The Fire Pony

by Rodman Philbrick

  “We can leave anytime you want,” I say.

  Joe grips my arm. He’s real intense, like something is bubbling inside him and wants to get out. “It’s not what I want,” he says. “I hope you understand that, Roy. It’s what we have to do.”

  He gets up to tend the fire. You can feel the heat licking at us, it makes my face warm and my eyes hot, and the sparks rise up like lightning bugs, swirling and dancing in the air. It makes your head feel light, watching the sparks rise up.

  The sun has finally gone down, and you can see the lights in the valley coming on, all them ranches lighting up. I’m seeing those ranch lights through the fire and it all blurs together and I feel like something really important is happening but I don’t know what.

  Beside me, Joe is working on his fifth bottle of beer. He don’t ever get drunk, exactly, but it changes him into somebody else, somebody I don’t know.

  “You ever really looked inside a fire, Roy?” he says.

  “I guess.”

  He’s crouching by the fire now, poking at it with a stick, so close you think he’d get burned but he don’t. “Look there, see how it comes alive? Them old church pictures show hell afire, but they’ve got it all wrong. You’re looking at heaven, Roy, all that light and heat and purity. There’s angels inside that fire!”

  I look but I don’t see no angels. All I see is the heat and flames and how the fire makes Joe Dilly kind of crazy, how it fills him up inside until it has to come bursting out.

  Then the smoke turns and my eyes start to water.

  “You got no cause to worry this time,” Joe says. “I promise you that.”

  “I ain’t worried,” I say.

  But Joe knows I’m lying and he turns me toward him. I can smell the beer on his breath, and the onions. “Listen to me,” he says. “That barn fire at the last place we worked, that was an accidental kind of thing. It won’t happen again, you got my word on that.”

  I don’t say nothing because the last thing I want to think about is what happened back in Montana, or what they say Joe done. Or how I seen him with that can of gas and the way his eyes looked crazy hot when that barn went up in flames. Because I know what Joe Dilly done and I know it wasn’t no accident.

  He drinks his last beer in one long gulp.

  “Give a hand,” he says, standing up. “Help me put this out.”

  We both of us kick dirt at the fire, but it don’t die down easy. The red heat of it keeps coming back through the dirt. Them branches look like hot bones glowing under the earth, and the way they twist and move it’s like they’re alive somehow. I get this idea that the flames are like blood, keeping the thing alive, but that don’t make sense.

  Joe thinks it’s pretty funny, the way the fire won’t go out, but I’m not laughing. I’m heaping clods of dirt at the glow and it keeps on breaking through and it’s enough to make me cry, the way a fire keeps on burning, no matter what you throw at it.

  “No!” I shout, and I’m stomping at them hot coals like a madman while Joe watches and shakes his head.

  “And they say I’m crazy,” he says.

  On the third try we finally kill that fire, but even after it goes out I keep heaping dirt on it until Joe says, “That’s enough,” and he pulls me away.

  “You think you can drive that truck?” Joe asks.

  “My feet don’t reach the pedals. You know that.”

  “I thought maybe that hot dog made you grow,” Joe says. “I guess not.”

  “We could just sleep here,” I say.

  “No way,” Joe says.

  We get in the truck and he drives so slow I think we’ll never get back to the Bar None. That ride just goes on forever. So dark we could be inside a long, long tunnel, even though I know the sky is wide open, and there’s nothing over us but black air. You can see the red eyes of the rabbits waiting alongside the road as the headlights go by, and I start counting the rabbits.

  I must have fallen asleep somehow, because the next thing I know, Joe is setting me into my bunk and snugging up the covers, and I fall back to sleep thinking he smells just like the fire smelled when I tried to put it out.

  After that, Joe quit talking about how we’ll have to leave come fall, and I just put it right out of my head I’m so busy with Lady Luck.

  Mr. Jessup, when he’s not messing with Pit Stop, he’s helping me with Lady, and it’s amazing how much he knows about training horses. You can tell from the very first time he comes into the barn, where Lady has a stall to herself, at least until the other animals get used to her.

  “You ever break a pony, Roy?” he asks me.

  “No, sir.”

  Mr. Jessup has a way of thinking for a while before he talks. He’ll shift his weight from one boot to the other and nod his head, until he’s settled on what he wants to say. You have to be patient and not keep butting in or it takes forever. Anyhow, he’s rubbing his chin and squinting his eyes and finally he says, “There’s a lot of ways to break a horse, but you boil it all down and it comes to this. You can either beat the animal into submission, or you can bribe it with sugar. Which way do you want to go with Lady?”

  I don’t have to think about that for even a second. “Sugar,” I say.

  “Good,” says Mr. Jessup. He reaches into his shirt pocket and hands me a sugar cube. “Let’s see if she’s got a sweet tooth,” he says. “Not every horse loves sugar right off the bat.”

  I hold the sugar cube in the palm of my hand and keep my hand flat so she can’t accidently-on-purpose nip me. Lady takes a sniff of that sugar cube, but she don’t open her mouth.

  “She doesn’t know what it tastes like,” Mr. Jessup says. “You’ll have to show her.”

  “You mean eat it myself?” I say.

  Mr. Jessup laughs. “Nope,” he says. “What you do is stick it in the corner of her mouth. Once she gets a taste, she’ll want more.”

  Sure enough, when I slip that sugar cube into the side of her mouth, she chews it up and shakes her head and snorts. “I think she likes it,” I say.

  “That’s enough for now,” Mr. Jessup says. “Let her get used to one idea at a time. You brush her good, and after you finish, see if she’ll take a cube from your hand.”

  So I give her a good brushing. You have to go with the grain and not fight the way her coat grows, and if you do that, you can tell she likes the feel of that brush stroking her skin. When her coat is clean and shiny and glowing I set to work on her mane. It’s her Arabian blood that makes her mane so long and fine and silky so the comb just glides through real smooth. She gets a little frisky when I comb out her tail, though, like she wants to turn around and see what I’m doing back there.

  “You want some more sugar, is that it?” I say. “You’ll have to learn some patience.”

  Another thing you have to get a horse used to is lifting its feet. Joe showed me the trick of getting a hoof up, where you lean your weight against the leg and reach down and touch behind the knee with one hand while you lift the foot with the other. Pretty soon that horse will learn to lift up its feet just by touch, and you can use a pick to keep the bottom of the hoof clean, where it gets caked with dirt and manure. You don’t do that and a horse with dirty hooves will come down with thrush, which is a bad infection that will make it go lame.

  Anyhow, I try that trick on Lady, touching behind her knee, and what do you know, she fights me! She stands there with her weight balanced and just plain refuses to pick up her feet, no matter how much I nudge her.

  Finally, I lose my patience. I look her in the eye and say, “Pick up that foot or else!”

  She tries to rub her head against me, looking for sugar, but I won’t have none of that. “I ain’t leaving until you learn to pick up your foot,” I say. “That’s the long and short of it.”

  The next time I try, she snorts and sighs and then finally lifts her foot, as if to say, oh big deal, take a look if you want, it’s all the same to me.

  You’re probably thinking she’ll get th
e sugar for lifting her foot, right? Wrong. I do that, she’ll want a lump of sugar for every hoof, and once you start a horse in on a bad habit, they keep it up — I know that much from listening to Joe. So I wait until she’s forgotten about her feet and when I hold out my hand, she carefully sniffs the cube and then slurp! she’s chomping away on it and making contented noises that mean she’s happy.

  Which makes me happy, too.

  * * *

  The next morning when Mr. Jessup comes into the barn he’s carrying an empty feed sack. “This is an old trick,” he says, handing me the sack. “Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t.”

  I’m standing there holding the empty sack like a goon, because I don’t know what to do with it. Mr. Jessup finally notices and he says, “Oh, right. The sack. Okay, what are we trying to do with this pony?”

  “Get a saddle on her,” I say.

  He nods. “Exactly. She has to get used to the feeling of something on her back. Start with the empty sack. Go on, just drape it over her back, like it was a saddle.”

  Of course it ain’t a saddle, but I do like he says. Lady, she sort of shivers and that sack comes floating down off her back.

  “Keep trying,” Mr. Jessup says. “Rub her legs with it and flick it around until it doesn’t spook her anymore. When she leaves it on, give her a lump of sugar. That’s the bribe. You’re teaching her good behavior. Just keep that in mind, you’ll be okay.”

  He hands me this bag of sugar cubes and I hide it outside the stall, so Lady can’t sniff it out and cause a fuss. First thing I do, like Mr. Jessup suggested, is I get Lady used to the idea of something going on around her back and legs. I keep laying that sack on her and pulling it off and kind of flicking it against her withers. Well, she makes a game of it, twitching her tail and tossing her head, but finally she gets tired or maybe bored and she quits snorting and shaking her head and she ignores that fluttering sack — it don’t bother her no more than a fly.

  After that, I leave her alone for a while. The way a horse thinks, it needs time to settle in.

  So I go on and give Joe a hand, where he’s working this purebred Arabian mare that’s picked up a bad habit of kicking. He’s got her in cross-ties so she can’t move around too much, and he’s checking her out, real cautious. “It ain’t a mean streak that makes her kick,” he says. “Somebody hurt her once, before she come to the Bar None. Mr. Jessup knew, and he took her anyway.”

  “Will she try and kick you, Joe?” I ask.

  “Don’t matter who,” he says. “The habit of kicking has dug deep into her mind.”

  “Can you stop her?”

  Joe shrugs. “I’ll give her a good try,” he says.

  When Joe hears about Mr. Jessup’s idea of sacking Lady to get her used to a saddle, he don’t say much, he only nods.

  “If you got a better way, you only got to tell me,” I say.

  “You go on like he told you,” Joe says. “Sack the sugar beast. That’s as good a way as any.”

  “You mean it?”

  “ ’Course I do,” he says, and that’s an end to it.

  After lunch, which I didn’t eat much, I go back and try that sack again. Because maybe she’s forgot by now, and I’ll have to start over. But when I slip the sack over her back, right where the saddle will go, she don’t even try to shake it off! She just looks me over, like she’s saying: What do you think I am, stupid?

  I run back outside to the riding ring to tell Mr. Jessup the good news. He don’t act the least bit surprised. Rick is helping him put Pit Stop through his paces, cutting tight around these barrels they’ve set up in the ring, and Mr. Jessup turns to Rick and says, “What do we have in the way of small saddles?”

  Rick looks at me and grins and says, “Come with me.”

  The tack room at the Bar None is bigger than on most ranches because Mr. Jessup, he don’t like to throw nothing away. That’s what Rick says. First thing, you go into the tack room, you can smell the leather and oil, which is a good smell. There’s all these pegs on one wall, with bridles and halters hanging there. Mr. Jessup has a whole other wall reserved for his ropes and lariats, because they have to be just right. Then there’s like this long set of rails where they keep the saddles, and there’s every kind of saddle. There’s this one cowboy saddle that looks so old you’re almost afraid to touch it, and Mr. Jessup says it was owned by an outlaw called John Wesley Hardin.

  “Old John Wesley Hardin probably stole that saddle from a hard-working cowboy, but I paid good money for it at auction,” Mr. Jessup says. “You look over there on the left side, there’s a bullet hole.”

  I look, and sure enough, there is a bullet hole.

  “Had the horse he stole shot out from under him,” Mr. Jessup says. “Which is a sin, shooting an innocent horse.”

  “What happened to John Wesley Hardin?” I ask.

  “He was on the run for a long time,” Mr. Jessup says. “But in the end the law finally caught up to him. Like it usually does.”

  Rick hears that and he clears his throat and says, “About that saddle,” like he wants to change the subject. So Rick pulls out a few saddles, one by one, and Mr. Jessup looks them over and finally nods at a small one and says, “That’ll do. You carry it, Roy, see can you heft it.”

  There’s some saddles I can’t even pick up, they’re so heavy, but this one is pretty light, although it does seem to get heavier and heavier the longer you carry it.

  Anyhow, we get that saddle back to the holding pen, with me carrying it all the way by myself, and Mr. Jessup says, “You tired, son? We can wait until tomorrow, the pony won’t mind.”

  I’ll mind, though, so I take a deep breath and say, “I’ll get this saddle on Lady if it kills me.”

  Rick laughs and says he hopes it don’t come to that.

  I figure they’ll let me do it on my own, and they do, except everybody wants to watch. When I bring Lady out from her stall to the holding pen, Rick and Mr. Jessup are there, leaning on the fence rail. Even Joe comes out from where he’s been working with the kicker, and he hangs up his leather apron and folds his arms and says, “You get a saddle on that pony and I’ll eat spinach for supper.” He hates spinach worse than anything.

  “You better work up an appetite,” I say.

  But when I get into the pen with her, Lady rolls her eyes, like she’s thinking, You better not try anything fancy on me, boy. But she don’t fight when I clip her halter to the post. Maybe she’s waiting to see what happens next.

  The truth of it is, I don’t know what happens next. It’s like Rick and Mr. Jessup and Joe are waiting for me to figure it out on my own.

  I’m about ready to get it over with and just heave that little saddle up on her quick when I get this idea.

  First I take that old sack and shuck handfuls of grain in until it weighs as much as the saddle, near as I can tell. Then I slip the weighted sack up on Lady and she dances around some, but she don’t shake it off.

  I look over then and see Rick and Mr. Jessup and Joe, and they’re all watching me. One by one they nod to let me know filling the sack was the right idea.

  “Can’t I have a little privacy?” I ask.

  So they all turn their backs and pretend they’re not looking but they are.

  “Fine,” I say. “See if I care.”

  I get the saddle balanced on the fence rail where I can reach it, and I loop one stirrup up over the horn so it don’t get in the way. Then I stroke Lady for a while, until she’s calm and not moving around much. Next thing, I slip the grain sack off her back, and before she hardly knows it’s gone, I replace it with a light saddle pad. Then I grab hold of that saddle and slip it up on her back, over the pad. She makes a little snort, like What’s this? But before she can figure it out, I reach up under her belly and grab the cinch strap and slip it into the rings.

  After I get the cinch snugged up, I give Lady her sugar. That’s all I figure to do, get that saddle on her, but she seems so gentle and relaxed I decide why n
ot get it over with? Why not go the whole way to the moon?

  So without really thinking about it, I put my foot in the stirrup and grab hold of her neck and swing myself up into that saddle. Once I get there, Lady kind of dances sideways, pulling against the halter rope, and I have to grab hold of the saddle horn and hold on for dear life, but she don’t really try to buck me off.

  Before you know it she settles down and just stands there, flicking her tail, like it was the most natural thing in the world, having a boy on her back.

  “Good girl,” I say, and lean down to stroke her neck and give her a lump of sugar.

  Then it hits me, what I just did, and I start feeling kind of shaky. I don’t know what got into me, to get up on her back so soon, and I been so concentrated I clean forgot about the audience until Joe lets out a whoop.

  “You see that?” he says, slapping his hat against his leg. “You see that runt of a boy tame that wild pony in a day? What do you think of that, sports fans!”

  Then he starts slapping high fives all around and Mr. Jessup and Rick are shaking their heads and grinning. “Oh, I suspected he might have the gift,” Mr. Jessup says. “He got it from you, Joe.”

  “Never mind where he got it,” Joe says. He’s practically jumping up and down, he’s that excited. “Where’s the spinach? I’m so hungry I could eat it raw!”

  That’s the funniest thing, how happy Joe is when I get a saddle on Lady Luck. I figured he didn’t like the idea of that pony, or the way Mr. Jessup promised her to me, but Joe Dilly, he’ll surprise you sometimes.

  As it turns out, getting the saddle on Lady was the easy part. Because the next day when I try to put the bit in her mouth, she clamps up her teeth and won’t have nothing to do with it.

  When I can’t get her to take the bit, not even with lumps of sugar shoved in first, Mr. Jessup gives it a try. He holds the loop up against her head like you’re supposed to, ready to slip it over her ears. Then he pries at the hard part of her jaws, and tries to slide the rubber bit between her teeth, but Lady fights him, too. She just won’t have none of it.