The Mare

Velvet

When I went back to the barn, Beth wasn’t there anymore. Some of the horses weren’t there either: Spirit and Blue Boy and Baby were gone. Instead there was a new girl named Heather and her horse, this weird pale horse she called Totally Crushed. Heather wore gold things, rings and little chains, and she had short, shiny nails and Barbie hair. I thought maybe she was one of the rich people Beth told me about, the ones who Beverly trained the horses for just so they could look good. But Heather already looked good on Totally. She was everything right and did everything right and everything that wasn’t right made her sick. She didn’t like Joker because “he doesn’t want to work.” She didn’t like Rocki because he was “wimpy.” She didn’t like Fiery Girl because, besides being “psycho,” she had “ugly ears.” Who she liked was Beverly. And Beverly liked her a lot.

I hated her worse than Gare and I think Gare hated her too. After Heather came to the barn, Gare didn’t eat her lunch with everybody anymore. She went out and ate her sandwich on a feedbag, her shoulders curled up and her dumb purple head down in them.

The day Joker got loose was the day Heather finally did something wrong. It was mad hot, we were all sweaty and the horses were sleepy and all the big fans were going, and I was pushing this wheelbarrow of dirty sawdust to dump it when I heard Heather scream, “Loose horse!” And it was Joker. He’d gotten away from her when she was going in to clean his stall, and he was running, heading for the door, with his eyes going Hee hee hee! Pat yelled, “Get out the way!” and I threw myself flat against the wall and he went past like a smiling tornado, heading right for the door where Beverly was. I thought, Now she’s gonna learn some respect — even her.

But I was wrong. She saw him coming, and she grabbed a rake somebody left and stuck it right up in his face. He made a scared noise and turned around, and she followed him with the rake, chased him back into his stall.

“Good goin’!” yelled Pat.

“Watch what you’re doing next time,” Beverly snapped at Heather, who turned red.

Which I would’ve liked except for what happened then. When I first rode Joker and he didn’t do what I asked and Pat said, If he was your little brother, what would you do? I said, Hit him, and she said, I wouldn’t try that with Joker. I didn’t try it. I was nice and he did what I wanted and I was proud. Now Beverly was in his stall hitting him, like it was nothing. Like he was nothing. And Pat didn’t say nothin’.

So I stood around Beverly and waited for her to say something about it. And she did, kind of. She told me a story about a boy my age at a place she used to work at in Texas. She said he worked in his father’s stable and one day this stallion got loose. She said this boy knew that horse, that it was unpredictable. Still, that boy was stupid when he knew better. He saw that horse running right at him, and he stood in front of it and tried to stop it by waving his arms, and that stallion stood up and knocked the boy out with his hooves.

“The kid was out of it for days. They weren’t even sure he’d come back to normal,” she said. “And he deserved it. Even his father thought it. People thought he’d put the horse down, but he didn’t. It was a valuable horse and the kid did a dumb thing.”

“His own father?”

“Yeah.” She looked at me the way she looked at the horses when they were starting to make her mad. “It wasn’t the horse’s fault. He was just saying, ‘Get outta my way, you idiot.’ ”

Then I really didn’t understand. I still thought Beverly was cool. But like you think somebody scary is cool. Because she thought horses should be hurt if they acted up. And she did the same as the boy did, she got right up in Joker’s face. But she was still on the stallion’s side, and all I could think was, she felt that way because he was the one who hurt somebody. Like she did.