Catch Rider (9780544034303)

by Lyne, Jennifer H.

  SIX

  WHEN I OPENED my eyes in the morning, I knew immediately that summer was over. The thought pushed down on my chest like a ton of bricks. I got dressed and left the house before I had to speak to anyone. I started my car, turned on the country music station, and took off.

  From the parking lot I walked up to the ugly concrete-box high school. The school seemed huge compared to junior high. Seeing other kids get out of their cars was weird. I saw the cluster of rich rednecks. And the jocks. And a few hillbillies. The kids looked tanner and older than they had last May, and they didn’t make eye contact with me. I didn’t see Ruthie or anyone else I knew, and I didn’t care. The sooner I got out of this place, the better. I wasn’t there to make friends.

  My first class was English with Ms. Cash, who frowned at me like a bulldog. I’d had her in eighth grade, too, plus she was kin to my father. Boy, I hated English. I usually read the first couple of chapters and faked the rest.

  After class, I was walking out the door when I heard Ms. Cash growl my name. “Sidney Criser, I would like to talk to you.”

  I turned around.

  “You plan on working this year?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Ms. Cash waited for the other kids to leave. “A lot of these nimrods can barely read a newspaper.”

  I was surprised she said that, and I laughed.

  “But they still do the damn reading. Maureen will probably be pregnant a year from now and married to that idiot. But she’ll still have read As I Lay Dying.” Ms. Cash tightened her mouth and sank into her snarly mountain voice. “Too hard, Sidney?”

  “No ma’am, it’s not too hard.”

  “Then read it.”

  I nodded and walked away. Shit. First class of the year.

  At lunchtime, I went to the cafeteria and grabbed an empty table. The rich kids sat at one table, the trailer-park kids at another. The sons and daughters of the local judges, lawyers, and doctors sat at their own table. They wanted to go to private schools, but there weren’t any around, and boarding school meant boarding school. They didn’t look at anyone, much less talk to them.

  I finally saw Ruthie. Her dark hair was pulled into a messy ponytail as usual, and her cheap blue sweater had little fuzz balls all over it.

  When she saw my black eye, her mouth fell open. “You get in a fight?”

  “Yeah. With a horse.”

  The big Martin boy who lived in Low Moor whistled loudly, and I looked at him. He was staring right at me.

  “Hey, come sit with me, girl!”

  Ruthie glanced at him nervously, and then we ignored him. He was cute, but I would never tell anyone I thought that. I had seen him once at Walmart, and after he winked at me, I couldn’t look him in the eye ever again. He was a lot less cute when he was driving around in his jacked-up Ford F-250, revving his engine. As long as these were the boys that me and Ruthie saw on a daily basis, we would never, ever lose our virginity.

  Eileen Cleek, whose hair was cut short and boyish, stopped by our table. She had a deep farmer’s tan from working on her dad’s cattle farm all summer with her four brothers. Everyone thought she was a lesbian, including me, but Eileen didn’t care. She was as tough as they come.

  “Your uncle Wayne sold my daddy a Percheron mare that could pull the goddamn Titanic,” she said. “Strongest horse I ever saw.”

  “Hope you got a good deal,” I said.

  “From your uncle? Not quite.”

  I smiled.

  Eileen walked on. She would definitely work at her family farm once she got out of high school. Eileen was the only person I’d ever seen who was like me.

  Ruthie was looking over her homework.

  “My mom got laid off,” I said.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Shit’s right.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to try to sell this horse with Uncle Wayne and make a couple thousand. Then we can get Donald out of the house, once and for all.”

  “You think your mama wants him out?”

  “I’m gonna get him out whether she does or not,” I said.

  One of the rednecks yelled at me, “How’d you get that black eye, girl?”

  “Beating up assholes like you,” I said.

  His friends laughed. Ruthie ignored them. “You could go work in the mill with Daddy,” she said.

  “I think I’m a little young for mesothelioma. Then again, maybe you’re never too young.”

  I knew what she was thinking. The kids here thought they’d be lucky to get a job at the mill when they graduated.

  “What are you going to do after high school?” Ruthie asked.

  “I’m going to be a catch rider.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Catch riders go to horse shows and people pay them to ride their horses. They can ride anything.”

  Ruthie looked at me like I was crazy. “See you in class,” she said. She got up and dumped her trash into the garbage can.

  As Ruthie left the lunchroom, two girls laughed at her, and she walked away from them as fast as she could. I got up and went over to the girls. One of them was tall with dyed blond hair and bad posture. The other one was a stumpy little cheerleader with tight jeans and pink lip-gloss. They got worried when they saw me coming with my black eye and fat lip.

  “You’re just friends with her because you feel sorry for her,” said the tall one.

  “You gonna be the one people feel sorry for,” I said.

  “Oh, please. Who beat you up, your daddy or your mama?”

  I balled up my fist and pushed it against the tall one’s chest. “You laugh at Ruthie again, you’ll look worse than I do.”

  The tall girl froze, and her friend scurried away.

  I couldn’t stand anyone being nasty to Ruthie. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. One day in middle school she had seen me eating by myself, and she’d sat down. I guess I glared at her, and she looked so scared that I felt awful. We ate without talking for a few minutes.

  “You make me laugh in math,” she said. “You’re all sarcastic to those popular girls, and I have to pinch myself so I don’t crack up.”

  “Well, they’re dumb as dog shit. If I don’t make fun of ‘em, I’ll strangle ’em,” I said.

  Ruthie snorted and grabbed her nose in embarrassment. I laughed. After that, we ate lunch together every day.

  When I went to school after Jimmy died, no one knew what to say, so no one said anything. I had thought people would be nice to me, but having a dead parent just made you weirder. Ruthie understood this, even though her mother had been dead a long time. That was why Ruthie had found the guts to talk to me in the first place. It was our club, the only club we could join, the only place we felt welcome.

  I went back to the table to finish my lunch alone. I looked at the vast room full of kids laughing, talking, and taunting each other, the blinking fluorescent lights, the missing ceiling tiles. These kids were never going anywhere. They’d either be drunk and unemployed or drunk and collecting a paycheck from the paper mill.

  I had to get out of there, and the first step was selling that red horse.

  SEVEN

  AFTER SCHOOL, I DROVE to Wayne’s. I pulled into his dirt driveway, parked, and got out. I had a spring in my step just thinking about how we were going to start working the red horse. Maybe we’d just trot him clockwise, or we could do figure eights to loosen up his shoulders, but I didn’t want to make him ring-sour. I finally decided I was going to ride him in the lower field where it was flat. We’d take walks on the trails and around the hay fields. That way, he wouldn’t get bored.

  I saw Wayne next to the shed, picking the horse’s feet. I was glad he already had him out of the field.

  “Melinda got laid off,” I said.

  Wayne examined the bottom of the horse’s hoof, then put it down. He stood up straight and looked at me.

  “He stepped on a wood staple,” he said.

  I picked up th
e horse’s foot and looked underneath. I saw the tiny hole, then I saw the long wood staple in Wayne’s hand, and I knew it had gone in deep.

  “Must have happened last night in the field,” said Wayne. “He’s lame. We gotta dig that hoof out, pack it, bandage it, and lay off for at least six weeks. Got to soak it every day in Epsom salts, pack it with iodine.”

  The horse wouldn’t put much weight on that foot. His head hung low, and his ears drooped sadly to the sides.

  I felt sick. Rage boiled inside me and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I looked at the barbed wire, the rusty barrels, and the broken tractor with weeds growing around it. I picked up a blacksmith’s hammer and hurled it into the side of the shed, leaving a deep dent.

  “Hey!” Wayne yelled.

  “Maybe if you cleaned up this place, he wouldn’t have stepped on a wood staple! Looks like a hillbilly lives here!”

  I tried not to cry but I just couldn’t help it. Sub was standing there, his lower lip hanging loosely like an old man’s. I looked at his calm, strong face and cursed at him.

  “That was your daddy’s horse, Sid.”

  Wayne chewed on a toothpick, thinking. “One of the men quit at the barn. You want to come work there?”

  I thought he was kidding me. “At Oak Hill? Cleaning stalls for those rich kids?”

  “You think you’re too fancy?”

  “The last thing I need is a bunch of snotty girls bossing me around while I shovel their horses’ shit.”

  “Come right after school, and work on the weekends,” he said.

  He was serious. He thought I would ride with him all the way over to Crozet to clean stalls. I knew he did it three times a week, and I figured that was his penance for being a drunk and not having a plan for his life. Damned if I was going to be his age and working as a stable hand. I wasn’t going to do it at fourteen, either.

  Wayne sliced open a bale of hay with his pocketknife. “You want to make some money or not?”

  “I don’t need to make money that way. I make money riding and selling.”

  “Listen, Sidney. Your grandma got up at four thirty in the morning to shovel stalls before school, rode all day afterward.”

  He was full of shit and I knew it. “I thought she was a catch rider.”

  “She was.” His voice was loud and sharp, and he straightened up and looked me right in the eye. I could tell he was going to let me have it.

  “She could ride any horse you got—I don’t care if it was a show hunter or a donkey or a Budweiser Clydesdale. She might have been poor, but she would iron her riding clothes until they were perfect, shine her boots, and go to a horse show, and them owners would be fighting each other to pay her to ride their horses. And when she rode, she won. You know how she learned all this? By working her ass off, night and day.”

  “I work my ass off here with you.”

  He looked at me, smiled, and let out a big guffaw. “You think so, do you? Be here tomorrow after school. Three o’clock.”

  I started up my engine with a roar and kicked up dirt as I left.

  Driving home, as the sky grew dark, I looked at the paper mill, the smokestack lights blinking, like a ship on the ocean. As the shift changed, workers filed in and out like robots. I pulled over and watched them, wondering what it would be like to have a paycheck put right into my bank account. It would be great to get Donald out, and my mother would be so happy, whether she knew it or not. I saw a girl a little older than me walk out and get into a new truck. She drove past me, laughing into her cell phone.

  I stayed up that night and read a little, just to get Ms. Cash off my back. The book was weird. It told you what was in every character’s mind. I wondered if you really should feel empathy for some of these lowlifes. If you saw things through everyone else’s eyes, the world would be a house of mirrors. It was confusing, and I fell asleep.

  EIGHT

  THE NEXT DAY at school, I sat through my classes thinking about whether I would go to Oak Hill with Wayne. I couldn’t learn anything new from shoveling more manure. It was all the same, whether it came from a fancy show jumper or an old mule.

  When I passed by the main office on my way out the door, I saw Eileen Cleek being lectured by the assistant principal. “Eileen, you miss more than two weeks of school this year, you ain’t going to graduate.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Eileen said.

  I laughed, and Eileen winked at me, walked outside after me, and headed for her beat-up Chevy truck. A couple of boys yelled “Lesbo” at her. She swore at them, and for the first time, I felt a little sorry for her. She was always alone. No one really cared whether she liked boys or girls—people just got angry because they couldn’t figure it out.

  Wayne had never told me much about Oak Hill, just that the horses were fancy and the people were rich. He said they went to big shows and won lots of trophies. That was about it; for some reason, he didn’t like to talk about it. Maybe they were mean to him there. Maybe I’d have to set them straight.

  When I pulled in to Wayne’s place, I was late, but he was waiting in his truck. I turned off the car and we looked at each other.

  “What do I bring?” I asked.

  “Just yourself.”

  “I gotta get my saddle.”

  “You need your saddle to clean stalls?”

  I slid out of the car, walked around his truck, and got in.

  “What’re they paying?”

  “Minimum.”

  I sighed.

  “That’s more per hour than you’re making now,” he said.

  We got on the interstate and hit about eighty in that old truck of his. He said it was ninety miles—through Bath County, Allegheny, Rockbridge, and into Albemarle.

  He told me that he slept in the barn sometimes, got up and worked there the next day, which I never knew. I said I wasn’t sleeping in their goddamn barn—they could put me up in a hotel. For some reason, he thought that was hilarious.

  The truck heaved up Afton Mountain and started down the other side. There was so much fog on the top of the mountain that tractor-trailers were pulled over, hazards flashing. As Wayne came over the top, the fog thinned, and I could see the cars in front of us again.

  I looked at the white rock formations peeking through the exposed bluffs on top of the mountain. Ruthie’s dad, Earl, had told me it was quartzite, one of the toughest rocks in the world. He had been working in the Massey Mine in Highland County when Ruthie lost her mother, and he’d quit and gotten a job at the mill because Ruthie and her sister were scared that they might lose him, too. But he was a miner at heart, knowing every rock and vein in Allegheny County.

  One time, when we were little, he took Ruthie, Dorine, and me down near the Trueheart Mine in Amelia County in the early spring to look for gems in the rich, red clay. Amelia was on a fault line, ripe for rock hounds. We had packed a lunch and a couple of sodas and driven through the mountains, then through the tobacco fields lined with Queen Anne’s lace and barbed wire, and then we’d turned off the main road and gone deep into the woods. Ruthie’s father had pulled up to a white farmhouse and slipped a dollar bill under the door as payment for rock hunting. It was spooky. There was no one around but a deerhound covered in fat yellow ticks.

  We’d dug our shovels into the silty creek bed, put a clump of dirt onto the screen, and hosed it off. I found a piece of shiny black tourmaline the size of my finger wedged into a rock, and when Ruthie’s father saw it, he whistled. Over the years, he’d found dozens of aquamarines, amethysts, buckets full of smoky quartz, but this was something rare. He told me to keep it just like it was because God had taken his time with it. I was surprised when he said this—he wasn’t usually that sentimental. But it gave me a tingly feeling down my back because he said it like he meant it, and for a split second I thought it might be true. If God, whoever that was, took his time with a piece of tourmaline, why the hell didn’t he bring my father home from the Falling Springs market?

  “These rich people
are just like you and me,” Wayne finally said, interrupting my thoughts. “They put their boots on one at a time, just like we do.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  After we passed Shadwell, we took the Crozet exit. The spiny mountains rolled into hills with thick, wet pasture lined with black fencing. Horses grazed in clusters below barns on distant hilltops. The grass was bright green, no bare spots or patches of tall weeds. It was like green carpet that someone had laid out and stapled right up to the fence posts.

  I hadn’t been on this side of Afton Mountain in a while. When we looked for horses, we usually traveled the other way, toward West Virginia. Two Olympians from the U.S. Equestrian Team had come from near Charlottesville, and I wondered if I might meet someone who knew them. I’d read about Melvin Poe, the huntsman of Orange County Hunt, how he’d taken Jackie Kennedy out fox hunting. I pictured Melvin dressed in a pink coat and canary vest, flask in his pocket, dented hunting horn in his hand.

  “Who owns the barn?” I asked Wayne.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield. They owned the paper mill before they sold it.”

  “The paper mill?”

  He nodded. “Their daughter, Dee Dee, is at the barn a lot with her daughter, Kelly, who you oughta steer clear of.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “She ain’t no good.”

  I was going to ask him why and tell him I wasn’t steering clear of anyone—she could steer clear of me—but for some reason I decided not to.

  NINE

  WAYNE SLOWED DOWN at a sign that read OAK HILL above a fox head and hunting horn, and he turned in. I grew anxious, and my eyes searched the fields around us. We drove up a long driveway to a two-story stone barn. A stable hand was raking the pea gravel in the driveway, and another one was weeding planters overflowing with red verbena. I got out of the truck and jammed my hands into my pockets. I’d never walked into a barn before without bringing my saddle and chaps.