Boy on a Black Horse

by Springer, Nancy;

  That should have felt awful, to be a kid on your own with nobody missing you, nobody who cared. But Chav sighed with relief again.

  Grandpa was watching him. “Not that I think Chav is your real name,” he added. “I’m not stupid.”

  “It’s a Gypsy word,” Chav told him quietly and courteously. “All it means is ‘boy.’ Baval means ‘in the wind.’ Chavali means ‘little girl.’”

  “So you plan to call yourself ‘boy’ all your life?”

  Suddenly Chav was neither quiet nor courteous. “I’ll never call myself by any stinking gadjo name,” he said viciously. “Beat me bloody, why don’t you?” He stood up so fast he knocked over his chair, and strode back down the hallway to where Liana and the little kids were.

  Grandpa and I just sat. “I think it was a gadjo who did things to him,” I said.

  “What the hell is ‘gadjo’?”

  “Like you and me. Not Gypsy.”

  “He’s hiding something,” Grandpa said. “I can smell it.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I knew exactly what Chav was hiding: Rom. Topher must not have told Grandpa about Rom, or Grandpa would have been checking for stolen horses.

  Back down the hallway we could hear Chav start to sing for his brother and sister:

  “Red horse, blue horse

  see you in the zoo horse

  black horse, white horse

  put up a hell of a fight horse

  pink horse, green horse …”

  The children were laughing. “Do you still think Chav is dangerous?” I asked Grandpa.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re still mad at me.” This time it wasn’t a question. I could tell he was mad. He wouldn’t say so, and he wouldn’t even treat me much differently, but he would look straight at me—kind of through me, actually—and not smile.

  “It’s not so much that I’m mad,” he said, which was a lie. “It’s more that I just don’t understand how you could do what you did.”

  “You mean because I went behind your back? Even if I’d told you all about Chav, you still would have wanted to put him in a juvenile home.”

  “Yes, because that’s where he belongs! Not here. What I can’t believe is what you’re doing to Liana, bringing those kids here.”

  I goggled at him. “She likes having them here!” Surely he could see that.

  “And how’s she going to feel when they run away? Which is exactly what’s going to happen.”

  “It will not,” I said, but now I was the liar, because I knew he was right. I had heard Chav roaming in the night like a wild mustang penned in a corral. He wanted to run.

  Well, I would just have to make him want to stay somehow, that was all. Baval was sick. Chav wouldn’t go anywhere until he could take his brother and sister with him. I had a little time.

  Journal

  Language Arts

  Oct. 31

  Mrs. Higby

  Chav

  Today is Halloween. I hate it. How can people enjoy being scared? I don’t need this—I am afraid all the time anyway. I look out of my own eyes, but everything seems strange. My thoughts are strange. My hands don’t seem to belong to me. I am coming apart.

  Matt Kain said to me, “Hey, ugly, don’t go buying a mask. You can just wear your face and scare little kids.” Little kids, hell. I scare me. I can’t look in the mirror. I am terrified I might see who I really am.

  Partly it is the goodness frightening me. Liana and Gray are so good to me I can’t stand it. I don’t deserve it. Can’t they understand? Chavali was sick, and now Baval is. I am to blame, and I should be punished.

  Sometimes when they have been gentle with me I forget, I have these stupid thoughts, like I might live. Or like there might be a heaven. Then I would have a farm like Topher’s, and I would be the one who fed the animals, and they would all be black. Black horses, black sheep, black cats, glossy black goats, black rabbits, black birds flying around and singing. Black brainless dogs barking and running everywhere. Black snakes in the sun, black mice in the barn. Just black animals with no white on them, and no other kind. And they would all want me to pat them.

  Then I realize how dumb even thinking about it is, because there is no God for scum like me and I am going to die. Liana and Gray can take care of Chavali and Baval a lot better than I ever could. Soon they won’t need me anymore. Then I can do it, what I’ve always planned I would. Get a gun. Go out with a bang. Take a lot of filthy gadjos with me. Matt Kain, for one.

  I am frightened thinking about it, but I will do it. Dying doesn’t scare me nearly as much as living this way.

  “The self-presentation speech is required, Chav.” That was Mrs. Higby, who had this idea that we should each talk about ourselves for a few minutes, I forget why.

  “C’mon, Chav, you can do it!” That was Minda.

  “C’mon, Chav.” That was one of the other kids. Some of them were starting to talk to him a little.

  “Chav, you’ve got to. Please.” That was me. I’m not sure why I felt like he just had to do it, except that I wanted him to ace something so he’d feel better about himself. He was failing every subject, but I knew he could stand up and talk, because of his poem that first day. “If I help you?” I begged. “What if we do it like an interview? Mrs. Higby? Can we do that?”

  “You may do that.”

  I detested her but didn’t let it show. “Chav?” I stood up.

  He sat slumped in his chair shutting us all out, but then he looked up at me. It was his black-ice look—I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. But then he stood up.

  “All riiiight!” I led the way to the front of the room. Chav came with me.

  Being a ham is one thing I know how to do. I held an imaginary mike to my mouth and went into ham mode, not to make fun of Chav but just to lighten things up. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us today an unusual kid named Chav. He is going to tell us a little bit about himself.” I tried to think of a question he wouldn’t mind answering. “Chav, is it true that you’re a Gypsy?” I pointed the pretend mike at his mouth.

  For a second I was afraid he wouldn’t go along with it. He had his stretched-tight look on his face. But then he said, “Half true. My mother was a Gypsy.”

  “What’s that make you, Gyp?” Matt Kain called.

  Some people laughed. Chav did not look at anyone directly as he said, “You call Gypsies thieves. But Gypsies call themselves the tribes of Romany, the most ancient people in the world. They are nomads—they have always lived off the land. Why should they change their way of life because everything is taken over by—”

  Before he could say “gadjos,” I took charge of the mike. “Does that mean you were raised, like, roaming all over the country?” It would explain a lot about him.

  “No. My mother married a gadjo.”

  He said the word so bitterly I couldn’t duck the next logical question. “Gadjo?”

  “A white man. Not Gypsy.” I took the “mike” away, but he stared straight ahead and kept talking. “So her tribe disowned her. It was a disgrace—her parents and her people turned their backs. She never saw them again. She lived with her rich gadjo in his big house, and when he started to beat her and break her bones there was nowhere for her to go.”

  The class went stone quiet. I felt like I was on a runaway horse, hanging on, supposedly in charge, but really things were out of control. Way out of control. Forget about the stupid interview game and the stupid pretend mike in my hand. I asked softly, “Are you talking about your father?”

  “Don’t call him that!” His eyes blazed into me. “I hate him.”

  I don’t know how I got the nerve to say it. “He hurt you too.”

  He scowled at me and did not answer. Later I learned some of the things he was not saying. How badly his father had hurt him. How he had started to fight back, but it just made things worse. How he had wanted to kill his father but could not.

  “So you ran away.” It was safe to say this. If G
randpa could not trace him, nobody could.

  “Yes.”

  “And you took Baval and Chavali with you.”

  “Somebody had to take care of them. Mom was—dead.” His voice hung up for a moment when he said it, stuck like a raft on a rock, a hurt too hard for words. “I couldn’t leave them with—him. So we all went. We’ve been on our own awhile now. It’s rough.” Everybody in the class was watching him with eyes wide open, and all of a sudden he glared back at them. “You guys complain about the food in the cafeteria—sometimes I’ve eaten out of garbage bags, I’ve eaten things people put out for their birdfeeders. You don’t know how lucky you are, with warm rooms to sleep in and parents who—care about you.…”

  His voice faltered and quit. He sagged back against the blackboard and leaned there and closed his eyes. I could see the lids trembling.

  “Chav?” I took his hand and felt him quivering. “Chav, are you okay?”

  “Chav.” Minda left her seat and came and touched his shoulder. “Chav, it’s over now.”

  “It’s gonna be okay, Chav.” Of all people, Matt Kain the Pain came up. A whole group of kids came up and clustered around. “Chav? It’s okay now. You’re gonna be okay.”

  “Take your seats, all of you,” Mrs. Higby said, but not too sharply for her. “Chav, you may sit down.”

  He didn’t move at first, but then he opened his eyes, and they were burning dry, and he looked around at everybody in a kind of daze. He went back to his desk and sat like he wasn’t hearing anything, like he was just barely hanging on, riding a runaway life.

  “I shouldn’t have made you do it,” I told him when class was over.

  “Nobody made me do anything.”

  That was kind of true. But I was worried, because I couldn’t figure out why he had told us some of the truth about himself.

  Was it a good sign? Was he getting ready to settle in, be friends, be one of us?

  Or—was he getting ready for something else?

  I couldn’t explain it, but I felt trouble coming, I felt it like an ache in my bones, like the thickness in the air before a storm.

  CHAPTER

  9

  When we got home there were huge dapple-red apples on the kitchen table.

  “Chris brought them,” Liana explained.

  Huh? “Chris?”

  “From the stable.”

  “Topher.”

  “He asked me to call him Chris.” She was making an apple cobbler and humming. Chav went down the hallway to see Baval. I sat down and Chavali sat on my lap. Lee hummed some more, then said, “He says it’s high time he got over Christina.”

  Liana sliced apples, but she wasn’t humming now, she was thinking. And she wasn’t saying what she was thinking. One thing I had noticed, being around Chav: sometimes what people don’t say is as important as what they do. And what Lee wasn’t saying was, maybe it was time she got over Uncle Dan.

  Or maybe it was just me thinking that.

  “Do you know why she left him?” Lee asked, and now she sounded mad. “Because he wouldn’t give up his horses. Because she didn’t like the way he loved them, she thought it took something away from her. Of all the stupid—how can you marry somebody and not want them to be who they are? Everybody’s entitled to love what they love.”

  I snitched a slice of apple and offered it to Chavali. She grabbed it and grinned. Her chicken pox was almost gone, and it didn’t look like she was going to have any scarring. Her face would stay as smooth and pretty as a tan flower.

  “Like your uncle Dan and that boat of his,” Lee said softly. “He was bone-deep happy when he was on it. He got a light in his eyes just talking about it. Even if I’d known it was going to kill him, I could never have tried to take it away. Loving it was part of what made him alive.”

  Her voice was quiet but steady. It was the first time I had heard her talk so calmly about what had happened, and it gave me an odd, lost feeling, like I was being left behind.

  I blurted, “What do you love, Lee?”

  “You.”

  That made me smile. She would never leave me behind, not really. It was just that she was moving on. “C’mon. I love horses. What do you love?”

  She knew the answer, but it took her a while to say it. She put the dough on the cobbler first. Then, “I think I love taking care of people,” she said slowly. “Especially kids. I think maybe I need to go back to school to be a nurse or a therapist or something. I think you’re what has kept me going these past two years, but I have to watch myself that I don’t spoil you or smother you.” Now she wanted to talk to me alone. “Chavali, ‘Sesame Street’ is on.”

  It worked. Chavali slid down from my lap and ran to the TV. Lee put her cobbler in the oven and sat down across from me. She came right to the point. “Gray, how would you feel if I adopted Baval and Chavali and Chav?”

  It was funny, because in a way it was exactly what I wanted, but in another way it was a shock. Like, wasn’t I kid enough for her?

  What she said next made it worse. “I didn’t realize how empty the house felt before you brought them here.” Then she leaned toward me, happy, all glowy like a sunrise. “They fill it up. I don’t know … maybe I want to keep them for all the wrong reasons, but I just—have you noticed I don’t need to take pills anymore?”

  I had noticed. “They fill up your heart,” I said. She wasn’t missing Carrie and Cassie and Uncle Dan so much anymore.

  She touched my hand. “You’re the one who brought them here. Thank you.”

  “It just happened,” I grumped. “I didn’t mean to change everything.” I hated the way it felt to want two things at once, which were, I wanted Chav to stay, but I wanted things to be the way they’d always been between Liana and me. “I’d kind of rather have you to myself.”

  She was watching me with the funniest smile on her face. “I kind of figured you might feel that way.”

  “And what about Grandpa? He’ll think we’re nuts. So will Grandma.”

  “Well, are they right?”

  I had to smile back at her. “Sort of.”

  “It’s true that I’ll have less time for you if Chav and Baval and Chavali stay with us.” Lee was trying to be fair, even though we both knew what she really wanted. “I might even have to get a job. And Gray, they’ve been so neglected, there are going to be a lot of medical bills and so on. There might not be enough money for a horse for you after all.”

  Ouch. That hurt.

  Then I thought of something, and I was greedy and afraid both at once. Really, what I’d always wanted was a black stallion. And if Chav didn’t want Rom anymore …“What about Chav’s horse? Can we keep it?”

  “I haven’t figured that one out yet. Why won’t Chav go to see it?”

  “I don’t know. Lee, I’m worried about Chav.”

  So was she. It turned out she had already made an appointment for him to see a psychologist, starting in a few days. But I wondered how much good a person who didn’t even know him could do, and how soon.

  “Don’t say anything to him yet about staying with us,” she told me. “He’s not ready.”

  “Don’t worry. Neither am I.”

  Liana had stood up from the table to go on about her cooking, but now she looked at me, and then she crouched in front of me and looked at me some more. “Gray,” she said, “take a couple of days to think it over, and then let me know how you feel, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, okay?”

  “Okay.” I felt bad that I couldn’t just say yes right away. “It’s complicated.”

  “Yes, it is. Most important things are.”

  I didn’t get a couple of days to think it over. I didn’t even get a couple of hours. At suppertime Baval blew the whole thing wide open.

  Apparently he had been doing some thinking on his own, lying around scratching his chicken pox. This was the first night he felt well enough to come out to the dining room and eat with the rest of us. Aside from the apple cobbler, Liana
had cooked roast chicken with Pepperidge Farm stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry-orange relish, and baby carrots in some sort of butter glaze. Baval got cranberry relish on his face, and we teased him that the color blended in with his chicken pox bumps. He laughed and laughed, and then for half a second he looked like he wanted to cry, and then straight to Lee he said, “I want to stay here when I get better. Please.”

  She never even blinked, because she couldn’t let Baval down—I understood that right away. “I very much want you all to stay,” she told him gently.

  “I want to stay here,” Baval said again, this time to his brother. “Carl, I mean Chav, I’m tired of looking for Father. I want us to just stay here with Liana.”

  Chav didn’t say anything. To me it looked as if he couldn’t. He had gone stiff, with eyes like a spooked colt’s, wild and white and frightened.

  “Let Father find us,” Baval insisted.

  “Or we can look for him when we’re grown up,” Chavali put in.

  “Yeah. That’s what we can do. I’m tired of eating garbage and being cold and not having a place to live.” Baval’s voice was high and a little shaky. This meant a lot to him. “I want to stay here where it’s nice. Chavali, don’t you want that too?”

  She nodded very seriously, moving her pointed little chin once up, once down.

  “Chav?” Baval pleaded. “Can we stay?”

  Hanging on to the edge of the table, Chav opened his mouth but did not speak. It was like he was gasping for air, as if he felt like he was drowning.

  “Let him alone, Baval,” Lee said softly.

  “But it’s what he wants too! I know it is!” Baval’s voice went so high it squeaked. He couldn’t sit still—he headed around the table toward Chav, tripping in his new pajamas and bathrobe and slippers. “Isn’t it, Chav? Isn’t it what you always wanted? Somebody to give you good food and love you?”

  “Baval, let him alone!”