Chapter 7

Since Angela had been so interested, I picked her up on the way out to the stables the next day. While I drove, Kim gave her a basic lesson in horses and horsemanship with Angela asking all the right questions. I had my boots with me but hadn’t planned on riding. I was just there to support Kim.

While she groomed and saddled Diva, I cleaned up the indoor arena and rolled barrels out to where I thought they should be. A few minutes later, they walked out with Diva, Kim looked at the barrels and motioned for me to move one of them and I did. I’d remembered to bring a stopwatch. Angela and I found a good place to watch, while Kim and Diva warmed up. They took a few laps at a walk, then trot, then canter. Kim tightened up the girth and they took another couple of laps while I answered more of Angela’s questions.

Kim started Diva at the far end of the arena and made her first circuit at a trot. She did that twice more before picking up the pace. By her fifth circuit, they were really flying, their angle in the turns steeper than I would have thought possible. I didn’t think Angela knew enough to be as impressed as I was. When she felt like Diva was done, she cooled her down and brought her into the barn.

“Want to ride?” Kim asked Angela.

“Not like that, that’s for sure.”

“No. I know that. We have lots of time. Ghost is back to full strength. Let’s get Ghost and Scout ready and Jack can ride a few laps with you so you can get a feel for it.”

While I hosed down Diva, Kim showed Angela how to groom her horse, put a pad and saddle on, then put the bridle on. Ghost had a habit of nibbling fingers when I put a bridle on him and I laughed when he did the same to Angela. I’d ridden Scout while Ghost was convalescing so I stayed with him. I was ready first and walked Scout to the arena and walked him a few laps before Angela came out with Ghost.

Kim had me demonstrate proper posture, then some common mistakes. She had me demonstrate different cues and how eyes, shoulders, butt, and legs were all good cues to let her horse know what she wanted. Then Angela and Ghost followed us around the arena at a walk a few times. When she felt comfortable, we picked up a trot, then back to a walk.

“There’s too much to think about,” she said.

I pulled up even with her at a walk. “I worked on five things until they started to come naturally,” I said and she waited for me to elaborate. “Heels down, shoulders back, hands between elbows and bit, look where I want to go, and steer with my butt.”

“There’s obviously a lot more to it than that, but it works for Jack. He likes to focus on low-hanging fruit. Fix the easiest thing to fix with the most benefit for having done that.”

“What is it for me?”

“Posture, but that’s not really fair since you only rode for a few minutes. But you have to have good posture or your horse won’t know how to interpret your cues.”

“How long does it take? You’ve been doing it for a while and that’s not what I mean. I guess I want to know how long it takes to feel comfortable on a horse, you know, tell him to walk or trot and stuff.”

“The first thing is, you don’t tell a horse to do anything. Ghost weighs about eleven hundred pounds. If you tell him to do something, he’ll decide if he wants to humor you or just buck you off. If you ask nicely, he’s pretty good about going along with you.”

“I know,” I said. “It sounds weird but I think it’s an attitude as much as anything. When you train a dog, you’re the master and you teach it to do what you tell it. With a horse, it’s more like you’re partners.”

“I definitely don’t want to get bucked off. This is so foreign to me. Everything. The whole deal is just completely outside my experience.”

“Let’s do a couple more laps,” I said and started at a walk. Kim told her to stay two horse lengths behind and she followed. After a couple of laps walking, we picked up the trot for a couple of laps then walked them two more. We could both tell Angela was about done.

“It was starting to get fun at the end but there’s so much to think about.”

“But, did you enjoy it? Would you want to ride again? Perhaps learn more?”

“Yes. Definitely. I see the appeal, that’s for sure. And to ride the way you did, zinging around the barrels was amazing.” She was right.

We groomed our horses again, with Angela picking Ghost’s hooves. He stood for that really well. Some horses are a pain, and it almost seems like they’re trying to find the opportunity to step on your foot. Not Ghost.

Back in the car, we started for home when the rain finally quit. “I want to see the creek,” Kim said and I knew exactly what she meant. The little creek on our property would be flowing as fast as it ever would. Angela hadn’t seen our property and she was game. We were all wearing boots. The only question was whether or not the Rabbit would get us close or not. None of us wanted to tramp across acres of soaked ground.

I pulled into our path and stopped before I’d gone twenty feet. “We’ll get stuck. I don’t see any way I can keep any kind of traction in this mess.” I thought about it for a minute. “Wait here. I have an idea.”

I got out of the car and managed to walk along the edge of the path without sinking in too far. When I got to the clearing, I spotted a path to the run-in and gingerly made my way there. The Bobcat was dry and the skid-steer was already attached. I started it up and eased it out onto the muddy field. It definitely had better traction than the Rabbit. In fact, it had great traction. This might work. I drove it over the dryest patches I could see until I got back to the car.

Kim laughed and got out of the car and stepped onto the skid-steer. She hollered at Angela, and she joined her, laughing. “If we get stuck, we’re all going to have to slog through the mud back to my car. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Let’s go, Aquaman. I want to see,” Kim said, laughing.

“Hang on,” I hollered. They stood in the front, facing forward and holding onto the rail behind them. I drove toward the creek at a walking pace. The ground was lumpy and their ride was bumpy and they both laughed all the way to the creek. They got airborne a couple of times and laughed even louder. I half expected that from Kim but Angela was Mom’s age and it surprised me. It seemed like she had really connected with Kim and maybe that was it. Or maybe riding the front of the Bobcat was easier than riding Ghost.

The creek had grown from a foot wide to three or four feet wide in places and the water was really moving. I realized I had no idea where the water went. I told them I wanted to follow the creek and turned right, keeping the creek to our left. I drove about forty yards when the creek disappeared into the woods and out of sight. Mission accomplished, I drove back to the Rabbit, deposited the ladies, and drove the muddy Bobcat back to the run-in. We needed access to water at the run in. A hose would have been nice.

They were still laughing when I got back to the car. “Did you see what you wanted to?”

“Yes. I love it. Where does all the water go, though? It doesn’t go all the way to the street or we’d know it, right?” she asked.

“I think so. I guess that’s my next project. When it dries out, I’ll see if I can follow it to see where it goes. We don’t want to dig a pond without knowing where all the water goes. Did you notice all the water draining away from where our house and the barn will be? That’s a good thing.”

“That’s a really good thing. I wonder if it drains too fast or just right.”

“Franklin said that a drop of one foot for every hundred feet is close to ideal and that’s almost exactly what we have. More than that and you have erosion. Less than that and you have standing water. I guess we could put in French drains around the barn if we needed to. Something like that.”

“Listen to your boyfriend. He has got this figure out,” Angela said.

“Fiancé,” Kim corrected. Angela apologized and whispered ‘fiancé’. It was funny.

We took Angela back to Franklin and Karen’s house. She started to get out and stopped with the door open. “Thank you so much for inviting me. I had a lot of fun. You two are fun, and maybe a little dangerous.”

“Thank you,” we echoed.

“I am so glad she had a good time,” Kim said, then completely changed the subject. “Who do you think is the prettiest actress?”

“What? I don’t know. You know how little I watch movies or TV.”

“Yeah, but you notice things like that. You noticed Maureen O’Hara and Grace Kelley. So, who is the prettiest?”

“Is this one of those gotcha kind of questions?” I didn’t want to fall into some sort of trap.

“No. I’m just curious.”

“You just said Grace Kelley and I can’t think of anyone prettier, present company excepted.”

“Of course. She’s not acting anymore, so who do you think is prettiest that’s still acting?”

“I don’t know. Farah Fawcett, I guess.”

“Okay. Yeah, she’s pretty beautiful. Anyone else come to mind?”

“Are you thinking about an acting career?”

“No! Definitely not. Some of the girls were talking in the locker room the other day and I was just curious what you thought. It would be interesting to see what guys’ top ten were and compare that to women’s top ten.”

“I think it would be different from one guy to the next. I don’t even know that many actors and actresses. Grace Kelley, then maybe Raquel Welch or Sophia Loren. Barbara Stanwick looked pretty hot in Double Indemnity but it was in black and white. You’re prettier than any of them, though. Who did they think was prettiest?”

“Everybody was different. A couple of girls had Christie Brinkley pretty high on their list. Audrey Hepburn and Jaclyn Smith came up a couple of times. Oh, and not everyone knew who Grace Kelley was but the ones that did all put her pretty high on their list. They all think guys would put Farah Fawcett on their list.”

“But Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch didn’t make it?”

“Nope. Nobody even mentioned them. They didn’t mention Marilyn Monroe, either.”

“I would have thought they’d be talking about who the hottest guys are,” I said. I couldn’t imagine a bunch of guys talking about who the hottest guy was. We’d be talking about women.

“That was last week. Christopher Reeve was Superman and everybody thought he was super. He’s pretty cute. Kent something was on the list. I never heard of him but I guess he’s on some TV show. Adam-12.”

“But not Tom Selleck. Huh. Who do you think?”

“Robert Redford,” she said, much too quickly. “Paul Newman too. Butch Cassidy was great. I really like the guy in Much Ado About Nothing, though.”

“There was a movie?”

“No, silly. There was a drama in Shakespeare class. You, dufus.”

“Thanks. I saw Butch Cassidy. I loved the scene on the cliff where one of them says, ‘I can’t swim’ and the other guy says, ‘Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill us,’ and then they jump. Oh, the scene where he gives the rules for a knife fight. That was perfect. How come the Luke Skywalker guy isn’t on the list?”

“Mark Hamill? He’s too young.”

“He’s older than me.”

“I made an exception. You’re a rule breaker. Don’t let it go to your head.”

I drove to Kim’s house so she could change clothes, then back to mine so I could do the same. Then we drove out to Folly Beach. I parked on Ashley Avenue at the end of 10^th with the beach to our right. It was almost exactly two miles to the end of Ashley and the start of the trail that leads out toward Morris Island Lighthouse. Kim couldn’t remember if she’d ever run four miles before and thought doing it at the beach would distract her from the effort. It seemed backward to me since I liked to focus on the effort but that was her thinking.

We stretched a little and then started running north. She asked me how fast we were running and I told her to settle into a comfortable pace and not worry about it. I’d try to estimate it once we got to Fort Street. I told her I’d time us from Fort to the end and then back to Fort to give her a good idea. I wondered if she realized we had a tailwind on our way out. Should I tell her or let her discover it for herself? I’d let her discover it.

As we ran, I reminded her to keep her eyes on the horizon, her arms loose and relaxed, and her breathing steady. I crossed the street to watch her run from a different vantage point. It was hard to think about how she was running because she was just so damned beautiful. That might have been when I discovered I’m a leg man. We made it to the end and started back. She held her hands up, asking for a time.

“Just a bit over seven minutes,” I said, thinking that was pretty good.

She was going to comment on the time and changed her mind. “Wind is in our face,” she huffed. I guess she discovered it, alright.

“Slightly shorter steps,” I said and she asked why. “When your feet are off the ground, you’re slowing down. When you’re running into the wind or up a hill, shorter steps are better. You don’t slow down as much.” I could have kept that pace for the length of the island which was just over five miles. Kim was struggling.

We got to Fort Street and I checked my watch. I was about to tell her when she said, “I don’t want to know.” The wind was killing her. Off to our left were a couple of people windsurfing north, just outside the waves. They were moving right along, and that meant the wind in our face was, too. Kim started to slow and I started to encourage her.

“Head up. Don’t let a little wind destroy your mechanics. This is when that matters most,” I said and I could see her struggling to maintain good form. “Do you see the car? That’s the finish line. Don’t run to the finish line, Baby. Run through the finish line.”

She wasn’t going to answer. It took everything she had just to keep running. I wasn’t quite sure what I could do to encourage her for the last half mile so I started singing, if you can call it that. Laughter, joy, and loneliness and sex and sex and sex and sex. Look at me, I’m in tatters. I’m a shattered, shattered.” She smiled a little so I kept it up.

We passed my car and Kim exhaled, “Shadoobie, shattered,” and slowed to a walk. I had a smile on my face and started to say something but she could see I had lots of energy and she was close to death. “Not a word, Aquaman. Not a word.”

I opened the passenger door and Kim sort of fell into it. I grabbed a lukewarm Gatorade from the trunk and handed it to her, then took it back and opened it, then handed it back. She took a couple of long drinks.

“Are you sure that was only four miles?” she said, looking up at me with a pathetic plea. I choked back what would have been a disastrous laugh.