Ghetto Cowboy (4 page)

But Harper acts all calm, like it ain’t no big thing, following the horse with his eyes as he steps right into the horse’s path. The horse skids to a stop and suddenly, they face-to-face. I think for sure the horse is going to charge him, but Harper just raises his hands, nice and easy. Everyone watching gets all quiet.

When he steps closer, the horse backs up, almost into the fence. Harp reaches forward to touch him, and the horse suddenly jumps up on his back legs, like he gonna stomp him. But Harper don’t back off. He stands there, as calm as can be, like he reeling the monster in with his mind. He starts whispering something over and over until that horse finally settles back down to earth. The kids shake their heads like they can’t believe what they seein’.

Harper moves in closer and closer, the horse rising up a coupla times. But suddenly Harper’s standing right next to him, his hand on the horse’s shoulder, then his neck, and finally, his head. Harper shushes him like a little baby till the horse is all relaxed, and then it’s just the two of them together. Harper’s all smiles, patting the horse on his neck. Then he sees me. He walks the horse over my way, where it comes right up shaking its head at me. I jump off the fence.

“You ever seen a real-live horse before you got here?”

I step back a few feet. “Nah. I live in the city.”

He laughs. “This
is
the city.”

I roll my eyes. “This ain’t no city. This is like . . . I don’t know what. It’s crazy, all I know.”

The Muslim dude grins. “That your son?”

Harper shakes his head. “Nah, just found him on my doorstep.” He turns back to me. “Wanna ride?”

“You crazy? I ain’t getting on one a them things!”

He points to the kids sitting on the fence. “See them kids? They smaller than you, but they all ride.”

I look at them. They look just like any kids you might find flippin’ on a mattress in any ol’ empty lot. They don’t look afraid, pattin’ that horse from the fence. But I still ain’t getting up on something that’s ten times bigger than me. “Nah. I’m too hungry now. I ain’t eaten since yesterday.”

Then someone behind me says, “Is that so?”

I turn around and see a old head, looking at me all close-up through thick beat-up glasses, his big ol’ cowboy hat almost hittin’ me in the head. He must be a hundred years old.

He squints at me. “Harper, you didn’t feed this boy?”

Harper shrugs. “Can’t you see I’m busy? Boy can fend for himself.”

The old man shakes his head, whispers to me. “Dang fool. Don’t care about nobody unless they got four legs and a tail. Come on, I got some eats in the clubhouse. Follow me.”

I follow the old man. He got real dark skin, which make his white hair look like snow. His legs seem all crooked, like he been knocked off a horse one too many times. On the way over, he starts giving me a tour of the place. “We got us three stables on this property, ’bout thirty stalls total. We’re full up at the moment, since some of the other stables ’round here closed in the last couple years.”

He stops and waves at another old-timer who’s playing chess by himself. “Must be forty or so of us riders who call this home, though some guys is too old to ride much,” he says. “This fella here got knocked off his horse about three months ago, ain’t that right, Doc? We found him lying on his back, his shoes still stuck in the stirrups of his horse!” They laugh and shake hands. “Thought he was dead, but he was up and about and just fine after a few days. Tough dude, this one.”

We pass a few other kids stacking them hay squares. They look kinda scraggly, like they was playin’ in the dirt, but happy. Like them other kids, they talking about who’s the fastest racer. The old man jokes with them, “Y’all owe me sodas from falling off your horse, so you shouldn’t be talking about who’s the fastest just yet. ’Sides, we all know who the fastest
really
is.” He points at himself, and they all laugh and give him high fives.

“Them your kids?” I ask as we move on.

He smiles. “My kids? Well, I practically raised ’em since they was pups, but nah, they ain’t mine. My kids is too busy working for their corporate masters to be concerned with horses.” He sees I got no idea what he talking about. “These kids here come off the streets. They got nowhere else to go, ’cept gangs.”

A stray cat comes wandering up to him, and he picks it up. I notice there’s a lot of strays running around here. “Kids and cats. They seem to find their way here, and they keep coming back. What’re you gonna do?”

He hobbles around a corner, where I see a homemade shack. “Well, here we are.” The “clubhouse” is a old one-room shed with a dirt floor. We go inside, where the old man has a coupla plug-in cookers going . . . but it actually smells pretty good.

“Got some Texas chili with cowboy potatoes over rice and homemade corn bread. You like corn bread?”

“Right now, as long as it ain’t movin’, I’ll eat it.”

He blows the dust out of a old bowl and fills it up. “Boys got to eat!” he says, laughing.

We sit down on some old folding chairs, and he watches me dig in. Food’s good too, not like what I normally eat. It makes my stomach feel all warm.

He sees me looking at some old pictures of a black cowboy on the wall.

“That’s me, back in the day. Used to be the number-one bull rider on the southwest tour.”

I think he musta watched one too many cowboy movies on TV. “Sure thing, mister. . . .”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

I swallow my food. “Look, you guys might think y’all is cowboys, but all I know is, real cowboys is white.”

The old man shakes his head, like I’m a fool. “Son, don’t you know black cowboys is a tradition that goes back to before the Civil War?”

“Whatever,” I say.

He looks disappointed. “Not whatever, man. The word
cowboy
started as a
black
word. Wear it proudly.”

“So how come I never seen any black cowboys on TV then?”

He waves his hand. “TV. Humph. Can’t trust the media to tell the truth. The truth is, the white man always gets his way. Looky here. . . .”

He pulls out a book from a dusty shelf. It got pictures and drawings from a long time ago. He shows me some old black-and-white pictures of black dudes dressed in homemade clothes doing cowboy stuff — roping, riding, and cleaning horses.

“Back in the slave days, the slave who worked in the house was called a
houseboy.
The slaves who worked with the cows was called
cowboys.
Get it?”

No, but he just getting started. He points to a picture of a black cowboy riding a horse out in the wild. He got one of them cowboy rope things whirling in the air like he about to catch some bull. “That’s Bill Pickett, son of a slave and the most famous black cowboy of all. Back then, there was almost nine thousand black cowboys out West, working cattle and driving ’em up the Chisholm Trail and such. And these cowboys was so good that eventually, the whites took the name
cowboy
for themselves. Stole it, really. Now we’re just trying to take it back, is all.”

He straightens his hat, like he in a movie or something.

I shake my head. “You guys is funny. We in the city, with cars and computers and stuff, and you think you back in the
Wild, Wild West
!”

He smiles, like
I’m
the one living in a fantasy world.

I shrug and start eating again. He watches me for a long time until I say, “Why you gotta stare at me for?”

That makes him laugh. “You got your mama’s eyes, but your daddy’s attitude.”

I choke on something, and he lean over and smacks me on the back. “You know my mama?” I ask.

“Know her? I’m the one who drove her back to her folks in Detroit.”

This is definitely news to me. “Why’d you do
that
?” I say, my face gettin’ all hot.

He looks at me like I hurt his feelings or something. “I didn’t drive her away — I just took her home to her people, like she asked me to. See, sometimes young’uns aren’t up for the things they get themselves into. I know your daddy well, known him his whole life. He can take care of a horse better’n anybody, but a wife and a kid? He was useless. It was the best thing for you.”

Just thinking about Harp caring more for a dumb horse than us gets me seein’ red. “What’d I ever do to him?”

He bends down close to me and whispers, “You didn’t do nothing, son. You was only a tiny guy. Some people just relate better to animals. But your mama, she don’t got horse in her blood. She tried, but I knew it was gonna end badly. It don’t make either side bad; it’s just the way it is. Sometimes you gotta move on.”

That makes me even more mad ’cause I realize me and Harper got something in common: we both drove Mama away.

T
he old man pats me on the back. “Harp said he and your mama are gonna talk again tonight on the phone. We’ll get this mess cleaned up, don’t you worry. Meanwhile, eat up, then come on out and ask for me. Name’s Tex.”

I watch him shuffle out, and I just sit there, shakin’ my head.
Great. Texas in Philly now.
I finish up my bowl, and just when I start thinkin’ about what I’m gonna do next, Harper walks in.

He has a brush in one hand and a rake in the other. He hands the brush to me. “If you gonna be here today, might as well make yourself useful.”

I look at the brush. “I don’t think so.”

He acts like I didn’t say nothing. “It’s a horse brush. Go out front and help brush down the horses. The kids’ll show you how.”

I shake my head. “Nah-uh. I ain’t going near them horses. I seen how you almost got stomped on this morning.”

He smirks. “That’s whatcha call re-starting a horse. Some of ’em that we bring in are pretty nervous and out of control ’cause of what they been through at the tracks.”

I can see he not going to go away. “What’s wrong with ’em?” I ask.

“Nothing, they just been abandon —” He catches himself, starts again. “They’re old racehorses that normally get sold off for meat. We pool our money to buy what we can at auction before the slaughterhouse gets ’em. Then we bring ’em here so they can live out their days — the kids learn to ride, and we get a few more horses to race with. ’Course, with money being tight an’ all . . .”

But my mind’s still stuck on the meat part. “People
eat
horses?” I ask.

“Dogs. They get sold for dog food.”

I feel like I been sold for dog food, but I still ain’t getting near them things. “I’ll just stay here, thanks,” I say.

He shakes his head. “The heck you will. If you here, you gotta help out. Everybody works. All those kids work and so will you.”

I don’t say nothing, just stare hard at that brush.

He can see I really got my mind set, ’cause after a few seconds, he holds out the rake. “Fine . . . then go muck the stalls in the Ritz-Carlton instead.”

I’m confused until I find out the Ritz-Carlton is what they call the main stable. They call it that as a joke ’cause it’s definitely
not
a luxury hotel. In fact, when I see it, I know this as far from luxury as a horse can get. It looks more like a dungeon, all dark and cramped. And a homemade dungeon at that, since it’s held together by old doors and scrap wood from torn-down buildings.
And
it smells funky.

When I see what needs cleaning up, I think,
No way.
There’s piles of muck all over — and I mean the kind that come out of a horse. Man, these things must eat a lot. Harper leaves me there, with the rake and a wheelbarrow and says I got till sundown to finish picking up all this crap.

I stand there for five minutes, then decide I’ll do what he says for
today
 . . . but tomorrow, I’m outta here. I don’t know how, but one way or another, I’ll get back to Motor City. But the second I step into one of them stalls, I know I made the wrong choice to work in the barn. My white Nikes is all covered in greenish-brown you-know-what in about a minute. I’ll never get ’em cleaned.

I start working. Even though this sucks for sure, I just keep going, nonstop, ’cause if I stop, I’ll start thinking about how my mama just up and left me with a stranger. And a strange stranger too, even if he supposed to be my dad.

So I work and feel the burn in my arms, the sweat on my back. I don’t care. I’ll make her feel sorry for leaving me behind to clean up this stuff.

The only good thing right now is all them horses is outside. But just doing the one stall takes me ’bout a hour. When I fill up the cart, I wheel it out to find out where to dump it. I run into Jamaica Bob.

“Where do all this go?” I ask him. He waves me to follow him, but don’t offer to help me push. We turn the corner, and my jaw drops open.

Behind the barn is a mountain. Not a mountain like with snow on it and stuff. This is a mountain of
horse crap.
I ain’t kidding you. This thing is about fifteen feet tall and fills up a huge part of the yard.

Bob scowls. “City used to come and haul it away, just like it did for all the stables in Philly. Then about two months ago, they just up and stopped, saying something about budget issues and how we ain’t legal —”

“Legal? What you mean?” I ask.

He makes a face. “We own some of these structures here, but all of
this
land,” he says, pointing from the Ritz to the corral and the clubhouse, all the way out to the fields, where some teenagers are running horses. “The City owns all
that.
But it never did anything with it, ’cause nobody ever wanted nothing to do with this neighborhood. For decades, they just let it rot. Buildings would sit here empty and vandalized, just waiting to become crack houses and gang hangouts. But this our home turf, and we decided to make something of it. So we took it back. Made it our own.”