I saw a lady in nice clothes eating a slice of pizza while she was waiting to cross the street. I wondered why she didn’t have time to sit somewhere and finish it. I saw people of all different colors going home from work, all standing right next to each other. They looked like blood cells being pumped through the arteries, stopping at the lights between heartbeats. I looked into the side-view mirror and saw Sonny’s nose sticking out between the slats of the trailer, snorting. He was sucking in the air, the car fumes, the steam rising up from the sewers—breathing in coffee, food, perfume. I was smelling all that myself.
Damned if the four of us weren’t already exhausted.
THIRTY-FIVE
WE TURNED INTO an underground garage and a man waved us in. We drove down through a tunnel and into a makeshift stable area. Horses were being walked around, sweaty from traveling. Boy, it was tight down there. We parked where they told us to, and an official checked us in. I watched Wayne count out a lot of cash.
The official looked into the trailer. “You’re only down for one horse,” he said with an accent I had only heard on TV.
“Our horse brought his assistant,” I said.
“No room for two horses.” Wow. Just like that. He said it pretty mean.
I begged him. “They have to be together. Please.”
“Honey, there’s no room.”
Wayne was thinking.
“You know Seabiscuit?” Wayne asked.
“Sure,” the man said.
“He traveled with a pony. They cut a hole between their stalls so they could see each other.”
“I thought he had a goat,” said the man.
“They started with a goat, but Seabiscuit picked the goat up and tossed him out when the goat tried to eat his food.”
“This ain’t Seabiscuit,” the man said.
“This is our Seabiscuit, fella,” Wayne said.
“Then they have to share a stall, and the stalls aren’t big enough.”
We parked the trailer in a tiny underground garage area with low ceilings and unloaded the horses.
The official was right. The stalls really were too small for two horses. We tied Sub up in front of Sonny until we could figure out what to do.
Once we’d unloaded the trailer and stacked the equipment next to the stall, Wayne had to go out and park a few blocks away. I wished him luck, and he just shook his head and got into the truck.
“See if you can’t change that fella’s mind,” he said, pushing three crisp twenties into my hand.
I went out and found the stall man. “Sir, I know what the rules are, and I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do. My uncle said you might be able to rent us another stall.” I handed him the money like it was nothing, and he took it. He nodded for me to follow him and pointed to an empty stall around the corner. I put Sub in there. Sonny and Sub couldn’t see each other, and they started calling back and forth.
“You ain’t cutting holes in any walls,” the man said.
Wayne came back with our bags from the truck and said we needed to check in at the hotel.
The hotel was just a rundown building with fire escapes zigzagging across the front. Trucks roared by and banged over metal plates in the street so loudly that I jumped every time. A group of men were hanging out in front of a dirty little store on the corner with bright yellow lights and newspapers. Some men were black and some looked Spanish. They didn’t pay any attention to us when we walked by.
Inside the hotel, a big lady in a purple sweatshirt checked us in and didn’t so much as say hello. I wondered how on earth I would ever fall asleep there, and I wished I had my .44.
“I’m not sharing a room with you—you snore like a chain saw,” I said.
“Then find another one. I think there’s a vacancy at the Four Seasons,” Wayne said.
He opened the door to our room. It was tiny and musty, right above the dirty little store, and it smelled like an ashtray. I looked at the room, looked out the window. Wayne stared out at a bar across the avenue, the sign blinking.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said.
“You either,” he joked.
Wayne sat down on one of the beds. “Room’s so small you can’t cuss a cat without getting hair in your mouth,” he said, taking off his boots. He lay down, and before I knew it, he was snoring loudly.
I called Melinda and told her we were there. I made her promise to call Earl if Donald showed up, but we didn’t think he would. Setting foot on Wayne’s property would be a capital offense in Wayne’s neck of the woods, and Donald knew it.
I changed into my pajamas, then lay down on the other bed with the George Morris equitation book, but I couldn’t concentrate. For some reason, I started thinking about God. I asked him to watch out for me, and I started to cry, even though I wasn’t sad or anything. I didn’t even know if I believed in God, but if he or she was out there, I could have used some help.
Even with millions of people, New York was lonely in the middle of the night.
I got up, put my clothes back on, and walked out of the room. I went outside and walked down Ninth Avenue all by myself. People moved fast. When I looked at them, they looked back at me. When I didn’t look, I didn’t think they did, either. A lot of people were short and had dark hair, and I wasn’t used to seeing so many black people. They seemed different from the black people at home—confident, like their being black wasn’t a problem for them or for anybody else.
I was at the Garden in ten minutes. It didn’t feel strange to me now because I knew Sonny and Sub were there.
Three trainers were riding horses in the warm-up ring, and I had to show some papers to get past the guard. Sonny was sleeping crouched down in the shavings like a dog. Sub was asleep on his side, legs out, snoring like a big old pig. He couldn’t have cared less. I went back to Sonny’s stall, spread out one of his blankets along the wall on top of the shavings, lay down, and fell asleep.
THIRTY-SIX
NEXT THING I knew, Wayne threw open the metal stall door with a loud bang, scaring the devil out of me. Sonny was standing up, eating hay.
Wayne stared at me, his face tight and worried.
“You knew where I’d be,” I croaked.
“No, I didn’t know where you’d be!” he roared. “Nearly had a heart attack!”
“I’m sorry.”
He checked Sonny’s legs and ran his hand along Sonny’s body to make sure he hadn’t rubbed into anything during the night. Sometimes that happened in a show stall. Sonny still had shavings all over him, even on the top of his back, from a hard night’s sleep.
“Get a saddle on him,” Wayne said.
I looked at my watch. 6:03 A.M. I threw the tack on, put on my helmet, tightened Sonny’s girth, and stuck my left foot into the stirrup. I felt a sharp pain in my knee. My legs were tight from sitting in the truck for ten hours the day before. I tried again and pushed through the pain.
We brought Sonny into the tiny warm-up ring, where about six horses were being schooled. A man stopped us and asked for our official warm-up time. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“You mean to tell me we have to sign up to school the damn horse?” Wayne said.
The man looked at his clipboard, flipped through some papers. “We’re full.”
Full?
“But I might have a spot . . .”
I let out my breath.
“Three o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“You gotta be kidding me!” said Wayne.
“That’s all we got.”
That poor horse wasn’t going to know what hit him when I tacked him up at two thirty in the morning. He’d probably sleepwalk through the whole thing and kill us both.
The official started talking to someone else, and we decided to let the horse look around.
That was when I really started worrying.
The schooling area was about a third the size of a normal one, with metal columns that the riders had to maneuver around. It was plain
crazy to ride a horse in a place like that. And the worst part was the noise—every time a horse whinnied, the sound bounced around so you didn’t know where it was coming from.
Sonny was jigging on and off and not responding to my legs. I patted him behind the saddle and on the neck and told him it was okay. Then I sat up and tried to get him forward on the bit, but it only made him jig harder.
“Easy,” I said, trying to sound calm. But I sounded shaken up, and I was.
The horse was as tight as a drum, and there was no place to ride him down, no field to turn him out in. He felt like he was about to explode, and my mind jumped around, trying to come up with a way to make him feel better. If we were at home, I’d take him for a ride in the woods. Not here.
A trainer was watching from the side of the ring. “Is this the first time he’s been to a show?” he said.
The trainer looked like a mannequin in a department store. His collar was crisply folded over his down vest. His jeans were clean and pressed. His dark brown paddock boots didn’t have even a scuff on the toe.
I didn’t know what to say to him. He probably wasn’t asking because he cared. It seemed as though everywhere I looked, people were sizing me up.
“Put him back in his stall,” said Wayne, ignoring the trainer. “He needs to quiet down and get used to the place. Just give him some hay and leave him alone today.”
“The show starts tomorrow!”
“You can’t ride him until three o’clock in the morning, honey.” He yawned.
“People are looking at us,” I said.
“Screw them,” he said, and he meant it.
Sometimes I loved that nasty old man.
“I’m going back to get some rest,” he said. “Didn’t sleep a wink all night, with those people jabbering outside.”
That was the beginning of the day before the championship: the longest day of my life.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I PUT SONNY BACK in his stall and hung up his tack. He was looking at everything, pacing, wearing a ditch in the shavings. He ignored his hay, stuck his head over the door, raised his nose, and sniffed the air, trying to smell the other horses. He was a herd animal stuck in a box underground, a nightmare for him. The other horses had spent years learning how to do this, accompanying seasoned horses to shows, slowly building up to it. But not Sonny. I decided to leave him alone.
In the next stall was a beautiful chestnut gelding with big eyes. Two girls were taking pictures of him, feeding him snacks, and sweet-talking him. One girl, the chatty one, was tall and had long curly brown hair; the other one was little and quiet, with a tight blond ponytail and bright eyes.
“He’ll eat anything. Watch this,” said the chatty one to the other. She gave the horse a granola bar, and he took it in his mouth and chewed. A wave of drool spilled out the sides.
They laughed. The horse nodded for more.
“I can’t wait until we go to Florida.”
“When’s the first show?”
“I’ll ask my mom.”
The chestnut horse kept nodding for food, and the girls stroked his face.
“Ernie, you are so silly,” the taller one gushed.
I wasn’t used to seeing people enjoy themselves like this at a show, not after all the time I’d spent around Kelly.
The brown-haired girl hugged the horse around the neck while he chewed. “I want to keep him forever,” she said.
It had to be one of those hundred-thousand-dollar lease horses.
“Will you braid my hair?” she asked her friend.
“Sure.”
The blond one hopped up onto a step stool and started combing the other one’s hair.
“Use the purple yarn to match Ernie’s braids.”
“Okay!”
I stood there by Sonny’s stall watching them. They weren’t like the girls at Oak Hill. These girls seemed carefree and happy, as if nothing in the world mattered.
I walked over to the arena. I’m in Madison Square Garden, I told myself. There were flags from other countries hanging down, and there were electronic letters on a ticker floating by underneath them: “ASPCA MACLAY FINALS,” over and over.
I sat in the stands. It was nine o’clock in the morning, and there were about two dozen other people sitting in the seats while the crew dragged the arena, smoothing it out and getting ready to start building the course.
I saw one girl standing by the in-gate nervously tapping her foot. A man who I guessed was her father walked over to her, and she snapped at him to leave her alone.
Two women sat down in front of me. They were pretty, with nice sweaters, jewelry, and clean dark blue jeans.
“I know four girls applying for a spot in the ninth grade,” said one.
“How many of them are Greystone material?”
“Seriously.”
“When you talk to that admissions person, show total respect. Whatever it takes. Cry if you have to. Beg.”
“Whatever it takes,” the other agreed.
“You know what they say—if you don’t want to play by the rules, don’t play.”
“Of course. We’re playing.”
“And then the girls will be in the same class!”
“Knock on wood.”
“Knock on wood.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do if she has to go to public school.”
She turned and caught me looking at her. Very quickly, her eyes moved from my face down to my feet and then away.
Something told me these ladies weren’t there because they loved horses.
I left and walked through the stable area. Grooms were washing, feeding, cleaning stalls, soaking and wrapping legs, clipping. Hardly any riders in sight. A big black horse leaned on his canvas webbing and pawed loudly on the concrete. His groom whistled and swept along, swatting the horse’s feet out of the aisle.
I saw a sticker on a tack trunk that said “Live your dreams.” Everywhere I looked these days, I saw stickers and mugs and posters that told people to live their dreams, as if the only way to be alive was to go for it. That was true if you didn’t fail. If you failed, people thought you were a fool. I wondered if the people who said to live your dreams were going to pay my rent when living my dreams didn’t work out.
I looked at the groom sweeping and whistling. I had more in common with him than with those ladies talking by the ring, and it wasn’t because they had money. They thought they were winning at a game that the rest of us were losing. This groom sweeping the floor in a neat pattern, getting his work done early, loving his job—he wasn’t losing anything. He was playing a different game.
I was waiting for the officials to post the course and the “order of go.” Then I’d know how much time I had to braid. If I braided today, the day before, Sonny might rub the braids out. And somehow I had to find time to sleep, because my schooling time was at three o’clock in the morning.
When I went back to the stalls, there was Sub, standing loose in the aisle, eating hay. He could have run out the damn doors and right down Thirty-Fourth Street if he’d wanted to. One of the girls I’d been watching before, the one with dark hair, was putting a halter on him.
“He’s an escape artist!” she said when she saw me coming. “I’m Caroline,” she said, patting Sub. “And this is Laura.”
“Hi. I’m Sid.”
We smiled at each other, and I put Sub back in his stall. This time I clipped all three snaps of the webbing to the eyehooks so he wouldn’t get out.
“He’s sweet.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you bring him for company?” Caroline asked.
I nodded. “Is that your horse?” I asked, pointing at the chestnut.
“I borrowed him from a lady I ride for,” she said. “Just for the show. Dollar lease. I can’t afford an eq horse.” She smiled a little and shrugged. I didn’t realize kids at this level dollar-leased, too.
“I did that once,” I said, thinking about Ruby, although I’d never given Beezie a do
llar and we’d never written up a lease. We’d just put a halter on Ruby and loaded her up.
Caroline gestured toward Sonny. “Is he your horse?” she asked.
“My uncle’s,” I said.
“He’s cute. A little nervous, but he’ll settle down,” Laura said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You guys don’t seem nervous.”
“Oh, we’re freaking out. But what can you do?” she said. “You come here, you ride, you try not to kill yourself, and you go home and get ready for the next show.”
I had always thought I’d never make friends with girls who showed horses. They were usually all kinds of mean and snobby. But girls like these two could be my friends. They were happy. I didn’t think you were allowed to be happy until you were at least twenty-two.
A trainer appeared, and she seemed in a hurry. I’d seen her in Practical Horseman but I didn’t know her name. She was big and round with a long blond braid—preppy, with an alligator on her shirt and a pink leather belt with gold shells that connected in the middle.
She stopped in front of Caroline and Laura and took a dramatic breath.
“Girls, they posted the course.”
The girls followed her down the aisle.
I couldn’t move.
Laura turned around and waved for me to join them. “Come on!” she said, and I did.
Near the ring, coaches and riders were gathered around a bulletin board. Right in front of it was Wayne.
Before I could get over to him, I heard Wes’s voice. “Sid, you drew second.”
I turned around, so glad to see him. “Hi!” I said. “When is your schooling time? Where are your stalls?”
Kelly came up next to him. “Hi, Sid,” she said. “You hear what Wes said?”
My brain was frozen.
“You’re second,” she said.
I was going second. Out of two hundred.
Wes grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me toward Wayne. “Go look at the course.”
Wayne was rubbing his whiskers and looking at the course diagram, his brow wrinkled. I wanted to see but there were riders in my way. I finally squeezed through and tried to concentrate on the course.
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