There was a rumble of thunder so deep it shook the windows in the tack room and rattled the bottles lining the washing machine. Lacey looked at me significantly.
“The deeper it is, the further away it is,” I told her.
“That isn’t true.”
“It could be.”
I picked up a lead-rope and started for the paddocks, their grass poison-green beneath the dark boiling clouds. Ears pricked, eyes bright, Dynamo watched me come.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
If I could have wrapped Dynamo in cotton wool and rubber booties to keep him safe, I would have done it in a heartbeat. I would have put him in an oversized horse-head helmet to protect his skull, sheathed his legs with impact-resistant kevlar boots.
And a steel breastplate for his priceless, priceless heart.
As it was, I watched him like an anxious mother watched a first-born child. I kept him in the paddock closest to the house and the barn so that I could always keep an eye on him. I could see him from the tack room, from my bathroom, from my kitchen. My bedroom window faced his stall window.
And I was always glancing out one window or another, to be sure that he was safe.
It was my greatest fear that Dynamo would do, as horses do, something self-destructive, like hook his leg through a fence while pawing at someone who was annoying him in the next paddock, or choke on a daisy he hadn’t expected in his mouthful of grass, or trip on an anthill and fall down and break his shoulder. You know, the idiotic things that ruin athletic horses every day. I couldn’t risk him, not for a moment. I couldn’t lose him. Dynamo wasn’t the answer to everything, but for now, he was my big horse.
And there was this — he was my one great love. On summer nights, when the horses were out to take advantage of the sort-of-cooler temperatures, I could gaze out of my kitchen window and see him out there, his white blaze glowing electric in the blue moonlight, and feel my heart swell with motherly love, my throat close with the anxiety of true love, my stomach do a slow flip in the sheer terror of loving someone so much.
Maybe Dr. Em and everyone else who thought I needed a man in my life didn’t realize that my heart was full already, full of Dynamo.
On a moonlit summer night, I could see nearly all of the horses grazing away in the orderly rows of paddocks marching away from the stable. Only the three mares in their back pasture were invisible, slipping down the slope to the oak-strewn copses along the back fence. There they could argue and misbehave away from my prying eyes all night long. It was just as those witches liked it — and it didn’t matter. They were too tough and too nasty to get hurt. It was my gentle, foolish geldings that I fussed over, and that I peered out at nervously before bed or when I woke in the middle of the night, a mother’s night-watchman instinct in full effect.
But the only horse I could see on dark, moonless nights was Dynamo. The orange glow of the sodium light shone down from the side of the barn, directly onto his paddock. He was always in my sights.
Some nights I leaned against my window, an evening’s soothing beer in hand, and just watched him, grazing in the warm streetlight. Safe and sound, as I needed him to be.
My big horse, my chance, my champion. My ladder. And when I had climbed as high as he could take me, I’d put his bridle aside and let him grow fat and happy on the grass of his paddock, while other, stronger horses took on the heavy lifting.
“Dyno…” I called now, as I walked into the center of his paddock, his leather halter slung over my shoulder. “Dynamo… cookies…”
The big horse turned and watched me warily. He didn’t like to be caught. It was the last remnant of his bad old days, whatever they were. I didn’t know his history, but it can’t have been pretty. I found Dynamo five years ago, when I was still in high school, in a livestock auction in south Georgia. It wasn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find a classy horse. And he hadn’t looked like a classy horse.
There’s no telling what happened to Dynamo, only that he had to have been strong to have survived it. When I first saw him, he was a scrawny scarecrow of a horse, with more skin fungus than hair — only his mangey tail and the thin fuzz on his legs gave away that he’d once been a chestnut. His mane had been rubbed away by his crazed scratching, fighting the itching of parasites, infections, and assorted insects that had taken up residence there. He was a ruin, ready for slaughter, if only he weighed enough to be worth the trouble — that’s what the flake of alfalfa in his pen was for, its bright-green leaves pressed beneath his nervous hooves into the morass of manure and slick Georgia clay.
But one thing was starkly apparent about this bucket of bones — his skeleton was the frame of a Thoroughbred. When I stepped forward, grabbed his halter, and flipped up his upper lip, I saw exactly what I had expected — a blue tattoo strip of letters and numbers.
Once we were safe at home, I’d given the tattoo numbers to the Jockey Club and received his official identity in return. The tattered wreck on his way to slaughter was a chestnut gelding registered as Don’s Dynamo, sired by the great racehorse Dynaformer. His race record was anything but a champion’s, pulled up before the finish of his one and only race, and disappeared from racing’s radar after that. A racehorse only had a record at the racetrack. Where he went afterwards was a matter of fortune, and the conscience of the people who held his future in their hands.
Dynamo’s people had not had any conscience worth mentioning. That first day that I saw him, there was no indication that he’d been carefully bred from the bloodlines of champions. He stood in the corner of the little sale pen with a number chalked on his hip, and when he went through the auction ring he was trembling from fear, from weakness, both. He was worse than a broke-down nag. He was on his last legs.
And now… now he was a magnificent gleaming chestnut beast of a horse, shining copper in the sunlight, and whatever bad habits were leftover from the terrible things that must have been done to him, they were mostly small and manageable things.
Except for being caught whenever he was turned out in the paddock. I couldn’t get to the bottom of this one.
The first few months after I brought the sick, shivering horse home, I had to spend every evening sitting in the paddock, waiting for a chance to snag his halter. Laurie was sympathetic and encouraging. It was great, she said, that I had taken a chance on such a damaged horse. We would learn a lot together, and be closer partners because of it. But, she’d gone on, my horse had to come last. I was the working student. I took care of her horses, and the boarders’ horses, for the privilege of riding lessons and, now, keeping Dynamo on the farm. And work came first. (School came a very distant third, after Dynamo.)
And so every evening, after the rest of the barn was fed and watered and tucked in for the night, I went out into the whining mosquitoes and the singing frogs of the hot Florida night and coaxed Dynamo’s head into my hands. I still have the scars from the mosquito bites, innumerable purple dots on my forearms, to remind me of those interminable evenings in the field, watching the sun sink, the stars come out, and my horse evade me as if I was the kill-buyer he’d dodged at Quitman.
I’d bought him hoping to resell him for a profit. He’d only cost me two hundred bucks in the auction ring, after all, a nice investment of some leftover Christmas and birthday money that hadn’t already been appropriated by my mother as repayment for new riding boots I had needed before the holidays. The slaughterhouse truck was full already, thanks to a whinnying contingent of two-year-old Quarter Horses from a bankrupt breeder down the road, and the broker didn’t bother to outbid me for such a skinny wreck of a horse.
One advantage of buying a skeleton, though — I could see how those bones fit together. And Dynamo was put together very, very well.
I thought I could put weight on him, school him up nicely, sell him to an adult amateur or maybe a good kid. I’d make a few thousand, put some aside, and buy another. Horse-flipping — it’s like house-flipping, but much more interesting, and much more difficult to make
a profit. But training horses was what I knew. And by this point, I’d been riding sales horses for most of my life. I wasn’t worried about getting attached to this one, just because my name was on his papers.
I even had a plan for the money I’d make when he sold: a car, for when I went away to college. My parents had recently informed me there wouldn’t be enough money to buy me a car. Meanwhile, the other girls at the barn were already getting cars from their parents, and the barn parking lot after school was glittering with luxurious status symbols. Ashleigh Cooper got the cherry-red Mustang; Lucy Fleming got the silver Mercedes. She even got a vanity plate with her Oldenburg gelding’s name on it: FRITZ. (I used to call him “On the Fritz” because he was a ding-bat who spooked at shrubs when I was leading him in from the paddock every afternoon, but Lucy only rode in the shrub-free jumping arena, so it wasn’t a problem for her.)
The gulf between myself and the other girls at the barn was widening, and it was so very frustrating.
Just once, I didn’t want to be the poor girl. Just once, I wanted to stand up alongside my peers. I wanted to be part of the gang, instead of the girl who cleaned up after them.
And I would be sensible, of course, if I had the money for a new car. I’d buy a truck, something that could haul a horse trailer or carry a ton of hay back to the barn. A truck that was gorgeous and new, though. Something to compare favorably with the glitz and glamour of the girls I rode next to every day, and cleaned up after every night. Something to show off. Something to be noticed in.
And Dynamo was the key. All I had to do was fatten him up, get him going over fences, and bingo — sell him for a tidy profit. Dynamo was my key to fitting in.
Or, that was how I’d seen it when I’d looked him over in the auction ring and raised my hand to bid my two hundred dollars.
But I’d underestimated how damaged Dynamo was. I hadn’t expected the depth of his inner terrors — the way his skin would shiver and tremble at the slightest touch, the violence and determination in his dark eyes when he flipped over in the barn aisle to escape the bridle slipping over his ears, the mindless exhaustion he’d work himself into as he tried to escape humans in the paddock, a ring of white gleaming around his eyes, foam gathering on his sweat-darkened body.
Little by little, he came around. He let me brush him without shuddering at the touch. He took a peppermint from my palm. He tolerated — just — having his ears touched, so that I could stop taking the bridle apart just to get it off and on him for every ride. He stopped darting to the back of his stall when I came to do morning turn-out before rushing to school, hay in my bra and mud on my boots. Instead he waited, ears pricked, eyes quiet, while I carefully buckled the halter far behind his ears and led him out to his little square of grass and sand.
But once he was turned out, all bets were off.
And so after I frantically got through the little herd of troublesome projects that my trainer handed off to me, my nights slowed to a crawl. Instead of sitting in a saddle, proudly working on my very own project horse, I would sit on my heels in the center of his paddock. It was the smallest one the farm had available but still a good half-acre in size. I would glance at neglected homework, turning the pages gingerly, but really watching Dynamo surreptitiously, monitoring his worried circuits of the fence-line through sneaky sidelong glances. He wanted companionship, he wanted to come into the barn and be with the other horses, perhaps even the humans. But every night, he had to overcome all the demons that told him it was dangerous.
Every night, when he finally gave in, was a moment of sublime triumph that boosted me through the next evening of waiting.
So much waiting. Long minutes turned into longer hours that first month with Dynamo, my heels prickling beneath me, finally falling asleep, so that I had to sit down in the scrubby grass and take my chances with fire ants. But the thrill I got when the horse would at last make his way to me, and place his nose along my back, to snort and snuffle through my pony-tail, was worth any amount of pain. And about a million bug bites.
This was more than riding a horse, leading a horse, grooming a horse. This was more than anything I had ever done with a horse before. And all the rules I had set for myself grew steadily more and more irrelevant.
As I brought along Dynamo, slowly and painstakingly, fighting for every inch of ground I gained, my dreams of big profit began to evaporate. The scars a horse can carry within are not easily healed. Dynamo was raw and barely trained, a bolter and a bucker, with the fits of temper like sudden summer storms that are peculiar to high-strung, intelligent, nervy Thoroughbreds. Our entire relationship was based upon our mutual trust. Everything he gave me, he gave because I learned how to ask him.
He taught me more than any sales horse, any lesson horse, any packer pony every had.
And because of that, I owed him everything. The farm, the horses in their paddocks, the clients (barely) paying the bills — I owed it all to the lessons Dynamo had taught me about the nature of horses, the science of giving and taking, the art of asking and granting.
Now I held out my hand, fingers outstretched, to reveal the little brown horse cookies in my palm. Dynamo looked over, ears pricked, head high, copper forelock draped over one eye. He was breathtakingly beautiful. I was reminded sharply, as I was every time he made one of his regal poses, that he was everything to me. That I didn’t need anything or anyone but Dynamo in the end.
That someday, we’d show them all.
This afternoon, though, it would just be nice to catch him.
His inclination, as always, was to turn to the fence-line and canter in a big circle around me, evading the human in his space. But it was just an act at this point, a bad habit more than any actual protest, and it wasn’t long before his whiskered nose was in my palm, grabbing roughly at the cookies, and I was slipping my hand very carefully around his neck with the strap of the halter, buckling the headpiece well behind his ears, careful not to touch them. His ears were still a sore point, and at this sensitive juncture of capitulation, touching one of his fuzzy, unkempt ears would send him racing backwards in long frenzied strides, his head too high for me to reach. And we’d have to start the whole silly routine all over again.
Lord knew I didn’t have time for that. The skies were lowering, growling, setting us up for an afternoon of lightning strikes and monsoon rains.
Back in the barn, Lacey was still sweeping up the aisle, creating an unholy pile of manure, shavings, cotton balls, latex gloves, and plastic syringe wrappers. Dr. Em had, as always, left a sea of litter in her wake.
“Thank you so much,” I began contritely, leading a gentled Dynamo into the wash-rack and clipping the cross-ties to his halter. “I can’t tell you how much you saved my life today —”
“Oh Dyno-saur,” Lacey crooned, ignoring me completely. She planted a kiss on the little white spot between his nostrils and made an exaggerated smooching sound. “Him’s so cuuuuute!”
“Stop that,” I scolded, but we all talked to the horses this way. We talked to them like they were great big babies. Because that was exactly how they behaved.
“Let me groom him,” she said, abandoning the broom, and darted into the tack room. She reappeared with Dynamo’s personal grooming bucket, a little plastic tote filled with his favorites: a soft horsehair body brush, a delicate polishing cloth, a few assorted tail combs and hoof-picks. He never tolerated a rough or hard brush on his body, and even the gentlest brushes could send him into a black mood, swishing his tail and flattening his ears. I stepped back and let her get to work, reflecting that this was an excellent time for another Diet Coke. The air was soupy, thick with unshed rain drops and tropical heat. Riding the Twins had soaked my jog bra and tank top through. I felt like I’d fallen into a very hot pond and just splashed around in it for a little while.
“What are you going to do with him today?” Lacey was grooming him as I had showed her, keeping one eye on his expression and ears, watching for temper tantrum cues, her body a caref
ul distance from the sideways reach of his hind legs. When she groomed his hind end, she pressed her body close to his, so that if he did kick, he couldn’t get up enough momentum to hurt her. It was second nature at this point. No one had been kicked in months. “If you’re jumping, I want to come out and watch.”
“We’ll do a little course,” I agreed, retrieving my cold can of soda from the tack room. I overturned a bucket and sat down, happy to rest my feet for a few minutes. “Tack up Jilly and you can ride her while we warm up. I won’t have time for her today.”
No time for her or any of the other easy horses. Thank goodness for Lacey. I had two horses after this, if the rain held off. It would be three o’clock by the time I got on Dynamo, then forty-five minutes of riding, then two more of the same… Evening feed would be late, but at least everyone could go back outside afterwards, and there wouldn’t be any stalls to do in the morning.
I closed my eyes. Naturally tomorrow, when Becky was here, would go as smooth as pie and she would finish chores in record time and say something about homework and leave early.
And then something would break or someone would get hurt and I’d have to deal with it alone. I took a long swig of soda and listened to the thunder growl. The bottles on the wash-rack shelf rattled with its vibrations. Lacey shook her head and went on sweeping the polishing cloth across Dynamo — she’d never let him go out with a hair out of place, even if there was no one to see him but the two of us. She was so good.
“You make him look like a million dollars,” I said, and Lacey smiled at me. Then she threw the cloth back into the box and went for a hoof-pick. That girl loved playing at being my groom.
I drank down the dregs of Diet Coke, its acid bitterness cold on my throat, and thought of the horse trials at the Sunshine State Horse Park coming up. Of the menacing fences, the drops and the ditches. Of the big blue rosette on Dynamo’s browband, gold-spangled and fluttering in the breeze. I thought of Peter Morrison watching me from the sidelines, raising a hand in salute as we cantered around the jumping arena for our victory gallop, and I blushed. Luckily, my face was already so red with heat, it couldn’t be seen. I decided to concentrate instead on the alarming cross-country fences I’d be facing. They somehow seemed a safer topic than Peter Morrison.
Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1) Page 10