* * *
—
We’re toast, I realized on the drive home. Totally torpedoed.
I was all gung-ho in front of Tanya, but even as I was reassuring her that nah, c’mon, we’ll be just dandy, I could feel the dread rising as a small part of my mind was already calculating the wreckage. We were facing crazy odds and a tight deadline, and now the three most important members of Sherman’s team—Tanya, Scott, and Flower: his coach, medic, and personal trainer—were out.
No Scott meant no one to tend to Sherman’s healing but still misshapen hooves. No Tanya meant we’d lost both a donkey whisperer and a donkey, because what would we do with Flower? We’d made our biggest breakthrough when we decided to follow Vella Shpringa’s lead and surround Sherman with a band of friends, but without Tanya, we now had more donkeys than donkey handlers. Sherman and his new buddies had already bonded into such a Gang of Three that I cringed at the thought of taking two of them out for a run and leaving the third behind.
“Let’s see how it goes,” I told Mika, after I’d gotten home and filled her in. There was no telling if Tanya would be back in weeks, months, or ever, so we might as well find out now how hard it would be to go it alone. We headed outside, and as soon as the donkeys heard the chain rattle on the gate, they came frisking toward us.
“Look at them, ready to play,” Mika said. “That’s a good sign.”
We haltered and roped Matilda and Sherman, but I didn’t know how we’d get them outside the fence without Flower stampeding along behind them. “Turn her around a sec,” Mika said. I led Flower in a slow circle, and before we’d gone the full 360, Mika somehow funneled Matilda and Sherman through the gate and slid out behind them. I squeezed through, chaining the gate securely. Amazingly, Flower just stood and watched.
“We’d better haul ass while we can,” I said. Mika clucked to Matilda and we were off, trotting down the driveway. Behind me, Flower began to huff nervously. I didn’t dare look back, thinking that maybe if I didn’t make eye contact and got Sherman moving, Flower would just chill out and go on with her day. But Flower’s snorts kept getting louder and faster as she cycled from confusion, to concern, to—
“Oh my god!” Mika said, wheeling around.
—Four-alarm panic.
Flower had erupted with an earsplitting blast of utter despair, a wail both deafening and heartbreaking, the sob of the world’s saddest car alarm. If you’ve ever heard a donkey bray, you never again have to wonder what the souls of the damned twisting on the pitchforks of eternal torment sound like. Personally, I think Flower was hamming it up a little; I know for a fact that when Mika and Matilda did their Talking Donkey trick, Matilda could bellow out a pity party on command.*
But Flower’s misery was convincing enough for Matilda and Sherman. They wrenched themselves around while Flower was still in mid-bleat and strained to hurry back. Mika and I held our ground, pulling against the ropes as we debated our next move. We were right where we’d started two months ago, stuck in the driveway with no idea what to do. I didn’t know whether we should force Sherman and Matilda to come along, or respect their bond with Flower and give up on running without her. Were we good parents who knew our little ones would love kindergarten once we dropped them off, or Tiger Moms who didn’t know when to ease up?
“Sherman is going to have to run by himself on race day,” I reasoned, which sounded stupid and unlikely even as it was coming out of my mouth. On race day? We couldn’t even walk fifty feet without Tanya. Why pretend we still had a prayer of going thirty miles?
Mika must have read the surrender in my face and decided to take charge. “If Matilda goes, Sherman might follow,” she said. “And anything we start, we have to finish. Right?”
Mika braced the rope across her hips and marched toward the street, abandoning the ground-driving technique we’d been working on and reverting to the old-school tug-of-war style, pulling Matilda along from in front one grudging step at a time. I followed Mika’s lead, hauling Sherman down the driveway with me. Flower was storming back and forth along the fence line, bellowing for us to come back and get her, but Mika and I kept marching the two donkeys up the street to the turnoff onto the gravel road.
As we made the turn and disappeared behind the trees, Flower’s braying began to fade in the distance. Sherman and Matilda’s resistance eased as well, and with a little intensive clucking and encouragement, we got them trotting—for a while. Every few dozen yards, one or both would suddenly have second thoughts and pivot toward home, forcing Mika and me to constantly be on the lookout, scoping their body language for early-warning signs so we could scamper from right flank to left to cut off whatever U-turns were brewing between those furry ears.
By the time we got to the end of the gravel road, Mika and I had packed about three miles of running into a one-mile stretch, sprinting in zigzags to keep the veering donkeys moving forward. Now I really understood what Tanya brought to the game—not only her expertise, but her constant cowgirl maneuvering in the saddle as she deftly wheeled Flower around to stay one step ahead of any Sherman dumbfuckery. Without her, Mika and I could never relax into a groove; we were ranch hands more than runners, playing constant defense in a full-court press against breakaway critters. After one mile, we were fried.
“Bring ’em home?” I asked.
“I’m done,” Mika agreed.
I started to pull Sherman away from the grass he was chomping, but I didn’t have to. As soon as I walked toward him, he lifted his head and started walking up the gravel road. “Yup,” I said. “Flower time.” The closer I got, the more he picked up the pace, until we both shifted naturally from a walk to a jog. Matilda, who was a little more deeply invested in her munching, glanced up in surprise to find Sherman forty yards gone and opening ground. She closed the gap in no time, and together, the two little Seabiscuits raced toward home.
Flower was browsing quietly when we came around the turn toward the house, her separation anxiety apparently eased by some tasty wild greens she was pulling out from under the fence. But her head jerked up when she heard hoofbeats drumming on the pavement. She scampered back to the gate, letting loose a roof-shaking bray. Matilda and Sherman hollered back, whooping it up without missing a step as we charged down the road to the gate. Getting them inside, however, was madness; as soon as I lifted the chain, Flower and Matilda collided head-on, with Flower bulling her way out as Matilda was shoving her way in. Sherman, meanwhile, was dancing around in the middle, so thrilled by all the attention and companionship that he was happy to stay where he was, twisting and squirming while Mika and I dodged hooves and untangled ropes to sort everyone out.
I wasn’t looking forward to repeating this rodeo the next morning. The only sensible move was to bring Flower back to Tanya, but for at least three reasons that was too heartless to suggest: Sherman was devoted to Flower and Matilda; Flower was devoted to Matilda and Sherman; and Mika and I were devoted to Tanya. We couldn’t bust up the Gang of Three and saddle Tanya with another mouth to feed just because we’d had a rocky time during our first run on our own. All we had to do was be patient and consistent, and the donkeys would adapt. We knew that; we’d seen it happen, over and over, since the day Sherman arrived.
“We’re going to have to run them every day, no matter what,” I told Mika.
“First thing every morning,” she agreed. “Get the girls to school, then run.”
“First thing,” I promised.
* * *
—
First thing the next morning, I discovered we were out of chicken feed. Before messing with any donkeys, I had to hustle to the feed mill for half a dozen fifty-pound sacks and carry them up to the shed. I also picked up a salt block for the donkeys and a few bags of sheep feed, which required shoulder-carrying to a different shed. By the time everything was stored and everyone was fed—cats, chickens, ducks, geese, sheep, goats, and do
nkeys—I was famished myself. I went in for breakfast, but found the fireplace and wood-pellet stove were burning low, so it was right back out again, this time for a fifty-pound bag of pellets and an armload of split locust logs.
One thing you discover on even a small farm is that come winter, everything weighs fifty pounds and you’re always carrying it someplace: bales of hay to the feeders, bales of straw to the stalls, five-gallon buckets from the creek to the frozen water trough, chunks of logs from the woods for splitting, split firewood into the house for heating, and those eight-foot fence posts still piled in the yard, which, I suddenly remembered, absolutely had to be hand-dug and pounded in place right away before the ground froze.
I didn’t want to run as soon as I finished eating, anyway, so after breakfast, I decided to work on the fence posts for a while. A bunch of e-mails and a writing assignment also needed attention, and then Mika suggested lunch. By three that afternoon, the December sun was getting low and we remembered one of the girls had a basketball game…
All of which is to say, we never did get the donkeys out that day. Or the next; a winter storm was threatening, so we needed to get 150 bales of hay delivered from our neighbor and then haul each bale across the pasture and stack it in the bays in case we got socked by an early snow. All the other animals trailed along to snatch bites off the bales while we were carrying hay except the donkeys; they were wise to us now and kept their distance in case we were planning to abduct two of them again. By afternoon, we could see that the storm wouldn’t amount to more than a chilly drizzle, but the choice between chasing Sherman and Matilda for half an hour and watching the rain over a steaming afternoon coffee was no choice at all.
That was when we knew it was over. The days were shorter and colder and, with Christmas on the way, things were only getting busier. I knew the donkeys were only being a little fussy, and that once they got used to heading off without Flower, they’d be back to having fun again. But the hassle of chasing them in the cold, of lunging foolishly for them while our hands froze on the damp ropes and our feet got numb from the icy pasture, made it easy to keep postponing their training. When winter socked in and the roads were covered in snow, would we even try anymore?
Sherman’s chances of becoming an athlete—a donkey with purpose—were slipping away. And then the phone rang, and by the time I hung up, everything had changed. A friend was in serious trouble, and the only way to help was to get Sherman back out on the roads.
* Yes, we’ve got video.
16
Sick, Stressed, or House Arrest
Alarm bells went off as soon as I got Andrea Cook’s message. She was brief and upbeat, but I could tell right away that something was wrong:
Hey, Zeke is home from school and wants to talk to Chris about running. If he’s got a sec, could he give him a call?
We’ve known the Cooks almost as long as we’ve lived in the Southern End. Our kids went to the same elementary school, where Andrea was both the beloved nurse and the human dynamo who miraculously persuaded every class to run long, sweaty laps around the ballfield every year as a charity fund-raiser. Besides her nursing, charitable activism, graduate school night courses, homemaking, and shuttling her kids twice a day to swim practice, Andrea was also training for a triathlon (of course), so occasionally we’d go on long bike rides together during her ninety minutes of “free” time in the afternoon. I liked her a lot; she and her husband, Andy, and their three kids were so genuinely kind, bright, and neighborly that you could almost forgive them all for being so damn good-looking. Zeke, in particular, won my lifelong affection when he was in fourth grade and never blamed me for giving him poison ivy when I hauled him up into a tree by a rope during my daughter’s birthday party treasure hunt.
We saw a lot less of the Cooks as our kids got older and everyone’s lives got more hectic. Andrea and I hadn’t ridden together in a few years when I heard vague mentions that Zeke and his older sister, Ashling, hit a rough patch toward the end of high school. I didn’t hear many details, only something about depression, and when I saw them next, at Ashling’s graduation party, they both looked tan and strong and happy, a pair of teenage sun gods digging into nacho dip and butt-bombing cannonballs into the backyard pool. There was no hint of any lingering problems, and they both finished with stellar grades and went off to Penn State. But now, suddenly, super-student Zeke was home in the middle of the school year. And he wanted to chat with his mom’s fifty-two-year-old friend about jogging? Something wasn’t right.
Before talking to Zeke, I called Andrea to find out what was going on. To my surprise, Zeke picked up. I glanced at the phone: I’d accidentally dialed the home number instead of her cell. “Zeke, hey!” I stammered, groping for something to say that wouldn’t put him on the spot. “I hear you’re, uh…back for a while?”
“Yeah, I’m taking a semester at home,” Zeke said. He didn’t say why, which told me I shouldn’t ask. He’d be commuting to one class at the University of Delaware, he said, and since that left him plenty of free time every day, one of his goals was to get back in shape. He’d been buried in lab research last semester at Penn State, and needed more sweat and sunlight in his life.
“Why don’t you come over tomorrow for a run?” I offered. On the edge of my mind, an idea was taking shape. Already I could see it had some serious drawbacks, a big one being that I still had no clue what was wrong with Zeke. But if he was that same kid who’d let me hoist him fifteen feet into the air by an old clothesline, it might work. “You’re up for anything, right?” I asked.
* * *
—
The next morning, both Zeke and Andrea showed up. Andrea had been sidelined for a while with lower-back trouble, so I hadn’t expected her to come for the run. “I won’t get in the way,” she promised. “But I have to see what you’re getting my son into.”
We headed inside for a quick coffee. On the back porch, Zeke scooped up one of our mangy adopted cats and cradled it in his arms. Few visitors ever have the urge to put their hands anywhere near this battle-scarred little beast, but Zeke didn’t hesitate. What a tender guy, I thought, until I realized Zeke was just lifting it for closer inspection.
“Cool,” Zeke said. “Polydactyl.”
“No, that’s Cheetah,” I corrected him, a split-second before I remembered Hemingway’s Key West cats and missed a chance to sound smart. “That means six-toed, right?”
“Yup,” Zeke said. “Such an interesting mutation.”
Look who’s talking. What other Penn State sophomore even notices a snoozing cat, let alone classifies it by proper Greek taxonomy? I’d always heard that Zeke was smart, but he’s so muscular and energetic that whenever people told me that, I assumed they were too polite to add “for a jock.” It dawned on me that I’d only really known Zeke as a kid. I hadn’t been around him much over the past few years, so I didn’t know what kind of young man he’d become, or what kind of trouble had brought him home. When I came up with my idea the night before, I was building it around courageous, courteous, thirteen-year-old Zeke, not this twenty-year-old stranger. What if he’d turned into a smart-ass slacker? If so, this experiment wasn’t going to last much longer than the coffee.
“So here’s the deal,” I began. “Sophie finagled us into rescuing one donkey, and now we’ve got three.” I told them all about Matilda and Flower, and Tanya’s philosophy that donkeys need a purpose, and our current predicament: We couldn’t run Sherman and Matilda without Flower, but Flower no longer had a rider. If we had any hope of giving Sherman a crack at the pack burro championship this summer, we needed to get him back on the trails right away. I’d thought of asking the Amish guys for help, but they worked long days, lived too far away, and didn’t have cars.
“So if you’re okay with it—” I said to Zeke.
Andrea’s eyes widened a little, as if she were bursting to speak but biting her tongue.
>
“If you’re okay with it,” I went on, turning toward her, “I’m looking for an extra runner to see if we can take Flower out on foot.”
I’d never tried running with Flower, for obvious reasons. She’s so strong and jumpy, all it would take was one spooky shadow and she’d be gone, ripping the rope out of my hands and hightailing it for the hills. Still, I couldn’t forget that time I’d tried burro racing in Colorado and lined up next to Barb Dolan. Barb had a monster of a donkey named Dakota who was even bigger than Flower. The crowd was making Dakota nervous, but even though Barb is half my size, she handled that brute like a dance partner. She didn’t just keep Dakota under control; together they were so fast, they could beat most any other racer, man or woman, over any distance.
I’m no Barb Dolan, but I was hoping that what I lacked in donkey-wrangling skills I could make up for with Matilda. There’d be no stopping Flower if she decided to tear loose, but maybe she’d just follow Sherman’s lead and quietly fall into formation behind the little brown crew boss. And if that didn’t work…well, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t flee too far before returning to either our house or Tanya’s. I didn’t look forward to knocking on Tanya’s door to ask, Hey, about that favorite donkey you lent us—seen it around? But that was a worry for later. Right now, my problem was whether Zeke—and his mom—were okay with this scheme.
“So they run next to you?” Zeke asked. “Like a dog?”
“Pretty much like a dog,” I said, mostly for Mama Andrea’s sake. “Like a dog that kicks. But today, we’re just going to take it easy and see how Flower does. Andrea, you want to walk in front? If you lead, they’ll probably follow.”
“Fun!” Andrea said. “I’m in.”
Running with Sherman Page 16