True Blue

by Jane Smiley

  Blue was walking slowly, but I counted his steps—one, two, three, four, pause, snuffle the ground, five, six, seven, shake his head, snort away a bug of some sort, eight, nine, turn toward me and prick his ears. I said nothing. He stared at me as if wondering who or what I was, and I thought of calling “Blue, Blue, how are you?” but the lady was still lying on him, her face hidden in his mane, and I was afraid if I did call out, she would sit up and do something strange and ghostly, like rise into the air. I tightened my lips and held back the greeting.

  Blue and I stared through the darkness at each other.

  Just then, from off to my right, came a series of yips and then a long howl, owooo! There was a pause, followed by another. It was only for a moment that I wondered what it was—I knew it was a coyote, or more than one. And then, from my left, so loud it made me jump, came the answering howl—Rusty. “Owooo!” I could see her now, maybe ten or fifteen feet from me, standing with her nose pointing into the air and her mouth partly open. She sat. She howled again. Her howl was deeper and more eerie than the coyotes’ howl, longer, too. It seemed like it went into my head and made my scalp prickle even though I could see her and understand what was going on—the coyotes were shouting, “Anyone here?” and Rusty was answering, “I am, go away!” Then she bounded past me to the corner of the pasture, where she stood staring off into the distance.

  I turned back to Blue and the ghost.

  Maybe it was the howling, or maybe it was my movement in the dimness, but Blue reared and ran, and the dark-haired lady seemed to slide—she held on around his neck, and then she seemed to drop as he took off. I was staring. He kicked up and galloped away, and in a second or two, Jack had come out of the trees and was scampering along beside him, rearing and bucking. The two of them galloped out of sight, into the darkness. I stepped over to the gate and climbed it, leaning into the pasture, still staring.

  That feeling I’d been having, of being able to see everything, was still with me, but at the same time, I could see nothing—no horses, just the dim landscape and the bright stars. My skin under my sweatshirt was freezing cold, my mouth was open, my wrist was throbbing, my hair was damp and flopping around me in the breeze, my hand on the rail of the gate seemed locked shut. And then I made myself call out, not very loudly, “Blue, Blue, how are you?” and the two horses appeared out of the gloom, and Blue gave a big whinny, and then Jack whinnied, and they trotted over to the gate.

  It was Jack who made me feel normal again. He snuffled my hands and his warmth was just his warmth, and his winter coat was just his puffy winter coat, and his ears were just his ears, long and inquisitive, and his nostrils and the curve of his neck, and he snorted the way he always did, not frightened, only interested. He smelled like he always did, too, only damper and chillier, as he would have, staying outside on a damp and chilly night. I petted him the way he liked it, down the curve of his neck, and then Blue pressed in (though not chasing Jack away) and I petted him, too, and tickled him along the base of his mane, alternating my good hand between one and the other, and sort of hooking myself onto the gate with the elbow of my broken arm. I could see that Blue was nice to Jack—he had become his friend the way Black George had been his friend before we sold him. While I petted them, I said, “Was she here, you guys? Was she riding you, Blue? Does she come very often? Does she come every night? Do I want to know?” But they didn’t have any answers, and didn’t act as though I had asked any questions. Pretty soon, Rusty appeared again, having, I suppose, seen those coyotes on their way.

  Western Stirrups

  Whip

  Chapter 20

  THE NEXT SURPRISE WAS THAT IT WAS DADDY WHO FIXED MY breakfast when I got up in the morning. Mom was sleeping. He handed me two pieces of buttered toast and said, “I’m not sure she’s got it, because she didn’t seem sick in the night, but she’s sleeping, and it’s best to let her sleep.”

  I said, “Did you hear anything in the night?”

  “Nothing special. Coyotes now and then, but I hear that lots of nights.”

  I peeled my banana. “You do?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  He said, “Honey, you’re lucky to be such a sound sleeper.”

  I just nodded.

  He said, “What about school?”

  This may have been the first time in my life that he asked me whether I wanted to go to school. I shrugged. Even though after coming in (sneaking up the stairs the way I sneaked down them, step by step), I had only gotten maybe two hours’ sleep, I wasn’t very tired.

  “If you’re shrugging, then you’d better hurry, because the bus will be here in ten minutes.”

  I stopped shrugging. Shrugging is a little like rolling your eyes, in Daddy’s opinion. I said, “I could stay home another day. I could help you if Mom’s sick.”

  Daddy smiled, then said, “That’s better. Okay, let’s do a few things and get organized, then I’ll take you to the school and drop you, because I have to go into town anyway, but I want to wait until your mom wakes up to see how she is.”

  “Did you feel better after you were sick than before?”

  “In some ways. But it’s false, too. I think I felt better than I actually was, so I wouldn’t push it, if I were you. And eat all your breakfast.” One thing he had done that Mom never did during the week was fry some bacon. I liked bacon. For the rest of breakfast, we talked about how good bacon was; I had two slices and Daddy had four.

  Mom slept for a while, but when she woke up, she said she felt fine. By the time I got to school, I had missed science, French, and home economics. During study hall, I went around to my teachers and got my assignments from the day before. Before lunch, we had history, and all we did was watch parts of the second half of a movie called The Alamo. I had heard of the Alamo, of course—there was a section about it in our history textbook. It was a battle in Texas, where all the men inside the Alamo were killed. That was sad enough, and some of the men were very famous, like Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, but what I didn’t like the most was when the bombs exploded among the horses and the horses fell down. There was lots of whinnying, too, as if the horses were hurt. I don’t know if the other kids enjoyed the movie, or even watched it. I saw Stella and Debbie passing notes, and I saw Brian Connelly with his head on his desk, maybe sleeping. Larry Schnuck kept kicking Randy Jellinek under the desk. Finally, Mr. Harrison had to come over and smack Larry on the head with his ruler. Even though he didn’t hit him very hard, Larry put his hand on his head and said, “Ow! That HURT!” In the end, given how sad the movie was, I was glad of the distractions.

  As usual, I was able to put the slender lady ghost in the back of my mind for most of the day. Every time she occurred to me, I made myself think of something else, and during that movie of the Alamo, that was pretty easy. But the bad thing was that she had attached herself to some of my favorite things to think about. I had been riding for such a long time—as long as I had been going to school—and for all that time, when school got just too much to bear, I would think about the horses. Quite often on my report card, a teacher would write, Works hard sometimes, but easily distracted. That was about me looking out the window or at some picture across the room, or just down at my book, and thinking about Ornery George, or Black George, or Happy, or Jack, or the others who had come and gone. If the ghost was attached to Blue and now to Jack, I couldn’t imagine what I was going to enjoy thinking about.

  I knew that Brian Connelly, for example, thought about television and food, and that Stella thought about clothes, and Gloria thought about books and magazines and rock and roll. Obviously, Alexis and Barbie thought about everything. Larry Schnuck seemed to spend his time thinking about how he was going to beat up the seventh graders or get far enough outside the sight of the teachers to have a cigarette (I had seen him do it). Kyle thought about the way things worked, which was a very big subject. And now I was thinking about the ghost, though in a backward sort of way. I shook
my head to get her out of there and made myself listen to Stella talk about her new bathing suit, which she was going to wear over break when her family went to Mexico. They were going to Mazatlán, and her dad was going to go deep-sea fishing. “I am just going to unwind,” said Stella. Gloria nodded. I tried to imagine this.

  In phys ed, we were now going out to the tennis courts and “volleying,” which meant making the ball go back and forth over the net. You were supposed to hit it toward your partner so that she could hit it back to you—later, “Mr.” Tyler said, we would try to hit it away from our partners. At this point, hitting it away from our partners (into the net, over the fence, way off to the left, way off to the right, over her head, at her feet) was the easiest thing in the world. Actually putting it anywhere near her racket was hard. My partner was Maria. Her backhand was better than her forehand, so we had a little agreement—we would place our rackets more or less opposite to one another and get into a rhythm of back and forth, but we wouldn’t try anything because, frankly, I was too tired to run after the ball, and Maria was not interested in sports, so she didn’t care to exert herself, either.

  After forty minutes of this (which was rather pleasant, since “Mr.” Tyler had to pester the ones who weren’t hitting it at all), we went to the locker room to change. Barbie, who had been volleying with Lucia on the other side of the court, ran up to me and said, “Guess what!”

  “What?”

  “Our music teacher changed our dress rehearsal for the recital to Saturday morning, so can I come in the afternoon? We’ll be finished by two.”

  My lessons with Melinda and Ellen began at noon, so I said, “Can you come later? At four? I’m sure I’ll be back by then, but maybe not until then.”

  Barbie nodded. “I’ve been practicing like mad, and I know my part perfectly, so I’m sure everyone will be in a good mood and I will be able to have whatever I want.”

  “What’s your piece?”

  “It’s called ‘Canon in D.’ It’s by Johann Pachelbel. It’s really beautiful, so whenever we do a good job on it, everybody goes into a sort of daze and everything we ask for afterward, they say yes.” She looked dead serious, but I knew she wasn’t. I laughed, and then she laughed.

  I kept the ghost out of my mind until I got off the bus and was walking toward the house. The sun was shining right on that spot where she had fallen off Blue, and then in spite of myself, I now envisioned her floating up into the air and disappearing into the darkness, her dress or whatever she was wearing fluttering behind her. The thing to do was to go out there right now, before it got dark, or even twilight, and look around the spot. And in the sunlight, I thought maybe I could do it. I would take Rusty with me. For about one second, I noticed Danny’s car parked in front of the house, and Daddy’s truck next to it, but I’d seen that twice lately, and it didn’t strike me the way it might have.

  I went through the door and set down my books.

  Daddy and Danny were in the kitchen, and I heard Danny say, “I want to buy the horse. Why can’t I buy the horse?”

  Daddy said, “I didn’t say you can’t. I said, I’ll see.”

  I paused. They weren’t shouting, but their voices weren’t relaxed, either—it was as if they were trying not to shout, but loudness was pushing out around the edges. I paused, and then walked straight into the kitchen and said, “What horse are you talking about? Where’s Mom?”

  Daddy looked up at me. He said, “She’s upstairs, sleeping.” And then Danny said, “Happy.”

  It was startling to see them like that—Daddy was sitting in his usual spot at the kitchen table, and Danny was sitting across from him. Daddy had a half-full cup of coffee in front of him, and Danny had finished his. The sugar bowl was between them, and the milk carton hadn’t been put away again. They were both wearing colorful shirts—Danny’s blue denim and Daddy’s red plaid flannel. Their chairs were turned slightly away from the table. They had taken off their boots, and their feet were flat on the floor. It was like looking at Alexis and Barbie—mirror twins—but as men. In the year and a half that Danny had worked for Jake Morrisson, he had gotten big in the shoulders and the chest, but more than that, his hands were strong, like Daddy’s, and his face was tan until you looked at his forehead, which was white because he always wore a hat. Just like Daddy. They were both gritting their teeth, and the only difference that I could see was that Daddy had a few gray hairs, but you wouldn’t notice them except that Danny’s hair was glossy, thick, and dark—no gray hairs. Daddy drank up the rest of his coffee and opened his mouth, and I said, “Happy is perfect for you. All she wants is cows cows cows, all day long.”

  Daddy opened his mouth again. I said, “What was the name of that horse you had, Daddy, that mare who cut cows without a bridle on? Whenever I look at Happy, I think of her.”

  Daddy said, “Josephine. Josie.”

  I said, “Yeah, her. Happy could be like that.”

  “She could be a nice horse,” said Daddy. “That’s why I bought her. But—”

  I said, “Too bad we don’t have any cows. It’s kind of like it was with Black George. I miss him, but I realized finally that he wasn’t going to be contented with jumping a few straw bales every so often, given how much he enjoyed himself.”

  Daddy said, “Are you finished?”

  Danny said, “I need a horse of my own. I want to start her.”

  Daddy said, “She’s started.”

  “Well, she’s started with the saw cow. I would—” And then, “Jake has a few calves—”

  “She’s been up to the Jordan ranch.”

  Daddy was getting stiffer and stiffer.

  Danny looked away, out the window.

  There was a long moment of silence, and I thought how I could just keep going, right through the kitchen and out the back door. Rusty would meet me or find me, and we could go look in the pasture or chase coyotes or something.

  Daddy cleared his throat.

  Danny cleared his throat.

  I said, “Well, Danny, can I show you something? Out in the pasture?”

  There was another long moment of silence.

  Danny pushed back his chair and stood up. He said, “Sure.” He looked completely like he didn’t believe me. He said, “Let me get on my boots. I did ride Blue today. We went down the road, but I think the arena should be dry by tomorrow.”

  “Oh, sure it will,” said Daddy. “No more rain until Monday or Tuesday, they say.”

  Danny and I went out the back door, which I closed carefully, so as not to seem as though I were slamming anything.

  Sometimes, after a lot of rain, the sky where we live is so bright that you have to shade your eyes. All the leaves on all the trees are washed clean and the grass seems to have grown another inch in the last hour. The trunks of the oak trees are dark and damp, too, and a sort of greenish lace hangs down from them that Mom calls Spanish moss. Some of the horses are clean, because the rain sluiced them down, and they haven’t yet rolled in the mud. Horses are different in their enjoyment of mud—we had one gray horse a few years ago who raced Daddy to a mud patch—Daddy had hosed him off and turned him out in the arena to dry in the sun, something that he was used to doing with the other horses. Then, as Daddy turned to walk back to the barn, he realized that there was one puddle in the arena that had still not dried from a storm four or five days before. He turned and ran to catch the horse—Smoky George, we called him—but the horse had already arrowed straight for the puddle and was just getting up from a good roll when Daddy came back around the corner of the barn.

  Danny blew his nose and put his bandanna back in his pocket. I said, “How was Blue?”

  “He was okay.”

  “Did he do anything bad?”

  “No. Little tense.”

  We walked on.

  “Did you ride anyone else?”

  “Happy.”

  I sniffed, then said, “Was she happy?”

  He cleared his throat. We got to the gate. I decided t
o drop the subject. Danny rested his arm on the top railing of the gate and said, “What are we doing here?”

  “Enjoying the weather.”

  “I don’t really have time to do that, I have to be …”

  “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Didn’t you ask me that before?”

  “Yes, but I saw one, and I heard one. It’s the ghost of Blue’s old owner. She was riding him in the middle of the night last night.”

  “You were dreaming.”

  “I wasn’t. I was out here. It was about three. She fell off.” I suddenly thought about that kid Freddie, in Alexis’s story. And of course, Danny said, “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Rusty saw her, too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She ran to the house and pushed her way in.”

  “Last night?”

  “No, a few nights ago, when I came out to check on the horses. The ghost tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear that Blue was her horse, and then I ran to the house and Rusty was behind me when I started, but she was ahead of me by the time we were on the porch. She HAD to get in.”

  “What did she see?”

  “The GHOST!”

  He shook his head.

  I opened the gate and walked into the pasture, shooing away the horses. Danny stayed at the gate, obviously not intending to take this seriously, and for once, I was pretty mad at him. And Rusty did come over. As Danny was closing the gate, she slipped through and ran toward me, but she didn’t look around and sniff anything, she just galloped on, bellied under the far fence, and ran up the hill.