by Betsy Byars
I looked down at the little Palomino nuzzling against his mother. I wanted the colt all right. I wanted him a lot. I don’t guess a man can be a stunt man for half his life and not want a winged colt.
“Well?” she said.
“I would be pleased to take the colt and mare back.”
“And no forcing this animal to fly either,” she said. “I don’t want to turn on my television some night and see you forcing him to fly.”
“No’m.”
“I want you to be good to this horse. He’ll fly if he wants to.”
“Yes’m.”
“Shake on it.”
I put out my hand and we shook. Then she got a firmer grip on my hand and leaned over and said, “And there better not be any tricks.”
“There won’t be.”
Charles and I took a last look at the colt, and then the three of us went out of the barn. Mr. Minney was still leaning out the back window. I tried to pretend I didn’t see him and kept walking, but he called, “Mr. Cutter! Mr. Cutter!” I kept walking and he called, “Mr. Cutter, did you find out what those things were?” I kept walking. “The things we thought were wings—what are they?”
“Mr. Minney’s calling you,” Charles said. “He wants to know what—”
“I heard him.” I shifted my hat and said in a low voice, “They’re wings, Mr. Minney.”
“What?” Mr. Minney called.
“Wings!” I shouted. “Wings!”
“But I thought you said—”
“He was wrong,” Mrs. Minney said behind me. She sounded real satisfied.
We hesitated a minute, but she didn’t say anything about the lemonade or driving us home in the truck, so Charles and I began walking. I was too stunned to talk, but Charles plowed right in.
“You know, I thought of something else,” he said. “There’s a statue in one of the French museums of a horse with wings and also—”
“There is no such thing as a colt with wings,” was all I could manage to say.
“Also there was Pegasus—he was the most famous flying horse in the world—and do you know how they tamed him, Uncle Coot?”
“There is no such thing as a—”
“With a golden bridle. And I also remember reading an article in Time magazine about this man who believes that Greek myths like Pegasus really did exist, that they were super beings from other planets. So maybe there was a winged colt at one time, and this colt is a descendant!”
“There is no such thing as—”
“And there’s another statue—I think it’s Egyptian—and—” Charles kept talking about flying horses all the way to the ranch. I thought he never would run out of things to say. I thought he must have spent the biggest part of his life reading books. Finally I interrupted and said, “Wait a minute. How do you know all this stuff, Charles?”
“I read.”
“Well, yeah, sure, everybody reads, but they don’t know all that stuff.”
“Well, I read a lot. I once decided to read every book in the school library—that was because I had a lot of extra time, you know, like during vacations when everyone else had gone home?” He looked up at me. “But anyway, getting back to the statues, if there was no such thing as a flying horse, well, then why doesn’t one of those countries have a flying bear or a flying dog? You never see statues of flying dogs.”
“I don’t know, Charles. The only place I ever saw anything about a horse with wings was on a gas station sign, and I can’t even remember which one it was now.” The truth was I was starting to feel dazed. It was like the time I did a gag for a movie called Riders of the Plain. They tied this rope around my chest, and it was about two hundred feet long and six men were holding the other end of the rope. Well, I got on my horse and started out, full gallop, until the rope was played out, and then I was yanked backward from the saddle. It was supposed to look like a blow from a rifle had knocked me from my horse. It doesn’t sound like a bad gag—I’d done worse—but when I slammed into the ground, my knee rammed into my forehead. I wandered around for the rest of the day feeling dazed and stupid. That was the same way I felt now. I had seen that colt. I had looked right at him. The wings had touched my hands. I still couldn’t take it in.
“I wish,” Charles was saying, “that I was close to a really good research library, because I would like to look into this matter in my spare time.” He stumbled in his excitement. “Hey, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to start a record of the colt and keep notes on everything he does. Tomorrow I’ll take pictures with my Polaroid and—what time can we get the colt?”
“Afternoon.”
“He’ll be walking by then?” He looked up at me. His eyes were as round as quarters.
“He’ll be walking,” I said. “He may even be flying.”
And Charles leaped up in the air and hollered, “Yeah!” I guess I would have joined him if it hadn’t been for my hip. I resettled my hat and kept walking.
After a minute Charles said, “Oh, yeah, Uncle Coot, I just thought of something else. There’s this Etruscan vase—it was dug up near Cerveteri—and on this vase is a wonderful flying horse. It—”
The Storm That Went On and On
WE GOT HOME WITH the colt the next day, and I began to realize right then that my past experience with horses wasn’t going to help me as much as I’d thought.
This colt was different. It wasn’t just his wings. It was something in his nature, something that made him shyer, less predictable than other colts. And he was lightning quick. It took me the best part of two days to ease a light halter on him, and after two weeks I was still trying to teach him to back up on command.
All this time Charles was writing down everything the colt did in a notebook. I never saw anybody write so much. It wasn’t the kind of thing a person would casually take down about an animal, but real scientific things, measurements and behavior and all.
I was in the notebook too. Everything I tried with the colt during those first weeks was written down. And if I’d stop for a minute he’d say, “How’re you doing, Uncle Coot? Is anything wrong?”
I’d shake my head. “Nothing more than usual, Charles.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean that it’s not going to be as easy to train Alado as you’re thinking.” Alado was what Charles had named the colt because alado means “winged” in Spanish.
“Oh, I know it’s not going to be easy, but you can do it. You’ve already haltered him.”
“Yeah, but it’s almost like working with a different kind of animal, Charles, it’s—”
“I know, Uncle Coot. That’s why it’s so lucky that you’re the one training him. Nobody else could do it.”
“Yeah.” And I’d hear him click his ballpoint pen so he’d be ready to write down what I tried next.
Those first weeks had a strangeness about them. There is something about a new and unknown horse that usually brings up the spirit in a man. When I was a boy there were wild horses on the range, and there was something about seeing an untamed horse tossing its mane and running like the wind—didn’t matter if it was a shining black, a great mustang, or a flea-bitten pinto—that made the blood rise in me, that made me feel free and wild too, even though I was nothing but a skinny, patched-pants boy.
I should have felt that way even more about Alado, because he was wild and free in a way that I had never imagined, but I didn’t. I felt about the colt the same way I had felt about the boy when he turned to me that first day with his face shining and said, “I want to be just like you.” It was a sort of worried, uneasy feeling, as if something was going to happen that I couldn’t control.
It showed in the pictures we took with Charles’s Polaroid. I had a stiff, strained look. The colt was a pale unnatural blur. And Charles looked like a kid who had just discovered Christmas. To look at those pictures, you would know that there was going to be trouble, and the trouble came in August with as bad a storm as I ever saw.
Southwest Texas has always had a lot of storms. I remember when I was a boy there was one so bad that my grandad lost five head of cattle and two horses on the range in one afternoon. The lightning just seems to pour down from the sky like arrows, hitting whatever’s in the open. And I remember that afternoon my grandad got so mad that he stood up and hollered, “All right, lightning, go ahead and strike me and the boy too and be done with it. Go ahead! Strike us!” It scared me, standing there beside him, and one time later when I did get hit by lightning on the range—got thrown out of the saddle and came to lying on the ground with my mouth filling with rain water—the first thing I thought of was my grandad yelling at the lightning.
The horses were restless that afternoon, sensing that a storm was coming. The air was so full of electricity that little balls of electricity like peas were flashing on their ears and tails.
Late in the day the horses came up closer to the house, stood in a restless bunch for a while, and ran away. Then they came back and did the whole thing again.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” Charles asked in a worried voice.
These storms make me as uneasy as the horses because weather out here is usually an excess. If it rains, it can rain six inches in one hour; or if it’s dry, there won’t be a drop of rain for two months; or if it’s hailing, balls of hail will make dents in trucks and raise knots on people’s heads. There just doesn’t seem to be such a thing as a gentle storm in southwest Texas.
“Nothing we can do,” I said.
He looked to the horizon, which was black and streaked with lightning. Then he looked at the horses moving nervously around the corral, pawing at the ground, running in spurts.
Alado was the worst. He would run first this way, pause to listen, then run the other way. The rumblings of thunder caused his ears to flatten against his head and he tossed his mane in the air again and again. The sound of thunder doubles over the mountains and rumbles down twice as loud as you ever heard it anywhere else.
“My main worry,” Charles said finally, “is the colt.”
“The colt’s all right. He’s with his ma and they’ve got a shelter.”
“But, Uncle Coot—”
“These horses stay out on the range all winter. They can take care of themselves.”
“But—”
“They’re all right.”
We went into the house and had a supper of fried beans and bread. Charles didn’t do more than push his beans around on his plate. “I’ve heard of lightning striking animals,” he said finally in a low voice.
“It’ll do that occasionally,” I admitted.
“And one stroke of lightning can measure more than fifteen million volts.”
“I guess. I never measured one.”
He didn’t say anything else for a minute, and I thought that the trouble with him was that he knew too much for his own good. He got up, pushed his plate away, and went to the window. If the horses were close to the house he could see them from there. I watched him leaning against the glass. Then he looked down at his hands and said what he had been working up to all along. “We could bring the colt into the house.”
It was only seven o’clock now, but black as night. Everything was still. The wind hadn’t started to blow yet, and for the moment there was no thunder either.
“I think Alado’s all alone by the fence. I think all the other horses are in the shelter.” He turned around and started stammering, “Uncle Coot, please! I know I’m not supposed to bother you. Mom told me how you hate to be bothered, but if you’ll just do this one thing I’ll never ask you for anything again. I’ll stay completely out of your way. You won’t even know I’m around.”
“Now, hold on, Charles. Be sensible.”
“I am being sensible. The colt’s not like any of the others. He’s got wings and if the wind gets strong enough—well, anything could happen. He’s got to come in the house.”
I could see that he wasn’t going to be able to sleep a wink with the colt out in the storm. I didn’t imagine I’d sleep too well myself. I said, “All right, I’ll get the colt.”
It was a mistake and I knew it, but I pulled on my poncho, yanked my hat down on my head, and started out the door. “You stay here though. Understand?”
“I will, and thank you very, very much.”
“Just stay here.”
“Yes sir, and I promise I will never, ever be any trouble to you again as long as I live.”
He would have promised anything to get me out the door. He was all but pushing me. I stepped out onto the porch, and right then the lightning struck somewhere to the west. I was ready to turn and go back into the house. If I’d had good sense I would have. Only I looked back at Charles in the doorway, and I stepped off the porch and ran for the corral.
The wind came up as I got halfway across the yard. It came up quick and strong at my back and doubled me over. I ran in a crouch to the corral. I couldn’t see the horses anywhere, but I started struggling to get the gate open against the wind.
Right then there was another crash of lightning. This one had a human sound. It was like somebody had screamed in my ear, and I felt like somebody had hit me on the head with a sledge hammer at the same time. The pain went all the way through me, down to my toes, and then I blacked out.
When I came to, I was crumpled up against the fence like a piece of uprooted weed. In a movie called Six Outlaws I was once thrown right through a balsa wood fence. It was so real-looking that when the movie was shown, people in the audience would let out a moan when I went through that fence. It was nothing, though, I can tell you, compared to slamming into this real fence. Every bone in my body hurt.
I tried to get to my feet by holding on to the fence post, but my legs and arms were like rope, and my head must have weighed a hundred pounds. Finally I gave up and slumped to the ground and bent my head over my trembling knees.
The storm lasted for another hour. There was a hard blistering rain and deadly lightning and wind and some hail thrown in for good measure. I just lay there. I couldn’t do anything but pull my poncho over my head to keep the worst of it off my face and wait. I didn’t know then, and I still don’t, whether it was getting hit by lightning or being slammed against the fence that shook me up. Whatever the cause, I was in bad shape.
After a bit the rain slackened, and Charles came running out with a black umbrella he had brought with him from school. The wind tore it out of his hand first thing and tumbled it out of sight. He ran over to where I was, zigzagging in the wind. He looked so frail I half expected him to go blowing away after the umbrella.
“Are you all right?” he hollered, bending over me.
I couldn’t do more than nod.
“Where’s Alado?” He was looking over the fence now, trying to see where the horses were.
I reached out and grabbed him, and he helped me to my feet. It was hard getting to the house with him looking backwards the whole way. But we finally made it, and I sank down on my bunk.
“I’ll get you some dry clothes,” Charles said, but I shook my head. He hesitated and then covered me up with a blanket.
“Did you see Alado out there anywhere?” he asked in a worried voice, tucking the blanket around my shoulders.
I shook my head.
“Do you think he’s in the shelter?”
I nodded.
“Do you think you’ll feel like going out in a little while and making sure he’s all right?” Before I could shake my head there was the sound of the wind getting stronger. Charles glanced toward the door. “I think another storm’s coming.”
It was the last thing I heard because I closed my eyes and fell asleep. When I woke up it was dawn. Charles was slumped over by the window, his face on the sill.
He woke up as soon as I stirred and came over. “How are you this morning, Uncle Coot?”
“Well, I’m better,” I said. “A little sore and stiff maybe.” Actually I was like a board. If I bent, I would most probably break.
> “It’s my fault,” he said, looking down at his feet.
“Well, let’s don’t get into that.” The last thing I wanted right then was an argument about whose fault my condition was.
“No, it is my fault,” he continued. “I thought about it all night. Anybody else but you would probably have been killed.”
“Yeah.” I was just too tired and sore to argue. I got up, moved my arms a little, and shook my legs. I expected my hip to be hurting more than anything else because that’s my weak spot. Instead it was my shoulders. I started over to the dresser, moving real slow, to get some clothes, and when I passed the window I stopped and looked out.
In the pale light of dawn the whole place had a strange look. Water was still lying on the ground because too much rain had fallen to be taken into the earth, and everything had a faded, colorless look. On the horizon the huge orange sun was just coming into view.
Charles came and stood by me and said, “I don’t see the horses.” He grabbed my arm in both his hands and yanked. “I don’t see the horses!”
“Now, don’t get upset.” I limped out on the porch and stood at the edge of the steps. Charles came out and grabbed my arm again.
I said quickly, “Don’t yank my arm, Charles, because my shoulders are—”
“Where’s the colt, Uncle Coot?” he asked, yanking my arm harder. His voice broke and I thought my shoulder had too. “Where’s Alado?”
The Search That Didn’t Go On Long Enough
A PERSON CAN SEE for miles from my front porch, but the only horse in sight this morning was Stump. He was standing about a hundred yards from the fence looking at a puddle on the ground.
“Where could the horses be?” Charles asked in a funny voice. The gate had blown off its hinges during one of the storms, and I figured the horses had left some time during the night.
“Now, don’t go getting upset.”
“I can’t help it. They’re gone.” He looked at me. “Alado’s gone.”
