Riding Chance Page 3

  After we cleaned the stalls, Winston brought us new kids around the horses. Real slow at first. Said he’d learned the hard way not to take it too fast. They never had an accident or nothing, but you could see how something could go wrong.

  You should’ve seen all the different horses. Most of them were dark brown but some were almost black. They had some that were all white and a few were white with dark spots. And their faces were all different. Like some of the brown horses had a white patch on their foreheads or between their eyes. Man, all of them, all of them, were built. They didn’t have any fat horses. And as strong as they were, they were gentle. They weren’t trying to hurt nobody.

  This was only our second weekend at the stables but we were learning a lot of stuff already. Like you have to know what you’re doing with horses ’cause they get scared real easy. Spooked. That’s what it’s called. That was news to me. I didn’t think they’d be afraid of nothing. You have to be careful about how you walk up to them and where you stand around them, stuff like that.

  Winston took us over to a little field—he called it a paddock—with just one horse. I knew it was Luke; I could tell from his raisin color and long black mane. Anyway, Winston wanted to show us how to move around a horse.

  “You guys just watch,” he said. He led Luke a little bit away from us and tied him to the fence with a special knot. “Horses weigh between eight hundred and twelve hundred pounds, so you don’t want to upset them.”

  “They weigh that much and they don’t eat meat?” I asked.

  “Very good,” said Winston, nodding at me. “They eat mostly grass and hay.” Winston had a way of always looking sharp, like nothing could knock him off his game. He looked neat even standing there in the dirt. “It’s very important that you be peaceful and calm around these animals.”

  We sat there on the top railing of the fence and watched Winston talk to Luke.

  “This is so lame.” The chunky dude leaned over me, whispering loud. His breath smelled bad. I put my hand up to stop him from getting all in my face.

  “Never approach a horse from the front or the back,” Winston was saying. “Instead approach him from the side so he can see you.” He was standing at Luke’s left shoulder, petting him. “Your voice is the second most important way to communicate with a horse. Your hands are number one. Use your hands to communicate with a horse first.”

  “I’m gonna communicate with my feet in a minute,” the chunky dude said, crossing his arms over his chest and looking up at the sky. He nudged the new girl with his elbow. “I gots to get outta here, you know what I’m saying?”

  I looked at Foster but he was watching Winston run his hands all over Luke. Winston started at his nose, then went around his ears, down his neck to his shoulders and body. Winston was moving alongside Luke in slow motion until he got to his backside.

  “Now, pay attention,” he said. “I’m going to show you how to get from one side of a horse to the other safely.” He kept one hand on Luke’s butt and stepped behind him to the other side. Luke’s tail never stopped swishing and Winston talked the whole time, saying stuff like I’m right here, Luke. He worked his hands back up Luke’s other side to his head and down to his lips. Very smooth. Looked like Winston and Luke were best friends, totally cool.

  Winston untied Luke and brought him closer to where we were, to the water bucket hanging on the fence. Luke stuck his mouth in the water but we didn’t hear slurping.

  “Is he drinking?” I said. “How come we don’t hear nothing?”

  “Horses drink silently,” said Winston. “They suck the water; they don’t lap like dogs and cats.”

  “We make more noise than that when we drink,” I said, grinning at Foster. The chunky dude and the girl rolled their eyes but I wanted to know how Luke could be so quiet.

  “It’s grace,” said Winston. “You may not know what that word means now, but you will if you’re around horses long enough.”

  Luke brought his head up out of the bucket, and water dribbled out of the side of his mouth.

  “Oh, that’s graceful,” said the chunky dude, twisting his lips out real far. He and the girl laughed.

  “Can I get closer to him?” I said.

  “Sure.” Winston nodded. “Just be mindful of what you learned.”

  “That’s right.” The chunky dude twisted around toward me, waving his arms. “Be very, very mindful …” he said, all loud.

  “Man, why don’t you just shut up?” I jumped down off the fence and landed hard. Luke jerked back from Winston and stretched his long neck around to see what was going on. I sorta froze, not knowing what he was gonna do.

  Winston whispered to Luke and patted his long neck. Then he turned back to us. “That’s exactly the kind of behavior that could get someone hurt.” He squinted his eyes like he was trying to figure me out. “Since you have so much energy, I’ll have to find some extra chores for you.” He pointed at me and the chunky dude. “Both of you.”

  The chunky dude sucked his teeth but he didn’t say nothing else. I was still frozen in place. Luke’s ears were perked up but he was calm. I wanted to get next to him, so I tilted my head in his direction.

  “All right, Troy,” Winston said, “if you’re settled down, Luke’s still waiting for you.” I took a deep breath and walked over to Luke’s left side. I put my hand on him and moved it up over his shoulder. He shifted his weight a little bit, but I didn’t jump like I did the other day in the barn with Alisha.

  “Here, you hold the lead line,” said Winston. He handed me the rope and stepped aside. Luke sniffed around my head and shoulders, then put his head in the bucket to drink some more water.

  “Let him drink as much as he wants,” said Winston. “He’s comfortable with you.” Right then, Winston didn’t seem so weird and Luke didn’t seem so strange. Everything was cool until, all of a sudden, I felt a spray of water all over the side of my face and shoulders.

  “Is that close enough for you?” the new girl said, giggling behind her hand. The chunky dude was laughing along with her; Foster wasn’t.

  “Horses do that sometimes,” said Winston. “They wash their mouths out just like we do.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t like being laughed at. Seemed like everything I did at the stables just sorta backfired. But, I don’t know, I didn’t want to quit. I opened my eyes and saw Foster frowning, not at Winston or the chunky dude. He was frowning at me. Thinking about it now, he could probably tell that the horses were already drawing me in. You know, he probably thought he was losing me. I’d told him about Pops’s pacing at night. Maybe he could tell that when I lay in bed listening to that, the only thing that made me feel better was the horses.

  DRE RAN THINGS at the barn. The dude even lived there. In a little apartment upstairs. I don’t think I would’ve wanted to be out in the middle of that big park, in the middle of this big city, in the middle of the night, but he did. All these old houses and big statues. I’d be afraid they would come alive or something.

  Dre was always real busy but he stopped to talk to me and Foster when he saw us standing over by the field where they practice polo. We were watching two of the players, Willie and Little Keith, on their horses hitting a ball around.

  “You see what they’re doing, right?” Dre put the bucket of grain he was carrying down on the ground.

  “Yeah, moving the ball down the field to try to make a goal,” said Foster. “Look how they keep bumping into each other even while they’re riding.”

  “Oh, if you like to get physical, try polo,” said Dre.

  I leaned against the railing. “We don’t really know the game.”

  “I didn’t know it before I started coming here, either.” He pointed down to the ground with his two index fingers. “This place got me started. Then I played in college, too.”

  “You can play polo in college?” Foster asked.

  “Depends on the school.” Dre took off his baseball cap and wiped his forehead with the bac
k of his hand. “Not everywhere.”

  “How come nobody ever heard of it?” I said. I really wanted to ask him how he came to be living with all these animals, but I didn’t.

  “It costs money, that’s why. You gotta know how to ride and you have to have access to horses.”

  “Yeah, in hoops all you need is the ball,” I said. “And the hoop.”

  “But I’m telling you, if you aren’t afraid of getting rough, check it out.” He did a fake dribble and pass. “It’s like b-ball on horseback.” He picked up his bucket of grain and headed back inside the barn.

  “We’re both good at hoops,” I said to Foster.

  “Yeah.” He looked down at the ground. “But you’re the one with the flow.”

  “Flowing through what?” Jerome had come up behind us. “Horse turds?”

  He had a way of just popping up without you knowing it. He was carrying a shovel. He threw it so it landed at my feet before he walked off laughing.

  “Doesn’t he remind you of Lay-Lay?” Foster said.

  “He does, same nose and forehead.”

  “But he’s not from around our way.” Foster sat on the railing’s middle bar. He picked up the shovel and drew circles in the dirt with it. “He’s from the suburbs.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “He did.”

  “I don’t care where he’s from,” I said. “Why can’t he be cool?”

  “Just stupid.”

  It was getting cloudy. I held out my hand and felt some raindrops. “It’s starting to rain,” I said, looking up at the sky. “We should see if they need us.”

  Foster drew a stick figure of an animal in the dirt and handed the shovel to me. Cracked him up to see me ride that thing like it was a horse.

  I wanted to see how the horses would act in the rain since they didn’t have umbrellas but it only rained a few drops before it cleared back up. We didn’t have anything else to do, so me and Foster went to Winston’s little office to tell him we were leaving. We weren’t sneaking around or nothing but the door was open, so we could hear him talking to Jerome.

  “Whoever we get is going to have to be good,” Winston was saying. We heard a chair scrape against the floor like somebody was getting up.

  “Yeah, it’s too bad Marcus is moving away before the exhibition match.” Jerome added, “He’s almost as good as me.”

  “Well, the sooner we get another person on the team, the better.”

  Sounded like Winston turned off the computer just as Foster raised his hand to knock on the door. Jerome must have been standing right there ’cause he snatched the door open wide.

  “We’re leaving,” Foster said.

  “Don’t get into any trouble on your way home.” Jerome just had to say something.

  “Okay,” said Winston, “see you tomorrow at eight.”

  We nodded and turned around just as Dre came in the side door, leading this real spunky little horse. She was smaller than most of the others we’d seen. Winston got up from his desk and came out into the hallway to get a better look at her.

  “How’s she doing?” he asked. She was reddish brown with a mane the same color. The mane had been trimmed so it was real short. And the tail was braided like a girl’s hair.

  “You know Magic,” Dre said, moving his hand over her shoulder. “Always ready to go.”

  This horse—I don’t know how to say it—she moved like she did have someplace to go. You know, like she had her mind set on something.

  “Magic’s a polo pony,” Winston said to me and Foster. “Highly spirited and—

  “Kick-ass,” said Jerome.

  Winston cut his eyes at Jerome. “I wouldn’t have used that word,” he said, “but she’s a horse that’s been trained specifically for polo. ”

  They all looked at Magic like she was their little baby daughter. Felt like me and Foster were on the outside looking in. I wanted to be on the inside. I liked that little horse’s fire.

  YOU COULD TELL who was into the horses and who wasn’t. All you had to do was look at Alisha and see the girl was happy. She was in the barn Sunday morning singing. She wasn’t embarrassed about it, either. The other two new kids, the chunky dude and the girl, they definitely weren’t down with it. They didn’t come back on Sunday.

  Winston didn’t let me off the hook, though. He gave me extra work to do even though the other dude, the one who started the whole loud thing, was gone. Felt like Winston cooked up a special job just for me. He said he didn’t want mosquitoes to get out of control so I had to go around the whole place filling in all the big holes with dirt so they wouldn’t hold water when it rained. There were always flies and other bugs around, but Winston said we could do more to prevent things from getting worse. So there I was, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with dirt up and down the paths all around the place looking for mosquito hiding places. Winston said everybody would thank me later. Yeah, well, it felt like every time I filled in one hole, two more popped up.

  I was taking a break, sitting down beside the wheelbarrow, when Foster caught up to me.

  “Man,” I said, “I’m never complaining about mucking out again.” My T-shirt was drenched with sweat and, I swear, I was panting like a dog.

  Foster handed me an orange soda. “Don’t do any more,” he said.

  “I wish you’d said that two hours ago.” I wiped my sweaty forehead with the back of my hand. “I’m almost finished now.”

  “You’re never gonna finish, Troy. Jerome’s got some kids making new holes.”

  I just sat there, looking at my boy. Foster looked away.

  “You know, you sorta brought this on yourself.” He kicked a stone around with his rubber boot.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Asking all those questions yesterday,” he said. “I mean, I’m glad that other dude is gone, but some of this stuff is stupid.” He traced the outline of a horse in the air, imitating what Winston had done with Luke the day before. “That’s dumb, man.”

  I took a long swig of soda. What Winston showed us yesterday wasn’t dumb; I’d been thinking about it when I fell asleep last night. “You know my situation,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, your situation is everybody’s making you look bad.” Foster’s chest was sorta caved in. “I don’t think that was part of your plan,” he said.

  I heard a Mister Softee truck in the distance. Its tinny music sounded even more out of tune than usual. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “I had enough for today,” he said. “I’m leaving early.”

  “What are you going to tell Winston?”

  “Winston? Nothing.” Foster had already started walking away. “I don’t feel good,” he said. “I’ll find Dre and tell him I’m sick.”

  Everybody’s making you look bad. That’s what Foster said. He was right; that wasn’t my plan. I finished the soda and watched Foster go off before I pushed the wheelbarrow back up to the barn. Alisha saw me coming and walked down to meet me.

  “Where’s Foster?” she said. “He’s going to miss the polo match.”

  I walked right past her with the wheelbarrow. “What?” I said over my shoulder. I didn’t stop pushing the wheelbarrow ’cause I wanted to get rid of it in the barn as quick as I could. “A polo match here?”

  She had to walk fast to keep up with me. “Yeah, there’s a team from Jersey here to play a pickup game with our guys.”

  I thought about trying to find Foster so he’d come back, but he’d probably just tell me I was lame. Maybe Dre’d tell him about the game. I pushed the wheelbarrow up the little ramp in front of the barn and took it inside.

  I’m telling you, everything about the place was different. Man, that old barn was alive. And for the first time, I could see which horses had been trained for the game. Their tails were braided so they looked like they’d just come from a beauty salon. And they had bandages on their legs, too. Winston was in the middle of a bunch of guys and animals, directing everything. He was real serious about it
, barking orders like a drill sergeant. And the whole polo team, Jerome, Willie, Little Keith, and Marcus, all of them, were dressed in white pants, jerseys, leather boots, and helmets.

  I left the wheelbarrow up against the wall and went back outside. The Jersey team’s horses were over by the polo field, all done up like ours.

  “I thought you said this was just a pickup game,” I said to Alisha. “A casual thing?”

  “Nothing’s casual when Uncle Winston’s involved.” She threw up her hands. “You should go over there and try to get a good spot. They’re getting ready to start.”

  “What about you?” I said. “Aren’t you going to watch?”

  “I’m going to check on Uncle Winston first.” She shook her head like this was something she always did. “He gets all wound up whenever they play.” She looked a little worried when she disappeared into the barn.

  I walked back down the path to the polo field. I could see guys riding their horses around, warming up. Man, they were good. Looked like the riders and their horses did everything in sync.

  Our team came out with their horses led by Jerome and Magic; they were both profiling. I could tell from the way Winston was darting around that he was uptight. Pickup game or no, he wanted to win.

  I couldn’t really figure out what was going on. Horses and riders were everywhere before it settled down to just four players from each team and a couple of referees on the field. The players all put goggles on, so I figured the game was about to start. The next thing I knew, the two teams were fighting for the ball. And they weren’t riding slow, either. They were going fast, but they could stop their horses on a dime and change direction. Looked like the players were running interference for each other, hitting the ball backward and forward, knocking into each other, stealing the ball from the other team, galloping and shouting. I heard somebody yell, “Turn it.” Jerome reached out with his mallet and turned the ball around so he could take a better shot. He and Magic didn’t miss a beat. How was he doing that? Then somebody called, “Tail it.” Marcus stole the ball from the other team and smacked it back toward his horse’s tail. Little Keith was right there to run it down the field.