Boy on a Black Horse

by Springer, Nancy;

  He looked at me, wet-eyed. “Is that—what I am?” he asked, his voice thick with crying. “Your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  His shoulders relaxed, and he laid his head back against my neck, and one of his arms came up to hug me.

  He cried all the rest of the afternoon. It was like being in a thunderstorm—he couldn’t make it stop. Once he got up and staggered into the woods to vomit from crying so much. He’d finally let go of the rifle, he’d left it behind, and I grabbed it and ran a few steps onto the bridge and flung it into the river. Chav came back and didn’t seem to notice. He just sank down in the grass with the sobs still shaking him, and I went to him and held him again, and he let me.

  By the time the sun was going down he was so exhausted he could look me in the eye and tell me things he never could have said before. He lay on the grass facing up at me and told me how his father had once tied him to a tree and left him there for two days as a punishment. How his father had once locked him in the basement for a week. How no one in the family was allowed to use the telephone or bring friends home and no one was ever allowed to help him, not his brother, not even his mother. How she never fought back—sometimes he had hated her for not fighting back. Then he had hated himself and decided he must deserve it when his father hurt him.

  “It was always Mom or me he went after,” he said, terribly calm now, terribly tired—he was finally done crying. “He never hit Robbie, but sometimes he made him watch. In a way, that might have been worse.”

  It took me a minute to catch on. “Robbie is Baval?”

  “Yes. But don’t say it to him, he doesn’t remember. Someday Dad is going to come at him out of a bad dream.…” Chav closed his eyes. “I hate Robbie sometimes too.”

  “But you love him at the same time.”

  “I—that’s what hurts, the love. Dad—now I hate him, but then—I kept trying and trying to please him—I wanted—I just wanted him to—smile at me.…”

  He couldn’t quite say that he had wanted his father to love him. For a while he lay with his eyes closed. I reached over and stroked his hair back from his forehead.

  “Let’s get you home,” I said.

  He didn’t open his eyes. “Gray—it hurts so bad, I don’t know if I’m going to make it.”

  I knew he wasn’t talking about just getting home, because I remembered the feeling from a couple of years before. “You’ll make it,” I told him. He had to. “Come on. Are you ready to ride?”

  He opened his eyes and looked up at the horse standing over him very black in the gray dusk. Then he stood up, wobbly on his feet, and leaned against Rom, his face against the stallion’s strong arched neck, hidden in mane. I knew: Once a small hurt boy had run to his mother like that, pressing his cheek against her long black hair.

  “This big guy isn’t the black horse I was scared of,” Chav muttered. “All that crap is inside me.”

  Then he straightened, and his eyes were clear, and I really began to hope for him, because I didn’t see much anger in him anymore, just a terrible sadness that I knew would pass.

  I vaulted onto Rom first, because Chav was still pretty shaky. I helped him up behind me, and he leaned on me, laying his head against the back of my neck. We had to go across the railroad bridge in the almost-dark, but I trusted Rom and didn’t let myself be scared. I couldn’t. Somebody had to take care of Chav.

  CHAPTER

  12

  It was nightfall by the time we got back over the cemetery hill, but Topher had the floodlights on, and it looked like half the world was there at the stable, including the big Spanish Dancer Ranch horse trailer that had come for Fuerza Epica.

  “Chav,” I said, and I felt his head come up to look, and I felt his hands grip at my shoulders when he saw.

  “You feeling okay to take it from here?” I asked, because I thought it might be good if he did.

  He didn’t answer, and I felt his hands shake a little but not too bad. Maybe they just needed to get back on the reins.

  I halted Rom, swung my leg over his neck, and slipped down. “All yours,” I told Chav. “Show them what the black horse can do.”

  He had a choice, then: he could show them the black horse of anger galloping through the night, or he could show them Rom. From the way I had seen him ride I figured he knew what Rom could do. I stood aside and waited.

  Without looking at me he gathered the double reins into his hands like an expert, collected the Barb stallion, and eased him into a slow, graceful walk down the hill toward where the cop cars and reporters and gawkers waited along with maybe a few people who actually cared.

  Everybody saw him when he reached the level. About three dozen voices shouted, and some people started toward him and some ducked back as if he still had a gun. But then they all stopped where they were and watched, because Chav had given a signal and the black Barb stallion was dancing.

  Diagonally at an airy trot he danced toward them. Then Chav lifted him into a canter so slow and floating it was like a waltz, it circled and swirled—Chav signaled Rom for a change of direction at each stride. Rom’s reaching forelegs curved and turned like a ballet dancer’s reaching arms, like a dream, yet he was made of power, dynamite in the darkness, his barrel and shoulders and that thick arched neck so black they shone fiery white. People could not stop watching him. I walked up to stand with the rest of the crowd, and it was as still as church, and no one noticed me, they were watching so hard.

  It might have been three or four minutes. I don’t know. Time didn’t seem to count anymore. When Chav put Rom through one last long trotting diagonal and rode him up to the stable yard, everyone blinked and looked around like they’d forgotten where they were.

  Standing with Topher was a straight, handsome white-haired woman in a white blouse and wrap skirt. Chav halted Rom in front of her, put one hand down by his side, and lowered his head in a formal bow. Saluting the judge, I think they call it. The way he must have felt, the world was there to judge him that night.

  Then he slipped down off Rom, handed over the reins, and turned away.

  But the woman stopped him with a touch. “I know you.”

  Chav faced her, wild-eyed, scared. Baval and Chavali had come running out of somewhere and grabbed him, hanging on his waist, and his hands spread out and down, one over each of them to protect them.

  “I’ve seen you ride,” the white-haired woman said. “You took second in a show at—”

  “Please,” Chav whispered. “Nobody here knows my real name.”

  The woman nodded as if she understood. “And then because you had not gotten first place, your father took you behind the grandstand and hit you across the face with the butt of a crop.” Her voice had gone low. “I saw it, I reported it, but no one would do anything. He is a very rich, very powerful man.”

  Baval’s head had come up. He was listening with a frozen, thinking look on his face.

  Chav begged the woman, “I can’t let him find out where we are.”

  “Confound it, Chav!” Grandpa was there with his jaw sticking out. “You think we’d let anything happen to you or your brother or sister? That son of a bitch is not going to get near you without walking over top of me. And you can’t let him get away with what he did to you. He belongs in jail.”

  “He killed our mother,” Baval whispered.

  “What?” Grandpa exclaimed, gawking at him.

  “He killed Mom. I saw it happen.” Baval held on hard to Chav, and the look on his face—I tried to get to him, but somebody, Minda, had grabbed me, was jumping up and down and hugging me. And Lee was there, asking again and again if I was okay.

  Chav was not okay. Staring at a policeman, he didn’t seem to understand much that was happening around him. “You need to put me in jail,” he said straight to Grandpa. “I was crazy. I wanted to kill people.”

  “We don’t put kids in jail.”

  “You’ve got to!” Chav struggled a step closer to him. “I wrecked the graveyard, rig
ht? Put me in jail.”

  “That’s not true!” Minda finally let go of me to run over to Grandpa. “That’s not true. I know who trashed the cemetery, and it wasn’t Chav. It was—”

  “Not right now,” I told her. I’d finally managed to go over there myself and get hold of Baval, and I could feel him shaking. “Grandpa, please do something.”

  Grandpa was saying to Minda, “I already heard. The Fischel boy and his friends. Fishy talked to Peck and me this afternoon. Peck’s pretty broken up about it. His own son, for God’s sake.”

  Liana said sharply, “Dad, are you done with Chav? Baval looks sick. We’ve got to get them out of here.”

  “I hit Topher,” Chav insisted. “That’s assault with a deadly weapon, right?”

  “Heck, I been hurt worse by a pony foal,” Topher said.

  “I stole Rom!”

  Apparently this had already been discussed. With her hand on Rom’s neck, the white-haired woman was shaking her head and smiling. Grandpa said a little peevishly, “Chav, I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to make anything stick. Nobody wants to press charges against you.”

  Shaking in my arms, Baval started to moan. Chav looked down, and his eyes widened. “Bro, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

  “Dad killed Mom,” Baval whispered, moaning. “He was too big, and he hit her too hard, and her head came open. There was so much blood she has to be dead. There was so much blood she has to be dead. There was so much blood she has to be—”

  “Oh my God.” Chav grabbed Baval and hugged him against his chest. Over his brother’s head he looked hollow-eyed at me.

  “—dead. There was so much blood—”

  It was awful to listen to Baval chanting it over and over, his mind caught on a memory he couldn’t bear. “We better get that kid to a hospital,” Grandpa said. “Chav, is it true what he says? Your father killed your mother?”

  I guess Chav had had too much. He cried out at Grandpa, “Don’t talk to me about him! I’m just like him!”

  “No, you’re not,” Grandpa told him gently. “You just need a little help sorting things out, and that’s what doctors are for. Come on, both of you.”

  “—so much blood, she has to be dead—”

  Grandpa and Liana got Chav and Baval in the cruiser and drove out. I heard later they went straight to the hospital. Topher helped the Spanish Dancer Ranch woman load Rom onto the trailer, all wrapped and rugged to travel, the shining blackness of him all covered over. I saw one flash of a midnight eye, and then the doors closed, the truck rolled away, and the black stallion was gone. And even though there were still people chattering everywhere, even though Chavali was hanging on to my hand, I stood there feeling all alone.

  Chav and Baval were both in the hospital for a few days. It was hard on Chavali.

  “Where’s Rom?” she asked me at bedtime that first night.

  I was dead tired from everything that had happened. “In the big trailer,” I told her, “going home.” Where’s Chav? In a strange room, in the dark, with bars on the windows, probably, and a nurse sticking a needle into him.

  Chavali sat up, cozy in her own bed and her pink pj’s. “What will happen then?” she asked me anxiously, and I began to see: She needed a story.

  Okay. I could do this, as long as it was about horses.

  “The horses will all come out to meet him,” I said slowly, making it up as I went along. “It is a big beautiful farm with big trees and white fences and lots of horses, all kinds, Arabians and Andalusians and warm-bloods and mustangs and, uh, medicine hat pintos and little fat ponies. They all line up and wait to see Rom again, because he is their prince. See, his real name is Epic Fire, which means way, way back his great-great-great-great grandfather was a fire horse, but Rom didn’t know that because he was stolen away when he was a baby. His father is the king of all dancing horses—”

  “What’s a fire horse?” Chavali demanded.

  Really I guess it was a horse that pulled a fire engine, but now I was getting into this. “It’s a horse who’s a son of the sun,” I said. “See, the sun horse gallops across the sky and he’s all fire. But his colts and fillies came to earth and they just had manes and tails made of fire.”

  “And wings,” Chavali suggested.

  “Okay, yeah, wings made of fire. And their colts and fillies didn’t have the wings anymore. And their colts and fillies just had regular manes and tails with a fire forelock. And so on, until finally the fire horses just look like regular horses, but they still have sun fire inside. Rom is one of those. That’s why he’s a prince.”

  “Will the horses bow when he comes home?” Chavali asked. “Will all the different kinds of horses bow to him because he’s a prince?”

  I thought about that and decided against it. “No, it’s more like they’re very, very glad to see him, because they love him. They’ll nuzzle him and kiss him. His father the king will put a crown on him.” This story was starting to sound awfully familiar. “They’ll order in a truckload of pizza and have a feast.”

  Chavali started to giggle. “Horses don’t eat pizza!”

  “Maybe they’d like to, but nobody ever gives them any. They eat bread, and they eat tomatoes, so why wouldn’t they eat pizza?”

  “They wouldn’t eat pepperoni!”

  “They could order plain.”

  Chavali was laughing, which was good. I got up and kissed her and told her g’night, but she got serious again.

  “Does Rom like pizza, really?”

  “He just absolutely loves pizza.”

  “So he’s happy? He likes being back with his father the king?”

  “Yes. He’s happy.”

  “And his father likes him?”

  “His father loves him.”

  Chavali lay down, but I could see she was thinking of more questions.

  “Is his father a black stallion too?”

  I decided to leave it up to her. “I don’t know. What color do you want his father to be?”

  She thought for a long time. Then, “We’ll call and ask,” she said firmly.

  “Okay.”

  “Can we call Chav tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” We would whether we could or not.

  “And Baval?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will Chav be home soon?”

  “I hope.”

  Chav came home first, after three days, Tuesday evening. Grandpa brought him home. For some reason Grandpa was starting to like him and Baval and Chavali. I didn’t understand it back then, but the way to get Grandpa to like you is to stand up to him. He didn’t appreciate it much at first, but after a while he really respected the way Liana and Topher and I stood up for Chav, and he liked the way Chav wouldn’t tell him anything. Now he wanted the kids to stay as much as Lee and I did. He wasn’t mad at me anymore.

  Chavali and I had been busy making some preparations. And Liana too. We had everything ready when Chav came in the door.

  He acted tired and shy. “Hi,” he said without really looking at anybody. Then he glanced over and saw Topher sitting on the sofa. “Uh, how’s your head?” Topher had not been allowed to visit him in the hospital, just Lee and Grandpa.

  “Better,” Topher told him.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “You’re sorry it’s better?” Topher was trying to make him smile. It didn’t work.

  “Sorry for what I did.”

  “Son, don’t give it another thought,” Topher told him gently. “Just work on getting well.”

  “That’s what I’ve got to do. The doctors say the bad feelings will get easier for me to handle. They say if I talk to people, keep seeing my therapist …” Chav let the words fade away. He didn’t sound as if he really believed any of this.

  “Chav,” I said to him.

  “Hey, Gray.” He made himself look at me. “Thanks for what you did.”

  “Quit it with the thankses and the sorries, turkey.” I grinned at him. “Tell me something. What do you smell
?”

  His head came up as he sniffed the air, and the forelock swished back from his eyes, and for a moment I saw the black stallion in him again. He said, “Pizza.”

  “How much?” I challenged him.

  “Huh?”

  He didn’t get it yet. “Tons and tons of pizza,” Liana told him, rolling her eyes. I had coached her on what to say. “Gray put in an order for a truckload of pizza. We’re going to have to drag people in off the streets, or else be eating pizza for days.”

  “A truck—” The word caught in Chav’s throat. His eyes went wide.

  I nodded at Topher, and he stood up and pulled it out of his pocket, the headband, the one Chavali and I had been working on, made of play money coins fastened together. It had taken us a while to get it the way we wanted it, but finally it turned out really beautiful, almost like a crown. “Son,” Topher said to Chav, holding it out, “I understand that Liana and I are supposed to give you this.”

  Chav stared. He couldn’t seem to move or breathe.

  “It goes on him, silly,” Liana told Topher, and she took it and slipped it gently into place on Chav’s head. Against his black hair it shone like real gold.

  Tears started down his face.

  “Chav?” Lee hugged him, and he hung on to her like a baby. Then Topher was hugging him too, and Grandpa looked worried, but I could tell it was all right. These were the good kind of tears, the warm kind, not the kind that had cut him open like knives that afternoon beside the railroad tracks.

  “Pizza feast time!” I hollered.

  Chav looked at me, his face wet. “Gray,” he said, “I just absolutely hate you,” meaning the opposite.

  “Chavali helped,” I told him.

  “C’mere, sis.” He got down on his knees, and she ran to him, and he gathered her close to his heart.

  “I wish Baval was here,” she told him.

  “So do I.” He kept hold of her. “But he’s gonna be okay. We talked a lot. He’s gonna be fine. He’ll be home in a few days.”

  She pulled back enough to look at him kneeling there with the plastic-money crown on his head. “Chav,” she asked him, “is there really such a thing as a prince?”