The Horse Whisperer Page 10

  It was duly found.

  He was a stallion by the name of Cruiser, once the fastest racehorse in the land. Now though, according to the account Annie read, he was a “fiend incarnate” and wore an eight-pound iron muzzle to stop him killing too many stableboys. His owners only kept him alive because they wanted to breed from him and to make him safe enough to do this, they planned to blind him. Against all advice, Rarey let himself into the stable where no one else dared venture and shut the door. He emerged three hours later leading Cruiser, without his muzzle and gentle as a lamb. The owners were so impressed they gave him the horse. Rarey brought him back to Ohio, where Cruiser died on July 6, 1875, outliving his new master by a full nine years.

  Annie came out of the library and down between the massive lions that guarded the steps to the street. Traffic blared by and the wind funneled icily up the canyon of buildings. She still had three or four hours of work to do back at the office, but she didn’t take a cab. She wanted to walk. The cold air might make sense of the stories swirling in her head. Whatever their names, no matter where or when they lived, the horses she had read about all had but one face. Pilgrim’s. It was into Pilgrim’s ears that the Irishman intoned and they were Pilgrim’s eyes behind the iron muzzle.

  Something was happening to Annie which she couldn’t yet define. Something visceral. Over the past month she had watched her daughter walking the floors of the apartment, first with the frame, then with the cane. She had helped Grace, they all had, with the brutal, boring, daily slog of physical therapy, hour upon hour of it, till their limbs ached as much as hers. Physically, there was a steady accumulation of tiny triumphs. But Annie could see that, in almost equal measure, something inside the girl was dying.

  Grace tried to mask it from them—her parents, Elsa, her friends, even the army of counselors and therapists who were paid well to see such things—with a kind of dogged cheerfulness. But Annie saw through it, saw the way Grace’s face went when she thought no one was looking and saw silence, like a patient monster, enfold her daughter in its arms.

  Quite why the life of a savage horse slammed up in a squalid country stall should seem now so crucially linked with her daughter’s decline, Annie had no idea. There was no logic to it. She respected Grace’s decision not to ride again, indeed Annie didn’t like the idea of her even trying. And when Harry Logan and Liz told her again and again that it would be kinder to destroy Pilgrim and that his prolonged existence was a misery to all concerned, she knew they were talking sense. Why then did she keep saying no? Why, when the magazine’s circulation figures had started to level out, had she just taken two whole afternoons off to read about weirdos who whispered into animals’ ears? Because she was a fool, she told herself.

  Everyone was going home when she got back to the office. She settled at her desk and Anthony gave her a list of messages and reminded her about a breakfast meeting she had been trying to avoid. Then he said good-night and left her on her own. Annie made a couple of calls that he’d said couldn’t wait, then called home.

  Robert told her that Grace was doing her exercises. She was fine, he said. It was what he always said. Annie told him she would be late and to go ahead and eat without her.

  “You sound tired,” he said. “Heavy day?”

  “No. I spent it reading about whisperers.”

  “About what?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  She started to go through the stack of papers Anthony had left for her but her thoughts kept sliding away into farfetched fantasies about what she’d read in the library. Maybe John Rarey had a great-great-grandson somewhere who’d inherited the gift and could use it on Pilgrim? Maybe she could place an ad in the Times to trace him? WHISPERER WANTED.

  How long it was before she fell asleep she had ho idea, but she woke with a start to see a security man standing at the door. He was doing a routine check of the offices and apologized for disturbing her. Annie asked him what time it was and was shocked to hear it was past eleven.

  She called for a car and slouched dismally in the back as it took her all the way up Central Park West. The apartment building’s green door canopy looked colorless in the sodium glow of the streetlamps.

  Robert and Grace had both gone to bed. Annie stood in the doorway of Grace’s room and let her eyes get used to the dark. The false leg stood in the corner like a toy sentry. Grace shifted in her sleep and murmured something. And the thought suddenly occurred to Annie that perhaps this need she felt to keep Pilgrim alive, to find someone who could calm his troubled heart, wasn’t about Grace at all. Perhaps it was about herself.

  Annie softly pulled the covers up over Grace’s shoulder and walked back along the corridor to the kitchen. Robert had left a note on the yellow pad on the table. Liz Hammond had called, it said. She had the name of someone who might be able to help.

  SEVEN

  TOM BOOKER WOKE AT SIX AND LISTENED TO THE LOCAL news on the TV while he shaved. A guy from Oakland had parked in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, shot his wife and two kids and then jumped off. Traffic both ways was at a standstill. In the eastern suburbs a woman out jogging in the hills behind her home had been killed by a mountain lion.

  The light above the mirror made his sunburnt face look green against the shaving foam. The bathroom was dingy and cramped and Tom had to stoop to stand under the shower rigged in the bathtub. It always seemed motels like this were built for some miniature race you never came across, people with tiny, nimble fingers who actually preferred soap the size of credit cards and wrapped for their convenience.

  He dressed and sat on the bed to pull his boots on, looking out over the little parking lot that was crammed with the pickups and four-wheeler trucks of those coming to the clinic. As of last night there were going to be twenty in the colt class and about the same in the horsemanship class. It was too many but he never liked turning folk away. For their horses’ sake more than theirs. He put on his green wool jacket, picked up his hat and let himself out into the narrow concrete corridor that led to reception.

  The young Chinese manager was putting out a tray of evil-looking doughnuts by the coffee machine. He beamed at Tom.

  “Morning Mr. Booker! How you doing?”

  “Good thanks,” Tom said. He put his key down on the desk. “How are you?”

  “Fine. Complimentary doughnut?”

  “No thanks.”

  “All set for the clinic?”

  “Oh, reckon we’ll muddle through. See you later.”

  “Bye Mr. Booker.”

  The dawn air felt damp and chilly as he walked toward his pickup, but the cloud was high and Tom knew it would burn off by midmorning. Back home in Montana the ranch was still under two foot of snow, but when they drove into Marin County here last night it had felt like spring. California, he thought. They sure had it all worked out down here, even the weather. He couldn’t wait to get home.

  He pointed the red Chevy out onto the highway and looped back over 101. The riding center nestled in a gently sloping wooded valley a couple of miles out of town. He had brought the trailer up here last night before checking into the motel and turned Rimrock out into the meadow. Tom saw someone had already been out putting arrow signs up along the route saying BOOKER HORSE CLINIC and wished whoever it was hadn’t. If the place was harder to find maybe some of the dumber ones wouldn’t show up.

  He drove through the gate and parked on the grass near the big arena where the sand had been watered and neatly combed. There was no one about. Rimrock saw him from the far side of the meadow and by the time Tom got over to the fence he was there waiting. He was an eight-year-old brown quarter horse with a white blaze on his face and four neat white socks that gave him the dapper look of someone dressed up for a tennis party. Tom had bred and reared him himself. He rubbed the horse’s neck and let him nuzzle the side of his face.

  “You got your work cut out today, old son,” Tom said. Normally he liked to have two horses at a clinic so they could share the lo
ad. But his mare, Bronty, was about to foal and he’d had to leave her back in Montana. That was another reason he wanted to get home.

  Tom turned and leaned against the fence and the two of them silently surveyed the empty space that for the next five days would be buzzing with nervous horses and their more nervous owners. After he and Rimrock had worked with them, most would go home a little less nervous and that made it worth doing. But this was the fourth clinic in about as many weeks and seeing the same damn fool problems cropping up time and time again got kind of wearing.

  For the first time in twenty years he was going to take the spring and summer off. No clinics, no traveling. Just stay put on the ranch, get some of his own colts going, help his brother some. That was it. Maybe he was getting too old. He was forty-five, hell, nearly forty-six. When he’d started out doing clinics he could do one a week all year round and love every minute. If only the people could be as smart as the horses.

  Rona Williams, the woman who owned the center and hosted this clinic every year, had seen him and was coming down from the stables. She was a small, wiry woman with the eyes of a zealot and though pushing forty, wore her hair in two long plaits. The girlishness of this was contradicted by the manly way she walked. It was the walk of someone used to being obeyed. Tom liked her. She worked hard to make a success of the clinic. He touched his hat to her and she smiled then looked up at the sky.

  “Gonna be a good one,” she said.

  “I reckon.” Tom nodded toward the road. “I see you got yourself some nice new signs out there. In case any of these forty crazy horses get themselves lost.”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “Oh? Someone drop out?”

  “Nope. Thirty-nine horses, one donkey.” She grinned. “Guy who owns it’s an actor or something. Coming up from L.A.”

  He sighed and gave her a look.

  “You’re a ruthless woman Rona. You’ll have me wrestling grizzly bears before you’re through.”

  “It’s an idea.”

  They walked down to the arena together and talked the schedule through. He would kick off this morning with the colts, working with them one by one. With twenty of them, that was going to take pretty much the whole day. Tomorrow would be the horsemanship class, with some cattle work later, if there was time, for those who wanted it.

  Tom had bought some new speakers and wanted to do a sound test, so Rona helped him get them out of the Chevy and they set them up near the bleachers where the spectators would sit. The speakers squealed with feedback when they were switched on, then settled into a menacing, anticipatory hum as Tom walked out across the virgin sand of the arena and spoke into the radio mike of his headset.

  “Hi folks.” His voice boomed among the trees that stood unstirring in the still air of the valley. “This is the Rona Williams show and I’m Tom Booker, donkey tamer to the stars.”

  When they’d checked everything through, they drove down into town to the place they always had breakfast. Smoky and T.J., the two young guys Tom had brought from Montana to help with this run of four clinics, were already eating. Rona ordered granola and Tom some scrambled eggs, wheat toast and a large orange juice.

  “You hear about that woman killed by a mountain lion out jogging?” said Smoky.

  “The lion was jogging too?” Tom asked, all big blueeyed innocence. Everyone laughed.

  “Why not?” said Rona. “Hey fellas, it’s California.”

  “That’s right,” said T.J. “They say he was all in Lycra and wearing these little earphones.”

  “You mean one of them Sony Prowlmen?” said Tom. Smoky waited for them to finish, taking it well. Teasing him had become the morning game. Tom was fond of him. He wasn’t a Nobel prizewinner, but when it came to horses he had something going for him. One day, if he worked at it, he’d be good. Tom reached out and ruffled his hair.

  “You’re okay Smoke,” he said.

  A pair of buzzards circled lazily against the liquid blue of the afternoon sky. They floated ever upward on the thermals that rose from the valley, filling that middle space between tree and hilltop with an eerie, intermittent mewing. Five hundred feet below, in a cloud of dust, the latest of the day’s twenty dramas was unfolding. The sun and maybe the signs along the road had lured as big a crowd as Tom had ever seen here. The bleachers were packed and people were still coming in, paying their ten bucks a head to one of Rona’s helpers at the gate. The women running the refreshment stall were doing brisk business and the air was laced with the smell of barbecue.

  In the middle of the arena stood a small corral some thirty feet across and it was here that Tom and Rimrock were working. The sweat was starting to streak the dust on Tom’s face and he wiped it on the sleeve of his faded blue snap-button shirt. His legs felt hot under the old leather chaps he wore over his jeans. He’d done eleven colts already and this now was the twelfth, a beautiful black thoroughbred.

  Tom always started by having a word with the owner to find out the horse’s “history,” as he liked to call it. Had he been ridden yet? Were there any special problems? There always were, but more often than not it was the horse who told you what they were, not the owner.

  This little thoroughbred was a case in point. The woman who owned him said he had a tendency to buck and was reluctant to move out. He was lazy, cranky even, she said. But now that Tom and Rimrock had him circling around them in the corral, the horse was saying something different. Tom always gave a running commentary into the radio mike so the crowd could follow what he was doing. He tried not to make the owner sound foolish. Too foolish anyway.

  “There’s another story coming through here,” he said. “It’s always kind of interesting to hear the horse’s side of the story. Now if he was cranky or lazy, like you say, we’d be seeing the tail twitching there and his ears back maybe. But this isn’t a cranky horse, it’s a scared horse. You see how braced he is there?”

  The woman was watching from outside the corral, leaning on the rail. She nodded. Tom had Rimrock turning on a dime, in deft little white-socked steps, so he was always facing the circling thoroughbred.

  “And how he keeps pointing his hindquarters in at me? Well, I’d guess the reason he seems reluctant to move out is because when he does he gets into trouble for it.”

  “He’s not good at transitions,” the woman said. “You know? When I want him to move from a trot to a lope, say?”

  Tom had to bite his tongue when he heard this kind of talk.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “That’s not what I’m seeing. You may think you’re asking for a lope but your body’s saying something else. You’re putting too many conditions on it. You’re saying ‘Go, but hey, don’t go!’ Or maybe ‘Go, but not too fast!’ He knows this from the way you feel. Your body can’t lie. You ever give him a kick to make him move out?”

  “He won’t go unless I do.”

  “And then he goes and you feel he’s going too fast, so you yank him back?”

  “Well, yes. Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes. Uh-huh. And then he bucks.” She nodded.

  He said nothing for a while. The woman had got the message and was starting to look defensive. She was clearly big on image, made up like Barbara Stanwyck, with all the right gear. The hat alone must have set her back three hundred bucks. God knows what the horse cost. Tom worked on getting the thoroughbred focused on him. He had sixty foot of coiled rope and he threw it so the coils slapped against the horse’s flank, making it burst into a lope. He coiled the rope back in then did it again. Then again and again, making the animal go from a trot to a lope, letting it slow, then up to a lope again.

  “I want him to get so as he can leave real soft,” he said. “He’s getting the idea now. He’s not all braced up and tense like he was at the start. See the way his hindquarters are straightening out? And how his tail’s not clamped in all tight like it was? He’s finding out it’s okay to go.” He threw the rope again and this time the transition to the lope was smooth.

  “Yo
u see that? That’s a change. He’s getting better already. Pretty soon, if you work at it, you’ll be able to make all these transitions easy on a loose rein.”

  And pigs will fly, he thought. She’ll take the poor animal home, ride him just as she always did and all this work will have been for nothing. The thought, as always, moved him up a gear. If he fixed the horse real good, maybe he could immunize the poor thing against her stupidity and fear. The thoroughbred was moving out nicely now but Tom had only worked on one side, so he turned him around to make him run the other way and did the whole thing over again.

  It took almost an hour. By the time he finished, the thoroughbred was sweating hard. But when Tom let him ease up and come to a standstill, the horse looked kind of disappointed.

  “He could go on playing all day,” said Tom. “Hey mister, can I have my ball back?” The crowd laughed. “He’s going to be okay—so long as you don’t go yanking on him.” He looked at the woman. She nodded and tried to smile but Tom could see she was crestfallen and he suddenly felt sorry for her. He walked Rimrock over to where she stood and switched off the radio mike so only she could hear when he spoke.

  “It’s all about self-preservation,” he said gently. “You see, these animals have got such big hearts, there’s nothing they want more than to do what you want them to. But when the messages get confused, all they can do is try and save themselves.”

  He smiled down at her for a moment, then said:

  “Now why don’t you go saddle him up and see.”

  The woman was close to tears. She climbed over the rail and walked over to her horse. The little thoroughbred watched her all the way. He let her come fight up and stroke his neck. Tom watched.

  “He’s not going to look back if you don’t,” he said. “They’re the most forgiving creatures God ever made.”