Gee Whiz (22 page)

Once I was finished with him, I got Oh My out and tacked
her up. Then I put Nobby on the lead rope, and I took the two of them out the gate and up and down the road, since the trail and the hills were very wet. All we did was walk, and three cars passed, but they behaved themselves. We went way past the gate to the Jordan Ranch. It was green all the way. I figured that the next day I would ride Nobby and lead Oh My, and they could both learn the same lesson.

It got dark while I was giving the horses their hay. I went inside. Dad was doing some bills while Mom finished setting the table. I washed up. No one said anything. Just by looking at the telephone, I could see that it had been silent as a rock. We had hash made from the leftovers of the prime rib—one of my favorite things, the meat all savory and ground up with the potatoes and onions. There was plenty of it, too, and maybe because we had nothing to say, we all ate a lot—cleaned our plates, cleaned the serving bowl, ate the last green bean. The phone was a dead thing.

I helped Mom with the dishes, hung around for a few minutes, then gave up and went to my room. Of course right then the phone rang. It rang seven times. I guess after all the waiting, no one dared to pick it up.

But then I heard Dad say, “Oh, hi! Nice to hear from you.”

He would not say that to Danny. Too formal.

And then, “Abby!”

It was Jane, not Danny. She said, “What a rain! Did you feel horrible making poor Blue stay out in that downpour? With the water just running down his cheeks and into his eyes and turning the footing to mud?”

I said, “Sort of.”

She said, “Oh, darling! Well, you shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter what the weather is in California, it’s a paradise compared to everywhere else in the world. I’m sure he thought it was invigorating.”

I said, “I hope so.”

“But I have to soften you up. I really want that horse. It was so teeming yesterday that I didn’t tell you how good he was with both Melinda and Ellen. You know, the second time is the one that matters, and he was just as kind as could be, but willing. And Melinda feels comfortable on him—for certain she’s going to grow another couple of inches, and she’s quite long in the leg as it is. Of course, Ellen is about as big as a button up there on his back, but she thinks it’s thrilling.” She paused. “I also taught another student. Do you remember little Robert? He was in the show. I believe he cried. But he did fine on Blue, who is six times as agreeable as his horrible ancient pony who is a zillion years old and learned back in the nineteenth century to never listen to a mere child.” Another pause. I felt sort of overwhelmed. And Dad kept looking at me. Jane said, “I am raising my offer to twelve hundred, and you know that you can ride him out here, and take lessons, and show him, too. You don’t have to own a horse to enjoy him, Abby—in fact, many experienced equestrians would say that not owning a horse is the ideal situation.”

“My dad would say that.”

“Well, think about it.”

I said that I would.

Danny never called.

And he didn’t call the next day, either.

I heard Mom and Dad have a little discussion about whether Danny was stubborn, afraid, or “independent.” It reminded me of the bad old days after Danny and Dad had their big fight, and we hardly saw Danny at all.

But Friday afternoon, I got off the school bus at the very moment that Danny was turning into our driveway in his truck. I hugged my books to my chest and went to open the gate for him. He drove straight past the house to the barn, and I ran after him. When he got out of the truck, he said, “Go get your work clothes on. We have something to do.”

I knew it was about Gee Whiz.

Mom’s car was outside, but she wasn’t in the house, so I decided she and Dad had gone somewhere, which maybe was good, since maybe Danny wanted to do a few things on his own. I pulled on my jeans and a jacket, then ran out the back door, only stopping to put on my boots.

He was already brushing Gee Whiz. I grabbed a brush and helped him. The horse was so tall that I could only see Danny’s feet underneath and the brim of his hat on the other side. Gee Whiz seemed to enjoy the attention—he stood more quietly than he had the previous time. Even so, I wasn’t going to leave him alone to pull back—once they’ve tried it and succeeded, they often try it again. Danny seemed in a good mood. We didn’t know the results of his physical, but maybe he did. However, he wasn’t saying anything about it to me, and I was afraid to ask. When he got to smoothing a rag over Gee Whiz’s face to clean off some of the dust, he finally broke the silence. “Jem Jarrow came over to the Marble Ranch this morning when I was working a couple of the calves with Happy, and I asked him something.”

“What?”

“How to start retraining an ex-racehorse.”

“What are you going to retrain him to do?” I had never seen a cow horse nearly as big as Gee Whiz.

“You told me yourself that he jumped 3′3″—or three feet, anyway—without even thinking about it.”

I thought, “Uh-oh,” but I said, “So what did Jem say?”

“Well, you do him the usual way—you teach him to step under and use his back feet, because at the racetrack, the back end is there for pushing off, but he said, ‘Sometimes those racehorses don’t know that it can actually do anything.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“They get into habits—they always race to the left, for example, so how they use their haunches is always cocked a little so that they can get more power to the left. Or they dig in with the front end, which shifts their weight forward. Look at this.” He pointed to Gee Whiz’s neck. The muscles along the lower part bulged slightly more than the muscles along the crest. “That’s from pulling rather than pushing. They get in the habit of using their bodies in a certain way, and you have to recognize that it’s a habit rather than a fault.”

He led him over to the pen and took him through the gate, picking up the flag that was leaning against the fence post. I closed the gate.

Gee Whiz looked too big for the pen, just the way he had the time Barbie and I had put him in there, but as before, once Danny waved the flag, and he backed away, turned, and started trotting, it was clear that he was perfectly comfortable. This time, he shortened his strides by lifting his back and bending; he didn’t look at all awkward. Danny let him go
around three times, then stepped slightly in front of him and lifted the flag again. Gee Whiz gave him a quizzical look, then paused, and trotted off the other way. I said, “Right answer.”

Danny grinned.

I said, “We did this before. It looks like he learned something.”

Gee Whiz didn’t buck or kick out. He just kept making smooth turns and going the other way. Danny let him do this until he came down to a walk on his own, and then Danny stepped back, and Gee Whiz approached him. Danny slipped the training halter with the long lead rope over his head and tied it.

The first time Danny asked Gee Whiz to step over in the Jem Jarrow way, the horse gave him the look again, that “What in the world are you talking about?” look that I’d never seen on the face of any other horse. I thought of what Jane had said, about a horse “translating” what the rider or trainer is asking for, and I decided that was his look—not scared, not resentful, not indifferent, but curious. Danny went up to him, bent his neck around, lifted his nose, nudged him on the haunch with his hand. Gee Whiz seemed to say, “Oh, I understand! Sure!” He stepped over.

He stepped over several times to the right, then several times to the left. Then Danny did one of my favorite things—he slipped the rope over Gee Whiz’s head and ran it along his side until it came around his haunches, then he applied a little pressure. Gee Whiz stood there, big and white, looking off into the distance. Danny applied more pressure. Gee Whiz stiffened his head and neck, which is something horses do
when they feel pressure. Danny pulled a little harder. Gee Whiz lowered his head, and the rope along his side dropped so that I could see it along his legs. There was a pause, but then he turned his head toward the pressure, and a moment later, he swiveled his body. Once he was facing Danny, Danny petted him, and said, “Smarty-pants.”

We called this move the corkscrew. They did the corkscrew several times, until finally Gee Whiz wasn’t giving Danny the opportunity to apply pressure at all—as soon as he felt the rope across his tail, he turned.

Danny was now in an even better mood, as good as I’d seen in a couple of weeks. He stepped up beside Gee Whiz’s neck, on the left side, facing backward. He gently put his hand on the far side of Gee Whiz’s nose. They stood there for a moment, then Gee Whiz bent his neck and brought his head around. Danny held it until Gee Whiz relaxed. When Danny took his hand away, Gee Whiz kept his neck curled for about a second, then straightened it. Danny did this on both sides, too. The point was to always remind him that he wasn’t a plank. He was a supple, athletic animal—the more supple, the more athletic. Danny said, “I didn’t think he would be so cooperative. I thought he would be a lot stiffer.”

“He doesn’t move in the pasture like he’s stiff. He moves in the pasture like he can do anything he wants to.”

“Let’s go over to the arena.”

I said, “What else did Jem Jarrow say? This is the same stuff we would use with any horse.”

“He said, ‘Always let him go forward.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“I guess it means that at least for the first while, if we lift the rein from the saddle and ask him to come under, it’s just a little. He thinks they’re so used to going forward that they get nervous if you slow them down too much.”

I thought of the trot and the canter and the gallop I had seen Gee Whiz produce. My scalp prickled.

In the arena, Danny repeated the exercises he’d done in the pen, and added another, which was, when the horse is walking briskly around you, say, to the left, you switch the rope to the right hand (and the flag to the left), raise your right hand and give a little tug, and try to get the horse to bend toward you, shift his weight, turn, and go to the right without halting. Happy could do this at the canter—it looked like a trick. She would be cantering to the left around Danny, he would twitch the rope, she would sort of lift herself up, shift from her left hind to her right hind, and take off cantering to the right, but her canter was so controlled and graceful that she looked like a rocking horse. (Another trick he did was to walk along, leading her. He would say, “Lope!” and she would canter beside him, no faster than he was walking—I thought that was a trick Waldemar Seunig should see.) A horse who could do the turns Danny wanted could, of course, outsmart any calf or cow, but he could also maintain his balance at all times by easily shifting his weight backward and raising his front end. I won’t say that Gee Whiz learned this immediately—he was much bigger than Happy, two hands and 29 percent overall—but he got the idea.

Danny handed me the lead rope, and said, “Walk him around for a bit.”

He went over to his truck and came back with his saddle. He was carrying Blue’s bridle, and said, “This snaffle bit is easy. Let’s start with that.”

“Are you going to do what Wayne does and jump up onto him?”

He ignored me.

In the end, all we did was the same exercises with Gee Whiz tacked up that we had done untacked, but the stirrups flapped and the strings flapped and the saddle creaked. Gee Whiz bucked once, but it was clear he wasn’t unbroke—he knew that people do what they do, and if you are a wise horse, you go along with it the best you can. We took him back to the barn, and I brushed him down while Danny was putting that tack away. Then Danny put him in his pasture. It was getting dark—still no sign of Dad’s truck. Danny helped me put the hay in the wheelbarrow, but when I rolled it toward the horses, he got in his own truck and left. He didn’t say not to tell Mom and Dad he’d been there, but as it happened, I didn’t. We didn’t talk about Danny at all.

T
HE NEXT MORNING WAS
S
OPHIA
’
S BIG DAY
,
AND OF COURSE IT
was a production—she showed up at nine. Her dad was driving the trailer, and she was wearing perfect clothes. When they unloaded Onyx, it looked as though Rodney had dressed him up and sent him to Madison Square Garden. Our horses weren’t the ones we’d had when he lived with us as Black George, but they whinnied to him anyway, and he whinnied back. I’d expected Sophia to be kitted out, so I’d already been at it for an hour, making sure that Blue looked as good as possible, and that my saddle was soaped, if not oiled. You would have thought a trail ride was some kind of promenade.

Once we were tacked up, I pointed to the east, down between our pastures, through the lower gate, and up to the
Jordan Ranch. It was a spectacular ride, a little wild, but on good ground with flat trails. There were spots we could gallop if we wanted to. Mr. Rosebury asked how long we’d be gone, and I said, “Oh, a couple of hours.”

He said, “Are you sure?”

“Well, I don’t have a watch, but—”

“Are you taking any water?”

“You mean like a canteen or like a bucket?”