Venom

by Nikki Tate

  He looks happy. I wish a rub between my shoulders was enough to change my mood.

  “Who’s next?” Em asks, ducking under the stall guard and fishing out the next dose of wormer.

  “Take it easy, Lordy,” I say, giving the horse a rub between his ears as I take off his halter. Devil May Care wallops his stall wall with a mighty kick next door. This should be fun.

  Against all odds, Devil May Care is easy to worm. He barely moves when Em slides in the tube and squirts the paste into his mouth. His eyes get a little bigger and he lifts his upper lip, flashing his teeth and gums after he swallows, but he doesn’t actually do anything bad.

  “Who would have thunk it?” Em says, giving Devil an extra long scratch on the neck. “What a good boy. You could teach some of these other horses some manners.”

  Em keeps on scratching, and Devil keeps his upper lip pulled way, way back, so he looks like he’s grinning. Sometimes I think that’s what horses do best—fool us and then chuckle behind our backs.

  chapter ten

  “Was that your last one?” Grandma asks. I drop my backpack on the floor and flop onto the couch.

  “That’s it for this year.” Exams. I have two more years of high school left. I have no idea how I’m going to survive.

  “We should go out for dinner, maybe invite your mom.”

  “Hmm.”

  “That doesn’t sound very enthusiastic.” Grandma gives me a long, hard look. “Is your report card going to be that bad?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Grunting is for cavemen. You may as well tell me. I’m going to find out soon enough.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Why is it that when you talk about school you mumble?”

  I shrug.

  “Bs?” Grandma is nothing if not persistent.

  “Maybe one, in art. Oh, two. I did okay in gym.” I notice she doesn’t even start with the As.

  “Cs?”

  “Maybe in math. Depends on the exam.”

  “That’s it? Only one possible C in your real subjects?”

  “Art is real.”

  To her credit, she doesn’t push it. There isn’t much point, really. “I don’t think I have any Fs,” I add quickly.

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose.” She rubs her thumb back and forth under her chin. “I think we should go out for dinner anyway. Would you like to invite your mother?”

  The couch feels soft and warm, the kind of place I could happily stay for the next twenty years. At least until people forget about asking what kind of grade I got in grade-ten English.

  Grandma reaches over and pats my arm. “It’s all right, love. We can go by ourselves a little later. I’m sure your mother will want to see you after the report card arrives in the mail.”

  I’m sure she will. My head falls back, and I close my eyes. When Mom finds out how badly the last semester went, who knows how she’ll react. A major melt-down, I’m guessing. Maybe we shouldn’t meet anywhere in public until she’s finished screaming at me. Grandma must be thinking along the same lines because she says, “We’ll have her over here for coffee. But right now, go toss your bag in your room and think about where you want to go and eat. The new issue of Blood Horse arrived today. We can look at it over dinner.”

  Why, I wonder, can’t they have interesting stuff like Blood Horse magazine to read at school?

  The best thing about summer is that I can basically live down at the track. I get there just before dawn and stay as late as I can.

  There’s always something to do. Between riding regularly for Scampy, helping Em and picking up extra rides for other trainers, I don’t have much spare time.

  Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I slip into a horse’s stall and just stand there. There’s nothing as soothing as the rhythmic crunch, crunch, crunch of a horse chewing its hay. Which is how I find myself in the back corner of Bing Bang Bong’s stall, taking a mental-health break in the middle of the afternoon on the first day of summer vacation.

  Bing is a hay dipper. He tugs a mouthful out of the hay net and then dunks it in his water bucket. He swishes it around and then lifts his head to keep chewing. Bing repeats this for every single bite of hay. This might make his dry hay easier to eat, but his water bucket is always disgusting.

  A noise in the aisle catches my attention. Lordy’s stall is directly across from Bing Bang Bong’s. Tony stops in front of Lordy and looks up and down the aisle. He hasn’t noticed me in the corner of Bing’s stall.

  Tony takes Lordy’s halter from the hook and disappears into Lordy’s stall. “Easy, big fella—stand still. There...good...good. Okay—all done.”

  I hear him give the horse a pat, and then Tony emerges from the stall. He has a bright orange syringe cap clamped between his teeth. After he latches the stall door, he sticks the cap on the syringe and shoves it into the back pocket of his jeans. Then he strolls away, whistling softly.

  It’s only when I let out my breath that I realize I had stopped breathing.

  What is Tony giving Lordy? Lots of supplements and medications are perfectly legal. Many drugs have to be stopped a certain number of days before a race. It’s Wednesday. Lordy races on Saturday.

  I wait until I can’t hear Tony’s whistling before I peer out of the stall. I’m alone. I check the white board in the tack room. Nothing is written in the meds column. Tony has worked for Scampy longer than I have. Surely Scampy must know what’s going on? How am I going to find out without getting fired again?

  chapter eleven

  Later that afternoon I help Em drag everything out of the tack room and into an empty stall.

  “Were you here last year when we did this?” Em asks, pushing a wisp of fine hair off her forehead. It’s all I can do not to reach over and brush it away for her. “What? Have I got dirt on my face?”

  “No, I just—”

  Of all people to save me from death by blushing, Grandma comes around the corner and stops in the middle of the aisle.

  “What are you two up to?”

  “Painting the tack room,” Em says matter-of-factly. “It’s a summer tradition.”

  “Oh, right. Wasn’t that one of the first jobs you had to help with when you started here last year, Spencer?”

  How could I forget? I was terrified of Em and her famously grumpy Uncle Scampy. I’m not scared of Em any more, but Scampy? That’s different.

  “Where’s your uncle?”

  “Around. He doesn’t like to get too close to this kind of stuff,” Em says airily. She waves one slender arm in the direction of the stacked buckets, piled-up milk crates and the upended truck bench. “Too much like work. Check the café. He’s probably got his nose stuck in the Conditions Book.”

  It’s a funny thing, but every time anyone refers to the book that lists all the upcoming races, I get a strange squeeze of jealousy in the pit of my stomach. Is it weird, or what, that more than anything in the world I’d love to own and race my own horses? Like Scampy, Dad made most of his money training other people’s horses. He also liked to have one or two of his own in the barn. If I had a horse of my own and a couple of good clients, then I could be the one sitting in the Backside Café with a mug of coffee and a pen and my training notebook. I’d figure out who was going to run and when, and which horse had the best chance in which race. Just like my Dad used to do.

  “You want to take a break?” Em asks, looking from me to Grandma.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  I don’t know why Grandma wants to talk to Scampy, and I tell myself I don’t care. I can guess, though. She’s probably going to ask him about Lordy and his chances on the weekend.

  Lordy’s going to be in a race for horses three years and older that haven’t won a race this year. His strong finish a month ago means he’s eligible but will leave the gate with shorter odds than last time. The race handicappers will have noticed how he’s been doing. Depending on what other horses are in the race, he might even be a favorite at post time. Lordy definitely
won’t be a long shot.

  The purse is decent: $25,000. The race is part of a series sponsored by a local bank. The prize money is split between the top six horses, and the winner’s share would go a long way to covering Scampy’s operating costs.

  “I brought you two some dessert to share later—chocolate cake.” Grandma stands in the open tack-room door and gawks. “Where’s the fridge?”

  Em laughs. “Down around the corner out of the way. Just outside the feed room. Follow the extension cord!”

  Grandma disappears, and Em plops down on a hay bale and wipes the back of her forearm across her brow. “How did it get so hot? It was, like, yesterday when we were freezing our butts off. We have to get the fans going.”

  I want to sit down on the bale beside her, but suddenly the bale looks too small for two. Not that long ago I would have plunked down beside Em. We might have had a contest to see who could push the other off the end of the bale. Last summer, when it got hot in the afternoons, we went out behind the shedrow and hosed each other off in the horse wash rack. I’m tempted to suggest we do that again, but Em will guess that even while part of me might be cooling off, her wet T-shirt was going to heat things up in other areas. She’d kill me. The silence hangs in the air between us.

  “Break’s over.” Em springs to her feet. She strides back into the nearly empty tack room and gets back to work.

  We work steadily for hours. We sweep the floor and scrub the worst of the filth off the walls. Then we slap a coat of fresh paint over the walls and wooden shelves.

  The breaks we take are filled with the endless chores around the barn. We top up water buckets, measure out the grain and supplements for the afternoon feed, stuff hay into hay nets and sweep the barn aisles. We are busy, but not busy enough to stop the questions in my head. What did Tony give Lordy? Why would Scampy risk his reputation doping an average horse? It’s not like Lordy is ever going to be a stakes contender. Can I trust Em? Should I tell her what I’ve seen? She worships the ground Scampy walks on. I can’t tell her.

  “What? Sorry—”

  “I asked if you were hungry.”

  I wonder what else Em might have said while I was on another planet.

  “Do you want to grab something to eat before we put everything back in?”

  My gut responds with a loud rumble.

  “Okay, then, let’s go.” She laughs. “Try not to spook the horses with that disgusting noise!”

  We turn together and, with a final look back at the horses peeking over their stall guards, we head for the café.

  On Saturday morning, Em and I watch Lordy’s race from our usual place. It’s not far from the tunnel where the horses cross under the track to the paddock, which is the area where they are saddled and the jockeys mount up before the race.

  “They’re off!”

  We can’t see the starting gate over on the far side of the track, but we can hear the announcer calling the race and we can watch the start on the big screens above the odds board.

  Em starts yelling encouragement when Lordy takes an early lead. “Go, Lordy! That’s my boy! Keep it up! Watch on the outside! Gooooo!”

  Em bounces up and down as the horses take the far turn and bear down on the homestretch in front of the grandstand. From the start, Lordy has been pushed by a chestnut gelding who has stayed tucked in at his outside flank. From a distance, it looks like the other horse has his nose stuck to Lordy’s saddle cloth. I know they aren’t quite that close, but the chestnut isn’t giving an inch. A gray is making up ground fast and charges up around the outside of both Lordy and the gelding. The gray colt’s jockey glances over his shoulder and goes to the whip. The chestnut surges past Lordy and suddenly the race is now between the gray and the chestnut. Lordy falls back, and I can see the rest of the field closing the gap behind the leaders.

  Beside me, Em is nearly having a heart attack. She’s leaping up and down, bellowing, “Run! Lordy! Hang on, baby!”

  And, somehow, he does, making it over the finish line in third place, just ahead of the number four horse, a dark bay wearing the pink and gray racing colors of Jess McKay.

  “That’s okay,” Em says. “We’ll make a little money on that one. Let’s go!”

  We start the long jog to the backside, wave at Jo-Anne at security and are ready to cool out Lordy after he gets back from the drug-testing shed. The winners are always tested, but a second horse is also randomly chosen. Today, Lordy’s number came up— again. That’s twice in a row. I wonder if someone in power is suspicious.

  Grandma arrives back at the barn about five minutes before Lordy. She’s grinning, so I know she had money riding on the race.

  “Well done!” she says, beaming at us. As if we had anything to do with it. Grandma opens her purse, peels off a few bills and hands them to Em.

  “I love that horse,” Em declares.

  “You had a bet on Lordy?”

  “Of course I did,” Em said. “Didn’t you, Stretch?”

  It’s a dig, and I know it. I refuse to rise to the bait.

  “He was fading fast at the end,” I point out.

  “He hung in there exactly long enough.”

  True. But why? Just what had Tony given him?

  Em tucks her winnings into the back pocket of her jeans and smiles at Grandma. “That was excellent chocolate cake the other day, Mrs. Sheldrake.”

  Grandma smiles back. “Glad you enjoyed it. I’m stopping at the farmer’s market on the way home; it’s cherry season,” Grandma says.

  Immediately, my mouth waters. Fresh local cherries. With our long wet spring, they were late this year, but oh wow! How sweet they are!

  “I was thinking cherry pies...cherry tarts...”

  “Sign me up!” Em says.

  “As long as Spencer here doesn’t get at the cherries before I have a chance to bake.”

  “Em!” We all turn when Scampy barks out her name. He’s leading Lordy, who is jigging and prancing beside him. There’s no doubt about it, the horse looks pretty good.

  Em doesn’t need to be told what to do, and neither do I. I take the reins from Scampy, who turns to my grandmother and says, “Joyce, good to see you. Lordy ran a good race. I’m pleased. Come inside. How about a lemonade?”

  They disappear into the tack room and leave us to the long process of cooling out the sweaty horse.

  Lordy is drenched, and his sides still puff in and out. Once the saddle, saddle cloth and bridle are off and the halter and sweat sheet are on, we start walking loops around the barns. Each time we pass through Scampy’s barn, Lordy visits the water bucket.

  “Easy, big guy,” Em says when we arrive at the water bucket for the first time. Lordy doesn’t listen. He plunges his mouth into the water and takes a huge swig. Two swallows, and then Em makes him move on. We walk another loop and then let him have two more sips. Left to his own devices, Lordy would empty the bucket in one go. And, chances are, it would make him very sick.

  With each loop, Em checks Lordy’s breathing, how he’s moving and whether he’s cooling out okay. She slips her hand under the sweat sheet and reaches forward to feel his chest.

  Lordy is still wet with sweat and warm when Em says, “Bath time for Lordy.” She coos as she leads him into the wash rack out back.

  Lordy knows the routine. It’s so great working with an old trooper like him. He happily lets us clip the snaps to either side of his halter and stands quietly in the wash rack. Even so, I keep the lead shank on and stay near his head while Em hoses him down. She starts with his legs and works her way to the rest of his body. A bucket of warm water and horse shampoo are next, and she lathers him up. After a rinse and a squeegee, Em throws a light cotton sheet over him.

  Then we walk again. Around and around the barns we go, letting the sun do the work of drying off the horse. As we walk, Lordy’s legs loosen and stretch, and by the time he is ready to return to his stall, he is good and hungry and ready for a rest.

  chapter twelve

&nbs
p; That night my usual nightmare takes a new direction. In the dream, my dad is loading a horse into the starting gate. Everything seems to be going smoothly. I realize the horse is Lordy. I know something is wrong, but at first I don’t know what. Then I notice that Lordy only has three legs. Where his right foreleg should be, a bloody stump sticks sideways out of his shoulder.

  With the stump sticking out, the horse won’t be able to squeeze into the narrow stall in the starting gate.

  “Stop! Dad! He won’t fit!”

  The words are loud inside my head, but for some reason my dad can’t hear me. He moves behind Lordy, waving a big hook at the end of a stick.

  “Dad!”

  Dad swings the hook over Lordy’s back. He tears a strip of flesh from the horse’s back and flicks it back and forth. Blood sprays everywhere. Lordy’s ears pin flat against his neck.

  “Stop! He won’t fit!”

  Lordy tries to move forward, but his stump thuds against the back of the starting gate. Dad moves closer, and Lordy lets go with both back legs.

  Boom.

  The force of those powerful haunches drives both back hooves into Dad’s face. His face collapses like it’s made of soft clay. His eyeballs explode. His nose and mouth disappear. Flecks of blood and brain spatter everywhere. He falls. All around, horses’ hooves stomp and thump. Bits of brain bubble and ooze out of the gaping hole where Dad’s face used to be.

  “Stop!” I scream, and this time my voice is loud enough for everyone to hear. The horses kneel and melt into the ground. I run to where my dad has fallen and reach out to touch his shoulder.

  “Dad?”

  Dad’s back arches. He bends backward, pushing his head into the soft dirt of the track. His legs kick and push and his arms start doing something like the back-stroke. Dad drives himself into the ground. His head, his neck, and then his shoulders disappear. Thrashing and contorting, his legs lift off the ground.

  The earth opens her muddy lips and swallows my dad whole.

  “Dad!”

  “Spencer—shhh.”