cool, hazy morning with storm clouds quietly gathering on the eastern rim of the world, making the sky look bruised, like it had just been in a bar fight. The wind tugged at my sleeves and stirred the tall grass in the fields on either side of us. For once, I wasn’t sorry I had gotten up early to make this trek.

  “Curtis, how long you been riding?” Brent asked me after we had been riding for about an hour. “Your whole life?”

  I reached into my traveling kit and took a swig of bottled water. “For as long as I can remember,” I said after a moment’s pause. “Didn’t get really good at it until the summer after my sophomore year. Soon as I got a car, I started driving from one town to another offering my services at rodeos and carnivals. They could see I had some experience with animals, taming ‘em. Old man who ran a rodeo down in Paris said he wanted to see how I would do on his mechanical bull.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard this story,” said Dad.

  “Well, it’s not the sort of thing I’d have wanted to talk about.”

  “Did you get on it?” asked Brent.

  “I did—and promptly got knocked right off. Thank the Lord it wasn’t a real bull, or I’d like to have been trampled to death. But I was a stubborn young fool, and I got back on. And I kept getting back on, even after I’d acquired a black eye, a bruised arm, and a couple of loose teeth. If Mama had known what I was up to, she’d have come over and wrestled me off of that thing.”

  “Good thing you never told us,” Dad said quietly.

  “Like I said, I was stubborn, but I wasn’t stupid,” I said with a laugh. “Mama was scarier than any bull was, especially back then. She’s mellowed in her old age, but she could be a terror when we was younger. Anyhoo, that bull became my white whale. Every night after I finished team-roping with Marshall, I’d get up there and ride it for an hour. By the end of the summer, I could go for a full minute without falling off, which is all you really need. Word got around, and before very long, I had become a local celebrity.”

  Brent spat into the dirt. “All this time,” he said gruffly, sounding impressed, “you had a whole secret life that we didn’t know about.”

  “Well, none of you ever asked. And Marshall wasn’t about to tell nobody; he knew better’n that.”

  They were quiet after that, and we rode together for another hour in silence. A storm on the Texas prairies is an amazing thing to see, the way you can see the clouds forming and growing from miles off. There’s a stillness that sets in as the creatures that live in the grasses make for whatever refuge they can find. You can feel the humidity dropping and the air tingling with electricity, like a single spark could set the world on fire. It wasn’t very long before we realized we needed to turn around early and head back.

  There was a thin scrim of chinaberry trees to our left, and we trotted past it for what felt like an hour while robins and cardinals circled overhead in clusters of several hundred, flapping their wings and making an awful racket. We were about twenty minutes away from the house when I first noticed it—Bessie, my horse, was moving along in a herky-jerky fashion, like a puppet being dragged along on strings.

  “Dad, I think there’s something wrong with Bessie,” I said when he was close enough to hear me. “She’s not walkin’ right.”

  Dad looked over at her. “It’s her right leg,” he said after a lengthy pause. “The other legs are fine, but there’s a problem with that one.”

  I swore. “I’ll have to take a look at it when we get back to the barn. Last thing I need right now is a horse that can't walk right.”

  “Well, the way this storm is shaping up,” said Brent, “it might be three or four days before we can go riding again. That ought to give you enough time to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the worst of it,” I said grimly as a tawny armadillo waddled across our path. “Anytime one of the horses goes down, it costs us a small fortune in medical bills. Last summer, Phyllis got a nail in one of her hooves, and the animal doctor charged us almost a thousand dollars just to have it looked at.”

  “Well, they’ve got to earn a living somehow,” said Brent, who had an annoying habit of seeing things from the other person’s perspective. “I reckon they don’t get a lot of visits in a town like this, so they’ve gotta make money where they can.”

  “Maybe they do,” I said, stroking Bessie’s silk mane. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  ***

  When we got back to the barn, who should I find waiting for me but Elizabeth Philips Davies. She was leaned up against the side of the barn, wearing a pair of ripped blue jeans and a plaid shirt with two of the buttons opened to reveal a white camisole. Brent grinned at me wickedly when he saw her, and I could only imagine the filthy thoughts passing through his head.

  “Hey stranger,” she said as I dismounted from Bessie. “You look like you could use a break.”

  “That would be nice if I could find it,” I said in a sour voice. “Right now I’ve got to call the vet and schedule an appointment for tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll call him,” said Dad as he trotted past me.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Liz. “Somethin’ wrong with Jake?”

  “No, it’s Bessie. She’s limping, and I think she might have hurt her leg while we were out riding. Between that and the thunderstorm, it looks like we won’t be going out on the trail again for the rest of the week.”

  “Well, I ain’t got nothing going on tonight. I was just thinking about heading down to Fifth Street and grabbing myself a beer and a plate of chicken wings, maybe watching the game—”

  She was interrupted by Dad, who had just come running out of the barn. “Vet’s comin’ over to look at Bessie tomorrow at around ten. She says we won’t have to bring her in, not when she’s limping like that.”

  “You mean they’re coming over here?”

  Dad nodded. “One of ‘em, anyway. Apparently Dr. Thompson is out in Galveston for the week. I don’t know if you saw the news this morning, but there was a nasty oil leak, and he volunteered to do clean-up.”

  “Does he really have nothing better to do?” I asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, he’s sending his assistant.”

  “Well, I hope his assistant knows how to fix a horse’s limp.”

  Dad shrugged. “If not, we can always do things the old way.” He held up an imaginary gun and fired it with a loud “pachow!” sound.

>   “Dad, we’re not killing Bessie,” I said. “You can forget about it!”

  Dad grinned. He shuffled back into the house and left me and Liz to talk.

  I didn’t particularly feel like talking. It had been a long ride, I was tired and hungry, and it was obvious she wanted to come over that night but was hoping she wouldn’t have to ask. I always got irritated when girls hung around waiting to be invited places. Why not just come right out and say what they were thinking?

  She must have sensed I was feeling irritated, because she said, “Well, anyway. Guess I’ll let you alone for the night.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” I wiped my hand over my face, feeling low and mean. “Hey, maybe we can get dinner together tomorrow night or the night after that.”

  “Sure, sounds great,” said Liz, not very convincingly. With her hands in her back pockets, she turned around and walked out the gate. I watched her go, feeling a mixture of relief and shame.

  Chapter Six

  Allie

  With nothing else to do at the office, I spent most of my time at the front desk watching the cleanup effort on CNN. Every hour or so, the news would switch from footage of the president’s first European tour back to Galveston, where dead fish were beginning to wash up on the beaches to the horror of tourists and beachgoers.

  At first, I had tuned in hoping for a glimpse of Dave in a hazmat suit, but I kept watching because the images of destruction were viscerally compelling. A white crane stood with three of her babies in a patch of black oil roughly the size of a saucer, looking confused and unhappy. I wondered how many of these creatures would be dead by the time the crisis was over.

  On Wednesday morning, I tore myself away from the TV and closed up the office for a house call. A farmer who lived out near South Bend wanted me to come over and look at his horse. I pulled into the driveway at around ten. It was a lovely two-story ranch house with stucco tiles and a shaded patio where a woman was seated in a wicker chair, sipping sweet tea through a straw. She raised one hand in welcome as I got out of the car.

  “Morning,” she said. “I expect you’ll be wanting to see Bessie.”

  She directed me to the back of the house. There was a large, rusted red gate guarded by what looked like a pack of wild hogs. Seeing my hesitation, the old woman ran up behind me. “They won’t hurt you,” she said. “They’re about as dangerous as a pug. My son Curtis is waiting for you in the barn.”

  At the mention of his name, the barn door swung open, and a man came walking out.

  He was wearing a white muscle shirt, a ten-gallon hat, a pair of faded blue jeans, and long leather boots that spanned the length of his calves. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a full red beard and sad gray eyes, he looked like he had wandered off the set of an urban cowboy movie from the 1980s. Somehow, I didn’t mind.

  As he strode toward me and unlatched the gate with a loud clank, I could feel the heat rising into my face. I didn’t usually feel this nervous in front of clients, but then again, most of my clients were in their fifties or sixties. I felt like a schoolgirl who had just gotten a note from her long-time crush. I didn’t know what to do with my arms.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Are you Curtis?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Reckon you’re here to see Bessie?”

  “If that’s the name of your horse, then you bet I am.”

  I winced at the sound of those words coming out of my mouth. “You bet I am?” Really? But Curtis didn’t seem to notice.

  “First noticed she was limping yesterday afternoon,” he said as we made our way into the cool shade of the barn. It smelled of damp hay, chewing tobacco, and rusted leather. “At first I thought maybe she’d gotten a nail in her foot, like one of our other horses. But the more I led her around, the more I think she must’ve injured her bone somehow. I didn’t know what to do except call you.”

  “Well, I’ll do what I can.” My voice sounded oddly high and twangy, like I was on helium. And since when had I acquired a hick Texan accent? “My boss is out of town for the week, and normally he’d be the one making the house calls.”

  “My dad mentioned that,” said Curtis. “Where’d he go, anyway?”

  “He went out to help with the oil spill on the coast. Have you seen the news? It’s a real mess.”

  “Mama had it on this morning when I came in for breakfast. I’ve met Dave a couple of times, and he never struck me as the sort of guy who would drop everything to prevent an environmental disaster.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what his deal is, honestly. Sometimes I think he just gets these ideas in his head—but don’t tell him I said that.”

  “I’m phoning him right now,” Curtis smirked. It was such an unexpected response that I laughed out loud. It was more like a shriek, really. Curtis smiled.

  Still, I was relieved when he led me to the stall where Bessie was resting, not looking particularly happy. At school, I had found work a safe haven from boys and their ways, and today with my attention directed to Bessie, I could easily ignore the fact that Curtis was standing beside me, watching me lead her around the stall and lifting the affected leg to see how she responded.

  “There’s some slight swelling around her lower tibia,” I told Curtis. “That could be a sign of fracture, or she might be limping because of the swelling. If her leg were actually broken, she wouldn’t be able to move around as well as she is. You say you didn’t notice anything wrong until you were halfway through a trip last night?”

  “Yeah, I only noticed as we were coming home,” said Curtis, taking off his hat and scratching the back of his bald scalp. “She seemed fine before.”

  “And you say she carried you the rest of the way home without incident. That makes me think we’re looking at a bee or wasp sting, in which case the remedy is just to give her a few days’ rest and let it subside on its own.”

  He looked at me in sort of a confused way, and my cheeks burned. I realized I had just assumed he knew the meaning of all the words I was using, but what if he hadn’t?

  “That makes sense,” he said after a long pause. “We’re probably not going out again for the rest of the week anyway, so this comes at a good time.”

  “Yeah, and you may want to bring her back to the clinic at the end of the week when Dave gets back. Just to see how she’s healing and to make sure I haven’t given her the wrong diagnosis.”

  “Well, I trust your judgment,” said Curtis. He raised the brim of his hat and mopped his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. “Honestly, it’ll be a relief not to have to ride her for a couple of days. I could use a vacation.”

  “You know I’ve never ridden a horse?” I said before I could stop myself.

  Curtis scoffed and turned to me looking stunned. “Are you serious? And you’ve lived in Texas your whole life?”

  “Actually, no. I grew up in Maryland and went to school in Boston.”

  “I couldn’t tell—you sure sound Texan.” I blushed. “Anyway, we need to fix this pronto. I normally charge for riding lessons, but since you’re looking after my horse, and you’ve never ridden one, I think I’ll make an exception in your case.”

  “Well, that’s awful sweet of you,” I said, this time playing up the twangy accent. It didn’t sound right at all; I felt like I ought to be wearing a Stetson and chewing hay. “But I think I need to get going. I’m needed back at the office.”

  Seeing the disappointed look on his face, I was quick to add, “Maybe take a rain check, though?”

  “Yeah, for sure,” said Curtis brightly. “You’ll be coming back in a few days anyway to check up on Bessie. It won’t take more’n a few minutes to lead you around the pasture, and they’re good horses, gentle as can be. Like riding a golden retriever.”

  I laughed. “Well, I’ve never ridden a golden retriever, either, so we’ll see how it goes. I really would like to go riding; I’m not just being polite.”

  “I’ll walk you to the gate,” said
Curtis with surprising abruptness, and I followed him out of the barn, wondering if I had said something wrong.

  The moment I got back in the car, I pulled out my phone and called Lindsay.

  “Hey, I’m on my lunch break,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Lindsay,” I said, “you’re not going to believe this. I just met the most amazing man.”

  “What? In this town?”

  “I know, I couldn’t believe it, either. He’s like—I didn’t even ask how old he was, maybe thirty-five? And a farmer. He lives in this gorgeous ranch house with his mom…”

  It was clear from the tone of Lindsay’s voice that she didn’t share my excitement. “A farmer, really? Lives with his mom?”

  “At least I think they live together—”

  “Allie, I just feel like you could do so much better than that. Have you even tried taking an art class?”

  I was shocked. I couldn’t believe she was reacting like this. “I thought you would be supportive.”

  “I’m sure he’s great, and I’ll change my mind once I meet him. Listen, I have to run. Lunch is ending.” She hung up before I could say bye. I threw the phone down into the floorboard, feeling confused and hurt.

  Chapter Seven

  Curtis

  The next morning, Mama served leftover pork chops, sausage links, homemade biscuits, and eggs benedict for breakfast. As I finished my orange juice, I told her and Dad about the girl I had met yesterday.

  “I don’t want to hear another word about how I’m not even trying to find myself another girl,” I said slowly. “I’ve found myself a very nice one.”

  “You mean that woman who was over here yesterday?” Mama asked in a skeptical tone. “But she wasn’t over here to see you; she was here on business.”

  “Give her time,” I said. “She’ll be out here again in a couple of days to go riding. Apparently she’s never ridden on a horse before.”

  Dad grimaced. “You sure you wanna marry a girl like that?”