Colt

by Nancy Springer

  Colt

  Nancy Springer

  For Carmin Daryman,

  with great appreciation,

  and for

  Anne and Jack Wagner of Usin’ Hoss Ranch,

  and for

  all handicapped kids everywhere,

  and everyone involved with

  Horseback Riding for the Handicapped.

  Chapter One

  “I don’t want to!” Colt complained.

  His therapist was patient with him, as usual. “Hey, c’mon, big guy, with a name like yours you should love horses.”

  Mrs. Berry, always nice, always cheery—she drove Colt nuts. He raised his voice to a bombshell whine. “I don’t! And you can’t make me. I hate this place. It stinks.” The stable smelled of horses and saddles, sawdust and manure. Strong, warm smells. Colt did not in fact mind them, but he minded being brought to Deep Meadows Farm against his will. He whined, “I want to go home. Nobody asked me—”

  “You’re scared,” taunted Neely Brenneman from farther up the stable aisle.

  Colt knew quite well by the lizards crawling around in his stomach that it was true he was scared. This fact made him even angrier than Mrs. Berry’s everlasting sweetness. It made him angry because he felt ashamed of his fear, and why should he? He had every right to be scared. So why wouldn’t people let him be scared? He was not a “big guy.” He was small for his age, and even if he wasn’t, he felt small, because he was in a wheelchair looking up. When you’re in a wheelchair, with people bending over you and trundling you around like a baby in a stroller, you feel small. And you feel scared, because when you have spina bifida, the bones in your legs are brittle, and if you bang against something you could break them. If you rub open the lump of spinal nerve tissue on your back, you could have to go to the hospital. If you hit the metal-and-plastic tube nestled in your brain, you could have to get operated on. Again.

  “I am not scared!” he yelled at Neely. Though of course Neely knew he was. Colt felt scared of half the world and Neely knew, because Neely was in a wheelchair too. Neely had been born with a defect of the spine, just like Colt. Neely had a shunt hidden under his scalp too, and a soft plastic tube running down under the skin of his neck to take the excess fluid away from his brain. Neely had a lump on his back like Colt’s. Neely couldn’t use his legs either.

  None of this made Colt like Neely any better. Neely was a real boogerhead.

  “Neely,” reproached Mrs. Berry, “we don’t tease. Colt, here we go. Let’s go meet your horse.” Because he could not propel himself on the loose dirt of the stable aisle, she pushed his wheelchair toward the nearest stall. Colt grabbed for his brakes to stop her, but she just reached down and pushed his hands away. If she had to, she’d lift the whole wheelchair with him in it. He couldn’t do a thing about it when Mrs. Berry took charge. Even yelling didn’t help.

  He yelled anyway, because Colt hated to give up. “No! I don’t want to!” All up and down the stable aisle parents and aides and other grown-ups were pretending not to hear him, but he could see that they looked uncomfortable. Good, he thought. He hollered, “I don’t like horses!”

  Mrs. Berry ignored him. “Here’s our first rider, Mrs. Reynolds,” she said brightly to the blue-jeaned woman standing by the stall door. “Colt Vittorio.”

  Mrs. Reynolds nodded and did not bend over him or try to sweet-talk him or ask him if Colt was his real name. She had a no-makeup face and a slim, outdoorsy look, and she met his eyes in a man-to-man way. Okay, he thought. She seemed unaffected by the noise he was still making. Not okay.

  “Colt,” she said, “meet Liverwurst. Liverwurst, this is Colt.”

  A huge heavy-boned, long-nosed fleshy head swung out over the stall door and nodded in the air somewhere above Colt.

  He gasped, trying to lean back and flinch away, though in a wheelchair he could do neither. He gawked, too stunned even to yell anymore. Liverwurst looked like a diseased, no, a mutant fungus crawling out of a horror-movie dark hole of a stall. Liverwurst was all speckles and blotches of liver-brown, yellow, and dirty white. His nose looked like a bad case of sunburn. His eyes reminded Colt of eggs fried too long, with greasy brown whites. And if Liverwurst’s head was so big and ugly, the rest of him (hidden behind the stall door) had to be—

  “Liverwurst is an Appaloosa,” said the stable woman as if nothing was wrong.

  The rest of him had to be monstrous beyond belief. Big heavy shoulders. Great leaping haunches. Huge, hard steel-shod hooves that could smash a kid with a single kick.

  “Colt,” Mrs. Berry directed, “feed him his treat.”

  Colt looked down to discover that his clammy hands, shaking in his lap, were clutching an apple. He did not remember how or when it had gotten there, but he knew he could blame it on Mrs. Berry.

  The horse smelled the apple. Trying to reach it, Liverwurst swung his head low, so low Colt could whiff his hot sour breath and feel it stirring his hair. The horse’s fleshy nose reached to just above Colt’s head.

  “Hold it up where he can get it, Colt!” Mrs. Berry urged.

  Colt honestly couldn’t move. It’s one thing to be a regular person with legs that can take you away if something turns out to be dangerous, and it’s another thing to be trapped in a wheelchair with a gung-ho grown-up at the handles. Colt felt petrified.

  Liverwurst nodded eagerly and snorted, flaring his nostrils and spraying Colt with a polka-dot splattering of mud-brown horse snot.

  “He won’t hurt you,” Mrs. Berry said. “All of Mrs. Reynolds’s horses are very gentle.” Ah-ha—so she was saying it was okay to be afraid of some horses! And how did she know which ones? But before Colt could point this out, Mrs. Berry grabbed his hands. “This way,” she directed, prying open his clenched fingers and flattening them out so that the apple perched on his palms.

  The horse was starting to paw with anxiety to get at the apple. Colt could hear a hoof, maybe about the size of a manhole cover, thudding someplace inside the stall. Crack, crack against the thin wooden wall between him and Colt—like the crack of doom.

  “Hurry,” said Mrs. Berry. “It’s okay.” Those two concepts didn’t seem to go together. Nevertheless, Mrs. Berry guided Colt’s hands up toward Liverwurst’s straining, reaching nose. It’s not okay! Colt wanted to shout, but he couldn’t. His chest had gone tight. He was sweating and panting. He couldn’t talk.

  Liverwurst’s mouth gaped open about six inches in front of Colt’s bugging eyes. Humongous rubbery lips pulled back from yellow-stained teeth that were as long as piano keys. In one powerful chomp Liverwurst bit the apple in half right through the core.

  “Aaaaa!” Colt yelled. Screamed, really.

  Liverwurst tossed his huge head (about the size and weight of a medium-small dog) and chewed vigorously. Apple juice and bits of squashed apple pulp frothed out from the corners of his mouth and flew into Colt’s face.

  “Oh, honestly, Liverwurst,” the stable lady chided the horse.

  Colt found his voice. “I don’t like it. Make him stop! Get me away from him!” He was almost crying, and furious because he hated to cry when people could see him. It was embarrassing enough that he had screamed. Blast Mrs. Berry for getting him into a situation that made him want to cry.

  “Eewww!” Colt protested as Liverwurst lowered his slobbering mouth for the rest of the apple. “No, I don’t want to! I’m going to throw up!”

  “I don’t blame you,” said Mrs. Reynolds, the stable lady. “Liverwurst is being disgusting.” She took what was left of the apple out of Colt’s hands and fed it to the horse, coaxing his big homely head away from Colt. “Liverwurst apologizes for forgetting his manners,” she told Colt, “and thanks you for the treat.” She was neither smiling nor not smiling. He could not tell if she was making fun of him. �
��Let me get the saddle and bridle on him, and you can ride him.”

  It was time to start all over again. Would these grown-ups never learn? “I don’t want to!” shouted Colt.

  Most of the people had emptied out of the stable aisle. The other handicapped riders had fed their apples to their horses, and volunteers had saddled the animals and led them outside to the mounting ramp. Neely was up at the top of the ramp, being helped out of his wheelchair and onto a perky gray pony named Giggles. Colt, Mrs. Berry, and Mrs. Reynolds were alone inside the stable, with Liverwurst of course.

  Mrs. Berry squatted down in front of Colt. “Young man,” she said, “I want to remind you that the director of the center is here tonight. Now, we don’t want to give him a bad impression of our Horseback Riding for the Handicapped program, do we?”

  Colt observed that Mrs. Berry had a small mustache, nearly invisible, on her upper lip. He watched it as she talked.

  “Most of our horseback riders find the experience very rewarding.”

  Mrs. Berry also had a mole near her nose with a single brown hair curling out of it. The brown hair jiggled in time with the blond mustache on her lip.

  “Horseback riding will be good for your back and legs. It exercises muscles you don’t normally get to use.”

  “I don’t care,” said Colt. There was no chance he would ever walk without his crutches and heavy thigh-high braces, no matter how much they exercised his legs.

  “Colt, you know what I think of that I-don’t-care attitude.”

  A lot of the time Colt felt as if the real Colt was far away, as if he not only had great running legs but could fly, as if he were really in the sky somewhere, outside everything, looking in. He felt that way now. Looking down, not only could he see Mrs. Berry and her mustache but also himself, a dark-haired boy, stubborn chin, chunky shoulders, small for his age, belted into a wheelchair and trapped in the dark stable aisle.

  I don’t care!

  Because if he let himself care, how could he deal with the way he felt? He hated being handicapped. He hated having a shunt in his head and a lump on his back and not being able to walk and run like other kids. He hated spending half his life in doctors’ offices and physical therapy and being fitted for braces. He hated costing his mother so much money that they never had enough for anything nice. He hated needing people to do things for him.

  Mrs. Berry wanted him to be a good sport. And sure, he was cheerful sometimes, around Christmas for instance, but he saw no reason why he should ever be cheerful about his spina bifida. Especially not just to impress the director of the Easter Seals Center where he had his therapy. He didn’t care about him either.

  He said so, top volume. “I don’t CARE. I don’t WANT to ride a dumb horse. I just want people to LEAVE ME ALONE—”

  “Colt,” interrupted a quiet voice, “I want you to do me and Liverwurst a favor. I know he made a pig of himself about the apple; I know you don’t like him much at this point, but I do want you to give him another chance, please. Let him show you what a good horse he is.”

  It was Mrs. Reynolds, and she had the saddle and bridle on the Appaloosa horse. She was leading him out of the stall, and he was every bit as big as Colt was afraid he was. His hocks passed at the level of Colt’s face.

  And ugly. He had a tail like a rat, nearly no hair on it. And on his thick neck only wisps of scraggly mane.

  He clopped down the aisle like a big donkey, with his homely head nodding in a gentle way.

  For half a moment Colt considered doing what Mrs. Reynolds asked, as a favor to her. He liked her plain weathered face and crinkled gray eyes and the level way she talked to him. And though it was hard to remember at the time, he did very much like horses, as long as people weren’t trying to shove him into their big bony faces or onto their powerful backs. He owned several books about horses. He had taken a special interest in horses ever since he could remember, ever since his mother had nicknamed him Colt because something about his thin, useless legs reminded her of a newborn colt’s spindly ones. He liked to watch shows on TV about horses.

  Then again, he liked to watch shows about man-eating tigers too. “No. NO! I don’t want to!”

  But by that time Mrs. Berry had spun him around and pulled him backward up the mounting ramp. And the director of the center was standing ready to help—smiling like a snake. And the two of them were lifting him out of his wheelchair.

  Colt didn’t want anyone ever to call him a quitter. Briefly he considered throwing a real fit, flailing his arms, hitting, maybe giving someone a black eye. But Mrs. Berry was wearing her most patient look. He knew if he tried a tantrum she would just hug his arms down and croon and cuddle him, and he despised being treated like a baby. And if he struggled while he was being lifted he might make her drop him; he might fall and hit his shunt and die. Nobody had ever told him that hitting his shunt might make him die, but he knew it could.

  The others were on their way down to the riding ring. Anna Susanna, who had cerebral palsy, rode a white-faced strawberry roan. Matt, who was deaf, was on a chunky bay mare. Jay Gee, the retarded boy, had a big sand-colored dun. Neely rode the gray pony, Giggles. And cutesy-pie little Julie was on a tiny pinto-spotted Shetland pony with a shaggy mane. Julie had mild cerebral palsy and was such a sweet little angel face all the time, the kind you always see on TV shows about handicapped kids, she made Colt ill. Why did they have to put her on the weensy pony and him on this mammoth named after the world’s most barfable lunch meat?

  But on Liverwurst he was, with a helmet on his head and a wide green nylon belt around his waist and women he didn’t know standing one on each side of him, holding him by the belt handles. He was supposed to trust these strangers to keep him from falling off.

  Mrs. Berry took his feet and put them in the stirrups. He could tell by looking, not by feeling, that they were in the stirrups. In general, he could not tell where his feet were except by looking. He had no working nerves and muscles in his lower legs and feet, and only a few in his upper legs. Those few let him get around in braces and crutches sometimes, but he found it hard to walk that way. He got tired quickly.

  “Ready to ride?” Mrs. Reynolds asked him, standing by Liverwurst’s head. She was the one who was supposed to lead the horse. Each handicapped rider had three grown-ups clustered around, one leading and two side-walking.

  Colt didn’t answer. Why bother? Grown-ups generally did just what they were planning to do anyway. He stared out between Liverwurst’s mottled ears, feeling awfully high up. What if he fell … yet at the same time he sensed the horse’s warm, steady breathing under him. He looked down on shoulders mottled like the sunset in the early-summer sky over the fenced ring where the others were riding.

  Why wasn’t Liverwurst walking down toward the ring?

  “Ready?” Mrs. Reynolds asked again. She was actually waiting for him to say yes.

  Colt wondered what would happen if he said no. But in fact, he was sort of ready. He swallowed hard and nodded.

  Liverwurst walked.

  Colt stiffened and felt his body weight shift an inch to the left. Scared, he strained the reluctant muscles in his right leg and pulled himself back to the center of the saddle before his side walkers could help him. But the next step Liverwurst took pushed him toward the right. He grabbed onto the front of the saddle with both hands.

  “Let go, Colt,” Mrs. Reynolds instructed over her shoulder. “Relax your back.” She stopped the horse and explained to him how he should sit up straight but let himself sway with the gait of the horse.

  Liverwurst walked on. Sometimes Colt remembered to loosen his back muscles, sometimes not. It was hard enough for him to make his muscles do what he wanted to anytime, let alone when he was scared, which he was—plenty scared, but still … he felt Liverwurst’s strong, quiet body moving under him. The thrust of the horse’s hind legs and hips surged through Colt, moving his whole body, which actually felt sort of good. Instead of feeling scrunched and heavy and small
the way he always did sitting in a wheelchair, Colt felt tall, open, airy, sitting with his feet stretched down toward the earth and his head up toward the sky, high in the saddle. He felt as strong as the deep-breathing horse, and his own chest breathed deep, filled with more than summer air. Filled with the soft clopping of hooves on grass, with rich brown horse-and-leather smells and the way the world looked from up there on a horse’s back, up where the breezes were, looking out over people’s heads and feeling like—well, like something. Like he really could be a “big guy” who loved horses after all.

  Just for a minute he felt that way, and then Liverwurst shook his head to get rid of a fly and Colt grabbed at the saddle, scared all over again.

  “We won’t let you fall,” one side walker, a pudgy woman, told him.

  “Do you like riding the horse?” the other woman asked. She spoke slowly and too loudly, as if she thought he was deaf or stupid. A lot of people seemed to think all handicapped kids were retarded. At least Mrs. Berry knew better than that. She always told him he had brains if he would just use them.

  He didn’t answer the woman but pried his hands loose from the saddle and let them rest on the Appaloosa’s mane. He stroked it, trying to get it to lie flat. Warm, coarse hair, lots of colors: black, brown, rust, gold, silver. Liverwurst was as cloudily multicolored as the sunset sky.

  “How are you doing, Colt?” Mrs. Berry sang at him the next time she saw him, a few minutes later.

  He couldn’t admit to her that he was sort of, kind of, enjoying the horse. “My back hurts,” he told her, so she had to come over and check his lump and loosen his nylon safety belt.

  Chapter Two

  Colt’s mother and her boyfriend were waiting for him when he finished. (Mrs. Berry had asked Audrey Vittorio not to come for the horseback-riding session itself. Colt tended to “act out” more when his mother was around, Mrs. Berry said.) When Colt saw her waiting for him as he came up to the barn on horseback, he could not help grinning at her. His mother was such a mess (“I am such a mess,” she said often and cheerfully) that whenever he saw her he just had to smile.