paws stilled. In the space of a moment, he had accepted our claim to ride him,
to his being ridden. He had accepted the world as it was, in which he was an
owned thing. He had never been feral, so he could not hear the maddening
call of that other world, on the mountain, in which he could not be owned,
could not be ridden.
I named him Bud. Every night for a week I watched Shawn and Bud gallop
through the corral in the gray haze of dusk. Then, on a soft summer evening,
I stood next to Bud, grasping the reins while Shawn held the halter steady,
and stepped into the saddle.
Shawn said he wanted out of his old life, and that the first step was to stay
away from his friends. Suddenly he was home every evening, looking for
something to do. He began to drive me to my rehearsals at Worm Creek.
When it was just the two of us floating down the highway, he was mellow,
lighthearted. He joked and teased, and he sometimes gave me advice, which
was mostly “Don’t do what I did.” But when we arrived at the theater, he
would change.
At first he watched the younger boys with wary concentration, then he
began to bait them. It wasn’t obvious aggression, just small provocations. He
might flick off a boy’s hat or knock a soda can from his hand and laugh as the
stain spread over the boy’s jeans. If he was challenged—and he usually
wasn’t—he would play the part of the ruffian, a hardened “Whatcha gonna do
about it?” expression disguising his face. But after, when it was just the two
of us, the mask lowered, the bravado peeled off like a breastplate, and he was
my brother.
It was his smile I loved best. His upper canines had never grown in, and
the string of holistic dentists my parents had taken him to as a child had failed
to notice until it was too late. By the time he was twenty-three, and he got
himself to an oral surgeon, they had rotated sideways inside his gums and
were ejecting themselves through the tissue under his nose. The surgeon who
removed them told Shawn to preserve his baby teeth for as long as possible,
then when they rotted out, he’d be given posts. But they never rotted out.
They stayed, stubborn relics of a misplaced childhood, reminding anyone
who witnessed his pointless, endless, feckless belligerence, that this man was
once a boy.