Catch Rider (9780544034303) (20 page)

“Can you see through those things?” I asked him. “They look pretty dirty.” He handed them to me. I wiped them off with a paper napkin and gave them back to him.

We passed into West Virginia, then Maryland right after that, and I realized I had never been this far north.

“I was riding to Covington with old Curtis—you know, Curtis who lives behind the piggery, works down at the mill, Joe's son?”

I shrugged, not sure. I just wanted to listen. Wayne only told stories when he was relaxed, and that made me feel better.

“Curtis, he wears glasses, and he had his license picture taken with them glasses on. So we was going to Covington and there was this roadblock up, and Curtis said, ‘Daggone it, I don't have my glasses on. I'm going to get a ticket. I got my glasses on in my license picture. Hand me your'n,' he said. So he put on these glasses I had in the truck with no lenses in 'em.”

I started laughing at the thought of Wayne's old friend wearing glasses with no lenses in them.

“So when we got to the roadblock, we stopped directly, and Curtis, he just looked straight ahead, and the deputy just looked at his license and looked at him and said, ‘Mr. Curtis, I s'pose you better get some lenses for those glasses.' And Curtis said, ‘Oh my God, they done fell out of my frames,' he said. ‘I can't believe it!'

“Ha!” Wayne laughed so hard that he shook. “Ha! ‘They done fell out of my frames. I can't believe it!'”

When he stopped laughing, I started, and then we just kept cracking up.

Right about when I realized I had six hours to do exactly nothing, whatever I wanted, anything, or all three, Wayne told me to do my homework. I shrugged it off and he snapped at me. “Girl, you do your damn homework or you ain't riding.”

“Ha! You're telling me I ain't riding?” I said.

“You heard me. All that time you spend fighting about your homework, not doing it, explaining why you didn't do it—well, you could have done it five times by then.”

Shit,
I thought,
he's right.
I thought about pointing out that he hadn't gotten past the eighth grade, but that would have been stupid for a lot of reasons, and he had a mean-enough look in his eye that I didn't want to fight about it. I opened up my biology book and started reading about plankton. I gnawed on my fingernails and shifted around in my seat, doing anything I could to avoid thinking about that God-awful boring book, but then I imagined having it all done. So I read it, and by the time we were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I had answered the last question and slammed the book shut.

The signs looked dirty, and the reflective pavement markers were battered, unlike the perfectly uniform reflectors on Afton Mountain. We drove along right next to a concrete barrier that shifted left and right to avoid construction. It made me nervous as hell. Wayne had both hands on the wheel, and his face had gotten tight. The shoulder of the highway was strewn with litter, a towel, a CD, food wrappers. It looked chaotic and a little wild, like it was every man for himself.

When the highway straightened out again, I relaxed and fell asleep. I woke up when we were pulling in at a truck stop in New Jersey. We left the horses and went inside for lunch, sitting where we could see them. I drank a Coke and used the bathroom. The people looked different from the ones at home. They had dark hair and looked a little harder, a little tougher on the outside, and they sure were in a hurry. They spoke fast and didn't look you in the eye.

Finally, we saw the twinkling lights of New York City. I could not believe how beautiful and scary it was or that people lived and worked and ate and slept on that island. We'd lost the country station on the radio, and now we were getting music I'd never heard before. I felt chills going up and down my arms. It seemed crazy to bring these silly horses into this big city. I was so excited, I wanted to cry. I couldn't look at Wayne.

I saw the Empire State Building in the distance, and it seemed both frightening and encouraging, like it was there for me. One of the horses stomped hard, like he knew something was happening.

I looked down at my lap. My hands were clenching the map and shaking. Wayne was chomping on a toothpick so hard, I thought he might swallow it.

“Yep, there she is,” he said. His voice sounded different than usual. His throat was tight. He must have been excited and nervous, too. I asked him what the buildings were for.

“I guess some of those are people houses,” he said. “Offices. You know.” City people were like bees in a beehive. I couldn't imagine.

We lined up at the Holland Tunnel. The people in the cars looked bored. A couple of them cut in front of us, but then a shiny black Lincoln waved us in. I was glued to the window, thrilled and terrified.

We were getting ready to go through when I saw a sign up ahead:
TRAILERS PROHIBITED.

“Shit,” Wayne said.

We were in a lane with no tollgate. He hit the gas, we blew through some kind of sensor, we heard somebody yell, and we went down into the tunnel.

Here we were, under a great river, in a tube of concrete and steel, with Submarine and Sonny. The yellow lights passed rhythmically across Wayne's face.

We came out about five minutes later—not soon enough—into a cloverleaf of cars and signs and construction. There was a police car behind us and Wayne pulled over, but everybody started honking and the car went past us.

“What in God's name . . .” Wayne muttered.

I concentrated on the map. “This West Side Highway will take you up to Thirty-Fourth Street, and that will take you to Madison Square Garden.”

He followed my directions to the West Side Highway. There were thousands of cars all jammed up next to each other, honking their horns. I was so glad not to be driving. I saw beautiful glass buildings that looked like mirrored pirate ships, a crazy cement building straddling a train track with plants and trees growing out of it, and cars, cars, cars, streaming everywhere. I rolled down my window and heard honking, music, laughter. Wayne clamped down on a new toothpick just as a helicopter landed right outside his damn window.

I just laughed. A helicopter! Landing right by the water!

“Good God Almighty, let's just hope the horses don't see that!” he yelled.

We turned onto Thirty-Fourth Street. People were honking at us, and I rolled my window up and slouched down. Wayne made a turn onto a street and then realized it was one-way and started to back up. He was getting tense as hell.

A driver yelled something at him that I couldn't hear.

“Well, to hell with you, too—I got two horses in here!” Wayne said. Then he sighed and slumped down like he was at the end of his rope.

We circled around, passing the Empire State Building. I couldn't see the top, but the doors on that building were beautiful. Wayne stepped on the gas, forced his way through an opening, and finally got us to Madison Square Garden—but we were on the wrong side. He swore, and we waited at a light to circle around the block.

I saw a lady in nice clothes eating a slice of pizza while she was waiting to cross the street. I wondered why she didn't have time to sit somewhere and finish it. I saw people of all different colors going home from work, all standing right next to each other. They looked like blood cells being pumped through the arteries, stopping at the lights between heartbeats. I looked into the side-view mirror and saw Sonny's nose sticking out between the slats of the trailer, snorting. He was sucking in the air, the car fumes, the steam rising up from the sewers—breathing in coffee, food, perfume. I was smelling all that myself.

Damned if the four of us weren't already exhausted.

W
E TURNED INTO
an underground garage and a man waved us in. We drove down through a tunnel and into a makeshift stable area. Horses were being walked around, sweaty from traveling. Boy, it was tight down there. We parked where they told us to, and an official checked us in. I watched Wayne count out a lot of cash.

The official looked into the trailer. “You're only down for one horse,” he said with an accent I had only heard on TV.

“Our horse brought his assistant,” I said.

“No room for two horses.” Wow. Just like that. He said it pretty mean.

I begged him. “They have to be together. Please.”

“Honey, there's no room.”

Wayne was thinking.

“You know Seabiscuit?” Wayne asked.

“Sure,” the man said.

“He traveled with a pony. They cut a hole between their stalls so they could see each other.”

“I thought he had a goat,” said the man.

“They started with a goat, but Seabiscuit picked the goat up and tossed him out when the goat tried to eat his food.”

“This ain't Seabiscuit,” the man said.

“This is our Seabiscuit, fella,” Wayne said.

“Then they have to share a stall, and the stalls aren't big enough.”

We parked the trailer in a tiny underground garage area with low ceilings and unloaded the horses.

The official was right. The stalls really were too small for two horses. We tied Sub up in front of Sonny until we could figure out what to do.

Once we'd unloaded the trailer and stacked the equipment next to the stall, Wayne had to go out and park a few blocks away. I wished him luck, and he just shook his head and got into the truck.

“See if you can't change that fella's mind,” he said, pushing three crisp twenties into my hand.

I went out and found the stall man. “Sir, I know what the rules are, and I'm sorry, but I don't know what to do. My uncle said you might be able to rent us another stall.” I handed him the money like it was nothing, and he took it. He nodded for me to follow him and pointed to an empty stall around the corner. I put Sub in there. Sonny and Sub couldn't see each other, and they started calling back and forth.

“You ain't cutting holes in any walls,” the man said.

Wayne came back with our bags from the truck and said we needed to check in at the hotel.

The hotel was just a rundown building with fire escapes zigzagging across the front. Trucks roared by and banged over metal plates in the street so loudly that I jumped every time. A group of men were hanging out in front of a dirty little store on the corner with bright yellow lights and newspapers. Some men were black and some looked Spanish. They didn't pay any attention to us when we walked by.

Inside the hotel, a big lady in a purple sweatshirt checked us in and didn't so much as say hello. I wondered how on earth I would ever fall asleep there, and I wished I had my .44.

“I'm not sharing a room with you—you snore like a chain saw,” I said.

“Then find another one. I think there's a vacancy at the Four Seasons,” Wayne said.

He opened the door to our room. It was tiny and musty, right above the dirty little store, and it smelled like an ashtray. I looked at the room, looked out the window. Wayne stared out at a bar across the avenue, the sign blinking.

“Don't even think about it,” I said.

“You either,” he joked.

Wayne sat down on one of the beds. “Room's so small you can't cuss a cat without getting hair in your mouth,” he said, taking off his boots. He lay down, and before I knew it, he was snoring loudly.

I called Melinda and told her we were there. I made her promise to call Earl if Donald showed up, but we didn't think he would. Setting foot on Wayne's property would be a capital offense in Wayne's neck of the woods, and Donald knew it.

I changed into my pajamas, then lay down on the other bed with the George Morris equitation book, but I couldn't concentrate. For some reason, I started thinking about God. I asked him to watch out for me, and I started to cry, even though I wasn't sad or anything. I didn't even know if I believed in God, but if he or she was out there, I could have used some help.

Even with millions of people, New York was lonely in the middle of the night.

I got up, put my clothes back on, and walked out of the room. I went outside and walked down Ninth Avenue all by myself. People moved fast. When I looked at them, they looked back at me. When I didn't look, I didn't think they did, either. A lot of people were short and had dark hair, and I wasn't used to seeing so many black people. They seemed different from the black people at home—confident, like their being black wasn't a problem for them or for anybody else.

I was at the Garden in ten minutes. It didn't feel strange to me now because I knew Sonny and Sub were there.

Three trainers were riding horses in the warm-up ring, and I had to show some papers to get past the guard. Sonny was sleeping crouched down in the shavings like a dog. Sub was asleep on his side, legs out, snoring like a big old pig. He couldn't have cared less. I went back to Sonny's stall, spread out one of his blankets along the wall on top of the shavings, lay down, and fell asleep.

N
EXT THING
I knew, Wayne threw open the metal stall door with a loud bang, scaring the devil out of me. Sonny was standing up, eating hay.

Wayne stared at me, his face tight and worried.

“You knew where I'd be,” I croaked.

“No, I didn't know where you'd be!” he roared. “Nearly had a heart attack!”

“I'm sorry.”

He checked Sonny's legs and ran his hand along Sonny's body to make sure he hadn't rubbed into anything during the night. Sometimes that happened in a show stall. Sonny still had shavings all over him, even on the top of his back, from a hard night's sleep.

“Get a saddle on him,” Wayne said.

I looked at my watch. 6:03 A.M. I threw the tack on, put on my helmet, tightened Sonny's girth, and stuck my left foot into the stirrup. I felt a sharp pain in my knee. My legs were tight from sitting in the truck for ten hours the day before. I tried again and pushed through the pain.