Gee Whiz (13 page)

I tuned the rest out, but I did keep nodding and smiling.

And Ellen did concentrate, as only Ellen could. Her trot circles were round, her figure eights had identical halves, her transition to the canter was at just the right spot, and her canter down the long side was even and rocking. She didn’t have to be asked to pet her pony, and I didn’t have to be asked to
set the jumps at two feet, which was exciting enough for Ellen, totally routine for the pony, and not too exciting for me (I could just imagine something going wrong, but I tried not to). The arena we were using was a rectangle, so I set a jump in the middle of one end, another one about halfway down one side, and a third one about halfway down the other side. The first exercise was to do small circles in both directions, at the trot and at the canter, taking in each jump as she went around the circle. She did this very neatly. The second exercise was to do all three jumps, first to the left, then to the right, letting the pony pick his own comfortable gait. He picked the canter. The third exercise was to canter to the right over the three jumps, make a big loop after the last one, and then go back the other way. The pony landed on all his proper leads, and Ellen stayed with him the whole time, her heels down, her eyes up, and a smile on her face—the judge likes to know you are having a good time. She was good. He was very good. Or at least, that’s what she told Jane when we got back to the barn. Jane laughed and patted her on the head, then she said to me, “If you’ve got a minute.” But of course she knew I had plenty of minutes. As I walked into her office, I could hear Ellen telling Rodney in detail about every single jump, and Rodney saying, “You’re joking me, miss. Surely you didn’t do that!”

Jane sat on the edge of her desk and sighed a little sigh, then said, “The pony vetted out fine. They’d like to ship him down to LA the day after Christmas. That’s Monday. And they don’t want to take any chances, so he’s to stay in his stall except for Rodney walking him out every day. He’s suddenly
gone from being a very nice pony to being a very valuable pony, so he won’t be allowed to do anything on his own, without plenty of padding, I’m sure.” She looked at me and shook her head. “I know a woman in Maryland. She has a beautiful place with wonderful pastures and the best possible fencing, but she will not put the horses out because they are so valuable, and she’s so afraid one of them might get hurt!” Then she said, “Well, it’s not my business.” She looked right at me, and said, “That stall will be empty for five days after the pony leaves. I want you to consider something.”

“What?”

“I want you to consider bringing Blue over here and letting Ellen and Melinda ride him. Melinda will be back Monday.”

I said, “I don’t think my dad could afford keeping him here.”

Jane said, “Well, we’ll see. But you know, I haven’t seen him since the clinic. I miss him. I want to see what you’ve done with him. The stall is paid for, and I’ll give you a free lesson in the big arena. How would that be?”

That, I thought, would be great.

When we were finished talking, I walked over to Gallant Man’s stall to say good-bye. He was staring into the distance, chewing a mouthful of hay, and he nickered at me when I approached. Ellen and I had already given him all of our bits of carrots and lumps of sugar, so I went around behind the barn and pulled a few hanks of green grass, which he took from me very nicely. I scratched him under his mane and tickled him around his forelock, which he liked. There had been a time,
not so long before, when I’d had to reach up to tickle his forelock, but that wasn’t true anymore. I said, “You are such a Gallant Man. I wish you weren’t a pony.” We had called Gallant Man just “the pony,” but Jane had named him after a very small horse who’d won the Belmont Stakes. He had also almost won the Kentucky Derby, but his jockey thought they’d crossed the finish line and stood up in his stirrups. But the horse hadn’t yet crossed the finish line—another horse came up and beat him by a nose. Jane had seen two of Gallant Man’s races when she lived in the East, and she thought our pony had some of his “sass,” as she called it. When she’d named him that, it meant nothing to me, but now it meant something. I was waiting to see what. I bent down and kissed him on the nose and said, “Good-bye, little guy.”

Mom had so much stuff in the car that I had to carry a poinsettia in my lap all the way home, but it did put me in a Christmassy mood, especially when she told me that after Barbie was finished with her lesson, we would start making spritz cookies, which were my favorite kind, and then gingerbread men, which were Danny’s favorites.

When Barbie got to our place, she kissed me on the cheek and wished me happy spring, because the shortest day of the year had come and gone and we had survived. She was in a good mood. As something to do during vacation, she and Alexis had asked if they could repaint their bathroom, and her mother had agreed, so as she told me while we were getting Blue out of the pasture (and she did pause to pet Gee Whiz, who nuzzled her hand), they had agreed to paint a picket fence
around the whole bathroom. On each wall, above the picket fence, there would be a different scene. Barbie was to do two walls, one long and one short, and Alexis the other two. They were choosing their scenes independently, and Barbie felt that she had been inspired by the winter solstice. One of her walls, the one that faced south, would have a red, distant sun just peeping above the horizon, and lots of beautiful red, orange, pink, and yellow strips and ribbons of clouds. She hadn’t decided on the other picture, but she did not want to do the obvious (summer solstice), especially as that wall looked east. Then we talked about the party. I said I’d liked Marie. Barbie said Marie had left for her ski trip. We agreed that Marie was

“exotic.”

I decided to do something that I’d never done with Barbie before, which was to get on another horse (in this case, Lincoln) and ride with her while giving her her lesson. We mounted up outside the barn, and walked the horses over to the arena in a relaxed way. I didn’t correct much of what she was doing—she was pretty beyond that now. In the arena, we walked around, practicing good manners—when we were abreast, we kept going and didn’t let the horses argue. When she went ahead on Blue, I stayed three paces behind her, then passed her. When I was in the lead, I sped Lincoln up and slowed him down, and she had to watch me, and make sure that Blue kept the proper distance. We did an exercise where she passed me, then I passed her, then she passed me, all the way down the center line, at both the walk and the trot, then we trotted abreast in a circle and a figure eight, and finally, we cantered abreast, both directions. Lincoln was actually a little harder to handle than Blue, but that was because he wasn’t as
supple as Blue. When we were finished, I let her do her favorite thing, which was to canter around a few times at a pretty good clip, but I did not let her do it without the hard hat, which she wanted to do so that her hair could blow around her in the breeze. Then we walked them out by taking them into the mare pasture and riding down to the creek, though not into it, because it was ten or twelve inches deep and running fairly fast. We didn’t say much, except that I occasionally told her some little thing, like “Sit back going downhill” or “Watch out for the gopher hole.” We saw Rusty across the creek, scouting the far hillside for something or other.

It’s a fairly steep hill from the creek to the top of the mare pasture. We leaned forward, and the horses exerted themselves to make the climb, and as soon as we were in sight of the fence line, we heard a loud and demanding whinny. I said, “Did you tell Gee Whiz we were going to get him out and let him run around?”

She said, “I think he read my mind.”

“He seems to do that.”

“Just the look on his face is really smart.”

“You think that?”

“I do. He looks like this guy at school. Ben Rufus. He’s really tall, like 6′4″, and he never says much, but he’s always watching, and when the teachers actually call on him and make him say something, he gives the right answer as if he thought about it so long ago that it isn’t at all important to him anymore—he’s way past right answers and wrong answers. He’s a little intimidating.”

I tried to imagine someone being intimidating to a Goldman twin. It wasn’t easy. “Where’s he from?”

“Canada. Vancouver.”

Gee Whiz was pressing his chest against the gate enough for the gate to push against the latch, and I saw right then how he had gotten out—I must have left the latch not quite pushed far enough into its slot, and so when he pressed against the gate, it slipped out, and then the gate opened. I saw that we needed a chain and a clip. I shooed him away from the gate. He trotted in a little circle with his tail up. We untacked Blue and Lincoln, and when we put Lincoln in the pasture, he snaked his head and pinned his ears at Gee Whiz, as if to say, “You are not such a big shot!” Then he and Blue trotted out to the middle of the pasture and found nice places to roll. When Barbie and I carried the tack to the barn, Gee Whiz whinnied again, as if to say, “Why do I have to keep reminding you?”

I took the halter that had come with him off the gate, and when I opened the gate, he practically shoved his head into it. I realized that I had never led him anywhere before, and he was a
racehorse
, but he walked along properly, except that his strides were so big that Barbie and I had to hurry to keep up with him. For safety’s sake, I put him first in the training pen. Then I grabbed the flag that was resting against the gatepost and followed him in. He, of course, would not know any of Jem Jarrow’s lessons, but if I shook the flag at him, he would stay to the outside, away from me. I went to the center of the pen, lifted the flag, and waved it, not to scare him, but to see what he would do. He stared at me, flicked his ears and his tail, then turned gracefully, and started trotting around the pen to the left. At first, his stride was even but normal, and he
looked like a pleasant enough horse, though of course, gigantic. But after he’d made his way around the pen twice, maybe just to check out the space, he pricked his ears, lowered his head, and opened up. His stride was smooth, efficient, and huge, as rhythmic as a machine and, it appeared, perfectly natural—when I wanted Blue to speed up his trot (which was not his best gait), I could urge him, and he would do it, but when I stopped urging, he went back to his normal self, like a spring that has a certain natural bounce. Gee Whiz’s natural bounce was much bigger. I called out, “Easy! Whoa!” and stepped toward his head, and he slowed down. He walked, paused for a moment, then realized that he was being asked to turn around. He did so. I waved the flag, and he took off again, his stride huge and mesmerizing. I just stood there with the flag at my side, and he went around until he felt like slowing to the walk. Then I saw that his walk, too, which I hadn’t really noticed, other than seeing that he was crossing the pasture or investigating something, was also big and sinuous.

Barbie said, “He looks different from Tooter. Blue, too.”

I said, “He’s different from any horse I’ve seen, at least that I remember.”

“He’s really big.”

“That’s part of it.” He stopped walking and turned to look at me. I went up to him, grabbed his halter, and walked him over to the fence. “I mean, look at his legs. They’re really long.” I stood right up beside his left foreleg and put the outside of my hand against his elbow. My thumb was at my rib cage.

Barbie said, “It’s not just that they’re long, it’s that they’re
long compared to the rest of him.” And that was true, too. She said, “Let’s take him into the arena.”

“Okay, but we’re not going to do anything to make him run around. We’re just going to stand there and see what he does.”

“Of course! It’s a psychological test. Who is this mysterious stranger? What does he really want?”

“He for sure really wants something. He acts like that all the time.” I snapped on the lead rope, and we led him over to the arena. The best psychological test, I thought, was not to let go of him at the gate but to lead him to the center, where he could go any direction he wanted, and see what he chose, so we did this. I took off the halter so that he would feel completely free. For about thirty seconds, all of us stood absolutely still. Gee Whiz looked at Barbie and me, then off into the distance, then at the barn, then away from the barn. Blue and Jack would have taken off trotting, then started galloping, but Gee Whiz didn’t know this place, and so he started walking—sniffing the poles, sniffing the half-collapsed straw bales, sniffing the jump standards and the cones. Then he trotted away from us over toward the railing, and he seemed to investigate that, too. It was boring in a way, because he wasn’t doing anything exciting, but Barbie said, “What he really wants is to find out.” This seemed to be true. Even when there weren’t particular objects he was sniffing and looking at, there were perspectives—he wanted to see what his new home looked like from the arena, and how it was different from what it looked like from the pasture. Only when he was finished exploring did he start moving, first at the trot—that huge trot
once again—and then, gathering and lifting himself, at the canter. He cantered, but not in a straight line—he turned and switched leads and made loops and crossed the center. It was an easy and supple canter, not rocking and delightful, like Blue’s, but useful—to him. It was Gee Whiz’s own canter, and he could do whatever he wanted while cantering. It was not about being ridden, but about doing what he wanted to do.

And then he opened up and started to gallop.

Now he went in a straight line, keeping to the outside of the arena. It reminded me immediately of Blue and Jack’s little race, which I’d never happened to mention to anyone, except that however enjoyable it was to watch Blue and Jack, this was different. This horse was a professional, and his gallop was powerful and directed in a way that neither of them could understand. His stride was huge and flat, and his legs were like precision instruments in the way they touched the ground, then folded, then stretched. It was also clear from his expression that he was no longer exploring, that now he was galloping for the fun of it. Barbie and I stood there watching him (and I glanced at her—her eyes were wide and her mouth was hanging open, which made me laugh). And just as though he knew what he was doing, he made a loop at the end of the arena and went back the other way. Only now did he kick up.