Gee Whiz

by Jane Smiley

  “My dad would say that.”

  “Well, think about it.”

  I said that I would.

  Danny never called.

  And he didn’t call the next day, either.

  I heard Mom and Dad have a little discussion about whether Danny was stubborn, afraid, or “independent.” It reminded me of the bad old days after Danny and Dad had their big fight, and we hardly saw Danny at all.

  But Friday afternoon, I got off the school bus at the very moment that Danny was turning into our driveway in his truck. I hugged my books to my chest and went to open the gate for him. He drove straight past the house to the barn, and I ran after him. When he got out of the truck, he said, “Go get your work clothes on. We have something to do.”

  I knew it was about Gee Whiz.

  Mom’s car was outside, but she wasn’t in the house, so I decided she and Dad had gone somewhere, which maybe was good, since maybe Danny wanted to do a few things on his own. I pulled on my jeans and a jacket, then ran out the back door, only stopping to put on my boots.

  He was already brushing Gee Whiz. I grabbed a brush and helped him. The horse was so tall that I could only see Danny’s feet underneath and the brim of his hat on the other side. Gee Whiz seemed to enjoy the attention—he stood more quietly than he had the previous time. Even so, I wasn’t going to leave him alone to pull back—once they’ve tried it and succeeded, they often try it again. Danny seemed in a good mood. We didn’t know the results of his physical, but maybe he did. However, he wasn’t saying anything about it to me, and I was afraid to ask. When he got to smoothing a rag over Gee Whiz’s face to clean off some of the dust, he finally broke the silence. “Jem Jarrow came over to the Marble Ranch this morning when I was working a couple of the calves with Happy, and I asked him something.”

  “What?”

  “How to start retraining an ex-racehorse.”

  “What are you going to retrain him to do?” I had never seen a cow horse nearly as big as Gee Whiz.

  “You told me yourself that he jumped 3′3″—or three feet, anyway—without even thinking about it.”

  I thought, “Uh-oh,” but I said, “So what did Jem say?”

  “Well, you do him the usual way—you teach him to step under and use his back feet, because at the racetrack, the back end is there for pushing off, but he said, ‘Sometimes those racehorses don’t know that it can actually do anything.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They get into habits—they always race to the left, for example, so how they use their haunches is always cocked a little so that they can get more power to the left. Or they dig in with the front end, which shifts their weight forward. Look at this.” He pointed to Gee Whiz’s neck. The muscles along the lower part bulged slightly more than the muscles along the crest. “That’s from pulling rather than pushing. They get in the habit of using their bodies in a certain way, and you have to recognize that it’s a habit rather than a fault.”

  He led him over to the pen and took him through the gate, picking up the flag that was leaning against the fence post. I closed the gate.

  Gee Whiz looked too big for the pen, just the way he had the time Barbie and I had put him in there, but as before, once Danny waved the flag, and he backed away, turned, and started trotting, it was clear that he was perfectly comfortable. This time, he shortened his strides by lifting his back and bending; he didn’t look at all awkward. Danny let him go around three times, then stepped slightly in front of him and lifted the flag again. Gee Whiz gave him a quizzical look, then paused, and trotted off the other way. I said, “Right answer.”

  Danny grinned.

  I said, “We did this before. It looks like he learned something.”

  Gee Whiz didn’t buck or kick out. He just kept making smooth turns and going the other way. Danny let him do this until he came down to a walk on his own, and then Danny stepped back, and Gee Whiz approached him. Danny slipped the training halter with the long lead rope over his head and tied it.

  The first time Danny asked Gee Whiz to step over in the Jem Jarrow way, the horse gave him the look again, that “What in the world are you talking about?” look that I’d never seen on the face of any other horse. I thought of what Jane had said, about a horse “translating” what the rider or trainer is asking for, and I decided that was his look—not scared, not resentful, not indifferent, but curious. Danny went up to him, bent his neck around, lifted his nose, nudged him on the haunch with his hand. Gee Whiz seemed to say, “Oh, I understand! Sure!” He stepped over.

  He stepped over several times to the right, then several times to the left. Then Danny did one of my favorite things—he slipped the rope over Gee Whiz’s head and ran it along his side until it came around his haunches, then he applied a little pressure. Gee Whiz stood there, big and white, looking off into the distance. Danny applied more pressure. Gee Whiz stiffened his head and neck, which is something horses do when they feel pressure. Danny pulled a little harder. Gee Whiz lowered his head, and the rope along his side dropped so that I could see it along his legs. There was a pause, but then he turned his head toward the pressure, and a moment later, he swiveled his body. Once he was facing Danny, Danny petted him, and said, “Smarty-pants.”

  We called this move the corkscrew. They did the corkscrew several times, until finally Gee Whiz wasn’t giving Danny the opportunity to apply pressure at all—as soon as he felt the rope across his tail, he turned.

  Danny was now in an even better mood, as good as I’d seen in a couple of weeks. He stepped up beside Gee Whiz’s neck, on the left side, facing backward. He gently put his hand on the far side of Gee Whiz’s nose. They stood there for a moment, then Gee Whiz bent his neck and brought his head around. Danny held it until Gee Whiz relaxed. When Danny took his hand away, Gee Whiz kept his neck curled for about a second, then straightened it. Danny did this on both sides, too. The point was to always remind him that he wasn’t a plank. He was a supple, athletic animal—the more supple, the more athletic. Danny said, “I didn’t think he would be so cooperative. I thought he would be a lot stiffer.”

  “He doesn’t move in the pasture like he’s stiff. He moves in the pasture like he can do anything he wants to.”

  “Let’s go over to the arena.”

  I said, “What else did Jem Jarrow say? This is the same stuff we would use with any horse.”

  “He said, ‘Always let him go forward.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I guess it means that at least for the first while, if we lift the rein from the saddle and ask him to come under, it’s just a little. He thinks they’re so used to going forward that they get nervous if you slow them down too much.”

  I thought of the trot and the canter and the gallop I had seen Gee Whiz produce. My scalp prickled.

  In the arena, Danny repeated the exercises he’d done in the pen, and added another, which was, when the horse is walking briskly around you, say, to the left, you switch the rope to the right hand (and the flag to the left), raise your right hand and give a little tug, and try to get the horse to bend toward you, shift his weight, turn, and go to the right without halting. Happy could do this at the canter—it looked like a trick. She would be cantering to the left around Danny, he would twitch the rope, she would sort of lift herself up, shift from her left hind to her right hind, and take off cantering to the right, but her canter was so controlled and graceful that she looked like a rocking horse. (Another trick he did was to walk along, leading her. He would say, “Lope!” and she would canter beside him, no faster than he was walking—I thought that was a trick Waldemar Seunig should see.) A horse who could do the turns Danny wanted could, of course, outsmart any calf or cow, but he could also maintain his balance at all times by easily shifting his weight backward and raising his front end. I won’t say that Gee Whiz learned this immediately—he was much bigger than Happy, two hands and 29 percent overall—but he got the idea.

  Danny handed me th
e lead rope, and said, “Walk him around for a bit.”

  He went over to his truck and came back with his saddle. He was carrying Blue’s bridle, and said, “This snaffle bit is easy. Let’s start with that.”

  “Are you going to do what Wayne does and jump up onto him?”

  He ignored me.

  In the end, all we did was the same exercises with Gee Whiz tacked up that we had done untacked, but the stirrups flapped and the strings flapped and the saddle creaked. Gee Whiz bucked once, but it was clear he wasn’t unbroke—he knew that people do what they do, and if you are a wise horse, you go along with it the best you can. We took him back to the barn, and I brushed him down while Danny was putting that tack away. Then Danny put him in his pasture. It was getting dark—still no sign of Dad’s truck. Danny helped me put the hay in the wheelbarrow, but when I rolled it toward the horses, he got in his own truck and left. He didn’t say not to tell Mom and Dad he’d been there, but as it happened, I didn’t. We didn’t talk about Danny at all.

  Chapter 12

  THE NEXT MORNING WAS SOPHIA’S BIG DAY, AND OF COURSE IT was a production—she showed up at nine. Her dad was driving the trailer, and she was wearing perfect clothes. When they unloaded Onyx, it looked as though Rodney had dressed him up and sent him to Madison Square Garden. Our horses weren’t the ones we’d had when he lived with us as Black George, but they whinnied to him anyway, and he whinnied back. I’d expected Sophia to be kitted out, so I’d already been at it for an hour, making sure that Blue looked as good as possible, and that my saddle was soaped, if not oiled. You would have thought a trail ride was some kind of promenade.

  Once we were tacked up, I pointed to the east, down between our pastures, through the lower gate, and up to the Jordan Ranch. It was a spectacular ride, a little wild, but on good ground with flat trails. There were spots we could gallop if we wanted to. Mr. Rosebury asked how long we’d be gone, and I said, “Oh, a couple of hours.”

  He said, “Are you sure?”

  “Well, I don’t have a watch, but—”

  “Are you taking any water?”

  “You mean like a canteen or like a bucket?”

  “For yourselves, in case of dehydration.”

  I’d never thought of this. I didn’t know what to say, but Sophia said, “We’ll be fine,” in a tight voice.

  We waved and headed out. The trail had dried enough to be perfect—resilient but not slippery. Onyx looked happy. He walked along with his head swinging and his ears pricked, but at one point, he sort of stumbled on an uneven spot, nothing serious, and Sophia started and grabbed mane. Then she drove her heels down and straightened her back. This was the right response—if a horse goes down, you want to be sitting up, and in good balance, but Onyx was nowhere near going down. I said, “He’s been on this trail scads of times.”

  Sophia said, “I haven’t.”

  In the meantime, Blue was walking along just fine. His gait felt smooth and pleasant. I patted him on the neck and tickled him at the roots of his mane. I wondered what Sophia and I were going to talk about for two hours. But I should have known. Sophia didn’t need to talk—she never did. When you were with Sophia, all of the things you might have remarked on—look at the crows; the rain greened things up a bit, but the trail isn’t bad at all; Onyx looks good—remained unsaid because they seemed too dopey or too obvious or, maybe, too personal (I did wonder if she was nervous, but I didn’t ask). Had she done her homework? Well, of course she had. She always did her homework. How did she do on the math test? An A, of course, and if not, well, it was none of my business. So, if we couldn’t talk about anything, why did I like her a little more each time I saw her?

  We got to the gate into the Jordan Ranch. I sided Blue over to it and undid it, and we both went through. I locked it again. We picked up our pace as we climbed the hill, until both horses were trotting nicely, using their shoulders and lowering their heads. The hills spread to the east, and you could just see the cows and calves sprinkled black against a distant slope. They were far away, but the landscape amplified their mooing, so that it sounded resonant and deep. We let the horses pick their own pace, and Sophia did the right thing, which was to sit back a little and lower her shoulders, just because the ground could always fool you. Blue and Onyx seemed perfectly sure-footed and happy, though, and when we came to a wide, flat area, they both lifted into a canter. Blue was in the lead, but where the trail spread out, Onyx moved around him and took off.

  I admit I felt a single blast of alarm, but Sophia was only two lengths ahead of me, and her body was swaying easily with Onyx’s gallop. Her braids were flopping rhythmically, and her heels were deep. Blue exerted himself to keep up, and I decided to quit worrying and enjoy myself, which was easy, given how fresh and sweet the air was, and how hypnotic the sound of the horses’ hooves on the trail. As soon as Sophia settled into her saddle, Onyx slowed to a trot, and Blue was right with him. We trotted for a few strides, then we walked. Everyone was breathless, Sophia, Onyx, Blue, and me, but it was the breathlessness of pleasure. The horses tossed their heads and blew out some air, and then walked along, glancing here and there. I came up beside Sophia. She did not say, “That was fun”—she would never say such a silly thing. But I did say it. “That was fun.” Then, “So tell me why you finally came for a trail ride?”

  She looked at me. She seemed looser and more comfortable. “Because Colonel Hawkins said it would be a waste of time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What are we learning, Abby? What is to be gained? The horse is plenty fit without it. Something could happen. I would be very cautious.” She spoke in a deep, measured voice, and then coughed a Colonel Hawkins sort of cough.

  A few minutes later, she said, “Is this where you broke your arm last year?”

  I waved toward the distant cows. “Over across there, behind those hills.”

  “See?” she said. “That’s what he’s talking about.”

  “I guess so.”

  We walked along. I didn’t tell Sophia about the time I got lost and Rusty and Blue found the way home, but I looked around and paid attention to where we were. It all looked normal today. I said, “You never seem like you’re afraid of anything.”

  She glanced at me, and said, “I guess the thing I’m afraid of right now is what my life is going to be like if I do every single thing I’m told to do forever and ever.”

  Now the trail went down a hill and through the patchy shade of a grove of oaks. This was one of my favorite places to ride, though we didn’t ride here very often. The limbs of the trees were rough and crooked, and we had to pay attention in order to bend our heads beneath a few that stretched over the trail. We could see a trickle of water in the stream at the bottom of the hill, and that seemed to make the atmosphere especially peaceful. There was no wind. The horses were flicking their ears, though, so I sat up and took a slightly stronger hold. Sophia said, “Look over there.” The horses turned their heads. We could just see the face of a doe under one of the smaller trees, not far off the trail, maybe twenty feet from us. She was lying down, but her head was up, her triangular face turned right toward us, her dark eyes staring. I closed my legs on Blue’s sides, not to kick him but to make sure that he knew that he had to keep going. I saw Sophia do the same. We passed the deer and she didn’t move. A bit later, the trail angled upward, and when we looked back, we could still see her, watching us.

  Sophia said, “Who is that big white horse in your pasture? He’s a beauty.”

  “He’s a Thoroughbred off the track.”

  “I thought so. He’s got the look. I love Santa Anita.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “My dad took me one year for the Santa Anita Derby. He let me place a bet—two bucks on Lucky Debonair. I picked him because he reminded me of a horse I had then. We also went to Del Mar once. That’s like going to a resort that has racing down the street. Dad gets a little excited every time they run, and Mom and I just look at o
ur shoes, but I have to admit, that time I had the bet on Lucky Debonair, who I’d never even heard of half an hour before, I was jumping up and down and shouting his name, and he felt like he was my very own horse. Then, when they were coming back to the winners’ circle after they all galloped out, it seemed like the jockey was waving to me. It was such fun. What are you going to do with him?”

  “Train him to jump.” It seemed very bold to say this, but then I said, “I know he can do it, because he jumped out of the chute I built him when a bird flew in his face.”

  “Are you really?”

  It took me a second to say yes.

  The look Sophia—Sophia!—gave me said, “Lucky you.”

  When we got back, it had been an hour and a half, so I had to wonder what Dad and Mr. Rosebury had talked about for all that time. Whatever it was, Mr. Rosebury was smiling and laughing the way he always did. Probably it wasn’t religion.

  And as the Roseburys pulled out of the gate, Danny turned in from the road. He waved to me and waited for them to go through, then he passed me, drove to the house, and parked. I closed the gate and secured the latch. Mom was already out on the front porch, and when Danny went up the stairs, she said some little thing, and he nodded, and they hugged as tight as they possibly could.

  I went around to the kitchen and took my boots off, then I waited just inside the door while Danny, Mom, and Dad talked about it. It turned out that he had taken a bus with a lot of other guys from our town to the military base up the coast. On the way back, they all compared notes about how they’d done, what results they’d received. Some of them had not passed, even some of those who were sure that they would pass. But Danny had passed. Now all he had to do was wait for his draft notice. He’d heard that would take about two months. Dad said, “You’ll do fine.”