Boy on a Black Horse (12 page)

No. He loves horses
.

To bloody red hell with love! What has love ever done for you? Made you a flattened worm, that's what. Kill him. Kill them all, or
—

Okay, okay! In a minute
.

First he pulled the note out of his jacket pocket and dropped it in the middle of the dirt floor. Then he picked it up and reread it. He had written and rewritten the note in the dark morning hours of the night before, after Gray and the others had gone back to bed. It said:

Dear Gray and Lee,

As you will know by the time you read this, I am no good. Baval and Chavali are nice kids, but you don't want me. I know you will take good care of them, so now I can go. Please get Baval to a doctor. He saw too many awful things when he was little
—
our darling father used to make him watch. He can't bear it, so he shut it all out of his mind, he doesn't remember anything that happened before we ran away. He doesn't really remember Mom or anything, and all those stories I told him made it worse. I'm scared someday it will all come back and make him crazy like me. Maybe a doctor can help him
.

I hope Chavali will be okay. She doesn't remember much either, but it's just because she was so little
.

Just as a safeguard so nobody can ever send them back to their father, please don't try to find out their real names. I am going because I am bad clear through like him, I am full of hate like him. I don't want to hurt Baval and Chavali, but I don't care about anybody else. So you can just forget about me
.

Love,
Chav

You total jerkhead, can't you do anything right? You signed it “Love”
!

There had to be a pen someplace. He could scribble it out.

On the floor Topher stirred and groaned.

No time to scribble it out, unless he killed Topher right now …

No
.

There was no time to argue with himself, either.
Just drop the damn note and take the horse and get out of here
.

He laid the note near Topher's limp hand. Rom looked down at him with wise, calm, midnight-dark eyes.

Rom was not the black stallion of his rage.

“No,” Chav said aloud to him, “you stay behind. No more Gypsy scum for you. Go to the rich gadjo farm and be happy and make many foals with many mares.” Then he was suddenly furious. “Stop looking at me!” he screamed, and he ran.

His feet hurt, as always, because more than once his father had broken them. All his life they had hurt, and all his life they would keep on hurting.

All his life? Not too much longer now.

At the ruined cemetery he stopped running and sat on the white back of the broken angel with a rifle in his hand. He panted awhile and thought. One thing he was right about: Rom. Even though he had left Rom behind, the black stallion of anger was still with him, galloping, galloping in his chest.

“They think I did this,” Chav muttered, looking around at the toppled markers, the torn-up graves. “I will give them more to bury here. They can bury me here too if they like. But I know they will not like.”

When he got up he knew where he was going. It was Saturday afternoon. The big game was going on. Matt Kain and Fishy Fischel and all their gadjo buddies would be there. And a few thousand gadjos more.

Chav cradled the rifle like a baby and walked. Every few steps something made him hurt, maybe his feet, maybe a thought, maybe his heart aching, and he cursed. Most of the leaves had fallen. From beyond the brown hills ahead of him floated the booming of the band.

I whispered to the black stallion, “Where would he go, Rom? We have to find him.” But I didn't know how it was going to happen. I couldn't track him. Chav wasn't a horse, he didn't leave much of a trail, and anyway it hadn't rained in over a week now. The ground was hard again.

Rom's ears flicked back toward me, listening to me. I loosened the reins. “Which way, boy?”

At a smooth floating trot he headed toward the railroad tracks.

“Where is Chav?” I kept asking him or the air or maybe myself. “Where is Chav?”

It was weird. I'm still not sure what was going on, whether Rom actually understood what was happening, or whether he was tracking Chav by scent, or whether riding Chav's black stallion of anger gave me enough insight to head me in the right direction, along the tracks toward town. Sometimes Rom chose which way we went, and sometimes I did, or maybe we both did. We were joined, like two parts of the same black animal. I even had on my black jeans that day, and I felt black hooves pounding hard and hurtfully in my chest.

“He is so angry,” I whispered. “When they beat you and beat you and beat you, it makes you feel like roadkill, like you are almost nothing, and it makes you feel like you have to hit back or die.”

Or maybe it was just stupid luck leading Rom and me. We checked the “castle,” the silo—it was empty. We circled through the woods. When we came back to the tracks again, there was Chav.

There he was at the far end of the railroad bridge, aiming the gun straight at me.

I pulled Rom to a halt and sat there, and I think every part of me started to sweat at once. I don't know which scared me more, the idea of getting shot by Chav—though I never really thought Chav would shoot me—or the idea of crossing that damn high bridge over that damn deep water to get to him. I was riding bareback, and being on Rom was not like riding Diddle. Rom snorted and surged even when he walked. If Rom decided to dance in the middle of the trestle, I might fly off and land sixty feet below, in the river.

Sixty-eight feet, counting being eight feet up above the bridge on the horse.

“Stay away!” Chav yelled. Floating to me across the river, his voice sounded like Baval's did sometimes: high and shaky. He was just a kid, really, and he was as scared as I was.

That settled it somehow. I gathered the reins for control, squeezed Rom gently with my knees, and started him forward.

“No! Go away!” Chav sounded panicky.

“I can't,” I called. This was really true, because the horse was on the bridge now. No way I was going to try to turn him around on that narrow, dangerous slab of concrete.

“Stop! Don't come any closer!”

I kept going. Sure, I was scared, but I had to do it. I had to get to Chav.

“Stop where you are, or I'll shoot!”

“No, you won't.” If he did, and I fell in the river, I'd never live … but I felt pretty sure he wouldn't, and even more sure he wouldn't risk hurting Rom.

“I will! I'll shoot! You're a gadjo.”

Suddenly I was mad. “Gadjo, schmadjo!” I shouted at him so loud Rom flinched. “That's just something you made up so you could hate everybody!”

I was close enough now to really see his face, and it hurt to look at. All the pain and rage he had ever hidden from me were glaring out of his eyes.

“Damn you, Gray!” The gun barrel shook in his hands like a branch in the wind. He backed away from me. “Okay, goddamn you, I can't do it, I can't hurt you, but I can still hurt the others. You stay away.”

“What others?” I had Rom off the bridge now, finally. It was easier to breathe and easier to concentrate on talking to Chav.

“Kain. Fischel. All their sucky friends. All the pissy people in your gadjo school. In your gadjo town. They'll all be there, won't they? At your big important homecoming game for people who actually have a home?”

My God. I had to stop him, I had to get that gun away from him somehow.

I could have charged him with Rom, I guess. Knocked him down. But would Rom do it? Could I make him do it, and could I get the gun without hurting Chav or the horse? It was risky. I took a different sort of chance instead—I slipped down off Rom. It didn't feel right to be looking down on Chav, to be talking at him from above.

“You're heading for the game to kill people?” I tried not to sound too horrified, because then he would think it was him making me sick, and it wasn't. What he was thinking of doing was awful, but Chav was not a bad person. Even though he probably thought he was.

“Them, and me. Take as many as I can with me, then off myself.” He kept the gun up to his shoulder, and talked loud and fast, and his eyes were wild as a spooked mustang's.

“What if Liana were there?” Even though I knew he knew she wasn't.

“Then I would go someplace else. McDonald's or someplace. I could never hurt you or Liana.” He calmed down some just saying her name. “But—”

I let loose. “But you think what you're going to do won't hurt me?” I yelled at him. “You think if other kids die, I won't cry? Chav, people are people! There's no such thing as gadjo or Gypsy. Anything that hurts anybody hurts me!”

He was gawking at me but not like he understood. I wasn't explaining very well, but I had to keep talking.

I said, “What if Minda's there?” My voice shook, because it was true, she might be. Then I couldn't talk, even if I thought of something else to say, which I didn't. I stood there staring at him, watching the struggle go on in him. He stood in the middle of the railroad tracks with his face stone hard and his eyes like a black cloudy night.

Then his hard face seemed to break, and he let the gun sag. “Okay,” he burst out, “okay, screw it. You don't want me to, I won't.”

“Chav,” I whispered, and I reached out toward him to thank him, but he jumped back.

“I'll just—get rid of me.” His voice was going to pieces. “That's the main—point, anyway. End it.” He stepped back more, still on the tracks but way out of my reach, and turned the rifle so that the barrel tip rested under his nose and his thumb was on the trigger.

“No!” Oh my God, no, he couldn't. “Chav, why not just kill me too!” I cried at him. “You do this, I'll die inside anyway. I'll hurt every time I think of you.”

His hand shook and pulled away from the trigger. I saw that, but mainly I watched his face. His mouth, stretched tight and trembling. His eyes, staring at me, black with pain, like a trapped animal's.

I made myself be quiet and calm. “Why?” I asked him gently. “Why do you want to do this? Tell me.”

“I—need to die.”

“Because you want to hurt somebody?”

“Because I—I'm—
hateful
.”

His hand started toward the trigger again. He was really going to do it and I couldn't stop him, my heart could break right there and make a bright red puddle on the railroad tracks and it wouldn't stop him. I could only think of one thing that might stop him. “Carl!” I screamed at him. “Your mother, tell me! Why did she die?”

I had to do it, I had to get through to him somehow, but his face twisted like I'd knifed him. “Don't!” he screamed back at me. “Don't talk about her!”

“We've got to. Did she kill herself? Tell me!”

“
No
! It was my father, he—beat—”

He closed his eyes in agony, and tears ran down his scarred face.

“He beat her and beat her, we were all hiding under the table and he banged her head against the floor—”

I went to him and pushed the gun aside and put my arms around him.

He was crying so hard he could barely talk, or I could barely understand. I only caught a few words now and then—“blood got all over me”—I hugged him and led him off the tracks to a patch of grass and got him to sit down—“dead, but—in the morning she was just gone”—I sat with him and held him—“like he put her out with the garbage. No funeral, no flowers”—Chav stopped trying to talk. I cradled him against my shoulder, and Rom came over and nosed him, and he cried—every sob should have ended the world. I had never heard anyone cry that way, not even Liana the day everyone died, not even me.

I sat and held him, and Rom stood there with his reins hanging, peering down at both of us, and the earth and sky stayed together, though I felt as if they should fall apart. After a while I reached down and tried to slip the rifle away from him, which was a mistake. He hung on to it, and sat up, pulling away from me.

“Chav,” I said to him softly, “I've lost one brother. Don't make me lose another one. Please.”

He looked at me, wet-eyed. “Is that—what I am?” he asked, his voice thick with crying. “Your brother?”

“Yes.”

His shoulders relaxed, and he laid his head back against my neck, and one of his arms came up to hug me.

He cried all the rest of the afternoon. It was like being in a thunderstorm—he couldn't make it stop. Once he got up and staggered into the woods to vomit from crying so much. He'd finally let go of the rifle, he'd left it behind, and I grabbed it and ran a few steps onto the bridge and flung it into the river. Chav came back and didn't seem to notice. He just sank down in the grass with the sobs still shaking him, and I went to him and held him again, and he let me.

By the time the sun was going down he was so exhausted he could look me in the eye and tell me things he never could have said before. He lay on the grass facing up at me and told me how his father had once tied him to a tree and left him there for two days as a punishment. How his father had once locked him in the basement for a week. How no one in the family was allowed to use the telephone or bring friends home and no one was ever allowed to help him, not his brother, not even his mother. How she never fought back—sometimes he had hated her for not fighting back. Then he had hated himself and decided he must deserve it when his father hurt him.

“It was always Mom or me he went after,” he said, terribly calm now, terribly tired—he was finally done crying. “He never hit Robbie, but sometimes he made him watch. In a way, that might have been worse.”

It took me a minute to catch on. “Robbie is Baval?”

“Yes. But don't say it to him, he doesn't remember. Someday Dad is going to come at him out of a bad dream.…” Chav closed his eyes. “I hate Robbie sometimes too.”