Centaur Rising

by Jane Yolen

  There was a squabble of hands and voices.

  The stork man asked, “He talks?”

  And the bearded man added, “In English?”

  Mom nodded.

  “What else?” I muttered. “He was born here. Of course he speaks English!”

  Mom glared at me.

  “What does he think of the news about the soldiers going to Vietnam?” asked the redhead.

  Martha huffed through her nose. “Don’t be an idiot. He’s a little boy. He loves fairy tales and board games. He’s a whiz at Monopoly, and he recently stopped playing peekaboo. He doesn’t watch the news. Or read the trash you write.”

  She stalked off, her shoulders hunched as if she thought they were about to throw paper bombs at her.

  After she left, Dr. Herks gave them a quick rundown on Kai’s anatomy, his diet, and the fact that he had two hearts.

  That’s when the balding guy said, “So what’s this about…” He looked down at his notebook. “Puericentaurcephalitis? Is it catching? Is it fatal? Can humans—”

  “Where did you hear that?” Dr. Herks almost barked at the man.

  “Not at liberty to give you my sources.”

  “Well,” Dr. Herks said slowly, almost as if he was also reluctant to give his sources. Then he grinned. “It means ‘boy horse disease’ in dog Latin, and I just used that made-up term to buy us time. None of us had ever seen anything like Kai before.”

  “You’re kidding,” the reporter said.

  Almost jumping in his wheelchair to have a say, Robbie put in, “He was kidding then. He’s not kidding now.”

  The reporters looked over at Robbie, and all of a sudden seemed interested in a different story.

  Dr. Herks called them back to the major story. Then after insisting they leave their cameras on the desk—which they did somewhat reluctantly—Dr. Herks turned to the door. “We’ll go outside now.”

  They followed him out, looking for all the world like ducklings in a row.

  * * *

  The reporters went up their assigned ladders carefully. Dr. Herks climbed the fifth one to keep a careful eye on everything. Mom, Robbie, and I were stationed by the gate connecting the barn to the run.

  Martha led Kai out, one hand on his shoulder, speaking softly to him.

  Before opening the gate, Mom looked at Kai carefully. She took the rubber bands out of his hair and gave his curls a quick brush. “There will be people up on the ladders to watch you run.” She used only one of the rubber bands to pull the hair away from his face. “You need to see where you’re going,” she said.

  “Going fast?”

  “Yes, and people will see how fast you are going.”

  “Mrs. A?” Unaccountably, Kai liked her. I think he found her constant babble soothing. “Joey?”

  “No,” I told him, “new people. They want … they want to admire you.”

  “Okay,” he said brightly. “What’s admire?”

  Robbie put in, “They want to watch you run and see how wonderfully you do it. They may even cheer or clap their hands.”

  I added, “Let’s show them how we play the walk-trot-canter-amble game.”

  He smiled at that. “I like that game! I like Robbie’s songs, too.”

  Robbie glowed.

  So Mom opened the gate, and Kai trotted in.

  The minute he rounded the bend where the first two ladders were positioned, the reporters gave startled gasps, and one said a word I’m not supposed to know. Or use.

  But unfazed, Kai broke into a canter, arms spread wide, crying out as he often did, “I’m going fast, Ari. See how fast I’m going!”

  I called back, “The Black Stallion would be proud of you, Kai.”

  His voice reached me from the far end of the run, “And the Island Stallion, too.” Then he turned and came galloping back for his hug and his first bottle of juice and oatcake of the day.

  After he ran back and forth a few times, I called out the gaits—walk, trot, canter, gallop. I mixed the order up a bit. He never missed one. Not even the fox-trot, which he’d been practicing. It may have looked difficult to the reporters, but to Kai it was basic stuff.

  High up on their ladders, forgetting Mom’s warning about noise, the reporters clapped loudly and called Kai’s name.

  At the end, out of sheer excitement from all the applause, Kai tried something I’d never seen him do before. He rose on his hind legs and pawed at the air!

  At that, everyone cheered—the reporters, Dr. Herks, Martha, Robbie, Mom, and me. So Kai did the hind leg stand a second time, but he was tired enough that he was a little wobbly. Martha dashed into the run and grabbed his hand, saying, “Enough for one day, I think.”

  I handed him another bottle of his juice, and he guzzled it down, saying in between sips, “I like the clapping, Ari.”

  “I can see you do.”

  “Just don’t get to like it too much,” Martha told him.

  “Why?”

  “It’ll make your head swell.”

  “Will that hurt?”

  “No,” I said, smiling at him, “but it will make it hard to wear a hat.”

  “I don’t have a hat,” he said. “Can I get a hat?”

  “You can have my Red Sox baseball cap,” Robbie said.

  “What are the Red Sox?”

  “A team that doesn’t win much,” Martha said. “Now, into the barn for a rubdown. Look at you, all sweated up and tired.”

  “I’m not tired,” he insisted.

  But we could all see he was by the way his tail dragged.

  * * *

  Once back in the stall, Mom wiped down Kai’s horse parts with a towel, but he used a second towel to wipe the sweat off his arms and chest himself. Then he changed T-shirts.

  “Can I have an apple, Ari?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, taking one from the pocket of my jacket. “And now we need to talk to the reporters.”

  “The ones who cheered me?”

  “The very ones,” Mom said.

  “Good!” Kai said, though he held a hand up to his face and yawned behind it.

  Mom called to Dr. Herks, who brought the reporters in but warned them that as soon as they were done, “this little pony boy will be taking a nap.”

  The interview went well. Kai allowed the reporters to touch his hands and his haunch, and look at his legs. The stork man even asked if he could feel Kai’s hair.

  “Why?” asked Kai.

  Stork shrugged. “I just … I just…”

  “Sure.”

  He answered the questions he could—what he ate, where he slept, what he did all day.

  “I eat like a horse,” Kai said, grinning to show he got the joke. “I eat grains and grasses and apples and carrots.” He nodded toward Dr. Herks. “And no chocolate. It makes me sick. Sometimes Dr. Herks lets me have sugar. But not often.” He smiled slyly. “Not often enough!”

  Dr. Herks explained Kai’s diet then, and about how tender horse stomachs could be.

  “So no pizza or ice cream?” said the reporter with the beard.

  “Afraid not,” Dr. Herks said.

  Someone asked what languages Kai spoke beside English.

  “Horse.”

  The redheaded reporter asked him to say something in Horse, so Kai gave them half a minute’s worth of whinnying and snorting.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  Kai turned and looked at me. “Why should I try him?”

  “Next question,” said Dr. Herks.

  “Tell us about your mother,” the bald one said.

  “I have three mothers.” Kai pointed to Martha and Mom. “And Agora.” He waved his hand at the side of his stall.

  “Our pony,” Mom explained. “She gave birth to him.”

  “I call her Mama,” Kai said. “In Horse, she’s called…” And here he did a long, sweet whinny that ended with a series of three snorts.

 
; “What does that mean?” the redheaded reporter asked.

  “It means the Short One with the Long Temper, and Look Out for Her Heels!” This time Kai grinned mischievously.

  “When someone she doesn’t like gets too close, she kicks,” Martha explained. “Fair warning.”

  “I have a father.” Kai nodded at Dr. Herks. “A sister,” smiling at me. “And a brother.” He gestured toward Robbie in the corner. Robbie waved.

  The reporters took it as an invitation to ask about Robbie.

  Stork man turned to me. “Why is he in a wheelchair?”

  “Why not ask him yourself? He’s not dumb.” I said it more sharply than I meant. Well, maybe not more than I meant, but probably more than I should.

  Dr. Herks rolled Robbie’s wheelchair next to Kai.

  Robbie leaned forward. “My mother was given thalidomide when she was pregnant with me.”

  I think he wanted to match Kai’s openness with the reporters. But I could almost hear them thinking seal child, and felt my shoulders hunch defensively. “My brother happens to be in a wheelchair,” I said, rather too loudly. “But that’s not who he is. He’s smart, funny, perceptive, and sweet.”

  “Wow, thanks, Ari,” Robbie said.

  Then remembering the new word I learned when researching centaurs, I added, “He’s liminal.”

  “Is that part of his condition?” the bearded reporter asked.

  “Don’t be stupid,” the stork man said. “It has something to do with werewolves.”

  I nodded. “That’s right. It means someone caught between”—I made my fingers into quote marks—“two contrasting natures. Like … like a werewolf. Or like a faun. Or a centaur.” I gave a half smile. “Or a selchie.”

  “Hey—spelling champ, spell that last thing,” said the redhead, so I did.

  “What’s a selchie, then?” the bearded guy asked.

  “A selchie is a mythical creature who’s a human on land and a seal in the sea.”

  “Neither one of these kids looks mythical to me,” said the stork guy.

  I liked him, stork legs and all. “Just … different,” I said.

  “Maybe better,” Kai added. “I can run fast. And my brother makes up songs.”

  “Can we hear one of the songs?” The bearded man tried to make his voice sweet, but it didn’t work particularly well.

  Kai and Robbie whispered, and then together they sang the walking-trotting-galloping song. Kai’s flutelike voice took off on a descant and Robbie’s steady, deeper tones anchored the tune. They must have sung it together before, but it was the first time I’d ever heard them do it.

  I looked at Mom, and she had an ahhhhh expression on her face. Dr. Herks did, too.

  With that, the interview was over. The reporters got to take pictures of all of us, and off they went.

  And Kai, as predicted, shortly fell asleep.

  Back at the house, Robbie did the same.

  It had been a long day.

  20

  An Unexpected Visitor

  IN THE MORNING, the stories were in more papers than we could count since the UPI wire was picked up by newspapers and magazines all across the world. Dr. Herks bought as many as he could find in Northampton and Amherst and brought them over.

  Each story was part true and part made up. One said Kai was a teen, another that he was a toddler. One said he was well-muscled, another that he was a hunchback. One article reported that he snorted like a horse and sweated like one, too. A woman reporter who hadn’t even been there wrote a story about how his hair was as stiff as a mane, and another story said it was as soft as a child’s. The only thing they seemed to agree on was that he had a horse’s body with four legs and a tail, but a human torso, two human arms, and a human face.

  No one mentioned Robbie.

  Each story had an extra bit of information that we hadn’t told them. Mom said they must have had it in some old files.

  Martha looked unamused. “Talking to neighbors,” she said.

  Some led with that bit of information; some ended with it: “Mrs. Martins is the ex-wife of rock-and-roll superstar and bad boy, the single-named Wolf, currently on an East Coast tour.”

  We were famous.

  We were infamous.

  We were overwhelmed.

  * * *

  The day after the papers hit the newsstands, we began to understand what our new life was going to be like.

  I was dressed and wheeling Robbie in for breakfast before starting my chores. He’d been chattering about the new book he and Kai were reading together, a biography of George Washington, when I heard Mom arguing heatedly in the kitchen with someone. I assumed it was another reporter or Mrs. Angotti.

  Instead, it was someone I hadn’t seen in quite a while.

  Six years, actually. But I knew him at once.

  “Dad!” I said as we came into the kitchen.

  He hadn’t changed at all, except that now he had a tattoo of a snarling wolf on his right arm, and his hair was much more gold than I remembered. I wasn’t sure if I was happy or angry he was here.

  Another man stood near the table, not the sort of person my father ever hung out with when he lived with us. Most of them had been scruffy musicians with long hair, and their mascara-eyed girlfriends. This man was well dressed, in a dark suit and tie, plus a pocket handkerchief that matched the tie. His hair was thinning a bit, and when he smiled, his teeth were very even and bright.

  “Hi, Princess. You’re so grown up and beautiful. I’ve missed you tremendously. I think about you every day,” Dad said.

  Every day? He thought about me every day? Then why hadn’t he come back to tell me before this? Why hadn’t he sent any letters? Invited me to one of his concerts? Why hadn’t he phoned?

  He shot me a charming smile, and I realized it was his stage smile. I guess I was now old enough to understand that his eyes were not charming and sparkling with any love, but calculating the effect he was having on me.

  And calculating something else as well, which I found out in the very next sentence.

  “Haven’t we hit the jackpot here!” There was a sweetness in his voice that seemed made up, as if he was acting a part. He refused to look at Robbie.

  “We’ve hit nothing,” Mom said. “Unless it’s rock bottom, having you back here. Just another one of your schemes, Les. The ones that used to drag me in. And nearly killed me until you left—”

  “Dragged you in? You begged me to take you with me wherever I was going, Han.” His face had gotten flushed. Spots of color like clown makeup blossomed on his cheeks. “You wanted out of that small-minded ivory tower college town where your professor daddy taught. You saw me as the knight in shining armor come to rescue you from boredom.”

  “Jackpot?” It was the one word he’d spoken that seemed … well, genuine. The one true word he’d really meant in his compliments to me. Because the meanness that had just sprayed out of his mouth made everything that had come before a lie.

  He spread his arms wide, as if I was the audience at one of his shows. “We’ve got a gold mine here if that horse thing is real and not some Disney animatroon … animatronic,” he said. “You know, Princess, I saw one of those things at the World’s Fair when I played there last year.” He gazed at me as if no one else mattered. “Yeah, I get to do cool stuff like that, Princess. And that animatronical thing looked just like Abe Lincoln. Moved in a herky-jerky way, but kinda cool, too. You’d love it.”

  He must have thought I was still seven. Maybe in his eyes I was. But he didn’t see the real me, the one who grew up when he wasn’t there.

  He went on without a clue. “So you see, I need to know if this pony-boy thing is the real deal. If it is, we could have a major movie here or a TV series, like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, plus stuffed animals, lunch boxes.” He did the smiley thing at me again. The smile that never really got to his eyes. “You’d like a lunch box like that, wouldn’t you, Princess?”

  “I’m in junior high, Dad. We don�
�t have lunch boxes. We have a cafeteria.”

  As if he hadn’t heard my answer, or didn’t care, he said, “Well, maybe a breeding program then.”

  “Breeding program? Kai’s not two months old!”

  He bent toward me, as if we were close. “Is it?” he asked.

  I backed away. “Is it what?”

  “Is it real?”

  “It’s a he,” Robbie said. “His name is Kai. And he’s as real as you are.”

  The wolf who was our father ignored Robbie. He was now close enough that I could smell something bitter on his breath. I wondered if he’d been drinking. Biting my lower lip, I moved away, as if whatever he had was catching. “A lot realer than you, Dad.”

  “Ouch,” he said, and smiled again, but not as broadly. “You sure know how to hurt a guy. Like your mother that way. She broke my heart.”

  “You were the one that left, Les,” she reminded him.

  “Wolf,” the suit man said, “let me do the talking. I’m your lawyer. It’s my job.” He turned to Mom and held out his hand. “My name is Daniel Pickens, of Pickens, Berlin, Hyatt, and Temple.”

  Mom shook his hand.

  Still smiling, my father took a seat at the kitchen table, looking more and more wolflike every minute. His smile was starting to turn into a snarl as he worked at it, showing too many teeth.

  “Tell them,” he said to Mom, “tell them how this is my house and my land and therefore my little monstrosity in the barn there.”

  “You gave me this place,” Mom said quietly. “Sent me a letter and said you never wanted to see it or me again. Said I was only good at making girl babies and…” She thought a minute about what to say next, then said it very quietly as if it soiled her mouth. “And monstrosities. You seem to like that word.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “As for breaking your heart, that would have been impossible. You never had one. You’re as animatronic as that Abe Lincoln you sang with.”

  “Nice to see you haven’t changed, Mrs. Smart-Mouth College Girl,” Dad snapped at her.