Colt Read online

  “Hey! 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.

  “How did it go?” Colt’s mother insisted eagerly as Mrs. Reynolds stopped Liverwurst near her.

  “Okay,” Colt admitted. Mrs. Berry was busy with somebody else and wouldn’t hear him.

  “All right! You going to come again next week?”

  “Audrey,” 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, not even in his mother, who was a lot of fun but kind of dense sometimes about what a guy was feeling.

  So who the heck was this Brad Flowers that he knew so much? Never having paid much attention to his mother’s boyfriends, who had been coming and going since he could remember, Colt had not yet noticed that Brad was different. But now he noticed: Brad had been around longer than any of the others. Six months at least.

  Mrs. Berry sailed up. “Ready to get down, Colt?”

  “Noooo,” he said sarcastically, to annoy her. As usual, it didn’t work. She was too busy bossing the two people it took to get him off Liverwurst and into his wheelchair again.

  His mother and Brad Flowers had an easier time of it getting him into the backseat of the car. They had more practice, and his mother, who had been lifting him since he was a baby, was big and strong—not chunky, just long limbed, athletic, and deft. Brad Flowers was a husky slow-moving man, raised on a farm before he went into the army. Colt noticed that he didn’t drive, the way most of the boyfriends did. Brad let Audrey drive, even though she drove like she talked: awfully fast, with lots of shortcuts.

  “Well?” she yelled back at Colt.

  “Well, what?”

  “You riding again next week?”

  “I guess.” There was something special about being on top of Liverwurst. A lot better than being under his big rubbery slobbery nose.

  “Soon as we get home it’ll be time—”

  “I know.”

  First thing when he got home Colt had to get to the bathroom and catheterize himself. That is, he had to empty his bladder with a small flexible plastic tube.

  Maybe the one thing Colt hated most about spina bifida was that the nerve damage left him without any control of his bodily functions. He always had to be on a schedule to take care of them. He always had to worry about springing a leak and embarrassing himself in public.

  Barreling through the living room in his wheelchair on his way to the bathroom, propelling himself over the low-pile carpeting with his hands, Colt nearly ran into a few things: a casserole containing dried-up bits of macaroni and cheese; Muffins, the Yorkie, eating at the casserole; a cut-glass vase being used as a holder for hammer and screwdrivers while its silk flowers lay dumped to one side; a giant box of Tide on its slow way to the basement; a water-color paint kit laid out to dry, then forgotten; his mother’s oxfords in the middle of the floor—she had left her thick white cotton socks draped over the unicorn picture on the wall. (Audrey Vittorio was a postal employee, and Colt often wondered how many pieces of mail she had messed up during any given day.) Also in the living room were Rosie and Lauri Flowers, Brad’s kids, looking as out of place as many of the other objects there.

  Surprised and a bit flustered to see the Flowers kids, Colt called hi but did not stop to talk. He got himself through the extra-wide bathroom door, found his catheter and sterilizing soap and cotton pads, positioned his wheelchair by the metal stall bars, lifted himself from the wheelchair to the toilet, worked his sweat pants down and took care of himself. Neely was older than he was, and Neely still had his mother or a school nurse do the job. Neely was a wimp. Colt had been catheterizing himself since he was six. It didn’t hurt.

  He struggled back into his pants, got back into the wheelchair, washed his hands and his catheter, and put everything away. The whole process took a little while, maybe fifteen minutes. Now he would be good for another four hours by the clock. Whoopee.

  No hurry. While he was in the bathroom, where he had some privacy, he did a few of his daily exercises, lifting himself up out of his wheelchair until his arms were straight, then setting himself down again. One, two … ten times. Later, once he had cleared a space on his bedroom floor, he would do his sit-ups and push-ups. At least twenty of each. Once, just to show him that he could do it, Mrs. Berry made him do fifty push-ups. He had been sore afterward, but proud, and he had started working out with hand weights too. He had started with a two-pound weight and was working his way up to five. He did not like exercises, but he did them doggedly, day after day, because he knew he had to. Exercises, like catheters, came along with spina bifida.

  They were all just sitting in the living room waiting for him when he came out: his mother, and Brad, Rosie, and Lauri. Rosie, despite his name, was a boy, a tall, slim blondish teenager as quiet as his father. Some tease had started calling him “Rosie” because of his last name, Flowers, and the nickname had stuck. He did not seem to mind it. Lauri, his little sister, was about Colt’s age, though she looked older. Whenever she was around, Colt watched her with cautious interest.

  She was plopped amid the clutter on the floor, looking bored and very pretty. “You’re lucky,” she complained at Colt as he wheeled his chair up beside her.

  “Huh?” He seldom thought of himself as lucky.

  “You lucky piece of scum. You got to go horseback riding.”

  “Big deal. All they do is put you on the horse and lead it around a ring.”

  “Hey, I wouldn’t mind! How come you get to go horseback riding for free?”

  “It’s supposed to be good for me.”

  “No fair! Just because you’re handicapped—”

  Before Colt could tell her that he’d trade her anytime, her father shushed her. “Lauri.”

  “Want to play something?” Rosie offered Colt vaguely at the same time, trying to smooth things over. They all thought Colt minded Lauri, but he didn’t. He liked the way she was honest with him.

  “Do you want to play something?” he asked her.

  She looked annoyed. But before she could answer, her father said, “Don’t go off, you guys.”

  “We want to tell you something,” Colt’s mother said. Which was not Audrey’s usual style at all. Whatever she had to say, she generally just poured it out. And Brad didn’t usually even bring his kids to the Vittorio place. Colt had met them maybe twice before, because Rosie and Lauri generally had other things to do besides tag along with their father. But tonight here they were—and Colt suddenly noticed how tense and awkward his mother and Brad looked, sitting there on that sofa, just sitting.

  They looked at each other, each one nudging the other to go first, like a couple of kindergartners coming on stage at a school assembly.

  “You tell them,” Audrey said, chickening out and passing the buck to Brad.

  He tried to joke. “It was your idea.”

  “Brad, c’mon! You’re the guy.”

  “I’m liberated.”

  “Tell us what?” Colt demanded.

  Rosie complained at the same time. “Will one of you just spit it out?”

  Flustered, Audrey tried. “Your father—I mean, Brad—well, we—”

  “We’re going to get married,” Brad helped her.

  Nobody said congratulations. All three kids looked just plain shocked. Colt gawked at his mother.

  “You serious?”

  She reached for Brad’s hand, and her warm, funny smile was answer enough. But she tried to say more. “Colt, he—he’s the one.”

  Looking back a year or t
wo later, he wondered why he had been so surprised. It was just that, well, there had been other boyfriends. Boyfriends came and went, but Colt stayed. He had kind of thought it would always be just him and her.

  Now it was going to be him and her and Brad and …

  Rosie stood up, moved a few steps closer to his father. “Dad.” His voice sounded tight. “Dad, Lauri and I aren’t going to have to go back with Mom, are we?”

  “Heck, no!” Brad Flowers looked as shocked as his children. “You’ll be with me. It’s just that we’ll be moving here, that’s all.”

  It was going to be Colt and his mother and Brad and Rosie and Lauri. All in a place not much bigger than a shoe box!

  Lauri sat up straight and looked around the chaotic house with a show of alarm.

  “I know it’s a mess,” Audrey apologized, “and I know it’s small. But, you see, it has the railings and wide doors and things Colt needs.”

  Great. Now it’s all my fault.

  “And I can try harder to get myself organized. I’ve already started clearing the junk out of the spare bedroom—”

  Lauri pounced. “Will that be my room?”

  “Depends,” her father told her. “We have three kids to go into two bedrooms. We figure you can have the one bedroom and Colt and Rosie can share the other. Or you can have the one bedroom and Rosie can sleep on the sofa. Or Rosie can have the spare bedroom and you can sleep on the sofa.”

  Lauri put up a wail. Rosie looked dazed. Colt burst out, “I don’t want somebody else in my room!” Especially not a tall teenage boy like Rosie. Everybody knew (everybody except parents, it seemed) that teenagers were mean and dangerous to younger kids, and that tall boys beat up on smaller boys—held them down by the hair and banged their heads on the ground, even. And Colt would not be able to run away. Who knew what Rosie might do to him in the privacy of a shared bedroom? Rosie might hold him down and twist his arms. Rosie might take away his crutches and braces in the night. Rosie might knock him down and make him break bones and hit his shunt and tear open his lump and die.

  “I want my room to myself!”

  Audrey said, “Colt—”

  “We don’t have to settle it all tonight,” Brad put in quietly.

  “I don’t want to sleep on the sofa!” Lauri wailed.

  “Hush up,” Mr. Flowers told her, and she hushed. He went on, “Whatever arrangement we come up with, it’ll be temporary. Audrey and I are hoping that we’ll be able to save enough money by all living together to make a down payment on a bigger house in a year or two.”

  “A year or two!” Colt yelled. He might be killed by Rosie seventeen times in a year or two.

  “COLT!” His mother seldom shouted at him, and even now she didn’t look so much angry as ready to cry. “You apologize to Brad!”

  “Never mind,” Brad said.

  And Rosie spoke up in a quiet voice very much like his father’s. “Let’s just say I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  Brad told him, “Now, Son, you might not need to. We have plenty of time, I know we can work this out—”

  “It’s all right. I’m the oldest. I’ll sleep on the sofa.” Moving with awkward short steps, Rosie went and stood in front of his father and Audrey Vittorio. “I just want you to be happy,” he mumbled, and he leaned over and gave them each a hasty hug.

  “Me too,” Lauri said, shamefaced. She hurried over to give her dad a long hug. More gingerly she hugged Audrey.

  Colt had a miserable feeling that he did not in fact want Brad Flowers and his mother to be happy. He wanted them to be unhappy, so that Brad and his kids would leave and he would have his mother to himself again. Meanwhile, he felt awful, as if he was left out of something important, and it was all his mother’s fault.

  Keeping his voice very calm, very virtuous, he said to her, “Mom, I can’t get over there because of all the junk on the floor.”

  “Aaaak!” Audrey Vittorio jumped up to clear a path. “I am such a mess.”

  The next week, when he went to Horseback Riding for the Handicapped, Colt fed Liverwurst a carrot. This was better and less scary than an apple, he found, because he could poke it at Liverwurst while keeping his distance. And Liverwurst did not break it open in so terrifying a way, but merely sucked the long object up into his long mouth, where he chomped it with loud crunching sounds and some orange slobber.

  Mrs. Berry made Colt offer the carrot, of course, and Colt fought her all the way. But later, when he was riding Liverwurst with an aide on each side, and Mrs. Reynolds said, “Would you like me to show you how to use the reins?” Colt said, “Yes.”

  That summer evening he learned to stop the horse with pressure on the reins, to start Liverwurst forward again with a voice command and a tilt of his body, to steer Liverwurst in circles with a signal on the reins and a twist of his head and shoulders, even to ride Liverwurst over a low obstacle. All at a walk, of course. He learned to follow the nodding of the horse’s head with his hands, so that the bit at the other end of the taut reins would not hurt Liverwurst’s mouth. He even managed once to nudge Liverwurst into a walk with his legs.

  “Wonderful, Colt!” Mrs. Berry beamed at him. “Excellent posture!”

  He was sitting up straight because it felt good and because it helped him ride the horse properly, not because she said so. She should know that. The horse took cues from the position of his body, Mrs. Reynolds had explained, as well as from the reins. Didn’t Mrs. Berry understand these things? Her compliment annoyed him because good posture was not the point, at least not to him. Riding the horse was.

  Riding the horse was really something.

  His mother and Brad were waiting for him after the hour of horseback riding was over. He ignored them as Mrs. Berry pushed him in his wheelchair up the lumpy driveway to them, looking instead over his shoulder at the horse being led into the barn.

  So his mother was getting married to this guy he barely knew. So he was going to have three strangers living in his house, all of them healthy and stronger than he. So he was a poor wimp of a handicapped kid in a wheelchair. So what. At least there was one thing in his life—a big, powerful thing—he could control.

  “See ya later, Liverwurst,” he called.

  Chapter Three

  “Are there bears?” Colt demanded.

  “Not likely,” Mrs. Reynolds answered him, in her usual level way. She was walking along beside him as one of his aides. Colt no longer needed anyone at Liverwurst’s head. He took care of guiding and controlling the horse these days. He could make Liverwurst walk on, stop, back up, do circles and serpentines and figure eights, go over a low jump, and run relay races. Or walk relay races, rather. So far all the handicapped kids were riding just at a walk.

  The next week, Mrs. Reynolds had just told him, he was going to get to ride Liverwurst outside the ring. The handicapped class was going out on the trails in the wooded state park nearby.

  “But there are some bears,” Colt insisted. He was scared of large wild animals. “There are bears in the woods in Pennsylvania. People hunt them.”

  “That’s up in the mountains, mostly,” Mrs. Reynolds told him.

  “Some of them could come down here. What’ll happen if we run into a bear?”

  Almost offhand Mrs. Reynolds said, “If Liverwurst even so much as smelled a bear he would rear up and throw you off and run home like a racehorse.”

  Oddly, this blunt statement of truth made Colt feel much better than any assurance could have. He said, “You’re not worried?”

  “I’ve been riding around here for twenty years and never run into a bear yet.”

  “But there could be bears.”

  “Probably not. You have to think in terms of probabilities, Colt.”

  “Huh?” Mrs. Reynolds always talked to him as if he were her equal, and he liked that. But sometimes he had to ask her to repeat or explain. Like now. “Think in terms of what?”

  “Probabilities,” she told him. “Nothing’s ever absolutely safe or ce
rtain. You have to go with what’s probably going to happen. It’s like that when you’re dealing with horses, and it’s like that when you’re dealing with life.”

  He guided Liverwurst into a circle, swiveling his shoulders and hips toward the direction he wanted the horse to go, hinting with the reins and squeezing as much as he could (which wasn’t much) with the leg toward the center of the circle. Liverwurst turned his neck in an arc that matched the line Colt wanted and clopped on.

  “So there’s probably no bears out there,” Colt said to Mrs. Reynolds.

  “The chances are very, very small that we will meet a bear.”

  He considered, then offered a small joke. “What about mountain lions?”

  She laughed. “Right, Colt.”

  But part of him really was worrying about mountain lions. Even though he knew it made no sense, he couldn’t seem to help being scared of things.

  He worried about bears, and sometimes mountain lions, off and on throughout the next week. Not too much, because he had plenty of other things to worry about. The bad grades he was getting in his summer tutoring, for one. His mother always had him tutored over the summer, because the way fluid buildup had affected his central nervous system made him have trouble with schoolwork, especially with math. And when he got bad grades in the summer she really got mad, because she was paying the tutor.

  And the wedding, for another thing. He worried that he would stumble going up the carpeted aisle, when everybody would be looking at him. Or a crutch would slip. Or he would get too tired, standing in his braces. He was supposed to be up front with his mother and hand her the ring she was going to put on Brad, and he worried that he would drop it. It wasn’t going to be a big fancy wedding, but still he worried that he would embarrass himself somehow.

  He worried about the wedding on the way to the stable the next week, and then getting ready for the trail ride he started to worry about large wild animals. But meanwhile he felt quite glad to see a certain large tame animal.