Catch Rider (9780544034303) Read Free

double-reined pelham like the ladies used when they rode sidesaddle in the old days. I imagined myself riding a jumper in a Grand Prix class at a horse show, holding his twelve hundred pounds of fury back in a fancy three-ring elevator bit.
    Wayne had a strong opinion that any good rider could ride a horse in a simple bit, no tricks or shortcuts. “Fancy bits are for bad riders,” he always said.
    I got impatient. “So how much?”
    He sucked on his dentures, pulling his cheeks down from his eye sockets until he looked like a crazy man. He snapped the teeth back in place. “A few thousand.”
    â€œThat’s it?”
    â€œBeen on the track so long, he can’t go clockwise,” he said.
    I felt frustration tighten my throat. “We could fix that in the ring.”
    â€œThen fix it. I’ll give you twenty percent,” he said.
    I knew that Uncle Wayne and his half-crooked horse-trader friends made all kinds of deals in the run-in shed with rain leaking down on them, and I wanted to make those deals too. He must have bought and sold thousands of horses—pleasure horses, carriage teams, mules, trick horses, you name it—to and from men with names like Boojie Dowdie, Apple Woodzell, or just “the Liptrap boy with the red truck.” They didn’t trust each other, none of them. If you were buying a horse, you had to look out for yourself—feel the horse’s legs, trot him out, and ride him. If you were dumb enough to buy a lame horse or an old horse, you deserved what you got. Except sometimes Wayne would take a horse back from a good customer for credit. No money back, but he’d find him something else. Even so, I was the only person alive who really trusted him, and he was the only person I could trust.
    I had read about the fancy show-horse world. It worked differently there. When a horse was for sale, the buyer’s vet took x-rays and provided a report. Wayne and his fellow horse traders laughed at that. X-rays! You could tell a horse had incurable navicular disease—which Wayne called “vehicular disease”—if he tiptoed. What kind of real horseman needed a damn x-ray of a horse’s legs?
    I scratched the red horse’s neck and he closed his eyes. My nails left a mark as they pulled up the grit.
    â€œYou wash your horses or what?” I teased Uncle Wayne.
    He flicked his toothpick into the mud.

THREE
    I T STOPPED RAINING, and the wind began to blow. Uncle Wayne and I walked through the sloppy paddock up to his old saltbox farmhouse. The roof was rusting at the seams and the porch hung off. We went up to Wayne’s kitchen door, where Grittlebones, an old yellow cat, was sitting on the top step. He was missing teeth and his ears looked like he’d been chewed on by a pack of hyenas. He saw Wayne coming and ran under the porch.
    â€œHe looks skinny,” I said.
    â€œThen I reckon he better get to work,” Wayne said.
    Bouncing my left foot off the cinder block he used as a bottom step, I opened the door and went inside.
    I smelled the smoke from the pine logs and the salty deer stew that had been sitting on the wood stove all day. Wayne was the only person I knew who cooked on a stove all summer. I hung my chaps over a chair by the fire to dry and got two bowls from the cupboard. As I put the stew into the bowls, Wayne opened the tin oven on top of the wood stove, pulled out a couple of biscuits wrapped in tinfoil, and handed one to me.
    We sat in chairs facing each other and ate quietly. Wayne rested his heels on the wood stove, careful not to burn the rubber soles. It was only four thirty, but Wayne was usually in bed before dark.
    In the old days, my mother had told me, Wayne had run around until all hours of the night. When I was growing up, he seemed to have a lady friend now and then, but it never lasted. Either she couldn’t ride, she was too stupid, or she had a husband. Sometimes all three. I never liked