Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [90]
“Kip, you’re just in time to watch Delfino break his neck.”
“That’s too bad,” Kip said.
“I ain’t breaking anything but this horse.”
Delfino was up on her, this green, unbroken stick, and she did herself and him proud, loping around the ring like a natural. When Delfino circled her around to the post-and-rail where they leaned, scrutinizing the performance, Kip asked, “Mind if I have a go?” Marcos looked more concerned than Kip might have liked. “I’m no horseman like Delfino, but I know how to hang on.”
Having leapt down, Delfino handed Kip the reins, saying, “Seems a talented horse.”
Carl said, “Talented enough this morning. Just don’t want to see Kip hurt himself.”
“I rode a lot as a kid.”
“Baby hair don’t know and gray hair don’t remember.”
Kip shoved his boot into the stirrup, grabbed the horn, and lifted himself into the saddle, just momentarily catching his knee on the cantle. The horse appeared not to understand she had a rider aboard. Gently reining her away into a slow walk around the ring, Kip maintained the illusion of not being there. He made no audible sound. Several laps tracking left, several right. He never pushed her beyond a walk, nor did he relinquish control. Kept his back straight, pushed his heels down and legs forward, sat deep, hands quiet and low—two parts of the same beating heart, as he remembered his father telling him when he first learned how to do this, so many years ago.
Then it was as if the horse, too, remembered something, changed her mind. Rearing her head, tipping it to the side, she looked this rider in the eye before lighting out at a sudden full zigzag gallop, stopping abruptly to tack, lurch, halt. Kip was first thrown back, nearly losing the reins, then pitched forward. The onlookers began shouting and waving their hands, though Kip couldn’t hear or see them. The corral fence loomed and he prepared himself for a rude launching, but as suddenly as she’d gone mad on him, the horse calmed down.
“What the hell was that?” Marcos said.
Kip shrugged.
“Held his own, didn’t he,” Carl laughed, holding the reins as Kip climbed down.
Not a bad showing, which was all Kip had hoped to accomplish. Delfino couldn’t reasonably reject his new friend and self-appointed conscript on the ground he couldn’t ride—that was the point. Marcos clapped him on the shoulder with more exuberance than was necessary, yet with an affection that Kip realized, to his slight chagrin, he was going to miss. The inveterate veteran outcast riding a crazy horse around a corral before an audience of friends? Of his own volition, even at his insistence? Wagner would never have believed it possible. Nor Brice, the other of Kip’s twin towers, or towering twins, both rising—Brice and Wagner, antiwar hero and sainted soldier—to greet him on this same resolving if raveling day. He thanked them for the spin, excused himself, and retreated to the fieldhouse, more or less to hide from all that was incoming—clairvoyant bombardment as he, always the covert warrior, saw it. His mind was made up about Dripping Spring, however. It was the necessary end to all his wars, personal and public.
He was suddenly exhausted. Maybe the gray-hair gibe hadn’t been so far off the mark. His mind was troubling him, but then his mind had been troubling him, tiring him, more and more these past days. They say this happens to people—they keep it together until some dream is attained, then promptly fall apart. He lay down on his unmade bed and slept with the sun on his face, fitful, dreaming.
The next living voice he heard asked, “Kip?” and he opened his eyes to catch Franny looking at him with concern. “Are you all right?”
Still dressed in shirt, pants, boots, Kip blinked and pushed himself up onto one elbow.
“You were crying out. I heard you all the way from the far end of the paddock. I thought you were dying or something.”
He was speechless.
“That must’ve been some kind of nightmare you were having,” she