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Sky Rider

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

"No, Tazz," Dusty whispered as the tall bay gelding nuzzled her hip pockets, "no more carrots." Hugging his neck, with her face in his black mane, she wanted to cry but joked instead. Dusty always joked when life got not funny at all. "Too many carrots will make you sick," she informed her horse gravely. "You don't want to get sick for Doc, do you?"

It was dark in the stable, shadowy in the light of a single forty-watt bulb. At dawn the vet would come to put Tazz down. Euthanize him.

Kill him.

Dusty blinked hard, let go of Tazz, bent over—moving stiffly because of her back brace— and picked up her sisal cloth. Tazz loved to be curried. All night Dusty had been brushing him, rubbing him, sweet-talking him. He stood in the stable aisle with no halter on him, no cross ties, not even a rope looped around his neck. Dusty knew he would not bolt out the open door. As she rubbed his red-brown crest, he lowered his head with a sigh that fluttered his soft nostrils. He stood with his ears at a contented sideward angle. With his big eyes half-closed.

With one forefoot extended because of the navicular disease.

In a moment he shifted his weight and stretched the other forefoot, trying to relieve the pain. The great-hearted thoroughbred who had once borne Dusty over Olympic-size fences, who had raced goldfinches on the wing for the fun of it, who had run bucking down the pasture every morning just because the sun was up, could no longer hobble more than a few steps at a time. Tazz lived in constant pain.

Dusty knew what intractable pain was like. Her back hurt all the time now.

Like Tazz's forefeet. Once the navicular bones in his hooves went bad, there was no cure, and no treatment except painkillers—which had stopped working as his condition got worse. But even with Tazz barely able to walk, it had been hard to make the decision to end his misery by putting him down. "Remember, Dusty," her father had told her, trying to help her accept what had to be done, "Tazz doesn't know, so he doesn't dread it. He won't be frightened. It's not like we're sending him off to the auction or the slaughterhouse. It'll just be Doc, right there in his own stall. He won't care."

Yes, Daddy. But I care.

She tried to stop thinking about it. Didn't want to cry till this was over. Didn't want to scare Tazz.

"Big show, Tazz," she whispered owlishly as she picked up the soft brush. Let him think she was grooming him for hours and hours to get him ready for Devon or the National, like in the old days when she would be busy in the stable hours before dawn, when he and she, Miss Destiny Grove riding Razzle My Tazz, had won trophies all up and down the east coast. Back before her stupid spine got hurt and she couldn't ride anymore.

Out of nowhere, out of the 3 A.M. silence came a sudden chilly wind and, in Dusty, a gale of anger. Why don't they just put me down too? I'm unsound. I'm costing a lot of money. I'm in pain, I'm useless, why don't they kill me? "Tazz," she cried, throwing down the brush, "nobody should die young!"

The gelding's head jolted up, but not because Dusty had startled him. With his ears pricked high he was staring beyond her, toward the rectangle of night outlined by the big stable door. She turned.

There had been no sound of a car or a bike or even a footstep, but a stranger, a boy maybe sixteen years old, stood there looking at her.

Dusty felt her world stop, she was so startled, even frightened—yet she did not scream. He was too beautiful, a white marble Michaelangelo in Levi jeans, shadows softening his chiseled face. There was something not quite human about his beauty, yet something all too hot and human about the way his dark eyes glowered. He kept his face hard and still. The anger showed only in his eyes.

The breeze had halted as if the night were holding its breath. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.

Then the boy moved, one swift step toward her. He spoke. "You want me to take him?" His fierce, soft voice resonated between the stable walls.

"Huh?" Dusty couldn't think. His shadowed stare wouldn't let her think. What did he want? What was he talking about? Who was he?

"For God's sake," he said even more quietly, more fiercely, "it's either me or the vet. You want me to take him?"

He was talking about ... Tazz? He seemed to be. His dark gaze had turned to the horse, and his hard face softened. His hot stare gentled momentarily as he walked to Tazz and lifted his hand to stroke the silky fox-red cheekbones, the white blaze between deep, wise eyes. Dusty stood still. For once she couldn't think of a joke—but Tazz would tell her what to think of this stranger. Tazz knew things. All horses did.

When the stranger touched him Tazz did not shy away. His ears alerted so high that they almost touched at the tips, quivering. He tucked his chin, arched his shining neck, snorted—but not in fear. "Holy gee," Dusty whispered, for in Tazz's eyes she saw a blue fire she had not seen there for a couple of years. Morning was coming, and Tazz wanted to leap right over the sun. He rose into a low rear and came down with his weight squarely on his forefeet as if they had never heard of pain.

"You want me to take him?" the boy demanded again, not turning around.

Tazz reached with his head toward the boy. "Yes," Dusty whispered.

The boy glanced at her with a look she could not read. "Fine." His voice was as hard as his face, and she began to wonder whether she had done the right thing. "Let's see whether I know how to ride a horse."

With a couple of quick, sharp strides he positioned himself at Tazz's side. "I guess I can only get killed once," he said. Grasping the long, black mane, he vaulted onto Tazz's back.

Tazz flung up his head and neighed like a golden bugle. Again he neighed, long and loud, quivering all over and stamping his forefeet in his eagerness to go, run, fly. The boy grabbed the mane with both hands and leaned forward. Tazz whinnied, plunged his head, and lunged into a gallop within a single stride, bursting out of the barn as if out of a starting gate.

In the days to follow, whenever she thought she couldn't handle all the crazy things that were happening for even a minute longer, Dusty would close her eyes and remember Razzle My Tazz's vast, leaping joy, replaying it like a movie in her mind: Tazz, cantering across the stable yard and jumping the pasture gate with a foot to spare and high-tailing it across the pasture and jumping the fence even more extravagantly. Tazz, bucking with sheer moonlit euphoria—and yes, the boy did know how to ride, he sat on the big red horse like a silver flourish placed there by the wide-eyed moon. Then Tazz, with the boy swaying along with his every jubilant move, Tazz galloping to the crest of the hill, kicking at the stars—then gone in the night, out of sight.

"Whoa! What happened?"

Blinking into the darkness, Dusty found that her feet had carried her across the stable yard and halfway across the paddock, and that her father was standing barefoot and pajama- bottomed beside her.

"What's going on? What spooked Tazz?"

Tazz wasn't spooked; couldn't he see that Tazz was wild with joy? But Dusty did not correct him. With her mouth still agape, it was all she could do to get out a couple of words. "The boy," she whispered.

"What boy?"

"The boy ..." She found that she could not describe the boy who had appeared out of the night. What was she supposed to say? That he had a face too perfect for a human being and eyes like burning coals and hair as black as Tazz's mane? That he had come out of nowhere and healed the horse with his touch? That he was either a devil or an angel in white T-shirt, ripped jeans, sneakers? "The boy riding Tazz...."

"When? Somebody rode Tazz?"

Dusty turned to her father, staring. "Just now!"

"Huh?" He stared back at her.

"Didn't you see him?" How could he not have seen? "A boy—" An indescribable boy. "A boy I don't know. He touched Tazz, and ..." Dusty faltered, thinking of her horse, of his transformation, his exaltation.

Her father's stare gentled. "You were dreaming," he told her softly.

"No, I wasn't."

"Yes you were. You must have been. There wasn't anybody here."

But ... but ... Her mind stuttered. Her sleeping bag lay spread on some hay bales in the barn, unused; she knew she had not been dreaming. More like screaming. She had yelled something and turned around and the boy ... Why hadn't her father seen the boy? Dusty asked, "Did you just catch the tail end?"

"No, I didn't catch any tail end. I wish somebody would have caught his tail end. Goofy horse."

"Tazz is not a goof!"

"Yeah, well, anyway, I woke up when he neighed. I saw the whole thing."

"You saw him take off like a rocket?"

"Yes, I saw him. More like a wild turkey. Why are we standing here arguing about your dream?"

It wasn't a dream, Dusty wanted to say, but she was getting the strangest feeling, like silver feathers brushing her spine, sending shivers through her. Feathers of silence. She stood staring at the far hills, not saying anything.

"Are you okay?" Her father peered at her.

"I'm fine."

"Your back hurting you?"

Of course it hurt; it always hurt. Dusty shook her head.

"Well, we've got to get moving. Catch Tazz. What spooked him so bad, anyway?"

Dusty said nothing.

"You had him loose in the barn, didn't you?" Her father's grumbling was gentle. Dad knew she had been agonizing about Tazz. Maybe he even suspected that she had somehow made Tazz run away herself, although it would have taken a firecracker under the tail to get Tazz to run these days. Daddy should know that. Maybe he did, because he dropped it, or handed it back to her. "Any idea where to start looking?"

"I'd just wait a while. See if he comes home on his own." She knew he wouldn't.

Her father shook his head. "You can stay here if you want. I'm going after him." Typical, Dusty thought. Daddy was a classic Type A. He had to do things, mess with things, try to make things happen; he couldn't just let things go, not ever. He was sweet, but when he got something on his mind it was like he had bugs in his ears: you just couldn't make him listen. Like now. He turned away and stomped off toward the house to get the car keys, wincing as his bare feet hit stones under the grass.

Dusty stood where she was. She took a deep breath of cool nighttime air, listening to the darkness, scanning the indigo pastures. The moon was setting over rumpled hills she had known all her life—she saw nothing out there to make her tremble. Yet she stood quivering, feeling the silent touch of invisible wings.

There was a boy.

A boy who—who shone like white fire.

He was here. I saw him.

Bang! The slam of the house door startled her. Daddy came out, wearing shoes now, keys glinting in his hand. "Maybe I can find him before old Nisley sees him and starts trouble," he yelled to Dusty as he got into the Bronco four-by-four. The next moment he roared up the lane.

Dusty rolled her eyes. "You're the one who started trouble," she said, knowing her father could not hear her; she would not have said it to his face. But she often thought it. The way her father had been feuding with the neighbors the past couple of years made no sense to her. So what if the Nisley boys and their friends biked through the woods now and then? Dusty had ridden through Nisley land back when she could actually ride and the Nisleys had crossed Grove land and nobody cared. But Daddy had changed.

Dusty sighed. Since Mom had died, everything had changed so much.

It was an aneurism, but it might as well have been the sky falling. One day Mom was fine. The next day Dusty got called out of class. The vice-principal drove her to the hospital. By the time she got there, Mom was already gone.

The evening after the funeral, Dad had several drinks to help him sleep. He'd always liked a couple of drinks before dinner, to help him relax, he said. And he'd always enjoyed drinking at parties, getting a bit happy. But now almost overnight he was drinking, not because he liked it, but because he needed it. He would get home from work and start drinking and just keep going. When Dusty asked him to stop, he said he would but he didn't. Even when she told him she needed him to talk with in the empty evenings, even when she just about made him cry, he couldn't seem to stop. After the first few weeks, he got angry if she said anything about his drinking. Sometimes he drank so much he passed out.

Dusty's friends tried to help her after Mom died. They hugged her in school every day, called her every night. But somehow Dusty couldn't tell her friends that her father had turned into a drunk. He was all she had left. She didn't feel that she could tell anybody, even when he started drinking earlier in the day, even when he started drinking and driving.

It was the accident that had shocked him into sobering up, started him going to AA. That had been a bad time, only six months after Mom died, and the doctors telling Dusty that her back was never going to be right again, and Tazz getting worse all the time—but time helped her get used to the way things were. And Daddy started going to AA, so in at least one way things were better now. Dad was almost like the old Daddy now that he was sober—well, maybe a bit more of a control freak than he used to be. Somehow he'd gotten this idea that everybody had to stay off his land. He was almost paranoid about property lines. Before Nisley started trouble, he'd said? Old Mr. Nisley wouldn't do anything bad if Tazz strayed onto his land.

Dusty took a deep breath and one more long look at the indigo night. Tazz was out there. But somehow she knew her father would not find a tall, red horse wandering on the country roads. She had a feeling that the stranger boy was riding Tazz to a place far removed from Grove land or Nisley land or the world as she knew it.

The feeling reassured her. Tazz was somewhere safe. Yet, it ... scared her.

In a daze, she wandered into the barn and lay down on her sleeping bag, barely noticing that her back hurt atrociously, her mind in a kaleidoscope swirl of Tazz, Tazz, Tazz and the inexplicable boy. Tazz as he had been the past couple of years, a little more lame every day, until the hard decision had been made—but now Tazz rearing up with the blue fire of joy in his eyes again, Tazz leaping as if he wanted to fly, Tazz running to the sky. The boy with shadowed eyes appearing out of the night. The boy ...

Better not tell anyone about him, Dusty decided. She did not want people talking about her behind her back, the way they used to talk about her mother.

Tazz saw the boy, too. That means he's real, doesn't it?

Except ... Mama had always claimed that horses saw spirits. Dusty remembered one time when she was a little girl riding Pinocchio, her first pony, with her mother beside her on a palomino mare: the pony had spooked hard at an inoffensive white oak tree. "He saw a ghost," Mom had said. "A hundred years ago a circuit preacher tied his horse to that tree and a panther got it. It was a walleyed piebald horse. Pinocchio knows." At the time, Dusty had taken it seriously, that when horses spooked for no apparent reason they were seeing spirits. Then when she got older she had decided that her mother had been kidding her. Now she was fourteen and it was starting to look like her mother had not been kidding her at all.

The boy. What had he been doing there? The Grove place was way out in the country. People didn't commonly appear there at any time, let alone at three in the morning. How had he gotten there?

And how had he known what was wrong?

What was he? He was too eerily beautiful. Her heart was beating too hard just thinking of him. She was too grateful. Why had he healed Tazz? And how?

Would Tazz be all right with him?

Who was he?

An angel, her mother would have said. An angel without wings. Mama had talked with angels regularly. Other than that, she was a normal mom—no, she was a great mom. Washed breeches, packed tack, braided manes better than anybody. Rooted for Dusty from the sidelines of every show. Knew just what to say whether it went well or not. World's best organizer and world's best hugger. Mom had some oddball opinions about angels and things, that was all. Dusty swallowed hard, missing Mom all over again even though it had been almost two years since—since people stopped calling Mom eccentric, because it wasn't nice to speak ill of the dead.

Eccentric? Maybe not. Maybe Mom knew something.

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Excerpted from Sky Rider by Nancy Springer. Copyright © 1999 Nancy Springer. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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