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Chapter Twenty-three 7 page

Tom always started by having a word with the owner to find out the horse's 'history', as he liked to call it. Had he been ridden yet? Were there any special problems? There always were, but more often than not it was the horse who told you what they were, not the owner.

This little thoroughbred was a case in point. The woman who owned him said he had a tendency to buck and was reluctant to move out. He was lazy, cranky even, she said. But now that Tom and Rimrock had him circling around them in the corral, the horse was saying something different. Tom always gave a running commentary into the radio mike so the crowd could follow what he was doing. He tried not to make the owner sound foolish. Too foolish anyway.

'There's another story coming through here,' he said. 'It's always kind of interesting to hear the horse's side of the story. Now if he was cranky or lazy, like you say, we'd be seeing the tail twitching there and his ears back maybe. But this isn't a cranky horse, it's a scared horse. You see how braced he is there?'

The woman was watching from outside the corral, leaning on the rail. She nodded. Tom had Rimrock turning on a dime, in deft little white-socked steps, so he was always facing the circling thoroughbred.

'And how he keeps pointing his hindquarters in at me? Well, I'd guess the reason he seems reluctant to move out is because when he does he gets into trouble for it.'

'He's not good at transitions,' the woman said. 'You know? When I want him to move from a trot to a lope, say?'

Tom had to bite his tongue when he heard this kind of talk.

'Uh-huh,' he said. 'That's not what I'm seeing. You may think you're asking for a lope but your body's saying something else. You're putting too many conditions on it. You're saying "Go, but hey, don't go!" Or maybe "Go, but not too fast!" He knows this from the way you feel. Your body can't lie. You ever give him a kick to make him move out?'

'He won't go unless I do.'

'And then he goes and you feel he's going too fast, so you yank him back?'

'Well, yes. Sometimes.'

'Sometimes. Uh-huh. And then he bucks.' She nodded.

He said nothing for a while. The woman had got the message and was starting to look defensive. She was clearly big on image, made up like Barbara Stanwyck, with all the right gear. The hat alone must have set her back three hundred bucks. God knows what the horse cost. Tom worked on getting the thoroughbred focused on him. He had sixty foot of coiled rope and he threw it so the coils slapped against the horse's flank, making it burst into a lope. He coiled the rope back in then did it again. Then again and again, making the animal go from a trot to a lope, letting it slow, then up to a lope again.

'I want him to get so as he can leave real soft,' he said. 'He's getting the idea now. He's not all braced up and tense like he was at the start. See the way his hindquarters are straightening out? And how his tail's not clamped in all tight like it was? He's finding out it's okay to go.' He threw the rope again and this time the transition to the lope was smooth.



'You see that? That's a change. He's getting better already. Pretty soon, if you work at it, you'll be able to make all these transitions easy on a loose rein.'

And pigs will fly, he thought. She'll take the poor animal home, ride him just as she always did and all this work will have been for nothing. The thought, as always, moved him up a gear. If he fixed the horse real good, maybe he could immunize the poor thing against her stupidity and fear. The thoroughbred was moving out nicely now but Tom had only worked on one side, so he turned him around to make him run the other way and did the whole thing over again.

It took almost an hour. By the time he finished, the thoroughbred was sweating hard. But when Tom let him ease up and come to a standstill, the horse looked kind of disappointed.

'He could go on playing all day,' said Tom. 'Hey mister, can I have my ball back?' The crowd laughed. 'He's going to be okay - so long as you don't go yanking on him.' He looked at the woman. She nodded and tried to smile but Tom could see she was crestfallen and he suddenly felt sorry for her. He walked Rimrock over to where she stood and switched off the radio mike so only she could hear when he spoke.

'It's all about self-preservation,' he said gently. 'You see, these animals have got such big hearts; there's nothing they want more than to do what you want them to. But when the messages get confused, all they can do is try and save themselves.'

He smiled down at her for a moment, then said: 'Now why don't you go saddle him up and see?'

The woman was close to tears. She climbed over the rail and walked over to her horse. The little thoroughbred watched her all the way. He let her come right up and stroke his neck. Tom watched.

'He's not going to look back if you don't,' he said. 'They're the most forgiving creatures God ever made.'

She led the horse out and Tom brought Rimrock slowly back to the middle of the corral, letting the silence hold for a while. He took off his hat, squinting at the sky as he wiped the sweat from his brow. The two buzzards were still hanging there. Tom thought how mournful their mewing sounded. He put his hat back on and flicked the switch of the radio mike.

'Okay folks. Who's next?'

It was the guy with the donkey.

 

Chapter Eight

 

It was more than a hundred years since Joseph and Alice Booker, Tom's great-grandparents, made their long journey west to Montana, lured like thousands of others by the promise of land. The passage cost them the lives of two children, one from scarlet fever and the other drowned, but they made it as far as the Clark's Fork River and there staked a claim to a hundred and sixty fertile acres.

By the time Tom was born, the ranch they started had grown to twenty thousand acres. That it had so prospered, let alone endured the ruthless round of drought, flood and felony, was mainly due to Tom's grandfather John. It was at least logical therefore that it should be he who destroyed it.

John Booker, a man of great physical strength and even greater gentleness, had two sons. Above the ranch house that had long since replaced the tarred homesteaders' shack, stood a rocky bluff where the boys played hiding games and looked for arrowheads. From its crest you could see the river curving around like a castle moat and in the distance the snowy peaks of the Pryor and Beartooth Mountains. Sometimes the boys would sit there side by side without talking and look out across their father's land. What the younger boy saw was his entire world. Daniel, Tom's father, loved the ranch with all his heart and if ever his thoughts strayed beyond its boundaries, it was only to reinforce the feeling that all he wanted lay within them. To him the distant mountains were like comforting walls, protecting all he held dear from the turbulence beyond. To Ned, three years his senior, they were the walls of a prison. He couldn't wait to escape and when he was sixteen he duly did. He went to California to seek his fortune and lost a gullible succession of business partners theirs instead.

Daniel stayed and ran the ranch with his father. He married a girl called Ellen Hooper from Bridger and they had three children, Tom, Rosie and Frank. Much of the land John had added to those original riverside acres was poorer pasture, rough sage-strewn hills of red gumbo gashed with black volcanic rock. The cattle work was done on horseback and Tom could ride almost before he could walk. His mother used to like telling how, at two years old, they'd found him in the barn, curled up in the straw asleep, between the massive hooves of a percheron stallion. It was as though the horse was guarding him, she said.

They used to halter-break their colts as yearlings in the spring and the boy would sit on the top rail of the corral and watch. Both his father and his grandfather had a gentle way with the horses and he didn't discover till later that there was any other way.

'It's like asking a woman to dance,' the old man used to say. 'If you've got no confidence and you're scared she's gonna turn you down and you sidle up, looking at your boots, sure as eggs'll break she will turn you down. Of course, then you can try grabbing her and forcing her around the floor, but neither one of you's gonna end up enjoying it a whole lot.'

His grandfather was a great dancer. Tom could remember him gliding with his grandmother under the strings of colored lights at the Fourth of July dance. Their feet seemed to be on air. It was the same when he rode a horse.

'Dancing and riding, it's the same damn thing,' he would say. 'It's about trust and consent. You've gotten hold of one another. The man's leading but he's not dragging her, he's offering a feel and she feels it and goes with him. You're in harmony and moving to each other's rhythm, just following the feel.'

These things Tom knew already, though knew not how he came to know them. He understood the language of horses in the same way he understood the difference between colors or smells. At any moment he could tell what was going on in their heads and he knew it was mutual. He started his first colt (he never used the word break) when he was just seven.

Tom's grandparents died the same winter, one swiftly following the other, when Tom was twelve. John left the ranch in its entirety to Tom's father. Ned flew up from Los Angeles to hear the will read out. He had been back rarely and Tom only remembered him for his fancy two-tone shoes and the hunted look he had in his eyes. He always called him 'bud' and brought some useless gift, a piece of frippery that was the current craze of city kids. This time he left without saying a word. Instead, they heard from his lawyers.

The litigation dragged on for three years. Tom would hear his mother crying in the night and the kitchen always seemed full of lawyers and real estate people and neighbors who smelled money. Tom turned away from all this and lost himself in the horses. He would cut school to be with them and his parents were too preoccupied either to notice or to care.

The only time he remembered his father happy during this time was in the spring when for three days they drove the cattle up to the summer pastures. His mother, Frank and Rosie came too and the five of them would ride all day and sleep out under the stars.

'If only you could make now last forever,' Frank said on one of those nights while they lay on their backs watching a huge half-moon roar up out of the dark shoulders of the mountain. Frank was eleven and not by nature a philosopher. They had all lain still, thinking about this for a while. Somewhere, a long way off, a coyote called.

'I guess that's all forever is,' his father replied. 'Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.'

It seemed to Tom as good a recipe for life as he'd yet heard.

Three years of lawsuits left his father a broken man. The ranch ended up sold to an oil company and the money that remained, after the lawyers and the taxman had taken their cut, was split in half. Ned was never seen or heard of again. Daniel and Ellen took Tom, Rosie and Frank and moved away west. They bought seven thousand acres and an old sprawl of a ranch house on the Rocky Mountain Front. It was where the high plains ran smack into a hundred-million-year-old wall of limestone, a place of harsh, towering beauty, which later Tom would come to love. But he wasn't ready for it. His real home had been sold from under him and he wanted to be off on his own. Once he had helped his parents get the new ranch going, he upped and left.

He went down to Wyoming and worked as a hired hand. There he saw things he would never have believed. Cowboys who whipped and spurred their horses till they bled. At a ranch near Sheridan he saw for himself why they called it 'breaking' a horse. He watched a man tie a yearling tight by its neck to a fence, hobble a hind leg then beat it into submission with a length of zinc piping. Tom would never forget the fear in the animal's eyes nor the stupid triumph in the man's when, many hours later, it sought to save its life and submitted to the saddle. Tom told the man he was a fool, got into a fight and was fired on the spot.

He moved to Nevada and worked some of the big ranches there. Wherever he worked, he made a point of seeking out the most troubled horses and offering to ride them. Many of the men he rode with had been doing the job since long before he was born and, to begin with, they would snigger behind their hands at the sight of him mounting some crazy beast that had thrown the best of them a dozen times. They soon stopped though when they saw the way the boy handled himself and how the horse changed. Tom lost count of the horses he met who had been seriously screwed up by the stupidity or cruelty of humans, but he never met one he couldn't help.

For five years this was his life. He came home when he could and always tried to be there for the times his father most needed help. For Ellen, these visits were like a series of snapshots plotting her son's progression into manhood. He had grown lean and tall and of her three children by far the best looking. He wore his sunbleached hair longer than before and she chided him for it but secretly liked it. Even in winter his face was tanned and it made the clear, pale blue of his eyes all the more vivid.

The life he described seemed to his mother a lonely one. There were friends he mentioned, but none who were close. There were girls he dated, but none he was serious about. By his own account, most of the time that he wasn't working with horses, he spent reading and studying for a correspondence course he'd signed up for. Ellen noticed he'd grown quieter, how he spoke now only when he had something to say. Unlike his father however, there was nothing sad about this quietness. It was more a kind of focused stillness.

As time went by, people got to hear about the Booker boy and calls would come to wherever he happened to be working, asking if he would take a look at some horse or other they were having trouble with.

'How much you charge 'em for doing this?' his brother Frank asked him over supper one April when Tom had come home to help with the branding. Rosie was away at college and Frank, nineteen now, was working full time on the ranch. He had a keen commercial nose and in fact virtually ran the place as their father retreated ever deeper into the gloom created by the lawsuits.

'Oh, I don't charge them,' Tom said. Frank put his fork down and gave him a look.

'You don't charge them at all? Ever?'

'Nope.' He took another mouthful.

'Why the hell not? These people have money, don't they?'

Tom thought for a moment. His parents were looking at him too. It seemed this was a matter of some interest to all of them.

'Well. You see, I don't do it for the people. I do it for the horse.'

There was a silence. Frank smiled and shook his head. It was clear Tom's father thought him a little crazy too. Ellen stood up and started stacking plates defensively.

'Well, I think it's nice,' she said.

It got Tom thinking. But it took another couple of years for the idea of doing clinics to take shape. Meanwhile, he surprised them all by announcing he was going off to the University of Chicago.

It was a mixed humanities and social sciences course and he stuck it out for eighteen months. He only lasted that long because he fell in love with a beautiful girl from New Jersey who played the cello in a student string quartet. Tom went to five concerts before they even spoke. She had a mane of thick, glossy black hair which she swept back over her shoulders and she wore silver hoops in her ears like a folk singer. Tom watched the way she moved as she played, the music seeming to swim through her body. It was the sexiest thing he had ever seen.

At the sixth concert she looked at him all the way through and he waited for her afterward outside. She came up and took his arm without saying a word. Her name was Rachel Feinerman and later that night in her room, Tom thought he had died and gone to heaven. He watched her light candles and then turn to stare at him as she stepped out of her dress. He thought it strange how she kept her earrings on but was glad she had because the candlelight flashed in them as they made love. She never once closed her eyes and she arched herself into him, watching him watch his hands travel her body in wonder. Her nipples were large and the color of chocolate and the luxuriant triangle of hair on her belly glistened like the wing of a raven.

He brought her home for Thanksgiving and she said she had never been so cold in all her life. She got on well with everyone, even the horses, and said she thought it was the most beautiful place she had ever laid eyes on. Tom could tell what his mother was thinking just from the look on her face. That this young woman, with her inappropriate footwear and religion, was sure as hell no rancher's wife.

Not long after this, when Tom told Rachel he'd had enough of mixed humanities and Chicago and that he was going back to Montana, she got mad.

'You're going to go back and be a cowboy?' she said caustically. Tom said yes, matter of fact that was pretty much what he did have in mind. They were in his room and Rachel spun around, waving an exasperated arm at the books crammed into his shelves.

'What about all this?' she said. 'Don't you care about any of this?' He thought for a moment, then nodded.

'Sure I care,' he said. 'That's part of why I want to quit. When I was working as a hand, I just couldn't wait to get back in at night to whatever I was reading. Books had a kind of magic. But these teachers here, with all their talk, well… Seems to me if you talk about these things too much, the magic gets lost and pretty soon talk is all there is. Some things in life just… are.'

She looked at him for a moment, with her head tilted back, then slapped him hard across the face.

'You stupid bastard,' she said. 'Aren't you even going to ask me to many you?'

So he did. And they went to Nevada the following week and were married, both aware that it was probably a mistake. Her parents were furious. His were just dazed. Tom and Rachel lived with everyone else in the ranch house for the best part of a year, while they patched up the cottage, an old ramshackle place, overlooking the creek. There was a well up there with an old cast-iron pump and Tom got it working again and rebuilt the surround and wrote his and Rachel's initials in the wet concrete. They moved in just in time for Rachel to give birth to their son. They called him Hal.

Tom worked with his father and Frank on the ranch and watched his wife get more and more depressed. She would talk for hours on the phone to her mother, then cry all night long and tell him how lonely she felt and how stupid she was for feeling that way because she loved him and Hal so much it should be all she needed. She asked him again and again whether he loved her, even waking him sometimes in the dead of the night to ask him the same question and he would hold her in his arms and tell her he did.

Tom's mother said these things sometimes happened after a woman had a child and that maybe they should get away for a while, take a vacation somewhere. So they left Hal with her and flew to San Francisco and even though the city was hung with a cold fog for the whole week they -were there, Rachel started to smile again. They went to concerts and movies and fancy restaurants and did all the tourist things too. And when they got home it was even worse.

Winter came and it was the coldest anyone on the Front could remember. The snow drove down the valleys and made pygmies of the giant cottonwoods along the creek. In a blitz of polar air one night they lost thirty head of cattle and chipped them from the ice a week later like the fallen statues of an ancient creed.

Rachel's cello case stood gathering dust in a corner of the house and when he asked why she didn't play anymore she told him music didn't work here. It just got lost, she said, swallowed up by all the air. Some mornings later, clearing the fireplace, Tom came across a blackened metal string and sifting on among the ashes he found the charred tip of the cello's scroll. He looked in the case and there was only the bow.

When the snow melted, Rachel told him she was taking Hal and going back to New Jersey and Tom just nodded and kissed her and took her in his arms. She was from too different a world, she said, as they had always both known though never acknowledged. She could no more live here with all this windblown, aching space around her than live on the face of the moon. There was no acrimony, just a hollowing sadness. And no question but that the child should go with her. To Tom it only seemed fair.

It was the morning of the Thursday before Easter that he stacked their things in the back of the pickup to take them to the airport. The mountain front was draped in cloud and a cold drizzle was coming in from the plains. Tom held the son he hardly knew and would forever hardly know, bundled in a blanket, and watched Frank and his parents form an awkward line outside the ranch house to say their goodbyes. Rachel hugged each one of them in turn, his mother last. Both women were weeping.

'I'm sorry,' Rachel said. Ellen held her and patted the back of her head.

'No, sweetheart. I'm sorry. We all are.'

The first Tom Booker horse clinic was held in Elko, Nevada the following spring. It was, by common consent, a great success.

 

Chapter Nine

 

Annie called Liz Hammond from the office the morning after she got her message.

'I hear you've found me a whisperer,' she said.

'A what?'

Annie laughed. 'It's okay. I was just reading some stuff yesterday. That's what they used to call these people.'

'Whisperers. Mm, I like that. This one sounds more like a cowboy. Lives in Montana somewhere.'

She told Annie how she had heard of him. It was a long chain, a friend who knew someone who remembered someone saying something about a guy who'd had a troubled horse and had taken him to this other guy in Nevada… Liz had doggedly followed it through.

'Liz, this must have cost you a fortune! I'll pay for the calls.'

'Oh, that's okay. Apparently there are a few people out West doing this kind of thing, but I'm told he's the best. Anyway, I got his number for you.'

Annie took it down and thanked her.

'No problem. But if he turns out to be Clint Eastwood, he's mine okay?'

Annie thanked her again and hung up. She stared down at the number on the yellow legal pad in front of her. She didn't know why, but suddenly she felt apprehensive. Then she told herself not to be stupid, picked up the phone and dialed.

They always had a barbecue on the first night of Rona's clinic. It brought in some extra money and the food was good so Tom didn't mind staying on, though he was longing to get out of his dusty, sweaty shirt and into a hot tub.

They ate at long tables on the terrace outside Rona's low, white adobe ranch house and Tom found himself sitting next to the woman who owned the little thoroughbred. He knew it wasn't an accident because she'd been coming on strong all evening. She didn't have the hat on anymore and had untied her hair. She was in her early thirties maybe, a good-looking woman, he thought. And she knew it. She was fixing him with big black eyes but overdoing it a little, asking him all these questions and listening to him as if he was the most incredibly interesting guy she'd ever met. She had already told him that her name was Dale, that she was in real estate, that she had a house on the ocean near Santa Barbara. Oh yes, and that she was divorced.

'I just can't get over the way he felt under me after you'd finished with him,' she was saying, again. 'Everything had just, I don't know, freed up or something.'

Tom nodded and gave a little shrug.

'Well, that's what happened,' he said. 'He just needed to know it was okay and you just needed to get out of his way a little.'

There was a roar of laughter from the next table and they both turned to look. The donkey man was spinning some piece of Hollywood gossip about two movie stars Tom had never heard of, caught in a car doing something he couldn't quite picture.

'Where did you learn all this stuff, Tom?' he heard Dale ask. He turned back to her.

'What stuff?'

'You know, about horses. Did you have like, a guru or a teacher or something?'

He fixed her with a serious look, as if about to vouchsafe wisdom.

'Well Dale, you know, a lot of this is nuts and bolts stuff.' She frowned.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, if the rider's nuts, the horse bolts.'

She laughed, too enthusiastically, putting her hand on his arm. Hell, he thought, it wasn't that good a joke.

'No,' she pouted. 'Tell me, seriously.'

'A lot of these things you can't really teach. All you can do is create a situation where if people want to learn they can. The best teachers I ever met were the horses themselves. You find a lot of folk have opinions, but if it's facts you want you're better off going to the horse.'

She gave him a look he guessed was supposed to convey in equal measure a religious wonder at his great profundity and something rather more carnal. It was time for him to go.

He got up from the table making some lame excuse about having to check Rimrock, who'd long since been turned out. When he wished Dale good-night, she looked a little peeved at having wasted so much energy on him.

As he drove back to the motel, he thought it was no accident that California had always been the favored place for any cult that blended sex and religion. The people were a pushover. Maybe if that group in Oregon - the ones who used to wear orange pants and worship the guy with the ninety Rolls-Royces -had set up here instead, they'd still be going strong.

Tom had met dozens, scores, of women like Dale at these clinics over the years. They were all searching for something. With many it seemed in some strange way to be connected with fear. They'd bought themselves these fiery, expensive horses and were terrified of them. They were looking for something to help conquer this fear or maybe just fear in general. They might equally have chosen hang gliding or mountaineering or wrestling killer sharks. They just happened to have chosen riding.

They came to his clinics longing for enlightenment and comfort. Tom didn't know how much enlightenment there had been, but there'd been comfort a fair few times and it had been mutual. Ten years ago, a look like the one Dale just gave him and they'd have been bowling back to the motel together and out of their clothes before you could even shut the door.

It wasn't that nowadays he always walked away from such opportunities. It just didn't seem worth the trouble quite so much anymore. For there was usually trouble of some kind. People seldom seemed to bring the same expectations to such encounters. It had taken him a while to learn this and to understand what his own expectations were, let alone those of any woman he might meet.

For some time after Rachel left, he'd blamed himself for what happened. He knew it wasn't just the place that was wrong. She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn't been able to give. When he'd told her that he loved her he'd meant it. And when she and Hal went, they left a space within him that, try as he might, he was never quite able to fill with his work.

He'd always liked the company of women and found that sex came his way without looking for it. And as the clinics took off and he traveled month after month around the country, he found some solace this way. Mostly they were brief affairs, though there were one or two women, as relaxed as he about these matters, who even to this day when he passed through welcomed him to their beds like an old friend.

The guilt about Rachel however had stayed with him. Until at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him. And Tom knew that this was impossible. He could never feel such a need, for Rachel or anyone else. For without ever spelling it out to himself and without any sense of self-satisfaction, he already knew he had in his life a kind of innate balance, the kind that others seemed to spend most of their lives striving for. It didn't occur to him that this was anything special. He felt himself simply part of a pattern, a cohesion of things animate and inanimate, to which he was connected both by spirit and by blood.

Tom turned the Chevy into the motel parking lot and found a space right outside his room.

The bathtub was too short for a long soak. You had to decide whether to let your shoulders get cold or your knees. He got out and dried himself in front of the TV. The mountain lion story was still big news. They were going to hunt it down and kill it.


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 587


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