Chapter Five
Curtis
On Tuesday morning, Dad and I went out riding again with Brent Stuart and his brothers and some of the other ranch hands from around town. This time, none of the girlfriends tagged along, I guess because they had better places to be. Fine with me. It was a cool, hazy morning with storm clouds quietly gathering on the eastern rim of the world, making the sky look bruised, like it had just been in a bar fight. The wind tugged at my sleeves and stirred the tall grass in the fields on either side of us. For once, I wasn’t sorry I had gotten up early to make this trek.
“Curtis, how long you been riding?” Brent asked me after we had been riding for about an hour. “Your whole life?”
I reached into my traveling kit and took a swig of bottled water. “For as long as I can remember,” I said after a moment’s pause. “Didn’t get really good at it until the summer after my sophomore year. Soon as I got a car, I started driving from one town to another offering my services at rodeos and carnivals. They could see I had some experience with animals, taming ‘em. Old man who ran a rodeo down in Paris said he wanted to see how I would do on his mechanical bull.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard this story,” said Dad.
“Well, it’s not the sort of thing I’d have wanted to talk about.”
“Did you get on it?” asked Brent.
“I did—and promptly got knocked right off. Thank the Lord it wasn’t a real bull, or I’d like to have been trampled to death. But I was a stubborn young fool, and I got back on. And I kept getting back on, even after I’d acquired a black eye, a bruised arm, and a couple of loose teeth. If Mama had known what I was up to, she’d have come over and wrestled me off of that thing.”
“Good thing you never told us,” Dad said quietly.
“Like I said, I was stubborn, but I wasn’t stupid,” I said with a laugh. “Mama was scarier than any bull was, especially back then. She’s mellowed in her old age, but she could be a terror when we was younger. Anyhoo, that bull became my white whale. Every night after I finished team-roping with Marshall, I’d get up there and ride it for an hour. By the end of the summer, I could go for a full minute without falling off, which is all you really need. Word got around, and before very long, I had become a local celebrity.”
Brent spat into the dirt. “All this time,” he said gruffly, sounding impressed, “you had a whole secret life that we didn’t know about.”
“Well, none of you ever asked. And Marshall wasn’t about to tell nobody; he knew better’n that.”
They were quiet after that, and we rode together for another hour in silence. A storm on the Texas prairies is an amazing thing to see, the way you can see the clouds forming and growing from miles off. There’s a stillness that sets in as the creatures that live in the grasses make for whatever refuge they can find. You can feel the humidity dropping and the air tingling with electricity, like a single spark could set the world on fire. It wasn’t very long before we realized we needed to turn around early and head back.
There was a thin scrim of chinaberry trees to our left, and we trotted past it for what felt like an hour while robins and cardinals circled overhead in clusters of several hundred, flapping their wings and making an awful racket. We were about twenty minutes away from the house when I first noticed it—Bessie, my horse, was moving along in a herky-jerky fashion, like a puppet being dragged along on strings.
“Dad, I think there’s something wrong with Bessie,” I said when he was close enough to hear me. “She’s not walkin’ right.”
Dad looked over at her. “It’s her right leg,” he said after a lengthy pause. “The other legs are fine, but there’s a problem with that one.”
I swore. “I’ll have to take a look at it when we get back to the barn. Last thing I need right now is a horse that can't walk right.”
“Well, the way this storm is shaping up,” said Brent, “it might be three or four days before we can go riding again. That ought to give you enough time to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the worst of it,” I said grimly as a tawny armadillo waddled across our path. “Anytime one of the horses goes down, it costs us a small fortune in medical bills. Last summer, Phyllis got a nail in one of her hooves, and the animal doctor charged us almost a thousand dollars just to have it looked at.”
“Well, they’ve got to earn a living somehow,” said Brent, who had an annoying habit of seeing things from the other person’s perspective. “I reckon they don’t get a lot of visits in a town like this, so they’ve gotta make money where they can.”
“Maybe they do,” I said, stroking Bessie’s silk mane. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
***
When we got back to the barn, who should I find waiting for me but Elizabeth Philips Davies. She was leaned up against the side of the barn, wearing a pair of ripped blue jeans and a plaid shirt with two of the buttons opened to reveal a white camisole. Brent grinned at me wickedly when he saw her, and I could only imagine the filthy thoughts passing through his head.
“Hey stranger,” she said as I dismounted from Bessie. “You look like you could use a break.”
“That would be nice if I could find it,” I said in a sour voice. “Right now I’ve got to call the vet and schedule an appointment for tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll call him,” said Dad as he trotted past me.
“What’s the matter?” asked Liz. “Somethin’ wrong with Jake?”
“No, it’s Bessie. She’s limping, and I think she might have hurt her leg while we were out riding. Between that and the thunderstorm, it looks like we won’t be going out on the trail again for the rest of the week.”
“Well, I ain’t got nothing going on tonight. I was just thinking about heading down to Fifth Street and grabbing myself a beer and a plate of chicken wings, maybe watching the game—”
She was interrupted by Dad, who had just come running out of the barn. “Vet’s comin’ over to look at Bessie tomorrow at around ten. She says we won’t have to bring her in, not when she’s limping like that.”
“You mean they’re coming over here?”
Dad nodded. “One of ‘em, anyway. Apparently Dr. Thompson is out in Galveston for the week. I don’t know if you saw the news this morning, but there was a nasty oil leak, and he volunteered to do clean-up.”
“Does he really have nothing better to do?” I asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, he’s sending his assistant.”
“Well, I hope his assistant knows how to fix a horse’s limp.”
Dad shrugged. “If not, we can always do things the old way.” He held up an imaginary gun and fired it with a loud “pachow!” sound.
“Dad, we’re not killing Bessie,” I said. “You can forget about it!”
Dad grinned. He shuffled back into the house and left me and Liz to talk.
I didn’t particularly feel like talking. It had been a long ride, I was tired and hungry, and it was obvious she wanted to come over that night but was hoping she wouldn’t have to ask. I always got irritated when girls hung around waiting to be invited places. Why not just come right out and say what they were thinking?
She must have sensed I was feeling irritated, because she said, “Well, anyway. Guess I’ll let you alone for the night.”
“Yeah, sorry.” I wiped my hand over my face, feeling low and mean. “Hey, maybe we can get dinner together tomorrow night or the night after that.”
“Sure, sounds great,” said Liz, not very convincingly. With her hands in her back pockets, she turned around and walked out the gate. I watched her go, feeling a mixture of relief and shame.