Centaur Rising (6 page)

“If a key goes missing,” she told us, “we'll know by its color.”

“We'll know because the person who lost it will be looking for it,” Dr. Herks said, flapping his arms and pretending to be panicked.

Martha glared at him with a face that could turn a man to stone.

I was reading a book of Greek myths whenever it was my turn on foal watch. I needed to find out what I could about centaurs. It had these great paintings in full color, so real-looking it was as if the artist had taken a photograph of the characters, not just made them up from his imagination. I knew—from a unit in fourth grade—that centaurs were mythical horse-human creatures from Greece. However, this wasn't ancient Greece, and our pony boy was very real. It also seemed odd that magic should need us to be so practical: locks and keys, floodlights and blinds—and books. But we had to make our pony boy safe in this unmagical world.

I also figured that if he needed a name, I knew where I'd find one.

There were four pages on centaurs in the book, which I'd all but memorized. I read part of it aloud to Robbie.

I also learned a new word—
liminal
, which means something caught between two different natures: like someone between life and death, or someone who is both horse and man. Or a werewolf. Or a faun. Or—I thought—someone like me, not quite a grown-up, not quite a kid. That's liminal.

Also, it was a great spelling word.

Turns out, the Greek centaurs weren't very nice at all. I'd forgotten that. In fact, they sounded sort of like a gang—dragging girls away from weddings, beating up people, rioting in town centers. There was only one really good centaur, named Chiron. He was a teacher whose students included the heroes Jason and Achilles. Also there was Pholus, who was described as “civilized,” which made him sound like a snob. And Nessus. I liked his name best, but he was
really
evil and helped kill Hercules with a poisoned shirt. I sure didn't want to name our foal Nessus. He already had enough bad luck just being born into our world.

*   *   *

“So, what do you think?” I asked Robbie the third day of our four-day grace period. We were taking a three-hour shift, and I'd just been reading the centaur stories out loud to him.
Again.
Robbie could read on his own, but he loved the way I acted out the tales, hopping about like a crazed centaur or shaking my finger as Chiron might have done to his centaur students. Like Dad used to do to me.

Agora ignored me, but the pony boy listened intently, fascinated as the stories unfolded, almost as if he could understand them. His eyes were bright, a clear swimming-pool blue, and his head swiveled back and forth as he listened to each one of us in turn.

“How about Pholus?” I asked Robbie.

He shook his head. “Sounds too much like
Fool
.”

“What about Chiron?” That was my new favorite name.

“We could call him Kai!” Robbie said excitedly.

At that, the pony boy's mouth dropped open as if he knew we were talking about him. He held out his left hand, palm up, the right one being plugged into his mouth by its thumb. Then he put his head to one side considering us, or the name, or the world of his stall, before trotting over to Robbie. He no longer had the unfinished look of a newborn human, for he already had begun this phenomenal growth spurt. Like most three-day-old colts, he was still a bit unsteady on those legs, and he nearly pushed Robbie out of his wheelchair.

I stepped in between them and raised my hands. “Whoa there, Buster. Too bad brakes don't come with that body.”

“Not Buster—
Kai
!” Robbie reminded me.

Kai took the thumb out of his mouth and laughed out loud. “Kai!” he said, as perfect as that.

Robbie whooped. “He said it! He said his name!”

Talking at three days? Now
that's
magic!

“Kai it is, then.” I put my hand to my chest. “Ari,” I said.

It took three times before he got it. He poked me in the chest. “Awee.”

Close enough
, I thought.

Robbie gestured toward his own chest. Poking was too hard for his little arms. “Robbie!”

Kai laughed. “Wobbie.” And then he looked at me. “Awee.” Then he jabbed at his own chest. “Kai.” He said all three again quickly, as if it was a chant. “Awee, Wobbie, Kai.” Then his head went back and he laughed delightedly.

I put my right arm around his shoulders and gave him a gentle hug, as tentative as I'd been with Robbie when he was little, so afraid that with all his medical problems, I might break something important.

Kai threw both arms around me, his hug awkward and much too strong for a three-day-old. I could feel his heart beating.

His little boy heart. And the horse heart, too.

Enough love there
, I thought,
for all of us
.

 

7

The Angotti Factor

T
HOSE FIRST THREE DAYS WENT BY
much too quickly, like the lead horse racing at the Three County Fairground. All we managed to get done in that time was to name Kai and make his stall as safe as possible. The rest of the time, we had all the other horses to take care of, Robbie's schoolwork, and Dr. Herks' careful monitoring of Kai's extraordinary growth.

Extraordinary
was Mom's word. I just thought,
Wow! Is he getting big fast!

It was as if the boy part of his body had to grow extra quick to keep up with the horse part. In those first few days, he got more and more control of his legs, grew baby teeth, and learned to put a few words together to make sentences, something it would take a regular human kid a year or more to do.

He developed muscles in his upper arms by pushing at the stall door whenever we left and never got that pouchy baby tummy that some of my little cousins had.

Along with the growth, his hair grew in red-brown tendrils till it was halfway down his neck. He looked so adorable, I took three pictures of him with Mom's Polaroid camera. I showed them to him, and he said, “Who that, Awee?”

“Silly,” Robbie said. “It's you.”

Kai looked puzzled. He didn't understand how different he was. I mean, how could he? He was still a baby in many ways.

So I asked Mom if we could get a mirror for him.

The next time Dr. Herks came to check on Kai, he brought along a narrow full-length mirror and mounted it on the barn door.

Kai spent hours looking at himself in the mirror, playing peekaboo games, until he finally realized that the interesting pony boy there was himself.

As for the photographs, I pinned them to my bedroom bulletin board.

Mom called Kai's growth spurt a miracle. Martha called it a marvel. Dr. Herks called it nature, nurture, and myth combining.

I—the one person who had wanted magic in our lives—seemed to be the one person worried that it was going to mean more trouble for us. Meaning me.

Only Robbie fully accepted the magic that was Kai.

Oh—and Agora, of course. Since she'd never had a foal before, perhaps she just thought this was an ordinary birth, an ordinary foal, an ordinary boy.

*   *   *

The four days we asked our horse boarders to give us should have been enough. But we hadn't counted on Mrs. Angotti's sneaky determination. She kept calling Mom and getting put off again and again. So she took things into her own hands.

The morning of the next day, she didn't call ahead, just arrived without announcing her intentions at a time when Martha and I were mucking out stalls, Robbie was in with Agora and Kai, and Mom was in the house making phone calls.

The Angottis—Mrs. A and the two kids, Joey and Angela—all got out to shift the sawhorses so they could drive right up to the barn.

I saw them by accident as I started out of the stables and would have said something, but Mom had already seen them, too. She came galloping out of the house, waving her hands to stop them. So I shrank back against the wall.

She and Mrs. A argued for about five minutes, most of the time loud enough for me to hear.

Halfway through, Mom said, “I'll go and get your horses right now and tie them to the back of your car if you drive up to the barn.”

Mrs. A replied, “You wouldn't!”

“Just try me! They can trot home after you, or you can leave them here, but you're
not
coming in. Not till the four days are up and the vet gives us the all clear. Maybe even longer.”

They were still arguing when I sneaked back to Agora's stall. Robbie was reading a book to himself while Kai slept. Agora was quietly munching on grain.

I got into one of the green quarantine suits and put the mask on.

Just in case.

“Stay here,” I whispered so I didn't wake Kai.

Robbie dropped the book about Thomas Jefferson into his lap and stared at me.

“And put on Martha's suit just in case. Mask, too.” They were hanging on the back of the door. I handed them to him. He could just about manage without me.

“Why…?”

“The Angottis are here.”

“But it's not four days yet,” he whined.

“I know that. But they're here anyway.”

At that moment Agora made an odd sound, and I turned to see her straddling her sleeping foal and baring her teeth at the door.

It didn't take a horse whisperer to guess something was up.

Agora never acted this way except when one of the Angottis was around. I don't know that they're actually
bad
kids. But they're loud, and they always seem to find trouble.

As a four-year-old, Joey had spilled out a week's worth of oats onto the muddy area by the barn door to make something he called “horse poo!” He also poured his Coke into Bor's water trough because he felt sorry that Bor only had water to drink.

One time before a horse show at the Three County Fair, Angela plaited Marzipan's forelock so tightly, the poor thing was cross-eyed with a headache for a week. Martha finally had to cut the forelock short because trying to unwind it would take too much time and hurt Marzipan even more.

Of course, Mrs. Angotti blamed us for everything. She said we should have had a proper lock on the oats. Bor's stall should have been out of the reach of children. And she was
apoplectic
—Mom's word, but I love it and even learned to spell it—when Martha “damaged Marzipan forever by cutting off her hair.”

“Somebody explain to her that that hair grows back,” Martha muttered as she walked away. “I can't be bothered.”

But now Agora was practically growling. If Agora was upset about one of the Angottis, the problem had to be dealt with—and fast.

So, in the quarantine suit and mask, I went to the doorway of the stall, lifted the shade over the window, and peeked out.

Sure enough, there was Joey sneaking down the corridor. I opened the stall door, then closed and locked it behind me. In my surgical gear—now a bit dirty from sitting on the floor—I gave him quite a fright.

“Jeez Louise,” he said, “who are you?”

I took the mask off. “It's me, Arianna. And why are you
here
? Haven't you been told this part of the barn's off-limits?”

“What does that mean?” He actually looked innocent saying that, which made me wonder.

“It means you're not allowed here. Not for
any
reason at all. We've got sick horses that you just can't be around.”

“Whatcha dressed like that for?” His nose wrinkled as if he'd smelled something awful.

I pointed to the two signs, the one that said
QUARITINE
in Martha's block writing and the poster board where it was spelled right.

“What does
that
mean?” He went up close to the signs and sounded out the words, pronouncing them wrong. “Quart-een.”

“It means no one goes in or out without the proper clothes and proper mask.”

“I could do that.”

I had to think of something to really discourage him. “And you have to take a special bath with carbolic soap that stings something fierce and raises prickles all over your body.”

“Eeeeeew,” he said.

“Because,” and now I was really getting into it, “while we think what the horses have isn't catching, the vet says we've got to be
super
careful. You know, people catching a horse sickness wouldn't be pretty. In fact, it could actually be…” I stopped, looked around as if making sure no one was listening, leaned toward him, and whispered, “Life threatening.”

For the first time he seemed uncertain. “Which horses? I hope it's not Bor.”

Bor was his favorite.

Bor didn't think much of Joey.

“Agora and her new foal.”

“She's not a horse. She's a
pony
,” he said, as if that made her worthless.

This wasn't the time to argue with him. Besides, arguing with an Angotti is like arguing with a pack of mules, or so Martha says. “Only without having a two-by-four handy.”

“Can I see from out here?” Joey said. “I won't touch anything.”

“No, you can't.”

He made a face.

“I
mean
it, Joey.” I may be one of the shortest kids in my class, but I'm a good foot taller than Joey, who's only in third grade.

He shrugged and walked back the way he came.

I should have been suspicious when he gave up that easily, but I was just relieved he'd gone. As soon as he turned the corner, I went back into Agora's stall.

Just as I sat down, I heard a noise at the door, and the blinds twitched.

“Jeeze Louise!”

I looked at Joey's face peering through the blinds and jumped between Agora and his sightline, hoping I'd been fast enough. Then I stomped up to the door, opened it a crack, and sidled outside.