Colt (2 page)

Then again, he liked to watch shows about man-eating tigers too. “No. NO! I don't want to!”

But by that time Mrs. Berry had spun him around and pulled him backward up the mounting ramp. And the director of the center was standing ready to help—smiling like a snake. And the two of them were lifting him out of his wheelchair.

Colt didn't want anyone ever to call him a quitter. Briefly he considered throwing a real fit, flailing his arms, hitting, maybe giving someone a black eye. But Mrs. Berry was wearing her most patient look. He knew if he tried a tantrum she would just hug his arms down and croon and cuddle him, and he despised being treated like a baby. And if he struggled while he was being lifted he might make her drop him; he might fall and hit his shunt and die. Nobody had ever told him that hitting his shunt might make him die, but he knew it could.

The others were on their way down to the riding ring. Anna Susanna, who had cerebral palsy, rode a white-faced strawberry roan. Matt, who was deaf, was on a chunky bay mare. Jay Gee, the retarded boy, had a big sand-colored dun. Neely rode the gray pony, Giggles. And cutesy-pie little Julie was on a tiny pinto-spotted Shetland pony with a shaggy mane. Julie had mild cerebral palsy and was such a sweet little angel face all the time, the kind you always see on TV shows about handicapped kids, she made Colt ill. Why did they have to put her on the weensy pony and him on this mammoth named after the world's most barfable lunch meat?

But on Liverwurst he was, with a helmet on his head and a wide green nylon belt around his waist and women he didn't know standing one on each side of him, holding him by the belt handles. He was supposed to trust these strangers to keep him from falling off.

Mrs. Berry took his feet and put them in the stirrups. He could tell by looking, not by feeling, that they were in the stirrups. In general, he could not tell where his feet were except by looking. He had no working nerves and muscles in his lower legs and feet, and only a few in his upper legs. Those few let him get around in braces and crutches sometimes, but he found it hard to walk that way. He got tired quickly.

“Ready to ride?” Mrs. Reynolds asked him, standing by Liverwurst's head. She was the one who was supposed to lead the horse. Each handicapped rider had three grown-ups clustered around, one leading and two side-walking.

Colt didn't answer. Why bother? Grown-ups generally did just what they were planning to do anyway. He stared out between Liverwurst's mottled ears, feeling awfully high up. What if he fell … yet at the same time he sensed the horse's warm, steady breathing under him. He looked down on shoulders mottled like the sunset in the early-summer sky over the fenced ring where the others were riding.

Why wasn't Liverwurst walking down toward the ring?

“Ready?” Mrs. Reynolds asked again. She was actually waiting for him to say yes.

Colt wondered what would happen if he said no. But in fact, he was sort of ready. He swallowed hard and nodded.

Liverwurst walked.

Colt stiffened and felt his body weight shift an inch to the left. Scared, he strained the reluctant muscles in his right leg and pulled himself back to the center of the saddle before his side walkers could help him. But the next step Liverwurst took pushed him toward the right. He grabbed onto the front of the saddle with both hands.

“Let go, Colt,” Mrs. Reynolds instructed over her shoulder. “Relax your back.” She stopped the horse and explained to him how he should sit up straight but let himself sway with the gait of the horse.

Liverwurst walked on. Sometimes Colt remembered to loosen his back muscles, sometimes not. It was hard enough for him to make his muscles do what he wanted to anytime, let alone when he was scared, which he was—plenty scared, but still … he felt Liverwurst's strong, quiet body moving under him. The thrust of the horse's hind legs and hips surged through Colt, moving his whole body, which actually felt sort of good. Instead of feeling scrunched and heavy and small the way he always did sitting in a wheelchair, Colt felt tall, open, airy, sitting with his feet stretched down toward the earth and his head up toward the sky, high in the saddle. He felt as strong as the deep-breathing horse, and his own chest breathed deep, filled with more than summer air. Filled with the soft clopping of hooves on grass, with rich brown horse-and-leather smells and the way the world looked from up there on a horse's back, up where the breezes were, looking out over people's heads and feeling like—well, like something. Like he really could be a “big guy” who loved horses after all.

Just for a minute he felt that way, and then Liverwurst shook his head to get rid of a fly and Colt grabbed at the saddle, scared all over again.

“We won't let you fall,” one side walker, a pudgy woman, told him.

“Do you like riding the horse?” the other woman asked. She spoke slowly and too loudly, as if she thought he was deaf or stupid. A lot of people seemed to think all handicapped kids were retarded. At least Mrs. Berry knew better than that. She always told him he had brains if he would just use them.

He didn't answer the woman but pried his hands loose from the saddle and let them rest on the Appaloosa's mane. He stroked it, trying to get it to lie flat. Warm, coarse hair, lots of colors: black, brown, rust, gold, silver. Liverwurst was as cloudily multicolored as the sunset sky.

“How are you doing, Colt?” Mrs. Berry sang at him the next time she saw him, a few minutes later.

He couldn't admit to her that he was sort of, kind of, enjoying the horse. “My back hurts,” he told her, so she had to come over and check his lump and loosen his nylon safety belt.

Chapter Two

Colt's mother and her boyfriend were waiting for him when he finished. (Mrs. Berry had asked Audrey Vittorio not to come for the horseback-riding session itself. Colt tended to “act out” more when his mother was around, Mrs. Berry said.) When Colt saw her waiting for him as he came up to the barn on horseback, he could not help grinning at her. His mother was such a mess (“I am such a mess,” she said often and cheerfully) that whenever he saw her he just had to smile.

“Hey! How did it go?” his mother called to him, bouncing like a kid. Her hair, dyed ash-blond instead of being dark like his, was running wild as a mustang. Obviously she had forgotten to comb it again. Her pullover was on backward and inside out, with the tag at her throat like a rectangular jewel. If anyone pointed it out to her, she would giggle with delight. “I'm setting a new style!” she would exclaim.

“How did it go?” Colt's mother insisted eagerly as Mrs. Reynolds stopped Liverwurst near her.

“Okay,” Colt admitted. Mrs. Berry was busy with somebody else and wouldn't hear him.

“All
right
! You going to come again next week?”

“Audrey,” her boyfriend put in, “later.” His name was Brad Flowers, and he had seen Mrs. Berry coming. Colt glanced at him in surprise. It looked as if Brad understood that Colt could not say yes in front of Mrs. Berry, and Colt was not used to that much understanding in an adult, not even in his mother, who was a lot of fun but kind of dense sometimes about what a guy was feeling.

So who the heck was this Brad Flowers that he knew so much? Never having paid much attention to his mother's boyfriends, who had been coming and going since he could remember, Colt had not yet noticed that Brad was different. But now he noticed: Brad had been around longer than any of the others. Six months at least.

Mrs. Berry sailed up. “Ready to get down, Colt?”

“Noooo,” he said sarcastically, to annoy her. As usual, it didn't work. She was too busy bossing the two people it took to get him off Liverwurst and into his wheelchair again.

His mother and Brad Flowers had an easier time of it getting him into the backseat of the car. They had more practice, and his mother, who had been lifting him since he was a baby, was big and strong—not chunky, just long limbed, athletic, and deft. Brad Flowers was a husky slow-moving man, raised on a farm before he went into the army. Colt noticed that he didn't drive, the way most of the boyfriends did. Brad let Audrey drive, even though she drove like she talked: awfully fast, with lots of shortcuts.

“Well?” she yelled back at Colt.

“Well, what?”

“You riding again next week?”

“I guess.” There was something special about being on top of Liverwurst. A lot better than being under his big rubbery slobbery nose.

“Soon as we get home it'll be time—”

“
I know
.”

First thing when he got home Colt had to get to the bathroom and catheterize himself. That is, he had to empty his bladder with a small flexible plastic tube.

Maybe the one thing Colt hated most about spina bifida was that the nerve damage left him without any control of his bodily functions. He always had to be on a schedule to take care of them. He always had to worry about springing a leak and embarrassing himself in public.

Barreling through the living room in his wheelchair on his way to the bathroom, propelling himself over the low-pile carpeting with his hands, Colt nearly ran into a few things: a casserole containing dried-up bits of macaroni and cheese; Muffins, the Yorkie, eating at the casserole; a cut-glass vase being used as a holder for hammer and screwdrivers while its silk flowers lay dumped to one side; a giant box of Tide on its slow way to the basement; a water-color paint kit laid out to dry, then forgotten; his mother's oxfords in the middle of the floor—she had left her thick white cotton socks draped over the unicorn picture on the wall. (Audrey Vittorio was a postal employee, and Colt often wondered how many pieces of mail she had messed up during any given day.) Also in the living room were Rosie and Lauri Flowers, Brad's kids, looking as out of place as many of the other objects there.

Surprised and a bit flustered to see the Flowers kids, Colt called hi but did not stop to talk. He got himself through the extra-wide bathroom door, found his catheter and sterilizing soap and cotton pads, positioned his wheelchair by the metal stall bars, lifted himself from the wheelchair to the toilet, worked his sweat pants down and took care of himself. Neely was older than he was, and Neely still had his mother or a school nurse do the job. Neely was a wimp. Colt had been catheterizing himself since he was six. It didn't hurt.

He struggled back into his pants, got back into the wheelchair, washed his hands and his catheter, and put everything away. The whole process took a little while, maybe fifteen minutes. Now he would be good for another four hours by the clock. Whoopee.

No hurry. While he was in the bathroom, where he had some privacy, he did a few of his daily exercises, lifting himself up out of his wheelchair until his arms were straight, then setting himself down again. One, two … ten times. Later, once he had cleared a space on his bedroom floor, he would do his sit-ups and push-ups. At least twenty of each. Once, just to show him that he could do it, Mrs. Berry made him do fifty push-ups. He had been sore afterward, but proud, and he had started working out with hand weights too. He had started with a two-pound weight and was working his way up to five. He did not like exercises, but he did them doggedly, day after day, because he knew he had to. Exercises, like catheters, came along with spina bifida.

They were all just sitting in the living room waiting for him when he came out: his mother, and Brad, Rosie, and Lauri. Rosie, despite his name, was a boy, a tall, slim blondish teenager as quiet as his father. Some tease had started calling him “Rosie” because of his last name, Flowers, and the nickname had stuck. He did not seem to mind it. Lauri, his little sister, was about Colt's age, though she looked older. Whenever she was around, Colt watched her with cautious interest.

She was plopped amid the clutter on the floor, looking bored and very pretty. “You're lucky,” she complained at Colt as he wheeled his chair up beside her.

“Huh?” He seldom thought of himself as lucky.

“You lucky piece of scum. You got to go horseback riding.”

“Big deal. All they do is put you on the horse and lead it around a ring.”

“Hey, I wouldn't mind! How come you get to go horseback riding for free?”

“It's supposed to be good for me.”

“No fair! Just because you're handicapped—”

Before Colt could tell her that he'd trade her anytime, her father shushed her. “
Lauri.
”

“Want to play something?” Rosie offered Colt vaguely at the same time, trying to smooth things over. They all thought Colt minded Lauri, but he didn't. He liked the way she was honest with him.

“Do
you
want to play something?” he asked her.

She looked annoyed. But before she could answer, her father said, “Don't go off, you guys.”

“We want to tell you something,” Colt's mother said. Which was not Audrey's usual style at all. Whatever she had to say, she generally just poured it out. And Brad didn't usually even bring his kids to the Vittorio place. Colt had met them maybe twice before, because Rosie and Lauri generally had other things to do besides tag along with their father. But tonight here they were—and Colt suddenly noticed how tense and awkward his mother and Brad looked, sitting there on that sofa, just sitting.

They looked at each other, each one nudging the other to go first, like a couple of kindergartners coming on stage at a school assembly.

“You tell them,” Audrey said, chickening out and passing the buck to Brad.

He tried to joke. “It was your idea.”

“Brad, c'mon! You're the guy.”

“I'm liberated.”

“Tell us
what
?” Colt demanded.

Rosie complained at the same time. “Will one of you just spit it out?”

Flustered, Audrey tried. “Your father—I mean, Brad—well, we—”

“We're going to get married,” Brad helped her.

Nobody said congratulations. All three kids looked just plain shocked. Colt gawked at his mother.