Sky Rider

by Nancy Springer

  She pushed the barn’s heavy sliding door open just enough to slip through. Inside, it was so shadowy that for a moment she could not see. “Tazz?”

  “He’s busy trying to chew us a way out of here,” said a sardonic voice.

  Dusty stiffened and stared. Seated cross-legged in a wheelbarrow, the eerily beautiful boy stared back at her.

  “Skye,” Dusty whispered. She knew his name now.

  He flinched and scowled. Dusty could not take her gaze away from him; his was a face fit to make an angel jealous.

  She whispered, “You’re dead.”

  “No duh.” From the tone of his voice, he did not like being dead. Not one bit.

  Dusty didn’t know what to think, what to do, what to … What did you say to a kid who had died? Condolences? Maybe it would have been easier if she had known him when he was alive. Maybe not. She blurted, “Mr. Nisley didn’t tell me you were in here.”

  “Like he can see me?”

  Skye Ryder’s obvious scorn was a little hard to take, but Dusty had a feeling he hadn’t always been obnoxious. Being dead had to put a person in a really bad mood. Feeling awkward, she stood in a silence filled with the racket of Tazz’s teeth on wood. She could see her horse now, big Tazz standing squarely as he gnawed at the rail of a cow stall. Somebody, probably old Mr. Nisley, kindhearted in spite of everything, had put a flake of hay and a few ears of field corn on the barn’s dirt floor for the horse, but Tazz seemed not to have touched his snack, more interested in reducing Nisley’s barn to splinters. Dusty said, “When he was little we used to call him Termite.”

  It was as if light had come out from behind clouds. Skye Ryder actually smiled.

  Somehow the smile gave Dusty permission to function. She got herself moving. “Hey, Tazz!” He lifted his head from his wood sculpting to give her a horse’s inscrutable stare, and she slipped the soft rope halter onto him. “Doofus,” she murmured, “what do you think you are, part beaver? What are you doing here?” She led him over to the door, slid it all the way open and led him outside. He walked with the long, swinging stride of a strong thoroughbred, his forefeet drumming the ground in an easy rhythm. With not a trace of a limp.

  “I rode him here,” said Skye’s hard voice. “I thought maybe this guy was the one. But if he was, he’d be feeling guilty. Haunted. He’d be able to see me.”

  Dusty stood without any comprehension of what Skye had just said, none at all, because glancing toward the sound of his voice, she saw him walk right through the barn wall to stand beside her.

  “But …” Words failed her. She had been assuming that Skye had been shut into the barn like the horse, though that was stupid. Skye had hands. He could have slid the door open.

  Or could he?

  “What I can’t figure,” Skye said, “is how he can see the horse if he can’t see me.” The boy patted Tazz on his sleek red neck, rubbing his crest; Tazz leaned toward him, loving it. Skye’s voice softened as he said, “Tazz is in the same kind of limbo I’m in.”

  Dusty blurted, “You were staying with him?”

  His eyes flared like hot coals. His face hardened. He didn’t answer.

  Dusty turned away from his anger, her own stupidity. Of course he had been staying with Tazz.

  Whose horse was this? His or hers?

  She shied away from the question. Later—she’d answer it later. After her ride. She had promised herself one last ride.

  “C’mon, Tazz.” She led the horse to stand beside a rusting John Deere. Moving slowly and stiffly, she climbed onto the tractor, then onto Tazz, trying not to remember the days when she would have vaulted onto him, saddle or no saddle, from the ground. Then she sat light-headed, disoriented, it felt so strange yet right to be on his strong, warm back again. She gathered her single rope rein, turned her thoroughbred toward home, then stopped.

  She looked at Skye. Standing on the ground, he tilted his chin defiantly upward to look back at her. His black eyes were burning. Anger. But along with the anger, mostly hidden by it, Dusty thought she saw some other emotion.

  She held out her hand to him, silently offering him a boost onto the horse, a ride along with her.

  His eyes went wide and still. His face went soft and still. Then he stepped forward and took her hand.

  She saw. But she felt no contact, none at all. She saw him swing up onto Tazz right behind her. Or rather, one moment she could see him swinging up, and the next moment she could not see him at all. And she could not feel him sitting against her back.

  “Skye?” she whispered, spooked. “You there?”

  “Of course I’m here.” His scornful voice sounded right behind her ear.

  She swallowed and nudged Tazz into a walk. The big bay gelding strode easily, eagerly up the lane—and every step he took jounced Dusty’s spine from side to side and sent a jolt of agony through her.

  She concentrated on not showing the pain. Too much pride. Waving good-bye to Mr. Nisley, she smiled, showing her clenched teeth. Gripping the rope rein hard, she guided Tazz onto the gravel road, focusing on keeping each breath from hissing. She didn’t want anybody to know how much she was hurting.

  “What’s the matter?” Skye asked, none too gently.

  And she had thought she was hiding it so well. The sudden question made her blink back tears. Damn, she had wanted to enjoy this ride. “My back—hurts—so bad.” The words came out ragged.

  “What from?”

  “Stupid—accident.”

  Skye didn’t say anything. Dusty had no way of knowing what he was thinking behind her, whether he was moving, what he was doing, but just as she turned Tazz onto the forest trail the pain lifted away from her as if it were a metal sheath someone had torn off. She gasped. The sudden wellness, the release, filled her with a sensation as if she had wings; it snapped her head up, swelled her chest. Tazz felt her seat change and sprang into an airy canter.

  “Better?” Skye grumbled.

  She couldn’t answer. As she leaned into her horse’s rocking gait, her throat was so tight with happiness that she couldn’t speak.

  “Slow down, for God’s sake. We’re coming up on the place where I died.”

  She felt so afloat with gladness that this did not trouble her. She did what he asked; she slowed Tazz to a walk, but all the time she knew she was crazy, none of this could be happening, and therefore nothing mattered terribly much. Almost as easily as if she were talking about last night’s TV show, she said, “I don’t know how you died.”

  “It was—there.”

  She did not feel surprised to see the gleam of yellow police tape through the trees. It was the place that had scared her earlier.

  “Somebody strung a cable across the trail.” Skye was having a lot harder time talking about this than she was. “Black. It blended right in. Four feet up, not down low like it should have been to stop tires. I was on my dirt bike, and I was wearing my helmet and chest protector and everything, but it—” He couldn’t say it, but Dusty remembered from school. Caught him right on the neck.

  She thought how it must have been. Riding along, fast, wind in his face and sun on his shoulders, young and strong, glad to be alive, and then …

  Silently Dusty guided Tazz through the woods, around the place where the killer trap had been. She no longer felt glad to be alive. The world no longer felt like a good place.

  “I saw it a second before it got me,” Skye said very low. “Just a streak of white sheen. Pretty. Spiderweb, I thought. You know how spiders put strings across the trails and they only show up when the sun shines a certain way.”

  Dusty nodded. She knew. “I used to love riding out here.”

  “So did I. Bikes are the best. But I can’t ride bikes now.”

  Listening to him, Dusty guided Tazz around the first ditch booby-trapped with nails. The narrow side trail grew thick with baby striped maples, but Tazz did not snatch at any of the tender leaves within easy reach, not one. He was being an angel horse. Back when he was alive, Du
sty had tried every way she could think of to keep him from grabbing “snacks.” It was really embarrassing to ride into a show ring when your horse had a two-foot length of hollyhock dangling in glorious pink bloom from his mouth.

  Back when he was alive?

  “I can’t work the gears or the handlebars or anything,” Skye was saying. “My hands go right through them. But Tazz—it’s different. He sees me, he feels me, he knows I’m riding him.”

  Dusty guided Tazz around the second ditch. The horse walked smoothly past another little candy-striped tree. Dusty asked Skye, “Has he stopped eating?”

  “Yes. Same as me. He was meant to die, so … the other night, when I touched him … he—he crossed over. He’s a ghost now, like me.”

  The G-word hung in the air like a specter. Beyond the ditch, Dusty eased Tazz into a gentle jog trot. She was trying not to think, just to enjoy the feel of riding along the woods trail and not hurting. Tazz tucked his chin and snorted. Maybe he was remembering, too, how it had been back when she was a kid and he was a strong young colt.

  “I know he’s still solid,” Skye said, “but I think he’s going to turn to light soon.”

  Dusty sensed that he did not usually talk so much. He seemed to think he had to convince her. But maybe because she was her mother’s daughter, she had no problem believing what he was saying. It was something else he had said that seemed wrong.

  Silent, Dusty lifted Tazz from his trot into a collected canter again. Out of the woods, into the sunshine. Down the hill along the grassy trail between blackberry thickets. As the downward slope steepened, she brought him back to a walk. Her heart ached with joy and sadness.

  She told Skye, “You’re not a ghost.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re not a ghost. You—” This was hard to say, scary, way too much like something her mother might have said, but she made herself say it anyway. “You feel when people are hurting. You help people. You came to help when Tazz was going to die. You healed Tazz; you’ve healed me.” Her heart swelled with gratitude for what he had done, and she felt sure that the gift had come to her on invisible wings. She just knew. With soul-deep certainty she said, “You’re not just some kind of spook. You’re a … you’re an angel.”

  Dead silence for a moment. Then Skye said in a strangled voice, as if a hard rope had closed around his throat, “Stop this horse.”

  But Dusty had already drawn Tazz to a halt, gasping, the pain in her back closing on her like an iron garment she would wear for the rest of her life. She could not ride another step.

  Skye said, as harsh as hail coming down, “I don’t want to help people. I don’t want to heal people. I just want to get the son of a bitch who did this to me.”

  “It’s gone.” Dusty could barely squeeze the words past her pain. Healing was gone. Joy was gone. “No. Please—” But she stopped herself from whimpering at him.

  He demanded, “Who owns that land? Where I got killed.”

  “No-nobody.” Stiffly, struggling, Dusty swung her right foot over Tazz’s neck, sat sideward on the horse for a moment, then slipped down. The grassy ground, spongy with spring rains, gave her a soft landing, but even so, the pain of the impact weakened her knees. She sprawled, then managed to sit up. Above her, the spirit of Skye Ryder sat hard-faced and inhumanly beautiful on Tazz—sunlit, shining Tazz—looking down at her.

  He said, “I need to know.”

  She shook her head. “Just take Tazz and go.”

  “I—”

  “Just go away!” Suddenly she was shouting at him. She struggled to her feet and pulled the halter off Tazz. “You’ve got my horse, don’t you? Get out of here!”

  He didn’t move. “Are you going to be okay?”

  “What the hell do you care?” Staggering with pain, she turned her back on him and trudged toward home.

  All the way across the pasture, feeling the warmth of Tazz’s head on the halter in her hand, she did not look back. She heard nothing, no hoofbeats—but when she reached the house, let herself in, and looked out a window, Tazz and Skye were gone.

  Chapter Four

  DAILY SOULOG ANNO DOMINI 1998, 4TH MOON, 20TH DAY

  Subject Skye Ryder, recent ghost in danger of soul death. Hopeful signs include (1) his attachment to a horse he has rescued, and (2) his considerable gift of telempathy—subject has discovered his healing touch. However, his rage continues to negate his healing power, while he remains unaware that this is happening. Also, even on horseback, he continues haunting behavior, refusing to travel more than a few miles from his death site, thereby spurning the possibility of ascent. Subject is suffused with rage and appears intent on revenge for his untimely death. At this stage, subject lacks the vision and perspective to see that the cable across the trail was not intended to kill him or anyone else, that it was placed there by a troubled man who was not thinking clearly, who hoped that the booby trap might dump a trespasser on the ground, nothing more. In his anger, subject lacks sufficient compassion to accept that ego and stupidity, not evil, caused his death. Subject is too intent on his own pain to perceive the pain of others except, occasionally, that of the girl Destiny. She may well be his best hope. Continuing watchful supervision.

  J.G., Sector Supervisor.

  Dusty phoned Katelyn just because she badly needed to talk with somebody. “That boy who died,” she told her, “the Ryder boy … that happened on my place. Up in the woods.”

  “Yeah. I tried to call you when I heard.”

  Everybody knew, then. “Why couldn’t Daddy just tell me?” In her heart Dusty knew why, but she tried to feel only annoyance, which was safe. “He must have found out when I was asleep in the barn Saturday. Why’d he try to keep it from me?”

  “Well, I guess he didn’t want to, you know, upset you—”

  Katelyn’s answer sounded so lame it made Dusty mad. “Well, I am upset!”

  “No duh. What do you want me to do about it, Dustbuster?”

  The question made Dusty laugh. There was nothing Katelyn could do about Daddy, and Dusty knew it. They talked about other things; it felt good to chatter about dumb stuff, the leather jacket Katelyn wanted, fingernails and how Lauren had gotten her navel pierced. Katelyn wanted to get a second hole in her ears, but her parents wouldn’t let her. After a while Katelyn said, “You want to do something? Go to the mall?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Daddy’s lying on the floor drunk.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “He’s passed-out drunk.” It made Dusty feel better to say it, so she said it again in a different way.

  “God. Dusty, I’m sorry.” Katelyn knew Dusty’s father was an alcoholic, and she could be trusted not to tell the whole world. “What are you going to do?”

  “Use his butt for a coffee table, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Who can you call? His doctor or somebody?”

  “His AA buddy. I will, then. I have to work myself up to it.”

  Katelyn was silent for a minute, then said, “I guess we both know what made him start drinking again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You going to talk with him about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has he said anything about, you know, Skye?”

  “No. I don’t know a thing except what I read in the newspaper article.” Which didn’t name names, but it said that the police had questioned the landowner, which would be Daddy. Probably Saturday morning. According to the paper, Skye had died Friday evening, a little before dark.

  When he … when he came to the barn, saved Tazz—he’d only been dead a few hours.

  Probably Daddy hadn’t known a thing about it then, and Dusty hoped he’d forgotten about her “dream” of a strange boy riding Tazz.

  “I am so pissed,” she blurted.

  “At your father?”

  “Yes.” Actually more disappointed than angry. Hurt. Daddy had let her down so badly—

  No. No.
Daddy hadn’t done anything to her except let her sleep all day Saturday.

  And keep her away from the phone.

  And get drunk.

  “Dusty …” Katelyn hesitated, then asked softly, “Do you think he did it?”

  “I … I don’t know.” The question panicked Dusty.

  “Sometimes guys can act kind of stupid,” Katelyn said. “Do you think maybe your father might have—”

  “I said I don’t know!” Damn, now she was yelling at Katelyn. “Sorry,” she muttered. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”

  “No you don’t. I’ll shut up about it. Don’t go stomping off, ’Buster. We can talk about something else.”

  They talked about hair, homework, Katelyn’s new clogs. After a while Dusty said ciao and hung up and wandered to her bedroom. She felt better after talking with Katelyn, but Daddy was still snoring boozily on the living room floor. Dusty wished her mother were there. Mom would have known how to make Daddy get up off the floor and clean up and shape up.

  Dusty stood at the window, looking out into the deep blue shadows of the night. With an ache that filled her chest she missed her mother.

  Mama … Okay, it was all hypothetical, because Daddy hadn’t been a drunk when Mom was alive, so maybe even Mom wouldn’t have been able to make Daddy stop drinking. Or make my back stop hurting. Not even if she rubbed it with her warm, quiet hands. But if Mom were there, at least there would have been real meals—roast chicken with hot cranberry sauce, pot pie, beef soup simmering all day long, filling the house with its warm, brown, onion-and-parsley smell. There would have been daffodils on the table, maybe, and Mom smiling and asking how her day had gone and also talking with invisible spirits with names like Peri and Rabdos and Raziel, having these long discussions about things like What color was time? Could she give somebody her soul to keep in a jar like a firefly? If she could see forever, and the universe was curved, could she see the back of her own head? Sitting at the table and trying to include Dusty in the conversations as if she were translating or something. She would have included anyone, like it was only common sense good manners, but most people backed off. They thought Mom was cracked. But Dusty thought of her mother’s quiet hands arranging the daffodils, adding long, aspiring leaves and jonquil and narcissus, placing them all just so in the tall amethyst vase, and she found nothing cracked in the memory.