Boy on a Black Horse (5 page)

“Jerk,” Chav scolded himself. “Chicken.” He jogged in place, then started walking up the meadow, trying to get warm. His numb feet stumbled on the uneven ground, and he couldn't see where he was going. The pressure in his chest was worse than ever.

Even if Gray wasn't a danger, it was time, past time.… He and his brother and sister should have been on a southbound freight by now, heading toward Florida or Texas or Georgia, someplace warm to spend the winter. That was what they had done last year, and it had worked okay. That was why he was here, along the tracks: to jump a freight. Trains passed every day. Some of them even stopped, for some inscrutable railroad reason. Yet he had not taken advantage of any of them.

Last year there hadn't been Rom.

In front of him the night seemed to gather itself into an even blacker blackness. Chav froze where he was—there was a shape coming at him, like in his bad dreams when the huge heavy pain struck him out of nowhere. But then he heard the soft clop of unshod hooves. “Rom,” he whispered, and when the horse came up to him he threw his arms around the base of the stallion's neck and leaned against the warmth of Rom's shoulder.

After a few minutes the pressure in his chest eased up. Good. The one thing he absolutely positively swear-to-God did not want to do was blow up at Baval and Chavali. So far he had managed not to. For the year and a half they had been on their own he had not hit them or even screamed at them—unlike his darling father.

The anger started kicking inside Chav again. Someday it was going to bust him wide open, and then look out world.

He took a few deep breaths and tried to get his mind going. Some nights when he could not sleep he made up songs and poetry in his head. That was what he used to do when he was shut in the dark closet, make up stories and poems and songs. It was a way of staying real when the punishment was trying to make him smaller and smaller and less and less until he was nothing anymore, not a person at all.

He murmured to the horse one he had been working on:

“
My horse shines

like a black neon sign

in a black bar window

on a black wet night

so slick it's white
.

My horse moves

like a black Harley cruising

like black fire burning
—”

Rom nuzzled his back.

Chav quit trying. His chest hurt. Words had power, but they weren't helping this time. They couldn't help him leave Rom behind.

Rom was—Rom was a reason for living, and it was killing him.

“What am I going to do?” he whispered to the horse. “I got you away from that place, but now I can't take you with me. No way you can hop a freight.”

Minda had to visit her mother's grandmother in the nursing home the next day, and I asked to go riding. “Do you really have to?” Liana complained at me, which was about as close as she ever came to getting on my case. “I thought maybe we could do something together. Go to the mall or something.” She wanted me to keep her company.

“Please,” I begged, “the good weather will be gone soon.”

That was true. But in a way it was a lie, because I was hiding things from her, such as the reason I really wanted to go, and the raisin packs and Snickers bars and cheese crackers and bologna sandwiches filling all my pockets. I felt guilty and miserable as she drove me out to the stable, but that didn't make me say anything.

Topher was just coming out of his house. When he saw the car pull in he called, “Hi, Gray,” but then he walked over and said, “Hi, Mrs. Quinn, how's it going?” to my aunt, and he stood there talking to her through the car window. This was not something he'd done before, but it's a free country. I went to catch Diddle, so I didn't hear what they were saying.

When I was grooming, Topher came into the barn and watched me.

“How's stuff?” I asked him.

“Better.”

“Better than what?”

“Better than before. Gray, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” I stopped currying Diddle to look at him. He wasn't looking straight at me.

“If this is too personal, don't answer,” he said. “I just wondered—somebody told me—your aunt lost her husband and kids in some kind of boating accident?”

So far this was not being a real good day. I felt myself go wooden inside like a taxidermy project, like I had been stuffed and mounted for public display, which is what always happens when somebody brings this up. But I made myself nod and say something. “My mother and father and brother too. Same accident.”

“Oh, jeez, I'm sorry!” Topher said it like he meant it. “I—I didn't know you were involved.”

I went back to currying Diddle. “I don't want to talk about it,” I told Topher.

“That's okay. You don't have to. Dumb,” he grumbled, tapping himself on the forehead. “Ever since the divorce I've been so busy feeling sorry for myself, I haven't been paying attention to anything.”

At least he understood I couldn't discuss it. My grandmother and other people kept telling me I should try, I wouldn't really get over it until I could talk about it, but too bad. I just couldn't.

“Tell me just one thing,” Topher said. “How long ago was it?”

“Two years.” A little more now. The two-year anniversary, if you can call it that, had been in August. A couple of months before Chav showed up.

“It's really none of my business,” Topher said softly, almost like he was talking to himself. “It's just that—up until recently I never got to know your aunt. We talked a lot that night you stayed out so damn late. She was upset, but she never raised her voice at me or tried to blame me the way a lot of parents would have done. Hell, she tried to keep
me
from worrying. She's really something.”

That sounded like Liana. I nodded at Topher and kept making Diddle happy—she loved the feel of the rubber currycomb. Topher kept watching me. I guess he could tell I still felt kind of rocky, because then he went and got the saddle for me when he wouldn't have had to. “Listen,” he said, “I'm sorry. It was a dumb thing to ask.”

“Stop it with the sorries,” I grumped at him. “You can ask me dumb things anytime you want to.”

That was the truth. I liked Topher a lot. More than I liked Chav, in a way, because liking Topher was simple and liking Chav was complicated. But in a way I liked Chav more, because being around him was like riding a black stallion.

C
HAPTER

5

When I got to the deserted Altland farm, nobody was around, but Rom was browsing at the edge of the woods and I could hear voices. I left Diddle in the meadow and found Chav and Baval and Chavali down by the river with some liquid soap, a slime green kind I recognized. It was meant for hands, but they were using it to wash their clothes.

I said hi and watched awhile. The little kids were laughing and splashing water. Whenever they were around Chav they seemed to just assume that everything was okay, that he would take care of them. And I figured maybe they were right. But doing it had to weigh him down, like a colt carrying triple.

He wasn't talking. “You got the soap from a rest room at school, right?” I asked him.

He looked up. “Right.” There was a sneer in his voice, and his eyes dared me to make something of it.

I sat down on the ground, and he kept washing what was probably his total wardrobe: an extra pair of pants and two shirts. His clothes were crummy, but they matched. That is to say, they were all black.

“Why do you just wear black?” I asked him.

“I like black. It stands for death, and death is where the good people are.”

Some of the kids at school wore weird styles and said things like that to shock the adults. But Chav wasn't saying it to shock me. He meant it.

I said, “My mother is dead too.”

Where did that come from all of a sudden? I hadn't meant to say that. I hadn't even realized I believed part of his story, that his mother had died, like mine.

He stopped sloshing clothes and looked at me. Baval and Chavali got quiet and looked at me too.

I said, “My mother and father and brother all died.”

They didn't say anything, just pulled their clothes out of the water and hung them on bushes and headed back up to their castle. But somehow their silence told me it was okay for me to be visiting them again.

“We've got lunch,” Baval announced when we got to the silo, all excited, as if having lunch was something special. He pulled me through the crawlway and showed me a pile of cold, soggy, squashed, paper-wrapped McDonald's burgers.

“Chav got them,” Chavali said, squatting there and holding one of the packets in both hands as if it were precious.

“He bought them?” I was thinking he ought to get his money back.

“Rom and I got them out of the Dumpster,” he answered me from outside. “At two in the morning.” Again his voice challenged me to try to make him feel ashamed.

“Well, will they keep till supper?” I said just as sharply. “I brought lunch.”

I unloaded my pockets, and Chav let the little kids grab bologna sandwiches to eat, and then I jerked my head at him. I wanted to talk to him alone for a minute. We walked up the meadow toward where the horses were grazing.

“Mr. Fischel knows you're here,” I said. “Except he thinks you're a whole tribe of Gypsies. He says you thieve.”

“I do,” Chav said, looking straight at me, his head high and cocky, his eyes hard. Tough, but—was he daring me to believe in him? “Isn't that what Gypsies do? Lie and thieve?”

“You—you steal things?”

“Clothes out of the Goodwill bin. Blankets out of barns. McDonald's burgers.” There was mockery in his voice.

I found I was on his side. I mean, what else was he supposed to do? If he tried to get a job and work, people would be like Mrs. Higby, wanting to know his whole name, where he lived, his social security number. And these were things he could not let anybody find out. For his own reasons. Probably good reasons.

I told him, “Mr. Fischel wants Mr. Altland to run you off.”

“What else is new?” Chav said in the same scornful tone.

“Just telling you.”

“Okay, I hear you. Who's this Fischel guy?”

I explained, and when I was done explaining we both stood there awhile patting the horses. Rom was really beautiful in his rawboned stallion way. Big Roman head, strong legs, short back, slim ribby barrel tucked at the flank. Wild shaggy mane like a mustang's. Like Chav's. Marks on his shoulders. I asked, “How did he get the scars?”

“Fighting.” The hardness in Chav's voice, I decided, was aimed at the world in general. There was no need for me to snarl back at him. “Rom is like me, he has had to learn how to fight. Fight or be screwed.”

“Fighting other horses?”

“Yes.” He rolled his eyes—okay, it was a dumb question. “In my case, fighting people who try to hurt me or Chavali or Baval. Or Rom. No one touches Rom.”

Almost no one. I stood there rubbing the black horse's neck, and he liked it. “What breed is he?”

“Gypsy.”

It wasn't any breed I'd ever heard of. Was Chav a liar, the way he claimed to be?

“That's what
Rom
means,” Chav added. “That he's a Gypsy horse.”

No, Chav was not a liar. He was just—a poet. He had his own ways of saying truth.

“Where did you get him?”

A liar would have made up a story. But Chav sighed, and his voice was quiet, almost friendly, as he said, “I can't tell you.”

I patted Rom and watched Chav awhile, and then I asked him, “Are you coming to school tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

Chav

Yesterday after school Matt Kain and Fishy Fischel and some of their friends cornered me out back of the gym and tried to mess me up. They have heard I am a Gypsy, and that gives them an excuse to do what they want to me
—
as if they need a reason; I am different, that is reason enough. They called me “crooked Gyp” and all the usual names and beat me a few minutes before they got frightened and ran. I hurt them some, and I stayed on my feet. They were not able to put me on the ground. But now I ache, every bone that has ever been broken aches, and it is hard to act as if nothing bothers me
.

Gypsy, hell. I call myself a son of the Rom, but the stupid thing is, if I ever found my mother's people, they would call me “stinking gadjo” and drive me away. So I don't try to find them, not really. And I don't think too much. When I think too much about the way my life really is, it drives me crazy
.

I don't think the gadjo jocks know about Baval and Chavali yet. They can do what they want to me, but they had better not bother Baval and Chavali, or I will kill them
.

I must make up my mind to leave this place soon, or the weather will make it up for me. I think I am staying because I like the color of the leaves. It reminds me of hell
.

Gray Calderone

Today in science lab our team was supposed to be separating a mixture of sand and iron filings and salt and stuff, and Fishy Fischel, who is kind of a Peck Fischel clone, was being tough stuff and goofing around, so I said, “Stop it,” because if he messed up the experiment, we'd all get a bad grade, and he stopped it, but he called me an obnoxious bitch. Just for saying what I thought. If I were a guy, I don't think he would have done that. Or maybe if I were a guy, I wouldn't have let him
.