The horse I loved and mainly rode, by Mr. D’s accounts, was Alason, a former champion Mexican racing horse. As the story goes, he had won every race his owner had ever placed him in, until one day when his owner entered him into one-too-many races, and Alason finally lost.
The owner had bet on him, the farm and everything. It’s kind of sad, but that’s the story of how Alason ran his last race as a champion. He was handed over in a bet to a ranch owner who promptly trained him to barrel race. Alason showed promise early on, but ended up being too stubborn, so they gelded him.
By this time, the horse was 7 years old. When you geld a stallion too late it doesn’t do anything to the horse’s spirit but piss him off. It also makes him infertile. Former stallions don’t know that, they still react to everything just as Mother Nature would have any stallion react. And that’s about the time when Mr. D found him. They had a lot in common, those two. Both felt they were still virile, strong and masculine, the bond must have seemed more evident to Mr. D as he brought him back to the states and had his son train him to several levels of dressage. By the time I moved next door, it was Alason I saw in the paddock, rearing up for Mr. D's son.
As I rode Alason on this morning, it was very tempting for both of us to stay in the park as long as we could. I believe horses get just as bored as we do and I know he wanted to stay outside and run. Maybe he knew that when we returned to the stable, he would spend another day of standing in his stall, interrupted by moving outside to stand in the paddock, and then the highlight would be back into the stall to eat unless someone, usually me, took him out again. I turned Alason around and we headed home. Cars flew by us as we made our way through the neighborhood and back to the stable.
Mr. D would always worry about us while we were out on the city streets. But my mom never worried while I was out. She thought I was safer out there. Or she preferred that my girlfriend Lisa also be in the barn with me, especially late at night or early mornings.
“Was Lisa out with you this morning?” she asked.
“Mom, you know the answer to that, why do you ask?”
“I’m not comfortable with you being over there by yourself. I want you to always have a friend nearby.”
“I know, mom. But Lisa can’t make it over early in the morning during the week.” Lisa lived nearly a mile away on the other side of our old neighborhood and would come over to the stable in the afternoons after school when we didn’t have track practice.
“That’s not the point. The point is, you could get hurt over there and no one would even know.” I could see my mom thinking out her argument. She was smart, she knew I wouldn’t listen if she told me what to do, so she structured her argument on reason.
“What if a horse kicked you while you were cleaning out a stall?”
“That wouldn’t happen, mom. I’m always talking.” Then I added for emphasis, “They only kick when they’re surprised.”
My mom thought for a second, “What if someone else came in to the barn while you were behind a horse and it was scared? That would be out of your control.” Mom waited without showing any emotion. Had she really thought she could win this exchange so easily?
“Then someone would be in the barn, mom.” I quietly congratulated myself.
“True … but what if it were some little kid who didn’t know how or where to get help?”
I was too tired and too late for school to counterattack so I did the next best thing. I smiled at her. She returned a sly grin. She had gotten her point across, I had heard her. But she knew I would be back at the stable again.
And I suppose it was lucky for me that the margin of what was normal, to eccentric, to dangerously weird, was pretty wide in my family. But even then, I knew I couldn’t tell my mom everything that I already knew about Mr. D and his family.
Mr. D knew full well that if he kept the horses, the young girls would come by.
