Sky Rider

by Nancy Springer

  It’s been a strange weekend. Friday night real real late I fell asleep in the barn, finally, and Daddy just let me lie there and sleep all day Saturday, which was sweet of him. Which was why he had scheduled the vet to come on a Saturday morning in the first place, so I’d have the weekend to regroup, so I wouldn’t have to go to school right afterward or anything, except the vet didn’t have to come after all because Tazz took off–or that’s what Daddy thinks. He says he called the police and the radio and all that, but nobody’s seen Tazz. I have a feeling Tazz is better off, so I’m glad. Sort of. Or at least I’m not upset. But Dad doesn’t understand, so he is fussing. He jumps like a cat every time the phone rings, and he won’t let me answer it. Saturday night I was wide awake after sleeping all day so he rented a bunch of videos and we watched them till three in the morning, which was nice. Then I slept till noon today, and then Daddy took a notion that we had to go out for dinner and a “Sunday drive,” so we did. We drove clear to Maryland and back and we didn’t get home till after dark. But then all of a sudden Daddy got totally squirrely. He won’t let me turn on the radio or the television and there are messages on the answering machine but he says they’re all private for him and he can’t sit down, he’s pacing by the phone. He’s a mess. I would like to take him and shake him. Finally I told him to chill out and then he really got crabby. I wish he wouldn’t get like that but then I remember how it was when he was drinking and I realize it’s a lot better to just let him grouch. So here I am in my room and I’m not tired but I guess I might as well go to bed. Nothing else to do. Homework, what’s that? Anyway, I have a first period study hall tomorrow.

  P.S. Diary, I turned off the light to go to bed but then I kept looking out the window. There’s nothing out there except hills and woods and moonlight and shadows and the mares and old Pinocchio in the paddock, but I kept staring like I couldn’t help it. So I’ve turned the light back on and I’m going to sleep that way. Aaak. I guess I’m more upset than I thought.

  On her way to school Monday morning, watching as her father drove the Bronco, Dusty thought that he looked too tired, seemed too quiet. But she didn’t say anything. Didn’t want to get snapped at.

  “Look,” he said suddenly as he pulled up in front of Grovesburg Intermediate School to drop her off, “honey, you have a good day, okay?” It was almost like a plea, which was not his usual style at all.

  She tried to make him laugh. “Daddy, I have other plans.” But he didn’t laugh, and the look on his face made her say, “Daddy, what’s the matter? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. See you, honey.” He drove away. A man in an expensive three-piece suit driving a dusty four-by-four to his downtown business. For just an eyeblink Dusty saw him, really saw him as if he weren’t just her father, and what she saw was a man with too many obligations. Abel Grove. As in grandson of the Abel Grove who had founded Grovesburg. As in C.E.O. of the plastics business that kept the town going. A civic leader and executive who probably would rather have been a farmer. It was kind of sad.

  Then her glance shifted across the blacktop to the high school, and she stared. In front of the big doors, two girls who looked like they might have been juniors or seniors were hugging each other and crying. Several more were standing close together without talking, and they were all wearing dresses. Some boys stood farther apart, somber and quiet, wearing suits or jackets. Gray, black, navy.

  “Dustin!” sang a voice that made Dusty smile and turn. Katelyn seemed to come up with a new nickname for her every time she saw her.

  “Pierced nails?” Dusty asked, her glance caught by Katelyn’s rhinestoned frosted lilac fingertips.

  “No, just glue-on studs.” Katelyn stepped closer, apparently with a more serious subject on her mind. “Listen, Dustbuster, I tried to call you to see how you were and everything.” Because of getting Tazz put down, she meant. “But your dad said you didn’t want to talk.”

  “That’s dumb. Of course I wanted to talk.” Good grief, what was Daddy trying to prove? What was wrong with him?

  “He sounded stressed. Was it real bad?”

  “Actually, it sort of didn’t happen.” Rather than try to explain right then, Dusty looked back toward the high school. “What’s going on with the dresses and everything?”

  Katelyn lifted her studded fingernails in a kind of salute. “They’re going to the funeral, I guess.”

  “Funeral?”

  “Didn’t you hear, Density? Where have you been? Some high school boy got killed over the weekend. The funeral’s today.”

  Before Dusty could react, another friend, Lauren, came up. “Dusty! I heard your horse is lost!”

  “Yes, but—”

  All that day at school Dusty tried to explain to one friend or another that Tazz was gone but it was okay; if he had not run away he would be dead. Talk of Tazz, Tazz, Tazz mixed with talk of the boy who had died—“No, got killed,” Dusty thought, vaguely realizing there was a difference. Killed how? Car wreck? Ew. She didn’t like to think about car wrecks, so she didn’t ask. “One of the Ryder boys,” somebody said. She had heard of them a little. Wild, handsome boys. She felt both glad and sorry that she hadn’t known the dead boy. Glad because she didn’t really have to deal with this. The pills she took for the constant pain in her back made her woozy some days, and this was one of those days and she had trouble concentrating on anything. “Caught him right on the neck,” she heard in the halls. “He was going about forty.” Dusty didn’t know where the boy had wrecked, or how, and she didn’t get to ask because friends kept asking her about Tazz. They knew how much she adored her horse; they had been horrified and sympathetic when she had told them that she and her father had decided that Tazz needed to be put to sleep. But now Tazz was out there somewhere. “What happens when you get him back?” Katelyn asked.

  “I—I’m not sure.” Dusty found that she could not explain, not even to Katelyn, why she was not worried, why she felt sure it would not happen. She could not say anything to her friends about the eerie boy’s appearing in the night; she just couldn’t. They wouldn’t understand. Mom would have understood, but Dusty could not think of anybody else who might.

  It’s all right, Dusty thought. Some things were best kept to herself. I can handle whatever. If she just didn’t feel so tired and woozy. Her head felt so cottony that she couldn’t think.

  Getting off the school bus, every part of her as weary and achy as her spine, Dusty saw the Bronco parked in the driveway. Odd; why was Daddy home already?

  She went into the house. “Daddy?”

  No answer.

  She dumped her book bag on the kitchen table, and then she saw the bottle.

  “Uh.” The sight hit Dusty like a punch to the stomach. Whiskey. Or rather, it used to have whiskey. Now it was just glass, open and empty. She stood staring at the smelly thing, feeling herself go wooden.

  She tried to lighten up, tried to think of a joke. But she couldn’t. This was just not funny. Daddy had been doing fine for the past year, going to AA and keeping his promises. What could have happened to start him drinking again? This Tazz hassle? Dusty didn’t think so. It had taken a lot—the shock of finding his wife unconscious and dying—to turn Daddy into a drunk.

  “Daddy?”

  No answer.

  “Oh, Da-a-dee.” She could allow herself the sarcastic sing-song call because she knew he wasn’t a mean drunk. He had never been a mean drunk. Just … pathetic, that was all. Slurring, slobbering, runny-nosed, lugubrious. A pain in the butt.

  Dusty sighed, and slowly, because she dreaded what she was going to find, she went looking for him.

  Still in his business suit, he lay passed out facedown on the living room floor with another bottle close at hand. He hadn’t puked; his head was turned to one side and it looked like he was breathing okay. Dusty kneeled down and put a hand on his side to make sure. Then she stood up, took the bottle, and left him where he was.

  In the kitchen again, pouring whiskey down
the sink, she felt her weariness harden and go stony, a cue that she was deeply angry. But it was no use being angry. She knew she ought to make some phone calls, get Daddy’s AA buddy out here, try to find out what went wrong, try to get Daddy back on track. But she didn’t feel like she could deal with it yet. Maybe after she found something to eat.

  She headed for the cupboard where she and Daddy kept the peanut butter. A newspaper was lying on the countertop. She glanced down, and everything stopped.

  He was looking back at her. The boy.

  His photo. On the front page.

  It was him, the boy who had healed Tazz and ridden off into the night. She would have recognized him anywhere. Yet … it was not exactly him. The boy in the picture—he was handsome, but … human, normal. Real. But the boy she had seen in the night—it was as if someone had taken this boy and polished him like glass and filled him with white light and black fire.

  Skye Ryder, the caption said. AREA TEEN KILLED, the headline said.

  The Ryder boy. The boy everyone was talking about in school.

  Shakily Dusty reached for the newspaper to pick it up and read the article.

  The phone rang.

  She crossed the kitchen to answer it. “Hello?”

  “This is Nisley,” said a gruff voice. “Yer horse is up here.”

  One crisis at a time, Dusty told herself as she headed out the door. Just take it one crisis at a time. Story of her life. Dad will wait. She knew from experience that he would lie on the floor quite a while longer. So will the newspaper. It was not likely to levitate from the countertop where she had left it. What’s Tazz doing back? Is he okay?

  Her heart was pounding in her hurry to get to the neighboring farm. Briefly she thought of grabbing the keys and taking the Bronco. She knew she could do it, though she had never driven on the road, only around the farm. But if a cop happened to catch her on the road, she would be in big trouble. And even if nobody caught her, she knew she couldn’t hitch up the trailer by herself, let alone tow it, so how would she bring Tazz back?

  Did she want to bring him back?

  No. If he was lame again, she would hide him somehow, somewhere. But she tabled further thought about that decision until she had seen him. With a lead rope tied around her waist and a halter hanging on her shoulder, she set off on foot, short-cutting across country toward the Nisley place.

  It had been a long time since she’d tried to walk so far—less than a mile, but her back started to hurt before she even got across the pasture. Dumb, that after all the dangerous things she had done on horses, polo and steeplechase and jumping bareback and trying to stand on the horse at a canter like a circus rider, after all that, her back had been totaled not by a fall from a horse but by her own dear drunk father swerving into a ditch when she was in the passenger seat. The forty-mile-an-hour jouncing had done compression damage to her spine that the doctors were never going to be able to fix. Just the way they had tried every kind of vet and medication and corrective shoeing for Tazz, she and Daddy had tried doctor after doctor, treatment after treatment, for her back. After a year and a half, it looked like pills, pain, and back braces were going to be her life.

  As quickly as she could, while little black-and-white Pinocchio and two chestnut mares watched her curiously, Dusty trudged past the pasture pond and up the hill to the gate. Had it really been more than a year since she’d been out here? It hurt to remember what she had felt like back then, with Mom dead and Dad in treatment for his drinking and Tazz dead lame and her back—well, her wrecked-up back had felt like one damn thing too many. Story of her life, she had told herself at the time. What was the use of even wanting things to be any different? But now, at the sight of the familiar hilltop, her chest squeezed with yearning.

  Oh, to ride again. She remembered everything vividly. Same makeshift fence-wire gate. On the far side of it, same maze of grassy trails between blackberry thickets. Tiny blue-white flowers in the grass. Tiny blue-white butterflies flying up in clouds. Lump in her throat—that was new. She hadn’t realized till now what this particular piece of Eden meant to her.

  More than a year. Why hadn’t she walked out here before?

  Well … because she didn’t feel like doing things, that was why. Everything hurt. More ways than one.

  Still, Dusty lifted her head as she reached the woods, smiling at the tall hickories and tulip poplars, the dirt trail like a wide, lazy river winding under them, a brown meander rippled with footprints, hoofprints, bike tire tracks.

  She walked into the woods, breathing deeply, ignoring the pain in her back. Good old trail. How many times had she cantered along here? How many times had she fallen off, trying to get a balky, bucking pony to change leads? It was a soft, safe trail. Safe landings—

  Abruptly she stopped walking and stared. Something had changed.

  Across the trail at her feet, someone had dug a ditch about a foot wide and six inches deep. A ditch lined with spikes. Rough-cut steel railroad spikes. Points up.

  Nasty.

  And ugly. And stupid. Suppose a horse stepped into that? Or a person?

  Who would have dug such a mean thing?

  Without answering her own question, Dusty stepped over the ditch and trudged on. Suddenly she felt very tired and very conscious that her back was screaming. It was no longer a pleasure to walk along this trail. All she could think about was getting to Nisley’s. She felt like she had no energy to think about anything else.

  She came to another ditch lined with spikes. This time she walked around it. Judging by the narrow side trail worn through the ferns and mayapple, other people had been doing the same. The ditch had been there for a while. How long?

  Just keep walking. Don’t think. Don’t think about … pain.

  Something bright yellow caught her eye. Up ahead. She walked more slowly, staring, then faltered to a halt.

  Glaring yellow plastic tape stretched from tree to tree, enclosing an area about ten feet square, blocking the trail. POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, it said. POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.

  Step by hesitant step, as if something might hurt her, Dusty inched closer until she almost touched the tape. But she could see nothing to tell her why it was there. Maybe somebody else could have made sense of the marks on the trail dirt, but she couldn’t. Or the marks on the trees. Twin hemlocks flanked the trail, and on each of them the bark was scarred about four and a half feet above the ground. Dusty saw nothing else.

  Tazz. She had to get moving. Stop thinking about things that didn’t concern her. Go to Tazz.

  Picking her way between deadfalls and saplings, she made her way through the woods until she was past the obstacle. Back on the trail, she tried to run. Ow. Owww. Couldn’t do it. Panting with exertion and pain and frustration, she pushed herself along at the fastest walk she could manage. Almost to the road—

  There was a gate barring the trail from the road. A red metal gate. That was new, too.

  As with the ditches, people had worn a narrow side path to get past the gate. Dusty followed it out to the road, a rutted gravel road Daddy never drove her along, good for horseback riding and bike riding but not for girls with bad backs. Another place she hadn’t been in over a year, Nisley’s road. She stood looking back at the padlocked gate across the trail head. PRIVATE PROPERTY, a metal sign proclaimed in black-and-red letters. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU. The O of you was painted like a bull’s-eye.

  Dusty shivered.

  Well, yeah, it was private property. It was Grove property. The edge of her father’s land, which would be her land someday. And when it’s mine, Dusty thought, I’ll tear down that sign and that gate and watch the kids on ponies ride through.

  She would sit on her stupid back porch in her stupid brace and wave as the kids on Welsh Arabs rode by. And they would wave back. So would the kids on dirt bikes. It would be a lot better than sitting there and looking out on lush land with nobody enjoying it.

  I’m not even going to think about who put up that stupid gate.


  She knew who. She knew who obsessed about trespassers all the time lately, as if putting up gates could give back some sort of control over a life that had gone wrong. She knew who had been calling lawyers. Writing letters to the newspaper. Fighting with the neighbors.

  Dusty thought of the ditches with spikes in them, then pushed the thought away. One crisis at a time. Tazz first. She headed down the road toward the Nisley place.

  Chapter Three

  “Where’s your father?” old man Nisley said in that gruff way of his. “Ashamed to show his face?”

  “He’s not feeling well.”

  “Too sick to drive?” Nisley did not sound sympathetic. “He let you walk over here?”

  Dusty stood up straight in his farmyard and tried not to show how much her back was aching. “Flu,” she said firmly, then changed the subject. “You say my horse is here?”

  “Yep. Sashays in like he’s looking for something.” Nisley flapped one of his big hands toward the old red barn squatting at the bottom of his lane. “I’m in the barn, and he skips in like he wants to confabulate with me, and I just shut the doors.” Nisley spat tobacco juice onto the gravel. “He’s in there. You kin go catch him.”

  Dusty found that she had to know before she saw Tazz. “Did he act lame or anything?”

  “Lame?” The old man blinked. “Nah. Looked pretty frisky to me.”

  “Thank you.” It came out a whisper. Trying to walk strongly, Dusty headed toward the barn.

  “How you getting him home?” Nisley called after her. “Can’t that father of yours bring the trailer over here? You call him, tell him I’ll stay in the house.”

  Dusty had to smile at the old man. “I’ll just ride him home,” she called back.

  “You can ride?” Nisley was right to be surprised. He knew about her back.

  “That little distance, sure. No problem.” Actually, the idea had just that moment occurred to Dusty, and it set her heart pounding. Ride Tazz, ride her horse once more, now that he was no longer lame? She would probably trash her back royally—but it already hurt so much, who cared? She would ride Tazz one last time instead of leading him home. His mane would stir with each step. His ears would prick eagerly as he carried her along. His warm shoulders would flex under her hands. Even if it put her in the hospital, she would ride.