Boy on a Black Horse (14 page)

“Chav,” I said to him.

“Hey, Gray.” He made himself look at me. “Thanks for what you did.”

“Quit it with the thankses and the sorries, turkey.” I grinned at him. “Tell me something. What do you smell?”

His head came up as he sniffed the air, and the forelock swished back from his eyes, and for a moment I saw the black stallion in him again. He said, “Pizza.”

“How much?” I challenged him.

“Huh?”

He didn't get it yet. “Tons and tons of pizza,” Liana told him, rolling her eyes. I had coached her on what to say. “Gray put in an order for a
truckload
of pizza. We're going to have to drag people in off the streets, or else be eating pizza for days.”

“A truck—” The word caught in Chav's throat. His eyes went wide.

I nodded at Topher, and he stood up and pulled it out of his pocket, the headband, the one Chavali and I had been working on, made of play money coins fastened together. It had taken us a while to get it the way we wanted it, but finally it turned out really beautiful, almost like a crown. “Son,” Topher said to Chav, holding it out, “I understand that Liana and I are supposed to give you this.”

Chav stared. He couldn't seem to move or breathe.

“It goes on him, silly,” Liana told Topher, and she took it and slipped it gently into place on Chav's head. Against his black hair it shone like real gold.

Tears started down his face.

“Chav?” Lee hugged him, and he hung on to her like a baby. Then Topher was hugging him too, and Grandpa looked worried, but I could tell it was all right. These were the good kind of tears, the warm kind, not the kind that had cut him open like knives that afternoon beside the railroad tracks.

“Pizza feast time!” I hollered.

Chav looked at me, his face wet. “Gray,” he said, “I just absolutely hate you,” meaning the opposite.

“Chavali helped,” I told him.

“C'mere, sis.” He got down on his knees, and she ran to him, and he gathered her close to his heart.

“I wish Baval was here,” she told him.

“So do I.” He kept hold of her. “But he's gonna be okay. We talked a lot. He's gonna be fine. He'll be home in a few days.”

She pulled back enough to look at him kneeling there with the plastic-money crown on his head. “Chav,” she asked him, “is there really such a thing as a prince?”

He hesitated.

“I think there is,” Liana said. “A prince doesn't have to be perfect. I think you're looking at one.”

C
HAPTER

13

Chav Calderone

Gray's birthday present is done, finally. Chris got me all different colors of horsehair, red and yellow and black and white and gray, and I braided her a five-color bracelet the way my mother used to do it. And I'm putting my new poem in the box. It doesn't seem like enough after everything, but it's the best I can do. I know she'll love it
.

I'll make Chavali a bracelet when I get a chance, and Liana. I wish she and Chris would just go ahead and get married instead of waiting until the addition on his house gets done. I mean, I wouldn't mind sleeping on a sofa awhile. It's not like I need to have a bedroom to myself. I'm so lucky just to have a family I can't believe it. Lately I'm feeling a lot better about everything. I mean, I know I've got a long way to go, and a lot of the time I still slip up and think the way my father beat into me, but I feel like I can change that. I can do things. I'm not even scared of testifying against my father anymore
—
at least not much, not when Mr. Calderone is on my side
—
I think he'd pull out that cop gun of his and shoot anybody who tried to hurt me or take me away from here
.

It's a good thing I finally got the guts to tell him my father's name, considering that my father had hired goons to look for us kids. I can't believe I thought we were safe. Mr. Calderone is right, the son of a bitch belongs in jail. Daddy dear could hire his hit men and lie to everybody and say we kids were going to school in Europe, but he couldn't lie about where Mom was once the cops got a warrant and found the body. He's finally going to pay, and it feels kind of good
.

And kind of bad. Okay, I am scared, some. I'll be glad when it's over. But it's the right thing to do
.

Baval says he'll testify too, but I don't want him to. He's still real shaky inside. The doctors say stop blaming myself for everything, it's not because of all the stories I told him. They say actually they were good, they were what he needed at the time. And Liana says they were not lies, stories don't have to be fact to be true. Some days I even kind of understand that
.

Life is amazing. It's better than any story I could make up. Of all the wild and crazy things, now Mr. Fischel doesn't seem to mind anymore that I'm part Gypsy. He says hi when I ride by
.

What's even wilder, Minda is going with Fishy. After she found out he and his friends got drunk and wrecked the cemetery, after she talked with him and made him tell his father, now he likes her. He even treats her right. I guess maybe he never really talked with a girl before
.

I wonder why Gray doesn't think she's ever going to have a boyfriend. I'm glad, because the whole idea of that kind of love scares me silly, after what my dad did to my mom. And I want to keep her as my sister forever. But I want her to be happy, so I just wonder
—

Never mind, time's up. Gotta go dissect some poor dead poem. That's okay. Even Mrs. Higby doesn't seem so bad these days
.

Things happened. I turned fourteen; I wore the horsehair bracelet Chav gave me almost every day; Liana and Chris got married, so she is a Worthwine; and they started proceedings to get legal custody of Chav and Baval and Chavali, and then adopt all us kids, but I won't have to change my name. I am still Gray Calderone and Chav is a Calderone too. He says he just likes the name, but I think maybe it is more like I adopted him first. I think that because of the poem he gave me. It says:

I came here Prince of Scars

King of Hunger

Lord of Anger

on a black horse riding

in the dark of midnight

in the dark of my heart

in fear

but here

you made me Prince of Pizza

King of Calderone

Lord of Topher

by a Gray girl riding

in the daylight of my heart

with a crown of happiness

You brought me home

You better believe I am going to keep that poem forever.

More things that happened: we moved out to the stable. The Spanish Dancer Ranch sent Chav a poster of Rom, I mean Fuerza Epica, and an invitation to come ride for them someday. Minda bought a boy gerbil that performed a miracle and had babies. Baval and Chavali each got one. I helped Chris retrain Red the white Thoroughbred, and so did Chav. Chavali got a fat little dapple-dun pony. Baval started riding Dude sometimes, since Minda wasn't riding as much anymore. I decided what Dude's color was: palominto. Get it? Palomino pinto.

It's funny how some things work out. You give away a lunch or two, and look what happens.

There was a day that first summer when Chav and I went riding up the hill past the Fischel cemetery and out along the tracks to the abandoned Altland farm. I looked at him sometimes while we rode, because he was beautiful to look at the way he sat a horse. He wore his black jeans but a white T-shirt—he did that sometimes those days, wore white or silver or gray as well as black. I figured someday he'd surprise me and graduate to real colors.

We didn't talk much. Chav was riding Red, only he called her Angel—she was his horse now. He had to concentrate on keeping her together. She took a good rider because on the trail she was frightened of everything, but that was what he was, a good rider, because he had a feeling about horses. He never seemed to get angry at Angel. At other things, plenty, including at me sometimes, but never at Angel.

Me? I rode Paradiddle. I guess I really did have a horse of my own now; in fact, I had a couple dozen. I could ride any horse on the place, and I rode them all one time or another, but for some reason I kept coming back to Diddle, blimpy middle and curly hair and all. Chav and I were just taking a quiet ride, not trying to prove anything to anybody, so I rode Diddle.

Nothing had changed at the Altland place except that the grass and wildflowers were tall in the meadow now. We rode down the slope to the empty silo and halted the horses and just sat there looking.

“It hasn't even been a year,” Chav said.

“Seems so long,” I teased him. It did, but only because it felt like he'd always been my brother.

He barely smiled. It took a lot to make him smile. “Seems so different,” he said. “Everything's changed. Back then I didn't …” He went silent, looking around like something might sneak up on him. By then, living with him, I had learned to keep my big mouth shut sometimes. I sat and listened to Diddle swishing her tail and waited.

He said, “Back then I didn't ever think I'd keep, you know, living. I felt like a Kleenex or something: use it and then throw it away. Baval and Chavali were the ones who counted, not me. I felt thin as paper.”

I waited some more.

Chav said, “Nowadays this whole idea that I'm going to have a life, I can be something, maybe a horse trainer, maybe a poet or a songwriter or a storyteller—it feels so strange. I mean, it feels great, but really, really strange. I can't believe it. I still can't believe I'm going to be okay.”

“You're gonna be okay,” I told him.

“Doofus, I just said that.”

“But you don't believe it.”

“Give me a break. What about you, Gray? Are you going to make it?”

“Huh?”

Over Angel's pricked white ears he looked straight at me and said, “Tell me about the accident.”

He wasn't asking for information—he had heard all about it from Liana and Grandma and Grandpa. There was a hard edge in his voice. He was challenging me.

Oh no. I could fool all the adults, but I couldn't fool Chav. He saw right through me, how I wasn't handling it as well as I pretended. The others saw me smiling in the daytime; they didn't suspect how I still cried at night sometimes. But Chav knew. Not that he had heard me or anything—he just knew.

“Chav—”

“Gray, you are going to do this. Tell me about the accident.”

“Damn it, Chav!” I yelled hard enough to make Diddle jump. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Your brother. I am doing this because I loathe you and detest you and this is my way of showing it.” His voice was gentle now. “C'mon.”

I knew who he was. He was a boy who had mothered his sister and brother for a year and a half on his own. He was a kid who had come apart and put himself back together in a new and better way. He had been on the ground and still had his eyes on the sky. He was Chav. So I told him.

“Uncle Dan had this boat …” I started over because I wasn't telling it very well. “He had a big boat, and he had a cottage on Lake Champlain, which is, you know, a really huge lake. We were all supposed to go up for a weekend, but I got sick. I had the flu. So Lee said she'd stay with me, and everybody else should go. She never liked boating all that much, but the rest of us loved it. Including me. I was so mad that I had to go and get sick.”

My voice started to shake, but Chav nodded to me to keep me going. His eyes were quiet and soft and steady on me.

“So it was a hot sunny day, and they were all out in the middle of the lake, and they all jumped in to swim. All of them, even little Carrie and Cassie.” No, I couldn't do this after all. My voice was shaking too bad, and I had to hide my face.

“Gray, don't stop.” I felt Chav's hand on my shoulder, warm, bridging the distance between us. “Keep going. You have to talk about it. You've got to.”

I had made him do things sometimes. He was maybe the one person in the world who had a right to make me do this. So I blurted it out. “They—it was so stupid, they couldn't get back in the boat! It was too high.…” Never mind what my face was showing—I looked at him. “See, usually Liana would have been there to give them a hand back in, because she doesn't like to swim. It just so happened we'd never gone in all at once before, so nobody realized—they couldn't get out of the water. The boat rode too high when it was empty. And it's such a big lake, they were too far from shore, and nobody came.…”

It seemed so unfair. A storm I could have understood, but—there was not a cloud in the sky. I remembered lying in bed sick with flu, thinking what a great summer day it was, what a good time everybody else was having. Probably somebody had yelled, “Last one in's a rotten egg!” And then they had all dived in without thinking. People having fun. Jumping in.

And then—realizing. I wondered sometimes what they had said to one another, what they had done. Whether they had been angry, or cried, or said good-bye.

Somehow I had stopped crying. “They all drowned,” I told Chav almost calmly. “My father, my mother, my brother Adam, Uncle Dan, and little Cassie and Carrie.”

His eyes were deep and wet, like the lake, letting me in—but it was all right, I would not drown in Chav. I could trust him. He was warm. His hand was warm on my shoulder.

I told him, “Sometimes I—sometimes I feel like, why did I live?”

“Good thing for me you did,” Chav said softly.

That actually made me smile. But I said, “You know what I mean. Sometimes I feel like I should have been with them, I should have died. Or if it hadn't been for me, Liana would have been there on the boat to help us all back in the way she always did.”