Centaur Rising (13 page)

“Okay, but you have to stay close and listen to me. And when I say it's time to come back in, you have to come. I can't go chasing after you. Not in the dark.
I
can't see in the dark.”

“Okay, Ari,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

I nodded. “Promise?”

“Prrrrrromise!” His voice was breathily positive, as if he actually knew what a promise was.

I picked up one of my old sweaters that was hanging on the door and wrestled it over him. It was too big for him, so I had to help him with the sleeves. He giggled as I rolled them up.

“Don't want you getting cold out there,” I said. Actually, it was a soft August night, and Kai seemed as resistant to mild night temperatures as the rest of the horses.

“What is
cold
, Ari?” he asked.

I put my arms around him and made a shiver and said, “Brrrrr.”

He giggled and repeated the sound. But I wasn't sure he got it.

“Cold wind,” I said. “Ice and snow. Freeze. Low temperature.”

“I've read about snow,” he said. “When can I see it?”

“Not for months,” I told him. “But it's really cold.”

“Brrrr,” he said, and grinned.

“Never mind,” I said, and took his warm little hand in mine. “There's plenty of time for snow.” We went out into the corridor, and he began to run before I had a chance to lock the door into the paddock. He cantered down to where the door stood ajar and then ran right into the paddock with the kind of knock-kneed joy that all colts have. In a moment, he had gone into the darkness near the trees.

I ran after him, calling in a desperate whisper, “Kai, get back here, now!”

Hera put her nose out of her stall, top female protecting her herd. She whickered quietly, and Kai trotted back to whinny at her. His voice sounded much more human than horse.

And then I thought,
Come on, Ari, it's night.
Daylight
is the problem, not the dark. No one can see him now, but he can see in the dark. Let him run around a little bit without yammering at him. Maybe that's part of Plan C!
I touched the horse part of his back. “Okay, Kai—go run in the paddock. But come back the moment I call!”

Off he went, outlined by moonlight, out where Mom and Robbie and I had watched the star shower last year, a time when life was predictable, if not always happy. A time when I'd wanted magic to come into my life. Before I wondered if that was what I really wanted after all.

He stopped in the grass and turned to me. “Soft,” he said.

“Grass,” I told him.

He spread his front legs wide and bent over until he could touch the tops of the grass, then pulled some up and sniffed at it.

“What does it smell like?”

He giggled. “Grass.” He rose on his hind feet and flung his arms wide. “It smells like
grass
, Ari!”

“Shush,” I cautioned, but I was too late, for he was suddenly running around the field close to the fence. The moon outlined his body, and he seemed to glow, like something out of a legend—otherworldly, beautiful. Something too wonderful to be kept hidden in a small, square, concrete-floored stall.

Magic!
This time I was certain of it.
Magic should never be contained
, I thought.
It should run free in this world.
I was smiling so broadly my lips began to ache, and I didn't care a bit.

Stopping, Kai leaned down and plucked some of the long grass near the fence and put it in his mouth.

He spit it right out. “Poo, Ari,” he said, immediately trying another handful, but spitting it out as well. “No, no, no!” His voice rose, like a two-year-old having a tantrum. “No, no, no!”

I put my finger to my lips. “Shhhhh,” I said, “or we'll have to go back inside.”

He mimicked me and held his finger up, touching his lip. And as he did, something flashed.

I looked up at the sky.

No stars falling, though a lot of them glared down at us.

The flash came again. This time from beyond the fence.

Then another. And another.

I spun around, screamed, “Run, Kai, run back to the barn! Run! Run! Run!”

 

16

Lemons

K
AI MUST HAVE HEARD
the terror in my voice, because he immediately galloped away, heading for the safety of his stall, his hair and mane flagging out behind as he ran.

Once he was in the barn, I could hear his feet scrabbling on the concrete floor and was afraid he was going to fall and break a leg. A horse with a broken leg is a doomed creature. If the horse can't stand on the leg, then he can't maintain normal blood pressure. Death is only a matter of time. That's why a vet will put down a horse with a badly broken leg—so as not to prolong its suffering.

I tried not to imagine it. Gasping in fear, I followed Kai into the barn, making enough noise to wake up anyone.

But it was far too late to worry about that.

The flashes behind us had come in steady succession, like July Fourth fireworks.

Then someone on the Suss side of the fence had called out, “Run here, Kai, come here, Kai.” Then the voice cried, “Look at the birdie, Kai!”

But thankfully, Kai was already gone.

And I wasn't far behind.

*   *   *

By the time Kai was in his stall, the house and barn lights were blazing. Martha was there with her pitchfork, her nightgown flapping about her boots. Mom had taken up guard duty in front of Kai's stall, holding on to a rolling pin I didn't even know we owned.

Hair standing up in sleep-spikes, Dr. Herks was already by the fence, glaring into the darkness. He had a pistol in his hand.

“We're calling the police,” he shouted. “In the meantime, I'm armed. And as a captain in the army, I have a gun permit. Trust me, I know how to shoot!”

A pistol!

A threat of violence!

Try explaining
that
in our Quaker meeting. We're all supposed to be pacifists, a fancy grown-up way of saying we're against war in all its forms and against weapons entirely. But Dr. Herks had been a soldier before he was a Quaker.

There was a sudden flurry on the other side of the fence, a car door slammed. Tires squealed out of the field.

Behind me our horses were kicking at the stall doors, whinnying their distress. Bor was bugling, Hera practically screaming.

As for Agora, she'd backed Kai up against the far wall of their stall and pushed him down so she could stand over him. Her lips were drawn back over her yellowed teeth. No one—not even me—was going to get near him again this night.

Beneath her, Kai was sobbing as if his heart was breaking.

And maybe it was.

*   *   *

It was all my fault. I was the one who had taken him out, who encouraged him to run about in the open field—the one who'd let him be exposed. There was no wriggle room in my conscience to explain away my guilt.

“Sooner or later, we were gonna have to face it,” Martha said. “And as I'd fallen asleep on watch, this was really
my
fault, Ari, not yours.”

Arms around me, Mom said, “It was bound to happen, honey.”

“But this was too
soon
,” I mumbled into Mom's arms. “Kai wasn't ready.
We
weren't ready.”

Pacing back and forth and thinking out loud, Dr. Herks said, “It must have been that Fern guy. So, how good are his photos? If he was rushed, frightened, maybe not so good. And it's night. Night-vision cameras are mostly army stuff. Not really in public use. And used for spying, not taking pictures. With a regular camera the lighting's nonexistent. Yet, there's the moon. Maybe he only got shots of Kai's back.… Should we call the police?”

Over my head, Mom said to him, “No police. Not now. It will just make things worse.”

“I wasn't planning…” He stopped, and I could hear him take a deep breath. “Just talking things through. I see things clearer when I hear them. It…” He stopped, drew another big breath. “
I
take some getting used to.”

Mom put her hand on his arm, which stopped his pacing. “We all take getting used to, Gerry. Now more than ever.”

I asked everyone's forgiveness again, but couldn't forgive myself. Any time there was a lull in the conversation about what to do next, I mumbled, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” until finally after about an hour of it—or so it felt—Martha broke into one of my apologies with a voice like broken glass.

“No apologizing for lemons, girl. We gotta make lemonade. So says Dale Carnegie, and I agree.”

That made Mom and Dr. Herks laugh, but I didn't understand what she meant. “Who's Dale Carnegie, and what does she mean?”

“He. That Dale's a he. And he means, we are stuck with the lemon, so deal with it.” Martha was unstoppable. “It's a big lemon of a moment. Plenty of sour to go around. So what do we do with it? You can't eat it. So how are you going to use it?”

Finally, I got it. “Make lemonade.”

“We've got to think about containment,” Dr. Herks said.

I shook my head, because I didn't know what he meant.

“Circle the wagons,” he added, which just made things murkier.

“Say it straight,” Martha told him.

Mom sighed. “He means we've got to control the story.”

“What story?” Martha gave a short, sharp laugh. “This isn't a story.”

“It's a story
now
, Martha,” I said. “It's going to be in the papers and maybe even on the news.”

“Oh,
that
!” Martha shrugged. “Lemons.”

“But how do we
make
the lemonade?” My voice sounded whiny. I felt as if I was five years old again.

“Squeeze out the juice, water it down, add sugar.”

“But what does
that
mean?”

Mom answered for her, “We take the essence of the story and doctor it. We put our own spin on the story. We control the lemon
and
the lemonade.”

“Not my job,” Martha said, letting herself into the stall where Kai had sobbed himself to sleep. She closed the door to the rest of us and locked it behind her with a
snick
. It was as if she was saying we were the enemy as well.

And maybe we were.

*   *   *

Dr. Herks wrestled a table out of the office and put it outside the stall. Mom and I brought out four chairs, though only three of us were sitting and talking.

We spoke in hushed tones about circuses, movies, Disney animal documentaries, and more, until Martha—in a fit of nosiness—came out of the stall. She didn't sit at the table with us, but instead paced up and down the corridor.

Dr. Herks kept slapping his hand on the table like some kind of punctuation. “There's always the local zoo,” he said. “The one in Springfield.”

I stood angrily. “That's just another way of saying Kai's a freak. I veto
all
these ideas!” My voice was harsh with lack of sleep. Dr. Herks hushed me with a finger to his lips.

“We're trying to think of ways to
protect
him, honey,” Mom told me. She put out her hand and grabbed mine, but I shook her off.

“You're trying to find a way of displaying him, not containment but
entertainment
. He may be a freak—but he's
our
freak!”

“We're trying to keep him—and the farm—safe,” Dr. Herks said. His pistol sat on the table, a reminder of how dangerous this all was becoming.

“Ari's right. Display is not protection,” Martha said, coming out of the stall to sit in the chair put out for her.

I sat as well, too tired to remain standing.

“Keeping him in a stall forever is not good for his health,” Dr. Herks reminded her. “He needs to run.”

I nodded my agreement to them both, no longer trusting my voice.

The wind had picked up, and there was the sound of its swooshing through the tree limbs. We started to wrestle with the idea of getting onto radio and TV talk shows, the kids' shows, news shows. Mom and Dr. Herks sent ideas across the table as if they were playing a fast game of Ping-Pong.

All through the conversation, arms folded, Martha breathed noisily, like a winded horse, but made no suggestions. From the other side of the barn, a horse answered her back.

“Maybe what we need is a lawyer,” Mom said. “I only have John Banks from town. He handles divorces. Not sure he's up to this.”

“Maybe what we need is a
publicist,
” said Dr. Herks. He said the “we” softly, as if he hadn't the right to use it and wanted Mom to know that he knew. Then he turned to me in case I didn't know what a publicist was. “Someone to help us sort through publicity and make sure it's good publicity, not bad.”

Martha snorted again.

“Like it or not, Martha,” Mom told her, “someone's going to try to exploit Kai. That's why
we
have to find ways to protect him.”

And that's when I finally got it. Either he was taken care of by us, or he'd be taken over by people who only wanted to make money from him.

“We're going to need the backing of top veterinarians, folklorists, psychologists, professors…,” Dr. Herks said.

“Quacks, nuts, and academics.” Martha stood up, shoving her chair roughly to one side.

“Don't you walk away from this, Martha,” Mom said as Martha started down the corridor.

“Not walking here,” Martha called back. “Running!”

Their voices were getting loud.

“Shhhh,” I said, pointing at the stall. “You'll wake him.” I spoke slowly, as if talking to children. “He needs time to grow up. He needs Robbie and me to play with him. He needs to learn.”

“Learn what?” Mom asked.

“Learn what he likes—learn what he wants to be. And what he doesn't want to be. What if he became one of the bad centaurs in the Greek stories when he could be more like Chiron, who was a great teacher?”