Maybe it was time to take a breath and stop worrying. It had been a crazy year, with one big hit rolling in after the other. But every time, we’d bounced back a little stronger, a little sharper and more united, than before. Something could still go wrong, but it was out of our hands.
Or so I thought, until Zeke’s mom called. Damn! That’s what I’d forgotten. I was supposed to check with the family that reserved all the rooms at the Hand Hotel to see if they had any space for Zeke’s family. It completely slipped my mind until Andrea’s name flashed onto my phone screen. Total fumble. Every room in the Hand had to be spoken for by now.
“Hey, Andrea,” I began. “I know why you’re calling. I’m really sorry.”
“Oh.” Andrea sounded surprised. “So…you mean Zeke spoke to you already?”
“Zeke? No. You’re calling about the hotel, right?”
“No. Not the hotel.” Andrea paused. “Zeke was going to call, but he’s still processing it.”
“Processing?”
“Yes. Zeke broke his foot.”
24
Ladies ex Machina
Mika and I hurried over to Andrea’s house and found Zeke slumped in a recliner, his foot strapped in a walking cast and a pair of crutches by his side. The TV was on, but Zeke’s mom and two sisters had given up trying to engage him in the show or in conversation. Zeke was sunk in his own brooding world.
“Nice work, numbnut,” I said, then saw from his face that it wasn’t helping. “So what happened?”
After our run the previous day, Zeke said, he’d worked a double shift as a lifeguard at the Southern End public pool. The sun hadn’t completely set when he punched out, and after eight hours of sitting in a chair twirling a whistle, he was dying to shake out the stiffness. He spent the last hour of daylight practicing parkour in the playground, kong vaulting over the picnic tables and cranking out muscle-ups on the swing set. By the time it was dark, he felt fantastic—and hungry enough to eat his own arm. He jogged over to the car, debating whether to blow off keto for one night and have a double burger on a bun, and that was when he caught the curb weird with his foot. He downplayed his limp when he got home, insisting to his mom it was only a sprain.
“But when I got out of bed this morning, I almost fainted,” Zeke said. Andrea dragged him to the doctor for an X-ray, which confirmed what she suspected: shattered fifth metatarsal. Zeke’s foot was as bad as my hand, except you need only one hand to run with a donkey. “So,” I began, not sure if it was humane to even ask the question. “There’s not any chance that maybe, in a week or two—”
Zeke’s head shot up, as intent on his mom’s answer as I was.
“Maybe what? If he can run?” Andrea said. “Absolutely not. That boot stays on for a month. Minimum,” she added, staring Zeke down to make sure he got it.
“We’ll see,” Zeke muttered.
* * *
—
Mika and I were quiet most of the drive home. We were mentally orbiting the obvious, searching for something to say while circling the ugly fact that we wanted to avoid: This was checkmate. We’d finally taken a hit there was no bouncing back from.
“There’s got to be somebody,” Mika finally ventured. “Don’t you know anybody in Colorado?”
“Anybody can’t run with Sherman,” I said. “Nobody can. You think Sherman will listen to anyone except Zeke?”
Only as the words were coming out of my mouth did their truth really hit me. Until that moment, it never really sank in how inseparable Zeke and Sherman had become; not until I realized that no matter how wide I threw the net, I couldn’t think of anyone—no friend, no relative, no other runner—who could fill Zeke’s shoes. Sherman was Zeke’s donkey now, and you can’t matchmake that kind of chemistry. Every so often I’d feel a stab of guilt when I was running up front with Flower, while Zeke, who was really a lot faster, was stuck in the rear, trying to make Sherman quit dillydallying already and stop messing around with Matilda.
But then I’d remember a few things: It wasn’t Flower, I’d recall, who masterminded the mass escape of all the other animals by shaking the chain off the pasture gate with her teeth. It wasn’t Matilda who figured out how to steal cat food from the woodshed by head-butting the door until it popped open. And it was only Sherman who would take your arm in his mouth and pull you away, gently but damn seriously, if you were petting another donkey more than you were petting him. Shermie had a mind of his own and a will that wouldn’t quit, just like the kid who spent all spring battling depression and trying to become a better burro racer by sitting in a freezing creek. Those two were meant for each other, and they knew it.
With Zeke out of action, Maya subs in to help train Team Sherman.
“You’re right,” I said to Mika. “We’ve got to do this.” A lot had been thrown at Sherman and Zeke that year, and the two of them had soldiered right through. Zeke had been plopped into a crazy challenge, and he’d handled it with extraordinary patience and compassion; he never complained, he never gave up, and he never—except for that time we were all hangry and Zeke tried to push Sherman with both hands like a shopping cart—lost his cool. I could only hope that every time Zeke sat down with his therapist, she was half as caring and dedicated to him as Zeke was to that donkey.
Mika was right. We had to find someone to give Sherman his crack at that race. Zeke deserved it.
One week later, I was peering out the kitchen window, cutting my eyes back and forth from the setting sun to the empty road. The day before, Mika and Zeke had caught a flight for Colorado with my younger daughter, Sophie, and my niece, Sara. The four of them were going to set up base camp at the Earthship, while I was supposed to help Karin and her girlfriends haul the donkeys.
Supposed to, because as of dusk, there was no sign of any horse trailer. In fact, I hadn’t heard much from Karin since we’d had a little arm-wrestle on the phone a few days ago. I’d decided that even if I didn’t have a choice when it came to drivers, I didn’t have to hand over the Gang of Three to a complete stranger with no one to watch out for them. When I told Karin I wanted to come along for the drive, she sounded offended at first, then downright sour.
“Might not have room. Might have to put you back in the trailer,” she grumbled.
“Fine by me,” I shot back.
“Better be,” she retorted.
After that—silence. The last thing I wanted was to annoy her so much that she’d quit, so I left her in peace and waited for her to show up Sunday morning…Sunday afternoon…Sunday evening—
BLAAAPPPP-Blap-Blap-Blap! A horn was screaming like I had five minutes to evacuate. Outside, someone was blasting away behind the wheel of a giant diesel pickup while, at the same time, maneuvering the biggest, longest horse trailer I’d ever seen between two trees and up my driveway. The driver finally took her hand off the horn. The front doors flew open, and down slid two women in culottes and flip-flops. I looked behind them, holding my breath in hopes that someone bigger, stronger, and younger was about to emerge from the backseat. Both of the women were as short as my eleven-year-old daughter, and if I had to guess the age of the one in the pink tee, I’d say sixty-something.
Nope. “Linda is seventy-two. Can you believe it?” said Karin, whom I identified by the odd accent and the fact that apparently she wasn’t Linda.
“So, is this everyone?” I asked, still hoping. “You mentioned someone else?”
“Nah, Katherine couldn’t make it,” Karin said. “So looks like we can use you after all. We got a late start, so let’s get going. Grab your gear while we load the donkeys.”
“You better let me handle that,” I warned. “They can be really difficult.”
“Ha!” Linda snorted, stabbing a finger at Karin. “They ain’t met difficult yet. Go on, get your gear.”
Whatever. They might as well get a taste of Sherman right away
and see what they’re up against. I ran inside, quickly turning off lights and scribbling a note for Abe, the young neighbor who would be taking care of the cats, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and geese while we were away. I snatched my bag and locked the door, and in less than twenty minutes I came back outside to find Karin slamming shut the trailer door while Linda—seventy-two-year-old, eleven-year-old-girl-size Linda—was slinging fifty-pound bales of hay into the back of the pickup. I looked around for the Gang of Three. They were nowhere in sight.
“Wait. Are they in there already?” I said.
Karin waved me over to the back of the trailer. “Take a look.” Inside, the three donkeys were all nestled in their own individual stalls, each separated by a half-barrier low enough for the donkeys to still nuzzle one another. Flower and Matilda were facing their windows, quietly munching from bags of fresh hay. Sherman, being Sherman, had his butt to the window and was staring stubbornly at the back wall. “He’s your nervous one, huh?” Karin said. “Don’t worry, we’ll win him over.”
I went to help Linda with the hay, but she was already finished. In less than thirty minutes, the two women that I’d been afraid couldn’t handle the job had filled the water tanks, hoisted a half ton of hay, caught and loaded three suspicious donkeys, and I believe peed behind my car. Karin and Linda climbed into the front of the truck and I slid into the back, and before I even knew the plan—or if there was one—the two Virginia ladies were blasting us through Lancaster on our way to Colorado.
* * *
—
Sometime around midnight, Linda and I were filling the gas tank in West Virginia while Karin went inside for a rest stop and a Monster drink. “Something you should know about Karin,” Linda said to me. “She won’t tell you this herself. She had a really tough run with cancer a few years ago. Not up here”—she waved her hand across her chest—“but down here,” and she pointed to her crotch. Twice, Karin battled uterine cancer, and the removal of a tumor “the size of a baby’s head,” as Linda put it, nearly killed her. Karin was left unable to have children, which also nearly ended her marriage. During that darkness, she vowed that if she ever got her life back, she was going to live every second of it.
“Now, nothing stops her,” Linda said. “She gets an idea, she’s gone. And me and Katherine are usually with her. If she calls us for an adventure, we grab our purses and go. Once, Karin found a jet boat for sale in New Jersey. You ever been on a jet boat? They’re crazy! We took my husband’s trailer and were halfway there before I remembered to tell him I was leaving.” That was pretty much the only reason the Virginia ladies signed on for this trip: when Karin heard she could visit Colorado for the first time and watch a bunch of weirdos run around with donkeys, it was jet-boat time all over again.
Linda had survived some dark tunnels of her own. “My mother had four kids, one every June, and it was too much for her,” she said. “She was only forty-three when she took her own life. Can you imagine how you must feel to be that young and believe there’s nothing worth living for?” Linda was twenty-one at the time, and she never got over the aching sense of loss. She self-medicated by staying on the move, working as a long-haul driver for a trailer company and crisscrossing the Midwest in nearly nonstop seventy-two-hour deliveries. When she married and began raising her own family, she found an ingenious way to microdose her wanderlust: she became a horse midwife, which meant racing out the door in the middle of the night whenever she got an emergency call about a mare struggling with a difficult birth.
“Sissy Spacek, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda—I’ve helped all kinds of folks with their foals,” Linda said. That’s how Linda and Karin met, as Virginia horse lovers who ran into each other on the same backwoods trails. It wasn’t long before they were taking long, rambling rides together along the James River—and, every once in a while, obeying the call to hit the gas and head for the hills.
* * *
—
Karin strolled out of the gas station, jangling her keys in the air like a game show prize. “You’re up, cowboy. Ready to take the wheel?”
Hard gulp. “This is a lot of trailer for me,” I said out loud, while my brain was screaming, Are you nuts? We’re on switchback roads at two in the morning in the mountains of West Virginia. We’ve got headlights stabbing our eyes and live animals in the back. This is where I do my trial run? “I’ve never handled anything this big. I don’t want to make a mistake that could get the donkeys hurt.”
“You make a mistake, you get hurt!” Karin said. “You know how much this thing costs?” She was still holding the keys in front of me. “Now c’mon, you’ll be fine. We got a picnic in the back, we got good music. You’ll be fine.”
I climbed reluctantly behind the wheel, while Linda cozied into a blanket in the back to catch some sleep. Karin dug into the cooler for our midnight snack. She and Linda might be as tough as any trucker, but they don’t eat like one. I’d thought we’d be fast-fooding our way across the country, but they’d packed an amazing feast instead: grilled chicken and avocado on ciabatta, sliced bell peppers and apples, hard-boiled eggs, little bags of salad. Karin double-checked the navigator to make sure we were on course for Indiana in case she fell asleep, then settled back to chat.
“Did you know I’m Dutch?” she began, finally revealing the mystery of her accent. Her family still lives in Holland, where she was raised as a country girl who spent every second outdoors. Even as a kid, she liked working with her hands, and she developed such a flair for mechanics that she graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and became a technician for state-of-the-art copiers in the United States. “I was over here working on machines in the Pentagon and the National Institutes of Health,” she told me. Her Virginia home was a manageable commute from downtown D.C., but Karin loved the farm so much that every hour she spent in the city felt like an hour lost. Karin’s husband, Butch, is a farrier, and that put Karin in contact with lots of weekend riders who owned more horses than they could handle. Karin began hiring out as a trainer, and her firm but gentle touch and keen eye for body language earned her a reputation as a wizard who could unlock the potential of even the most troublesome animals.
“That explains how you got the Wild Thing into the trailer,” I said.
“Which one’s that? Sherman?” she asked. “Oh, he’s a sweet baby.”
Sweet baby? I couldn’t get over the difference between Karin-on-the-road and Karin-spitting-nails-at-me-through-the-phone, and I began to suspect it was partly my fault. When she suddenly appeared out of the blue and offered to save my bacon, she must have naturally assumed I’d be grateful. Instead, I fumbled around with doubting questions, which to her must have come across as some mouthy man challenging her expertise and independence. Once she saw that I was happy to follow her lead, she was amazingly supportive, trusting me to handle her beloved trailer and even letting her guard down when I asked about her illnesses. She coached me through the first hour of driving, until she finally gave me the ultimate attaboy: “You don’t need me in your ear,” she said, then balled her coat under her head and went to sleep.
* * *
—
Daybreak caught us just outside Terre Haute, Indiana. I eased the rig off the highway and into a Cracker Barrel parking lot. Before we went inside to eat, or even visit the bathroom, Karin made sure we attended to the donkeys. We pulled open the trailer door, and there was Sherman—still turned backward, facing the wall and ignoring his hay and open window.
“That guy is such a hardhead,” I said.
“Nah, you can’t think that way,” Karin said. “Animals don’t do things out of spite. They’re not trying to teach you a lesson. That’s the biggest mistake people make with animals, getting this idea that what they do has something to do with you. You gotta get yourself out of the picture, and then you’ll understand what’s really going on.”
Karin asked me about Sherman while we w
ere cleaning out the trailer, raking out the old pine chips and spreading fresh ones under the donkeys’ feet. I told her how we’d gotten the Wild Thing, springing him from the hoarder’s stall and bringing him back to our place, where he remained dead-eyed and withdrawn until that goofy goat Lawrence befriended him. “See, doesn’t that tell you what’s happening here?” Karin asked. Flower and Matilda had lived with Tanya on Christmas Wish Farm, where they always had plenty of friends and time to romp outdoors. Sherman had been locked away on his own like a prisoner in solitary. He had to come up with a mechanism to cope, and that was what we were seeing: in confined spaces, Sherman had taught himself to zone out until it was over.
“He’s not stubborn,” Karin concluded. “He’s scared. So we’re going to keep checking on him, and petting him, and letting him know he’s not abandoned.”
Linda began mixing a tub of electrolyte mash for the donkeys, while Karin and I carried buckets over to the back door and asked a dishwasher if we could borrow a hose. He disappeared and returned with the manager, who personally connected the hose and dragged it out to us with such brisk friendliness that I had to wonder if walk-up donkey service in the Cracker Barrel parking lot during the height of the breakfast rush was just a normal part of her daily routine. “Hon, anything else you need, just ask for Marilyn,” she told Karin, then hurried off to check on her packed tables.
Running with Sherman Page 29