Uchenna's Apples (7 page)

Uchenna shrugged. “Serves him right,” she said. “Sounds like he had it coming. But listen, you guys hear everything that happens around here. Especially you, Belle. So what happened to the horses?”

Belle looked at Uchenna curiously. “What horses?”

“You didn’t hear? There were horses behind Emer’s house.”

“I heard the story,” Belle said, picking up an ignored half-sandwich from her plate, “but it was just a rumor, it turns out.”

“Was not!” Emer said. “We went to see them!”

“Come on,” Belle said, “you’re pulling my leg, right? Some kids went over to the field where they supposed to be, yesterday afternoon right after school, and there was nothing there. If there was ever anything there to start with. Everybody I talked to just said they heard about them from somebody else, and the kids who say they actually saw them aren’t the kind you’d usually believe.” She took a bite out of her sandwich. “I think somebody made it all up to get at Garrity. Poor kid can’t just have a normal life; everybody
wants
him to have tinker ponies in the back yard and busted-up cars in the front.”

Uchenna shook her head. “No way,” she said. “We saw the horses. Got in the same field with them. And it wasn’t that long after school. Which field were they supposed to have been in first?”

“That one over by Airlie, the one with the burnt-out car in it.”

Emer shook her head. “Wrong field,” she said. “They were behind my house. One of those little patches between the back of my circle and the old houses.”

Belle finished putting away the half sandwich and then shook her head. “Doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Anyway, it’d take time to move them that far. You’d think somebody would have seen it happening.”

“That’s what I thought this morning,” Emer said. “Or at least heard. They were there last night when I went to bed. Now—” She waved a hand in the air. “Poof! Gone.”

“Ooooo,” Belle said, making a scary-movie sound, “ghost horses! Kind of early for Hallowe’en, isn’t it Eames?”

Emer scowled. “Probably somebody stole them,” Mary said.

“If they weren’t stolen already,” said Laura.

“Some kind of scam,” Belle said, finishing the bottle of flourescent orange Lucasade she’d been drinking. “I’d stay away from them, assuming they’re not some kind of crazy story you two are cooking up.”

“Belle, come on!” Uchenna said. “I don’t waste my time with crazy stories.”

“No, you’re Miss Practical most of the time,” Belle said, “which is why it’d be such a great story if you
were
making it up. Everybody’d believe you.” She gave Uchenna a sidelong look. “Look, it’s okay, you can tell us if it’s not for real. We’ll keep it quiet.”

Uchenna was starting to get annoyed, but she did her best to keep it from showing. “It’s for real,” she said. “Why would I make something like this up? Or why would Emer? Anyway, one of those horses has me worried. She was really pregnant, and there wasn’t much to eat in that little field.”

“So if they’re gone now, somebody took them away to where there’s more food, maybe,” Laura said.

“I hope so,” Uchenna said. “It’s just that now I want to know where they are so I can find out if the mammy’s okay.”

Belle grinned. “Our own little soap opera,” she said. “You want me to ask around?”

“Sure, if you want,” Uchenna said. “Just don’t make a big deal about it.”

“Me? Never,” Belle said, glancing up at the clock. “Uh oh, getting short on time here. Gotta run.” She got up, and Laura and Mary got up with her.

Uchenna and Emer waved as the others went off to dispose of their lunch trays and left the lunchroom. “You know where they’re going, of course,” Emer said under her breath.

Uchenna nodded. There were always kids who liked to slip out of school before lunch period was over and sneak a smoke somewhere, usually across the street by the Spar. “I wish they wouldn’t,” Uchenna muttered. “The way people around here smoke after they get started, they’re gonna be dead when they’re forty.”

Emer sighed. “Yeah, well, I’m still worried about my house.”

Uchenna blew out an annoyed breath. “Eames, your house is going to be fine. You’ve got alarms all over the place. It’s the horses I’m wondering about now! Listening to Belle, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think we hallucinated them.”

Emer snorted. “Oh? And did I hallucinate the mud on my trainers?”

“Oh, so there
was
mud?” Uchenna said, and had to snicker.

All around them, kids were getting up as the last few minutes before the post-lunch classes passed by. “Yes there was,” Emer said, “and there’ll be plenty more on the hockey field.”

“So don’t wear your good trainers there,” Uchenna said. “Still meeting me?”

“Yeah,” Emer said. “Because afterwards we’re going to go out and look for those horses.”

“Yes we are,” Uchenna said. “And we’ll see what we can find out between now and then.”

*

But there was little to find. Three classes’ worth of note passing, very clandestine texting (because texting in class was forbidden), and good old-fashioned leaning from desk to desk and whispering, told Uchenna nothing except that nobody had actually seen any horses. Though everybody claimed to know somebody who had, or else they knew somebody who knew somebody who had… Uchenna got increasingly cranky over this as the afternoon went on, and their teacher wound up being very cutting with her when she called on Uchenna for an answer later on and Uchenna hadn’t been paying attention to what was happening in the class. This in turn made Uchenna angrier still, so that when the bell rang at last for the end of the day, her mood was actively foul.

Mrs. Leenane was annoyed with her too, later, after Uchenna got changed into her field kit—the blue jersey T-shirt and the short team hockey skirt—and headed out to meet with the rest of the team in the smaller of the two Adamstown parks, two blocks away. It was their last practice before the game with the team from Presentation College in Naas the next day, and there was some tension in the air as the team divided itself up into red and blue sides, tying the little colored pinnie vests on over their field kit. But the rest of the team was tense for different reasons than Uchenna was: the mystery of the missing horses and the bad afternoon still had her fuming. She kept missing the ball, and Mrs. Leenane screamed at her a number of times, “What’s the matter with you, O’Connor, are you too mad to see straight? Mad won’t help you tomorrow afternoon! Cool yourself down and concentrate on the goal!”

Uchenna had no choice but to do just that, since all the rest of the people on her team, especially Joyce Donnelly who she really liked and enjoyed playing hockey with, were getting increasingly annoyed with her.
All right, let’s get serious,
she had to keep saying to herself:
they depend on me, I’m the biggest girl on the team, and if I don’t get straight tonight about what plays I’m supposed to be part of, we’re going to tank tomorrow.
All the same, between plays, while Mrs. Leenane was screaming at the others—she was an equal-opportunity screamer, and did not discriminate on grounds of race, religion or academic ability—Uchenna found her attention drawn again and again through the slowly falling dusk toward the northwestern side of the park and the view beyond it. The view was blocked by the trees that separated the park from the street, and by the houses between here and the fields—Emer’s house, among many others. But past there was the field they had been in last night, and Uchenna kept thinking,
Whoever took those horses away has to have left some kind of trace. Tracks or something. The ground was pretty soft. If there was a car, a trailer, they’d have to have left some sign…

“O’Connor!” screamed Mrs. Leenane as Uchenna was lining up on a particularly juicy shot into the red side’s goal. “Less of the million-mile stare, please, more of the hundred-yard one, toward the goal?!”

Oh come on, I wasn’t even looking that way!
Uchenna thought furiously, spotting the hole in the other side’s defense and whacking the ball straight through it. The ball streaked into the net, only very narrowly missing poor Deirdre Mallon, who stood there looking shocked as it shot past her.

“Nice, but sheer luck!” Mrs. Leenane screamed. “Lucky shot!” The rest of the team broke out in sardonic applause, though the irony was pointed at Mrs. Leenane: she never really believed that any of her team members could actually think their way to a goal instead of just slapping the ball around, which was all she was capable of herself. Uchenna, grinning at her teammates, simply bowed, acknowledging the clapping, and then straightened up again, holding the hockey stick up like a bishop holding up his crozier in benediction toward the team. “Bless you, my children, thank you…”

Over at the edge of the hockey field, Uchenna could see various people hanging over the chain link fence, watching the practice. One of them, standing by herself, was slight and had long blond hair. Emer had been home and changed into jeans and a rusty-black windbreaker and—Uchenna had to snort with laughter—a pair of green rubber “wellie” boots. “All right,” Leenane was shouting, “all right, that’s it for tonight, we’re in okay shape. Everybody, the bus leaves for Naas tomorrow morning at nine thirty, that’s
nine
thirty, Walsh, Merrion,
McConnor,
not ten-thirty, just get up a little early for a change…”

The team got together to bang fists and congratulate each other on a good practice. “Sorry about that, Deirdre,” Uchenna said as their turn to fist-pound came around. “Wasn’t trying to hit you…”

Little dark Deirdre grinned one of those quick crooked grins of hers. “I know that,” she said. “But you can do it to the Naas goalie if you want. Better to have them a little off balance…”

“Yeah,” Uchenna said as the team started breaking up. Along with the others, she made her way over to the pile of shoulderbags and bookbags and kit bags, and pushed various of them aside until she found the one that had her school clothes and her books in it. She picked it up and slung it over her shoulder, making her way across the field to the fence where Emer was standing.

Emer saw Uchenna’s amused glance at her wellies. “Not a bad idea,” she said. “I should have brought some of those.”

“You’re okay,” Emer said, looking critically at Uchenna’s field shoes: “got enough mud there already. And look at those socks!”

“Yeah, and I see you’ve got a fair chunk of mud on you too,” Uchenna said, as she swung her bags over the fence and climbed over it, rather than walk all the way down to the gate. “Find anything?”

Emer shook her head, looking depressed. “I went back to the field,” she said. “No tracks.”

Uchenna had to blink at that. “Nothing at all?”

“Nope.”

“I want to see,” Uchenna said.

“Don’t bother,” Emer said. “I took pictures with my phone…you can see those. There’s nothing but a lot of hoofprints inside the field.”

“They go anywhere?”

Emer shook her head again. “Not as far as I can tell. All the grass in that little field was eaten down. And every bit of the apples was gone. The gate was shut—”

As they came out of the park and crossed the street to the sidewalk of the street that led back toward Uchenna’s house, Uchenna saw Emer do something unusual. She actually shuddered. “Chen,” Emer said, “you remember how the gate was tied on with that old rope?”

“Yeah—”

“It was still tied the same way. There was moss on that rope, and the moss wasn’t even touched. Like the knots had never been untied. And if they weren’t, how’d they get the horses out?”

“‘They?’”

“I don’t know… whoever took them out.” Emer gave Uchenna a troubled look. “Anyway, they’re gone, all right…”

“You sound even more freaked now than when you thought the field behind your house was full of cars you couldn’t hear,” Uchenna said as they came around the curve that led toward Uchenna’s circle.

“Well, cars I could have coped with, sort of,” Emer said. “But now there’s no sign of anything, and I don’t know what to think…”

Uchenna sighed as they headed down into the circle and toward her house. “I need a shower,” she said. “It won’t take long. Then let’s go take some pizza out in the Back Office and chill for a while.”

Inside Uchenna’s house, her mam had been home from the hospital for some hours: and to Uchenna’s astonishment, her dad was home too, and had even brought dinner with him from one of the Indian takeaways in Naas. But Uchenna wasn’t yet up to feeling hungry—she was too sweaty and achy from the exertion of the game to care much about food just yet. “How did it go, sweet?” her mam said, looking up from the computer desk in the corner of the living room, while Emer paused in the utility room to pull the wellies off.

“Pretty good,” Uchenna said. “I’ll be down in a while, mam. Gotta sluice myself off…”

She and Emer went upstairs, and Emer went to Uchenna’s desk, woke up the computer, and while Uchenna went through her dresser drawers to get out some jeans and socks and a sweatshirt, Emer brought up her Facebook page and scanned idly down it to see who’d written anything new on her wall. Outside, the streetlight had come on: evening was setting in. Glancing through the window, Uchenna sighed. “I hate that,” she said.

“What?” Emer glanced at the window. “Oh, you mean it’s getting dark faster now…”

“I just seem to get stuck in the summer,” Uchenna said, shutting the sock drawer, “when the sun doesn’t set till like ten thirty, and it stays light so late… Somehow I expect it to keep doing that forever.”

“It drives me crazy,” Emer said. “It takes me forever to get to sleep in June and July.”

“You’re still stuck on California time. You’ll get used to it eventually,” Uchenna said. “And meanwhile, pretty soon you’re gonna start wanting to go to sleep at three thirty, when the sun goes down around Christmas time…”

“Please. I don’t want to think about it.”

“So don’t.”

“I can’t help it. I’m stuck in the Land Of Eternal Night Which Starts Gradually Next Month.”

Uchenna rolled her eyes at Emer’s moaning.
“Going to shower now,”
Uchenna said, and went.

Twenty minutes or so later she was out, dried, dressed, and found Emer staring hard at somebody else’s web page, on Tumblr.  “These people,” Emer said, not looking up, “not only have no souls, they have no design sense. Look at all that dumb pink glitter. How can anyone read this?”