Mister Boots Page 3

  She’s sitting on the floor next to the couch, leaning her shoulder against Mister Boots’s shoulder. I never saw her knitting on the floor before. I hardly ever look closely at her, but she really is beautiful. She has naturally curly hair, and now it curls all around her face, pasted to her cheeks with sweat. (I must look like our father. My hair is straight and black.) She’s staring at me, thinking hard, then she says, “He never came back.”

  “I know that already.”

  I’m thinking about how those clothes are odd, like that pink turban with the jewel, and silky things, and two pairs of pants with a satin stripe along the sides.

  “What was he? Why didn’t Mother want me to know anything?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “I know that! But she thought he’d come back, didn’t she? Or she knew he would. Is he coming back?”

  She stops knitting. “I hope,” she says, and then she just sits. She looks exactly the way I feel, like everything is falling apart. “I hope,” she says again, as if there never would be any, “he doesn’t.” She starts to knit again. She’s so fast she has a couple of inches already. “He wasn’t around much, but when he was, he was teaching you to be part of his magic show.”

  “I knew it! I knew I was magic! I always knew.”

  She looks at me like I’m being ridiculous, but she goes on. “Once you . . . (You were lots smaller and thinner then. We wondered if you’d live.) Once, you flew, and that one and only time, you flew away. To escape him. I didn’t see it, but it had to be that. You were all the way out at the creek. Mother didn’t want us to believe things like that, but how could you be that far away without flying? I found you. I brought you home. You were hardly three years old.

  “When our father was here, we had plenty of money, though being poor without him is better than being rich with him. He whipped all three of us, but back when I went to school, the teacher did that all the time, too. Even the girls, though not as much. Of course our father thought you were . . . You know.”

  “But Mother told me over and over not to believe in things like flying.”

  “How else did you get way out there? You must have landed hard and broke your elbow. But sometimes I wonder if he broke your arm himself—by mistake. He wouldn’t do it on purpose. He wanted you to grow up to be part of his show, but he didn’t know his own strength.”

  Right then Mister Boots groans a long, shaky groan. My sister turns around and puts her arm across his chest. “It’s all right,” she says. “You’re going to be fine. Just rest.” She’s talking to him as if to some wild animal that’s hurt and frightened. My sister never has dared talk to hardly anybody, but now she goes on and on. She lifts his head and holds water to his lips. “Your feet are in bad shape, but we’ll have the doctor here soon.”

  “What! We can’t,” I say. “These are the doctor’s clothes.”

  “We have plenty of clothes.” She’s completely calm about it. “Help me dress him and then go take the big horse back and say we need a doctor—for a different reason.”

  “He won’t do horses.”

  “Bobby!”

  “And why didn’t Mother ever call me Roberta?”

  But Mister Boots is trying to lift himself up, not using his hands, just his elbows. His wrists are almost as badly off as his feet. My sister helps. She props him on cushions and pillows. She says, “There now. Are you in pain?”

  “You’re . . .” His voice is hoarse and hardly sounds out. Breathy. Wobbly. Just hearing it I would have guessed right away this was, once upon a time, a horse. “You’re the one,” he says. “Did I get you there?”

  They look straight out at each other. My sister never does that with anybody, and horses don’t usually do that unless to challenge.

  “You did—of course you did.” She hugs him. For heaven’s sake, she would never have done that before, and she shouldn’t! She’s pulled his head right in close, next to her breasts. That’s the second time if you count Moonlight Blue leaning against her right after she fed him apples.

  “Jocelyn!” She’s always shocked at me, but now it’s my turn to be shocked. “You don’t even know him!” But I might as well be out talking to our tree.

  “Can you eat something? What do you eat?”

  “He’ll eat anything. I gave him Mother’s stew. I gave him chicken. I’ll bet he’d even eat horse meat.”

  Boots is still staring at my sister with his caramel-colored horse eyes, as if he can’t believe she exists at all and yet here she is, existing after all.

  “He’s not your kind of person. He’s my kind of person. Crippled forever, most likely. That’s what the doctor said.”

  She doesn’t even hear me.

  She brings him an apple again and feeds him exactly as before, by hand, bite by bite. I say, “Mother’s dead, for heaven’s sake. She’s lying in the other room, dead!”

  “Go take the big horse back,” she says, not even looking at me.

  I say I will, but I don’t move. I can’t bear to leave them alone together. I hope Mister Boots is in bad enough shape to keep his hands off her.

  Then my sister says, “Help me dress him before you go.”

  I don’t want my sister to see him naked. How can she know what men are like, being who she is? It’s different for me; I’ve already seen everything. And then there’s all those scars he has. Should she see those?

  “I’ll do that by myself,” I say.

  “Don’t be silly; we both will, and he’ll help.”

  We undress him down to the scars—all sorts of scars. (Some have got to be horse bites.) He’s not much more than a skeleton. My sister gives me a look, as if I’m to blame for something.

  “I don’t know about the scars, and I fed him absolutely everything I could find around. Didn’t you notice the leftovers were always gone?”

  “I know. It’s not your fault. It’s that . . . I can hardly believe it. Poor, dear horse.”

  Boots says, “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  She picks out the fanciest of those fancy shirts, light blue with ruffles in front, and a pair of those pants with a stripe down the sides.

  My sister says for me to take the doctor’s clothes out to the trash bin and burn them up, but I’d hate to do that. I picked them out special. And I like how Boots looks in them, more a gentleman and not so much a circus performer. Mother would have liked them, too, because they’re regular, normal clothes and yet dressy.

  I take the clothes out, but I dig a shallow hole in our vegetable garden where the earth is soft. I fold the clothes up, nice and neat, and bury them.

  Mister Boots is asleep when I come back in. My sister says he dropped off as soon as he ate something. She says, “So fast he nearly fell off the couch.” It looks like a real sleep, so I think now would be the best time to take the big horse back to town. My sister is settled on the floor knitting again. I’ll bet she’ll be more than half done with that sweater by the time I get back.

  “Jocelyn, there must be money here. You went to town hardly a week ago. They might charge me for using the big shire.”

  So we look again—all the same places we did before and different ones, too. “There has to be some. How much did you make last time?”

  “Almost a hundred dollars, but I had to buy fifteen dollars’ worth of yarn.”

  “What if we don’t ever find any money? What if we’re rich and don’t even know it? Is that because our mother thought our father would come back and take it?”

  “We’ll just have to manage. I’ll go on knitting, like I always do. I’ll take care of you.”

  “I’ll learn. I’ll help.”

  “And. . . Roberta . . .” (It’s as if Mother being dead made my name all right to say out loud.) “You’ll have to buy a coffin.”

  “With what?”

  “Take my order book. Perhaps the undertaker would place an order for some knitting instead of money. Tell him I’ll be fast.”

  “You’d better make that red s
weater for somebody else.”

  But I’m on my way out, and I don’t look back. If I’ve made her angry, I don’t want to know about it. I thought I had a secret person of my very own, and an important job helping him, and that he’d die without me, but here it is, all backward, and now he’s half dead because of helping my sister.

  And he’ll be telling her about shying in the wind for the fun of it. I can just see them, leaning their heads together, and the horsier he is, the more my sister will love him.

  When I get to town there’s arguments going on all over the place, but everybody relaxes when they see me ride up on their big black horse (the shires are the most valuable things in town). When they see how I’m so willing to pay for his rental later, and how my mother died and all, and that I need a coffin, they all calm down and feel sorry for me.

  I pretend I don’t know anything about what could have happened to that flea-bit gray with bad legs, but they say, “Not much of a loss.”

  They tell me that back when my father was around, they were suspicious of my whole family, though they like my sister. Lots of people make a point of checking if she’s waiting for a ride, and they pick her up whenever they see her.

  “But we don’t know anything about you, Boy, except we see you out by yourself in the middle of nowhere loping around as if you had someplace to go. But why did you borrow this big shire when you could have ridden home on something smaller?”

  I say, “I never got to be with a horse as big as this before.” And that’s the honest truth.

  The doctor thinks I’m the one who stole his clothes, but since I went straight to his house and asked him to come back to ours, he’s not sure. But he doesn’t want to come anyway. “That’s a godforsaken place,” he says. “It’s a long way, and I’ve already been out there once for nothing.”

  “Don’t you think that white afghan is worth enough for a little bit more?”

  “Well . . . but it better be for a good reason.”

  “It will be. I promise.”

  I get to have another ride in the doctor’s car, and this time I pay more attention and enjoy it. I ask a lot of questions about how much it cost and how much gas costs, and that makes the doctor happy.

  “Now this one . . . It’s not like just any car around. It cost a bundle. You can snap the windows in and out. . . .”

  There’s some cows on the road when we’re partway home, and I yell, “A-ooo-ga,” out the window, and they move right off. I sound exactly like a real horn. I do it when we get close to our house, too, so the doctor doesn’t have to honk his horn to let my sister know we’re here. The doctor doesn’t even thank me for honking for him. I guess he thinks I’m making a lot of racket for somebody whose mother just died.

  Every so often I catch myself making a mistake about myself, and it’s not all my fault. Here I am thinking: When I grow up to be a man, I’ll get myself a car like this one. But right after, I wonder if women ever have them. If they don’t, I could be the first.

  I can smell the strong smell of valerian tea even before the doctor and I go in the door. Mister Boots is awake, lying propped up on cushions and pillows, and my sister sits beside him rubbing his head just above his ears as if he’s still a horse. It’s so clear I think the doctor will see right away how this is the ruined horse that collapsed practically at his door . . . the scraggly horse beard, the scraggly mane.... (His hair is exactly the length of a mane.) And the doctor does look shocked, but then he says, “Is this your father?” so I know he’s shocked by the clothes. Which is my sister’s fault.

  My sister says, “Of course not.” Louder than necessary.

  “Well then, who is this man? There’s no circus around here. Where’d he come from?”

  I give my sister a look. What’s she going to answer to that?

  “He’s a friend of our father’s. . . .” She says it as if it’s a question.

  “I hope this man isn’t like him.”

  “Oh, he isn’t! He can’t be!”

  The doctor does what he has to do—and gently. He gives us a bottle of painkiller for nothing, so I guess he’s not so bad. Maybe he likes me better because I asked so many questions about his car and how to drive and how hard it is to find gas stations.

  He’s going to take Mother to the undertaker. He tells us not to watch, but I do. I want to be sure he treats her properly. He wraps her up in a sheet and puts her in his car. Jocelyn gives him Mother’s best dress for the undertaker to dress her in.

  Then he comes back to talk to me privately. I suppose since I’m the boy. He leans close and whispers, “That man will be a cripple for the rest of his life. You’d best be prepared. I’ll come again sometime next week and see how he’s getting along, and check up on both of you, too.”

  (To think my sister has already ridden Boots, but I never have and now I probably never will, even though he promised.)

  chapter three

  That night we build a fire in the fireplace. We all get a little drunk, my sister and me on sherry we found when we didn’t find the money, and Mister Boots on his pain medicine. My sister sits on the floor, knitting again. Every now and then she reaches up to give Boots a pat on the shoulder. I’m lying flat out on the rug Mother crocheted, and all of a sudden here’s Mister Boots, telling us his story. To Jocelyn. In all this time, he hardly even began to tell it to me. At first, as usual, I can’t make out what he’s talking about.

  He says, “Please excuse me,” and my sister says, “What for?” and he says, “For how I am,” and my sister says, “Of course,” and he says, “I mean really,” and, “It’s that I know other things. Stallions.” He thinks about it and then says, “Pitted against each other. I have the scars. And I wasn’t lazy. I never understood why they beat me. They raced us, too.”

  He sits up and puts his bandaged feet on the floor. My sister stops knitting. She touches his knee. “It’s all right now,” she says. “You won’t have any of that again.”

  “Of course we all did love to race. Even out in the pasture we’d race for no reason. Some horses stood up for each other, but not a single human being stood up for me. But then there was one, and—” he looks over at me “—and then there was you.”

  He stops and puts his head back on the pillow and his feet back up and starts again, so quietly I have to move closer and my sister leans her head on the same pillow, right up next to his. He’s talking in a whispery way that makes it magic. I wouldn’t dare interrupt.

  He grunts a couple of horsey grunts, and I’m wondering if he’s still in pain even though he’s drunk from that painkiller. “Those men had whips as long as three horses. They snapped. Lots of times not over my head. One night, after the worst . . . something happened. It was from panic.

  “I turned boy, escaped between the bars of the round pen, ran, and hid inside a gunnysack. But I turned colt again as soon as my terror died. They brought me back and terrified me worse than ever. But there would be another time.” He’s out of breath just telling about it. “Give me a sip of your sherry.”

  He blows out a great, loose-lipped horse breath right into her glass! Doesn’t he know anything? Well, I guess he doesn’t. How could he? Who would have told him?

  “And then tied up,” he says, “all day long. Sometimes in the sun. Nothing to do but learn to untie myself. Even as a horse I could do that. Lots of us could. We had plenty of time to learn it.”

  “I would hate that,” I say.

  “I did, too, but the panic was worse. A time did come when I changed out of terror again. I knew what to do this time. I ran, first as boy, and then for a long time as horse, long and hard and up into the mountains. When the going got too rough and steep and frightened me as a horse, then as a boy—until I ran into a man, his arms around me as I fell. I was too tired to care that this was, yet again, a man.

  “That man couldn’t bear to be with people, but he was happy to be with me, boy or colt. Neither of us understood what I was, but he knew me right away. Or cared about
me, which is the same thing and just as good. He held me on his lap until I stopped trembling. Stroked me, groomed me, both as boy and colt. His was the first love I ever got from a human being. All I know I learned from him. Except how to hear and smell and listen. I knew all those better than he did.

  “You’d think, with all that galloping around in pastures . . .” He shakes his head, up and down like a horse would. “You’d think when I think of freedom it would be as a horse . . . built for speed, born for speed and nothing other. You’d think it would be as a horse that I would feel free, but never so, sad to say.

  “At first I thought the part being a boy was the dream, and after that I thought the horse part was the dream—of speed and flying, as if a horse could be a bird. I thought I had been a person from the start, and only thought myself a horse, just as you do, Boy. But why would I daydream so much terror?” He rolls his big horse eyes. “I rubbed the skin off my chest and shoulders. I cut my lips. One time I jumped, but landed on the fence, only halfway out.”

  My sister leans her head into the couch cushions and begins to cry. Mister Boots turns and nibbles at her neck. I’m wondering if he knows how to kiss? It looks like he doesn’t.

  Then my sister turns and they’re cheek to cheek, nuzzling and nibbling like horses do, even my sister. I’m not sure, but I think he licked her neck. I don’t know what to do to stop it.

  “Mister Boots, I’m not a boy, you know. Mister Boots. Mister Boots. I’m not a boy.”

  Nobody is listening.

  My sister says, “I don’t want you ever hurt,” and I say, “Moonlight Blue is a horse and did you see his color? Flea-bit, flea-bit. That’s really what they call it. Sometimes they even call it fly-specked.”

  “Moonlight Blue,” she says, as if it’s the most beautiful name there ever was. (Does she know it was me thought that name up? But then I never told her.) “Moonlight Blue. I love you, Moonlight Blue.”

  Mister Boots says, “I felt a bird inside my chest the first time I saw you.” And Jocelyn says, “Oh yes. Oh yes.”