Colt

by Nancy Springer

  He had read the instructions and thought ahead, premoistening the sponges and storing them in a plastic bag. Everything he needed was waiting for him.

  When he got back to the bedroom with the stuff, Colt pulled himself to his knees at the side of Rosie’s bed, pointed the hair-remover nozzle downward, and squirted the stinky foam on his stepbrother’s bare legs, from his briefs right on down to his ankles.

  The streetlamps outside gave him enough light to work by. Using his fingers lightly, carefully, he spread the foam so that it covered the back half of Rosie’s legs. Rosie happened to be lying on his stomach. It did not bother Colt that he and the hair remover could not reach the thick growth on Rosie’s shins and the fronts of Rosie’s thighs. In Colt’s opinion, the two-tone effect would be stunning.

  He gave the foam the few minutes it needed to do its job, then removed it (along with Rosie’s leg hair) with his damp sponges.

  He had finished one leg to his complete satisfaction and was halfway through the other before Rosie woke up, grunted a wordless inquiry, and reared up on his hands, swiveling to look.

  “Lie still,” Colt ordered him cheerfully. “I’m almost done.”

  Rosie did in fact hold still for a moment longer, too startled to react. But then, with a yell of despair—the throaty bellow of a person pushed past his limits—he lashed around and lunged at his tormenter. Colt froze, terrified, realizing too late that if Rosie knocked him down, if he landed on his back and hit his lump …

  This is it. I’ve gone too far. I’m gonna die.

  But Rosie stopped just short of him, hands shaking in the air.

  “You!” Rosie screamed. “You—” And then Rosie choked back the words.

  “Go ahead!” All of Colt’s terror suddenly left him, and instead he felt deeply excited, earnest, sincere. He was an experimenter on the verge of a breakthrough. “Say it! What were you about to say?”

  Rosie grabbed the sponges dripping on his bed and threw them across the room.

  “Say it!” Colt begged. “Please!” Rosie had been about to call him names, and he very much wanted to hear them.

  Rosie glowered. “Can’t,” he muttered.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Dad told me—” Breathing heavily, wiping gunk off his ankle with the one remaining sponge, Rosie panted out the words. “Because—Dad—told me to try to get along with you, no matter how much of a brat you were.”

  “Really?” Colt was so delighted his voice squeaked. “Your dad said I was a brat?”

  Rosie stared at him.

  “Did he really say I was a brat?” Colt insisted. “I mean, that’s the word he used and everything?”

  No longer angry, Rosie looked less like a madman and more like Liverwurst: wide-eyed, bewildered. “Why the heck,” Rosie pleaded, “do you want people to call you a brat?”

  “Because …” Colt could not explain how being a brat made him real. How most people, looking at him, saw only the handicap, the braces and crutches, the wheelchair, and felt they had to be nice to him no matter what. Therefore, he had to make them not be nice to him. No matter what. “Just tell me what your father called me,” he said.

  “What kind of trouble are you getting me into?”

  “Oh, okay.” Colt saw Rosie’s point of view. For a moment he slumped against Rosie’s bed, discouraged, but then his head came up. “Do you think I’m a brat?” he demanded.

  Rosie looked straight at him. “You are an incredible brat.”

  It was a moment too good for smiles. Rosie understood. Rosie saw past the crutches to Colt.

  “You might be the top brat of all time.” Rosie stood up to examine his legs. Even in the dim bedroom light the half-shaved effect was startling. “Aw, maaan,” Rosie lamented. “Aw, CRUD! What the heck am I gonna do? I can’t wear pants and run.”

  The room light flicked on, making Colt and Rosie cower a moment in its glare. At the door stood Brad and Audrey Flowers, roused by Rosie’s yelling. They did not seem totally sleepy. Apparently they had been listening for a few minutes. So it was no use trying to pretend nothing was happening, and anyway the room reeked of hair remover, and Rosie was standing there with two-tone legs.

  Brad looked blank. Colt’s mother looked horrified. “Colt Vittorio,” she burst out with tears in her voice, “how could you?”

  It occurred to Colt that he was the only one in the house whose last name was not Flowers. He felt left out of something good, and guilty that he had upset his mother. He didn’t mind making her mad, but he hated to hurt her. “Sorry, Mom,” he mumbled.

  “If this is the way you’re going to act—”

  Brad’s quiet voice interrupted her. “Well, Son,” he said to Rosie, deadpan, eyeing Rosie’s legs, “you look like a ’56 DeSoto.”

  Father and son looked at each other, and a smile cracked Mr. Flowers’s poker face, and suddenly Rosie was laughing, guffawing, shouting with laughter, bent over with his hands on his knees. Brad chuckled more quietly. “This is a night Rosie is going to remember,” he said to Audrey.

  But she was not done with Colt. “I don’t understand what gets into you,” she scolded. “Maybe I ought to tell you to just forget about horseback riding until next summer.”

  “No!” Rosie straightened suddenly, his face shocked and serious. “Audrey, I mean Mom, this was just something between me and Colt. He didn’t mean anything. Please.”

  Colt was so startled to find someone else doing his pleading for him that for a moment he couldn’t speak. Then in a small voice he said, “I won’t hassle Rosie anymore.”

  It was the truth. Rosie was a friend after all, like Liverwurst. Colt felt glad he hadn’t put the hair remover anyplace serious, like Rosie’s head.

  “It’s just boy stuff, hon,” Brad said to his wife.

  Still more hurt and baffled than angry, Audrey grumbled, “Well, I don’t know …”

  “He won’t do anything else to me,” Rosie said as if promising for Colt. “Because he knows if he does, I’ll do it right back to him. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Right, brat?” Rosie grinned at Colt. Past him Colt could see Brad’s laughing eyes. These Flowers guys had something good between them, and they were offering to include him in it.

  “Right!” said Colt.

  When practice started, the last week of July, Rosie told his cross-country teammates that he had gotten himself a special aerodynamic leg clip originated by the Olympic running coach. To smiling passersby as he jogged he muttered something about racing stripes. To his sister he said that he would punch her lights out if he heard one more word. To Colt and his father he maintained that the hair remover treatment really seemed to be helping him run faster. His time had mysteriously improved over the previous year’s.

  All that hair, his father gravely agreed, had been slowing him down. Maybe he ought to defuzz his legs regularly, as he did his face.

  On that basis, Audrey remarked, a shaved racehorse should run faster.

  And Colt sat in his thigh-high leg braces and dreamed of going fast, faster, on a horse.

  His riding lessons had started. (“You scum!” Lauri had complained, and she had called her father at work to see if she could get him to promise her horseback riding lessons the next summer instead of gymnastics.) Because of the summertime heat, lessons took place in the evening, which worked out for Colt’s mother. By that time of day she was home from work and could take Colt to Deep Meadows Farm.

  For the first few weeks Lauri came along too, and watched wistfully. After that she quit coming. It just made her mad, she said.

  Mrs. Reynolds had arranged for Colt to have his lessons by himself, because she wanted to give him her full attention. He wore a helmet and safety belt borrowed from Mrs. Berry. After Mrs. Reynolds found that he could consistently keep his balance on a walking horse, she stopped staying right by his side. Leaning against the ring’s rail fence, she called instructions to him, watching him guide Liverwurst in circles and reverses and along diagonals.

  “Y
ou have good hands,” she told him. “You keep a nice, steady, light contact with the mouth. I like to see that. I hate to see a rider dragging on the horse’s mouth.”

  Colt said, “I try to think what it would feel like if I were the horse.”

  “We’ll make a horseman of you yet.”

  After a few weeks she put him into a class of non-handicapped beginning riders. Colt could do everything the others could do at a walk, but while they practiced posting to a trot he halted Liverwurst in the center of the ring, doing saddle exercises and watching. The trot was a piston-action two-beat gait, bumping the riders along until they learned to rise and sink, rise and sink in the saddle. When Mrs. Reynolds demonstrated, posting to the rhythm of her own thoroughbred’s long, reaching trot, she seemed to skim the world like a meadowlark.

  Colt’s mother, who was sitting on a bench reading a paperback novel while he had his lesson, lifted her eyes from time to time and watched him anxiously. He wished she wouldn’t stick around while he rode, but she always did. She had to help Mrs. Reynolds get him onto Liverwurst and off again, and she said by the time she went anywhere else it would be time to come back again. But if she was going to stay, he wished she would pay more attention to her book.

  He decided what he wanted to say to her, then waited until after the other riders had gone, until he had her alone, except for Mrs. Reynolds. Actually, he spoke to Janet Reynolds, although he wanted his mother to hear. “Mrs. Reynolds,” he said softly, “I want to learn how to trot. Maybe even canter. I want to go fast on a horse. And I want to go out on the trails.”

  Wanna, wanna, wanna. It could have sounded bratty, but it did not. Even Colt noticed it did not. Funny how he never got bratty when he was talking about horseback riding.

  Mrs. Reynolds looked back at him just as seriously.

  “Can he do those things?” Colt’s mother asked her. “I mean is it possible?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied to both of them. She knew Colt could raise himself from the saddle for short periods of time. Maybe he would be able to post to a trot. But whether his seat would ever be tight enough for safety at a canter … “I don’t know. We’ll just have to work, and see.”

  Chapter Five

  Colt worked.

  He had just enough strength in his upper legs to kneel. Sometimes. Every day at home he practiced to strengthen his posting muscles by kneeling without support. Mrs. Reynolds had said that he needed strength in his abdominal muscles to post too, so he did sit-ups as well. Or rather, more sit-ups than usual. And, while he was at it, push-ups.

  Rosie had exercises to do too, for cross-country, warm-ups and stretches. He would sprawl on the bedroom floor and limber his legs. One day, feeling companionable, Colt joined him and started doing push-ups.

  Rosie stared a moment, then flipped over on his belly and started doing push-ups too.

  Cold did more push-ups.

  Rosie did more push-ups.

  Colt speeded the tempo a bit, doing push-ups faster.

  Rosie matched his roommate’s pace and started to pant.

  Colt began counting aloud. “Forty, forty-one … How many you want to do, Rosie?”

  “As—many—as—you’re good for,” Rosie puffed.

  “Okay.” Cheerfully Colt pumped his way to fifty. Fifty push-ups was no big deal to him any longer.

  Past fifty, he noticed, Rosie slowed down a good bit. Colt slowed down to stay with him, and counted his way aloud through the sixties. He had just hit seventy and was aiming for seventy-five when Rosie collapsed on the floor with a groan.

  “God! How can you do that?”

  “Do—what?” Colt was puffing now too, but still pumping. He figured since he was feeling good he’d try for a hundred push-ups.

  “All those push-ups, turkey!”

  “Don’t worry—it’s not your fault.” Breathing hard, Colt still managed to insult Rosie between efforts. “Everybody knows—cross-country runners are no good—at push-ups.”

  “Aw, jeez! You better watch out. I’m gonna sneak in here some night and take all the hair off your arms.”

  Colt grinned and quit at eighty-five.

  Someday he’d get to a hundred. He might need strong arms someday, to control a headstrong horse. But for now he mostly needed posting muscles. Once he could kneel steadily, he tried to lower himself backward a little as if to sit down, then come up again. He held imaginary reins in front of his chest so that he would not use his hands to help himself.

  I—can’t—do it.

  Tried again.

  I—gotta—do it!

  He couldn’t, at first. And then after a few days he could do it once, just barely, maybe an inch. And then after a couple of weeks of hard work he could do it a few times, maybe two inches deep. Lauri tried it with him sometimes, and she could sit on her feet and come back up again without using her hands. But Lauri was a gymnast. And Lauri did not have spina bifida.

  Altogether Colt was working his body harder than he ever had in his life, and Mrs. Berry, who saw him twice a week for physical therapy, was amazed at the results.

  “His large-muscle strength in his torso has improved so much I can’t believe it,” she reported to his mother. “He’s sitting better, standing better, his endurance is a lot better, his balance is better, his walking gait has improved. I’m really hoping someday he’ll give up the wheelchair except for shopping malls and such, and just use his braces and crutches most of the time.”

  During his weekly lessons at Deep Meadows Farm, Colt practiced staying up off the saddle in “forward position” for as long as he could, at first with Mrs. Reynolds’s help and later by himself. There were problems. Because Colt had no strength or feeling below his knees, he could not rely on his stirrups to support him. Sometimes his feet dangled out of the stirrups and he didn’t even know it. He had to maintain his riding seat entirely with his upper body and thighs. This, Mrs. Reynolds assured him, was as it should be in any event. Judges at horse shows often asked advanced contestants to ride without their stirrups to show that they were not dependent on them. The lower leg was needed mostly to urge on and signal the horse. But Colt could use his body position and reins for signaling, and a stick for urging on.

  Liverwurst stood or walked patiently through all this. Good old big-headed Liverwurst. Colt had come to love the horse’s homely, anxious, hairy, snot-nosed face.

  Finally, one evening in late August, just before school was due to start, Mrs. Reynolds came over to Colt, took hold of his safety belt and said, “Okay, let’s try a trot.”

  Okay, sports fans, this is it, the moment you’ve been waiting for… Even though he tried to joke with himself, Colt felt so nervous his head throbbed.

  The hardest thing, Mrs. Reynolds told him, was going to be learning to feel the rhythm and post to it. Because of his back, she couldn’t let him just bounce around on top of the horse for a while as she did the others. She had put a fleece cover on the saddle for him, but even so, it would not be a good idea for him to bounce.

  “Stay up in forward position for now,” she told him, and she stood beside him, her arm between him and the saddle, just in case. “This time I’ll let you cheat and use a voice command.”

  “Trot!” Colt told Liverwurst.

  The horse could not believe him. It had all been walk, walk, walk with Colt up until now. Liverwurst raised his head anxiously but did not move.

  “Try again, and tap him with the crop,” said Mrs. Reynolds.

  “Trot!”

  Liverwurst trotted. It was just a quiet jog, but to Colt it felt like one of the delightful, scary amusement park rides he had never been allowed on. His stomach fluttered, his shoulders tingled, and he had to concentrate on staying up out of the saddle. His knees acted as shock absorbers, and his bottom waggled in the air. Mrs. Reynolds ran alongside, keeping her arm between him and the saddle.

  “Neat!” Colt panted happily. His breath was being jounced out of him. From her seat outside the ring, his mother
lifted her glance from her paperback romance and watched anxiously.

  “Liverwurst has a pretty smooth trot,” puffed Mrs. Reynolds. “For an Appaloosa. Had enough?”

  “No.”

  She had him stop Liverwurst anyway, because she had had enough. But after she caught her breath, they tried it again.

  “Now this time try to signal with your knees for the trot.”

  A normal rider would have squeezed with the lower leg. But it didn’t matter: Liverwurst, having learned that he was allowed to trot, jogged forward happily at the light pressure Colt was able to exert on him.

  “Try to feel the rhythm! Go up and down! ONE-two-ONE-two …”

  It was not easy. Several times Colt bumped down into Mrs. Reynolds’s arm. Then she ran out of breath again and had to stop. By the end of the lesson all she would say was, “We’ll see. Things take time.”

  Colt’s mother was quiet for a change as she drove him home.

  The next week school began, and Colt’s riding lesson time changed. He came late Saturday afternoon.

  “Hey, Liverwurst!” He rubbed the horse’s mottled forehead. Liverwurst thrust his nose down and nuzzled Colt’s chest. Then it was time to roll the wheelchair up the ramp and get onto the horse. Mrs. Reynolds and Colt had come up with a way he could mount with only one person to help him. He could get on his knees at the edge of the ramp and reach up to grasp Liverwurst’s withers and the saddle cantle, just the way regular riders did. Then Mrs. Reynolds would give him a “leg up” the way she sometimes did with anyone trying to mount a tall horse. She would cradle both hands under his left knee and lift while he pulled with his arms, and as she lifted, he could swing himself into the saddle. (His right foot dragged across Liverwurst’s rump, but Liverwurst didn’t mind.) This was all Colt’s idea. In a few years, he knew, he would be too big and heavy to be lifted onto a horse, and he wanted always to be able to ride. He didn’t want anything, ever, to keep him from riding horseback.