Colt Read Free

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.
    â€œWe won’t let you fall,” one side walker, a pudgy woman, told him.
    â€œDo 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.
    â€œHow 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.
    â€œHey! 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.
    â€œHow did it go?” Colt’s mother insisted eagerly as Mrs. Reynolds stopped Liverwurst near her.
    â€œOkay,” Colt admitted. Mrs. Berry was busy with somebody else and wouldn’t hear him.
    â€œAll right ! You going to come again next week?”
    â€œAudrey,” 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,