Made That Way

by Susan Ketchen

  “So what have we got here?” says Tanya, standing back and having a good look at Brooklyn.

  Kansas says, “We don’t know much. He was shipped out from Saskatchewan last week. His previous owner broke his hip and ended up in extended care. He’s an old friend of Sylvia’s grandfather who bought the pony and sent him as a present. There are no registration papers.”

  “Well that doesn’t surprise me,” says Tanya.

  Kansas looks at me for a second then carries on. “The pony was off on the right fore initially, but Declan, my . . . uh . . . farrier trimmed him up and carved out something that was pressing between his frog and the bar of the foot. I guess the pony could still have a bruise in there, but he seems fine in his paddock and hoof-abscess-lame when I lunge him in the ring.”

  “Oh,” says Tanya. “Declan. I’ve met him.”

  I think Kansas was about to say something more about Brooklyn, but instead she slams her mouth shut.

  Tanya takes a step toward Brooklyn, and I have to tell her to wait because Kansas hasn’t provided some crucial information about Brooklyn, who is, after all, my responsibility. “You need to know his teeth are kind of sharp. And he bit the driver of the transport truck.”

  Tanya nods. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Though he only bit him because the driver said Brooklyn was a not a bad little guy,” I continue.

  Kansas clears her throat but doesn’t say anything. She’s watching Tanya but doesn’t look very happy with her any more. “How do you know Declan?” she asks.

  I guess Tanya doesn’t hear her, because she doesn’t answer. She’s focused on approaching Brooklyn. She lets him sniff her sleeve. “I suppose you’ve run into people who smell like me before,” she tells him. She strokes his neck, runs a hand down his face then parts his lips to reveal his teeth. “Though it looks like it’s been a while,” she says. She wipes her hands on her pants. “I’ll be wanting to tranq him, then use the power float on those teeth. I think we should test his soundness first before we load him up with drugs.”

  “My dad would say no x-rays,” I say.

  “There are money issues,” explains Kansas.

  “I understand,” says Tanya. “Why don’t we give him a good old-fashioned look-over?” She moves to stroke Brooklyn’s forehead but her hand stops in mid-air. “Maybe we should have a look at this first,” she says, gently lifting his forelock.

  “I figure he scraped himself in the trailer,” says Kansas.

  “I don’t think so.” I’m horrified to see Tanya extract a pair of reading glasses from her chest pocket and perch them on her nose. “I think I may take a scraping here,” she says uncertainly, taking a closer look. “Or maybe a biopsy.”

  “I don’t think I can afford those,” I say, hoping I can put off an investigation on money grounds. Some things are better left unknown. Such as whether or not unicorns really exist.

  “Oh don’t worry about it,” says Tanya. “This one will be on me, to satisfy my professional curiosity.”

  “Brooklyn won’t like it,” I persist.

  “Sylvia, it’s okay, it won’t hurt,” says Kansas. “Or not much anyway, right Tanya?”

  But Tanya is snapping into her latex surgical gloves, paying no attention.

  Kansas tightens her grip on Brooklyn’s halter and says to him, “We don’t want you taking a piece out of the vet while she takes a piece out of you, now do we?”

  But Brooklyn offers no resistance. In fact he acts resigned, if not depressed. Just like I feel.

  Tanya quickly collects and bags her samples, then asks to examine the foot that Declan worked on.

  “You don’t have to hold him quite so short,” she tells Kansas, indicating her death-grip at the top of the lead rope. “His head needs to be free if he’s going to show us when he feels some pain.”

  Tanya picks up Brooklyn’s foot. “Well, isn’t this interesting,” she says, just like Declan did. Then she pops his leg between her thighs and holds it there. She uses her hoof-testers to apply pressure to several points on Brooklyn’s foot. Brooklyn doesn’t flinch, but cranes his neck around and sniffs her bum. Kansas slides her hand back up the lead rope. Neither of us relaxes until Tanya lowers the hoof and steps away.

  “Okay, Kansas, how about you walk him up the driveway and back and we’ll watch how he goes.”

  As Kansas walks Brooklyn away from us, Tanya explains to me that she’s watching for any irregularity in stride. I stand quietly so I don’t interfere with her concentration. Kansas walks Brooklyn directly back to us.

  “That looked fine,” says Tanya. “Now again at the trot.”

  Kansas trots the pony away, stops, turns, and trots him back.

  “Listen to the footfalls,” Tanya tells me. After a minute she nods and says, “Regular as a metronome. And see that—no head-bobbing either.” Then she calls out to Kansas, “And again, but I’ll look from the side.” And she repositions herself for a different view from the driveway.

  Kansas is puffing by the time she’s finished. Brooklyn looks like he’s enjoying himself, as though he likes being the center of attention.

  Tanya says, “Well he looks fine. You say he was unsound on the lunge? Why don’t we try that before we get into flexion tests.”

  I grab the lunge line and whip from the tack room and we head over to the riding ring. Kansas leads Brooklyn in and shuts the gate behind her. Tanya leans on the fence. I climb up and stand on the bottom rail and hook my elbows over the top. This is kind of fun. I’m beginning to relax and enjoy myself. Hanging out with horses and horse women—what could be better?

  Kansas moves to the center of the ring and sends Brooklyn out on a circle. He saunters along lazily until Kansas brandishes the whip and asks him to move forward with more energy. He staggers. I think my heart is going to stop. Brooklyn takes another step and nearly trips and falls.

  “Yikes,” says Tanya. “That’s some kind of lame. Try him the other direction.”

  “Isn’t that enough?” I say.

  But Kansas turns him and asks for a walk in the other direction. Brooklyn doesn’t have to be pushed this time before starting to limp. In fact he lurches more dramatically with each stride.

  I groan. “Oh poor Brooklyn!”

  Tanya puts her arm over her mouth and coughs. “Do you think you could get him to trot?”

  “Really?” says Kansas. “The poor guy can barely walk.”

  “I don’t want him to trot,” I insist.

  “I want to see what he’ll do,” says Tanya. “Just for a few strides. I don’t think he’ll come to any harm.”

  Kansas flicks the lunge whip behind Brooklyn and tells him to trot. He pushes himself off his left front, drags the right, comes back down on the left and almost collapses.

  “Oh no,” I say. I think I’m going to cry.

  Kansas looks at me and grimaces. “Sylvia, I’m sorry. But he’ll be okay. Maybe it’s the footing in here. Maybe it’s too deep and it pushes on something in his hoof.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with your footing,” says Tanya. She coughs again, but there’s a catch in the sound and I realize suddenly that she’s trying not to laugh.

  Kansas has noticed the same thing. She glares at Tanya. “You’re laughing at some poor kid’s lame pony?”

  Tanya shakes her head. There are tears in her eyes. “Oh forgive me, but he reminds me of someone, a horse I had when I was young. He was my first horse too,” she says to me, and then she laughs until the tears overflow.

  My eyes might be about to overflow too, but not with tears of laughter. I am totally confused.

  “Sorry,” says Tanya. She takes a deep breath. “Let’s try something. Would you be okay, Kansas, if he was at liberty in your ring?”

  Kansas hesitates. “He’s not easy to catch,”
she says. But then she shrugs and says okay. She unbuckles the halter, carries the gear back to the gate and slips through.

  Tanya takes the lunge whip, moves away from the fence and flicks the whip into the yard. It cracks like a pistol shot. Brooklyn’s head comes up and his ears perk but he doesn’t move his feet. Tanya cracks the whip again and Brooklyn stares at her.

  “I see,” says Tanya. She turns to Kansas. “How about you go get that pretty little mare of yours and bring her into the yard for a visit?”

  “Electra?” says Kansas.

  “Right, the chestnut,” says Tanya.

  Kansas glances in my direction. “Electra won’t want to visit,” she says, then looks at me apologetically. “Electra doesn’t like Brooklyn. Nobody does.”

  This is news to me, and I’m upset that Kansas hasn’t told me, but more upset for Brooklyn. I know what it’s like not to be accepted by the herd because that’s what happens to me at school.

  Tanya says, “Well, I’m not surprised, but go get her anyway.”

  Dr. Cleveland has told me that I’m teased at school because the kids notice that there’s something unusual about me—my height, my fingernails, my ears. But I can’t see what’s so unusual about Brooklyn that would make the other horses not like him. Then I remember Tootsie, the hermaphrodite pony in England. Tootsie looked normal on the surface, but the other horses wouldn’t accept him/her. They knew that underneath, things weren’t right. I suppose it’s too much to hope that Brooklyn is a hermaphrodite. At least hermaphrodites can be fixed with surgery, unlike unicorns.

  Kansas takes the halter to the pasture. Hambone, Photon and Electra have heard the whip cracks and are watching her with interest. She collects Electra and brings her back to the ring. Electra balks when she spots Brooklyn loose in the ring. He whinnies at her, a high-pitched asthmatic bugling sound. Electra looks to Kansas as if to say, Is he kidding? What kind of a whinny is that? Kansas shakes her head. “Takes all kinds I guess,” she says.

  Tanya has been checking text messages on her phone while Kansas was gone, which is fine because I’m too angry with her to make conversation.

  “What now?” says Kansas.

  Tanya says, “Lead Electra up the outside to the far end of the arena. Get her as close to the fence as you can.”

  Kansas does as she’s told. When Brooklyn sees Electra at the end of the arena he puffs up and trots towards her.

  “You can let them sniff noses, but just for a second,” shouts Tanya. “Then bring Electra down to the other end.”

  Electra is reluctant, but eventually moves close enough to Brooklyn to touch noses. Their necks arch. Electra squeals. Brooklyn screams and strikes. Kansas leads Electra away and trots down the long side. Brooklyn trots along beside them inside the fence. In comparison to Electra, his stride is kind of short and choppy.

  Tanya is killing herself laughing.

  Suddenly it’s obvious to me. “He’s not limping,” I say. “He was pretending.”

  “Ponies like this are one in a million,” says Tanya wiping tears from her face.

  Kansas is glowering at us. I expect she thinks there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot: first Declan, now Tanya. I don’t mind though. One in a million sounds pretty good to me. I’m actually feeling happier about Brooklyn than I’ve felt since he arrived.

  And then Tanya says, “But there’s something else you should know about him.”

  My heart sinks.

  Tanya says, “I don’t think he’s pure horse.”

  Oh no. The examination of his forehead. She knows he’s a unicorn.

  “I think he’s a hybrid,” says Tanya.

  Or part unicorn? This is a nightmare. I know what’s coming, but as if there’s some point in delaying things, like a complete idiot I say, “You mean like Dr. Cleveland’s SUV?”

  Tanya looks puzzled for a moment, but then she gets it. “Interesting,” she says with a smile. “But not that kind of hybrid. I think he’s a hinny.”

  “I knew it,” says Kansas, then she looks at me sadly and says, “Well, I was pretty sure. But I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  I don’t know what a hinny is. I’ve never heard the word before, despite my basically memorizing the Pony Club manual and doing all my research on Wikipedia. But I’m afraid to ask, in case a hinny is a cross between a horse and a wayward unicorn.

  I feel my life dissolving in front of me into something strange and inconceivable.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I’m sitting at the dinner table still kind of stunned and unsure how much to talk about recent developments.

  Mom and Dad have been exchanging stories about their days at the office. Mom saw five clients and she thinks her practice is picking up. Dad saw six clients but talked to twenty more on the phone. He says he’d love to be back in those early days before his client load built up and he didn’t have to work flat-out all the time. Maybe it’s time he hired an assistant. That’s when Mom asks me how my day went.

  “Well, the vet came out,” I say, hoping to lead up gradually to the more startling news about Brooklyn being a hybrid but apparently this was the wrong starter because Dad’s fork drops on his plate with a clatter.

  “The vet? Already we have vet bills? The horse just got here.”

  “Dad, I told you. He needed his teeth done. And his vaccines.” I decide not to say anything about the biopsies since Tanya won’t be charging for them. Or the fact that he’s not exactly a horse.

  Mom reaches over and pats my hand. “I remember, Honey. What was that like?”

  Dad grabs a slice of bread from the plate in the middle of the table and asks for the butter dish.

  “The dental work was really gross,” I say. “The vet gave him a shot of tranquillizer then used something like one of Dad’s power drills with a really long attachment and she ground off all the points and sharp edges from his teeth. There was smoke coming out of his mouth.” Kind of like the smoke coming out of my dad’s ears right now, I think, but I don’t say that of course.

  “I’ll bet Brooklyn didn’t like that, Honey,” says Mom. “I hope you were well out of the way.”

  “Mom, he was tranquillized. He could barely stand up. And they had this metal thing holding his mouth open so he couldn’t . . . .” I stop myself before I say “bite” because I don’t want to remind them about what Brooklyn did to the driver. I want to keep my parents’ opinion more on the positive side of the whole equation. “So he couldn’t close his mouth. But this was after Kansas lunged him,” I carry on quickly, having skirted dangerous ground. “She lunged him when I was in the hospital and she thought he was lame.”

  Dad has been spreading butter on his bread and the knife breaks through and scrapes his plate. “Lame?” he says.

  “Oh Honey,” says Mom.

  “But he wasn’t lame. He was pretending. Dr.Bashkir thinks he’s one in a million.” I’m almost there, I’m almost telling them, but then Dad says, “And what does your friend Kansas think?” His tone is ironic, probably because he thinks Kansas is a know-it-all since she has challenged his opinion on a few riding-related matters, like how my riding helmet is not “still perfectly good” since the accident and I have to buy a new one before I can ride again. Plus she put that hand-print on his shirt. Maybe he’s still mad at her about that.

  I am totally aware how fragile my new life with my own pony is. If the situation becomes too expensive, too risky, too anxiety-provoking, too anything, I’ll be back to lesson horses and dreaming of one day owning my own, perhaps when I’m an adult with a job of my own, something that leaves me with lots of money and time for riding. Like when I’m forty maybe, and too old and stiff to ride. I guess I’ve made some progress from a few days ago when all I wanted was for Brooklyn to go back where he came from. “Oh, Kansas thinks he’s great,” I say.

 
Mom frowns, puzzled. “I thought you said Kansas wanted you to get an honest horse, especially for your first one.”

  “Well yeah,” I say, “but just because Brooklyn pretends to be lame doesn’t mean he’s dishonest. I don’t think.” Really, I’m not sure.

  “What the hell is an honest horse?” says Dad. “You ever see a picture of a horse brain? It’s about the size of a walnut.”

  “Dad, it is not.”

  “Hardly big enough to think up ways of being deceptive,” says Dad.

  “Tony, I didn’t know you’d studied comparative brain morphology,” says Mom.

  “I’m speaking metaphorically,” says Dad. “You two are always anthropomorphizing.”

  “We are not,” say Mom and I at the same time.

  “Just a minute,” says Dad raising his hand. His other hand dives in his pants pocket and comes out with his BlackBerry.

  “Tony, not at the dinner table.”

  “I’d turned the ringer off, it was on vibrate. It’s okay. This is important,” he says reading the display. He pushes his chair away from the table and heads to the family room. “Hey, Phil, did you get that FAX?”

  Mom has that look on her face that means she’s either going to cry or blow up like a volcano.

  I hold out my empty plate to her. “Can I have more casserole please, Mom? It’s delicious.”

  She serves a small spoonful. “I’m saving the rest for tomorrow,” she says.

  “Declan really likes Brooklyn too,” I say, needing to talk about something, anything, even Kansas’s private life if necessary. Talk of boys always grabs Mom’s attention. She’s ever-hopeful that I am taking an interest.

  “And who is Declan?”

  “He’s the farrier. I think Kansas likes him. Her voice goes deep and mushy any time she talks to him or about him, and he’s the only person that can tell her what to do.”