CALEB AND I continued with lessons as Laura’s worst students for two more years. It was past time to think — and be — outside the box. Or the ring. Where could Caleb and I learn from each other without constant scrutiny? I spent the next week driving around the suburban neighborhoods within a two-mile radius of Silver Rock. On the county atlas, I marked where the roadside margins were wide enough for off-pavement riding. A mile and a half away from the stable stood hundreds of acres of the huge, mostly abandoned Rockland Psychiatric Center. A quick drive through revealed that, although the buildings were all boarded up, a public bus passed through the middle of the complex. I reasoned that if we stayed on the paved streets, no one would force us to leave.
One sunny summer morning, after Joe had been home from his latest trip for a week or so, I had an idea. “Are you up for an adventure?”
When he was home from the sea, Joe often showed willingness to aid and abet in what he referred to as my “wacky schemes.” I tried an indirect approach. “Do you think Caleb would follow you if you pedaled your bicycle out onto the road?” If Caleb followed a leader, I reasoned, the donkey’s focus would remain fixed on his buddy, not on passing cars or windblown trash, which he found so terrifying.
Joe and I debated the pitfalls, but in the end, he agreed. On the morning of our experiment, he loaded his old red bicycle into the back of our van, and we drove over to the stables. Once Caleb was groomed and tacked, I mounted him and rode up the driveway behind Joe’s bike. When we reached the road without a single mishap, I said to Joe, “Let’s aim for the psych center.”
Joe stood on the pedals and tore off. Caleb pounded up the pavement after him, ears pinned flat, in hot pursuit.
“Oh no! Slow down, Joe!” I yelled at his retreating back.
The deep rumble of a big diesel engine warned me that we were not alone. I turned to look back over my left shoulder to check. The slightest twist of my torso Caleb interpreted as a left turn, and he veered straight into the path of the speeding truck. The monster vehicle swerved around us without slowing and sped off, the driver honking and shaking his fist. I wrenched Caleb over to the side and stopped. Several minutes passed before my heart rate slowed to normal.
Caleb, his ears straight up and facing forward, concentrated on his goal: to catch up with Joe’s bike, which waited for us two blocks away. As soon as I loosened the reins, he shot forward — right down the double yellow lines marking the center of the narrow road. In a panic, I tugged the reins so hard that he reared, almost dumping me. I said in my lowest voice, “Slow down, boy. Eeeeasy, ohhh-kaaaay. Attaboy,” as if he was the one who needed to calm down.
When we caught up to the bicycle, Joe’s torso was bent over the handlebars as he gasped for breath. Caleb sauntered up alongside him and slobbered on his shoulder, nibbled his ear, and — despite having been swatted away several times — nearly tore the bike’s saddlebag off.
“Knock it off, damn it,” Joe muttered, swatting him with his hat.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“More or less.”
After we caught our breath, I said, “You’ve got to slow down. We shouldn’t be galloping down the road like this.”
“Easy for you to say. You should have seen the look in those eyes. Caleb’s wacko!”
“No, he’s not. He’s just enthusiastic.”
After a few minutes of rest, while Caleb grazed among the wildflowers on the verge, Joe pedaled off again. At the sight of his departing back, the donkey’s head snapped up and he accelerated like Seabiscuit charging through the gate at Pimlico.
Joe yelled over his shoulder, “Can’t you slow him down or stop him?”
I yelled, “You slow down” — gasp — “then he’ll slow down!”
“Slow down? With that monster coming after me? Forget it.”
I tugged on the reins. Nothing. In the big ring, I often sought in vain for Caleb’s gas pedal; outside the fenced enclosure, I had a runaway train.
Joe slowed down at an intersection, which allowed Caleb to barrel right into him. His front legs advanced until he had straddled the still-rolling rear wheel, tickling his chest hairs. He bucked a little at the new sensation but continued to inch forward until his belly cleared the back wheel, pushing Joe over the handlebars.
“Oh God, Joe. He’s trying to mount the bike!”
Joe removed one hand from the handlebars and elbowed Caleb’s chest, but he kept on coming, even when Joe yelled and smacked the donkey’s nose with his hat.
“He is mounting it!” I said. Did he think the red bicycle was a mare?
Caleb ignored Joe’s elbows and flapping hat and moved forward until his front leg rubbed against a pedal, which finally brought the whole circus to an abrupt stop. Just then a large panel truck passed, making a wide detour around us. The driver was treated to the sight of a man hunkered down over the handlebars of his red bicycle with a huge white furry mass riding his back fender — and a red-faced rider sitting on top of the whole pile.
Joe shoved Caleb’s chest with one hand, while I backed him off the bicycle fender. My husband dismounted. Holding the handlebars with one hand and swinging his cap at Caleb’s intrusive nose with the other, he pushed the bike down the road. The donkey trotted next to his elbow like a faithful dog, until he suddenly veered into Joe, knocking him and his bike to the ground. Joe got up and inspected a new tear in his shirt.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Joe gave me a wan thumbs-up but avoided eye contact. He righted his bike and turned to walk ahead.
“What scared you, Caleb?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a yellow plastic bag flapping from a garbage can. “Come on. Easy, now. It’s just a plastic bag, silly!”
Calmed by my words or maybe just tired, he turned his attention to the weeds on the shoulder of the road. A psychedelic-colored Hula-Hoop lying in a driveway set him off again, dancing sideways, snorting, and edging his rear end into the roadway.
Meanwhile, delivery and utility trucks, SUVs, and luxury cars raced past, as if we were invisible. I was shocked that there were so many vehicles on the road. Instead of slowing down to give us time to step off the pavement, their drivers gunned their engines and honked. Didn’t they know any better? Instead of warning us off the road, the sudden noise threatened to create a rodeo right in front of their hoods.
We continued onward. As long as Joe stayed not too far ahead, I could arm-wrestle Caleb back into line again. Whenever he stopped to sniff something, I released the reins to relax my aching arms. Subjects of avid concentration included a hamburger wrapper, a yapping dog, and a dead squirrel. I rested while he devoted minutes of rapt attention to these novel treasures.
Forty-five minutes later we arrived at the poison ivy–shrouded gates of the old psychiatric center, setting a new donkey speed record of a mile and a half in thirty minutes. At least we had gotten this far more or less in one piece. I asked Joe, “Do you want to go inside?”
“Some other time,” Joe said in a neutral voice. “We’ve got to get the Beast back home on the same roads, don’t we?”
“How about for just a few minutes? There’s no one around.”
If there is one place spookier than a psychiatric hospital to me, it’s an abandoned psychiatric hospital. So, why was I steering my donkey through its rusty gates? The setting was restful, with just the sound of late-summer crickets and the echoes of Caleb’s unshod hooves rebounding off the massive soot-covered yellow-brick buildings. Ivy and Virginia creeper had all but gobbled up the facades. Rusted, ivy-covered meshed windows were opaque with grime, the doors boarded up.
As creepy as the ruins struck me, Caleb ignored them, his eyes myopically scanning the ground. That is, until he approached a large manhole cover. He reared over it, doing an exaggerated, comical double take — I expected his eyes to pop out on springs. After wrestling the panicky donkey back onto all fours, I studied the psychiatric hospital’s dirty pebbled-glass windows concealed behind corroded steel mesh. What must it have been like to be confined, sometimes for years, behind these walls?
The paved streets of this city of the formerly damned were laid out in a neat grid, with stop signs, crossing stripes, and even street signs with pleasant names, like Oak and Maple. Benches dotted open lawns, shaded by fine old trees. Instead of a place of unspeakable horrors, this leafy campus must have been a welcome refuge for many.
I had settled into Caleb’s loping donkey gait, when he stopped dead and pranced sideways next to yet another manhole cover, snorting at it like he alone could keep it from rising up to release a plague of donkey killers. Joe had stopped a few yards ahead to catch his breath, examine the torn sleeve of his favorite shirt, and wipe the sweat from his face. Caleb required some help to pass the gurgling monster. The storm drain, not Joe. I waited until Joe’s shoulders straightened again before saying, “Can you goose him from behind?”
“Goose him?” Joe’s red face and bulging eyes suggested something other than eagerness to comply. He counted to ten and then looped behind us. I waited, but Joe had stopped.
I yelled, “Go! Push him!”
Joe glided the bike forward a few inches until the front wheel passed right between Caleb’s hind legs. With his rump level with Joe’s head, Caleb raked his tail across Joe’s face. Joe yelled and whacked him with his cap, at the same time backing up his bicycle as fast as possible. Caleb, however, backed up faster than Joe did, but he lost his footing and sat down hard on the handlebars. With my kicks and Joe’s swats urging him on, Caleb regained his footing and, with a jump, escaped the ticklish wheel. We left the manhole monster behind.
Soon it became clear that as long as Joe’s bike remained no more than twenty feet ahead of us, Caleb more or less sauntered past manhole covers and storm drains — which seemed to be spaced about fifty feet apart — hardly breaking stride.
Joe decided to turn left and pedaled up a gentle hill on a side street. This less-traveled street of broken pavement, with grass growing up between the cracks, might be off-limits to outsiders, but no one seemed to be around. Two blocks farther ahead, though, at the intersection with another shady street, I saw that about a dozen adults stood on the sidewalk in front of a building. “Whoa, Caleb,” I said.
Joe noticed them, too, and said, “The place is supposed to be closed down, isn’t it?”
“I thought so.”
He turned his bike and coasted back down the hill. I turned Caleb to follow, but halfway through a wide U-turn in the middle of the street, he spied another manhole cover. He froze. He sniffed it, snorted. This was not just any manhole cover but the entrance to the underworld. He arched his back and started to buck.
“Easy, now, Caleb. Easy,” I said in a low voice as I struggled to keep my seat. A fall onto cement pavement would be serious.
I hoped that the people were too far away to notice the dancing white donkey. Here was one time I dreaded Caleb’s ability to attract strangers.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone sprinting toward us clad in pajamas, a terry-cloth robe, and slippers. There were inpatients here, after all. The man stumbled and slowed, tripped up by the belt of his trailing robe, but continued to approach. Half a block away, he raised his arms in a gesture of. . .what? Supplication? Horror?
“Caleb, let’s go!” I kicked harder and hauled hard on the right rein. “Move on! Now!” What would the patient do when he reached us? More important, might Caleb, already panicked by the gurgling monster under the iron lid, trample the man?
The man reached the curb and fell to his knees, his look ecstatic, like a child gazing up at the Virgin at Lourdes. Caleb paused middance and raised his head to stare at the man, the manhole cover forgotten. The patient spoke up: “Excuse me, but, um, are you real?”
Astonished, I stared at the middle-aged man in his biblical striped brown-and-tan robe, kneeling a few yards away. For a second, I wondered if he was real.
In the distance, I noticed that a burly man in green scrubs had separated from the group and was trotting toward us. He was still too far to intervene.
The patient spoke again. “Are you really there?”
Caleb listened, one ear fixed on the kneeling patient, the other rotated 180 degrees to catch my answer. Speaking in a calm voice for the benefit of both man and beast, I said, “Hi! I’m Margie, and this is my donkey, Caleb.” I patted the donkey’s shoulder and smiled.
The man, still on his knees, giggled. “Oh, okay, that’s good to know.”
“Do you want to touch him?” I asked.
The man frowned and curled his hands into fists. “No. It’s just. . .”
The orderly was twenty yards away and closing in fast. “You see,” the patient continued, “sometimes I see things that aren’t there.”
“Oh yes. The donkey and I are real,” I assured him, sounding like the Virgin in the grotto herself.
Just then, the orderly caught up and placed his hands on the man’s shoulders, gently for someone capturing an escaped patient. He helped the man to his feet and turned him away with a quick nod to me. Looking back over the attendant’s shoulder, the patient said, this time in a childish voice, “Bye-bye, now. Bye-bye.”
“Goodbye,” I called. “Happy to meet you.” And then, like an idiot, I called out after them, “Have a nice day.”
With Caleb unstuck from the manhole, I jerked the right rein to turn him away from the departing patient and toward Joe, who had turned around and was pedaling back up the hill toward us. When he was close enough to hear, I whispered, “Did you see that?”
Joe lifted a weary leg over the bike seat, dismounted, and leaned the bike against a light post. He slowly wiped his glasses on a less-smeared section of his undershirt. In the meantime, Caleb stretched his neck over to the bicycle and sniffed its seat with disturbing thoroughness. Satisfied, he rested his heavy chin on it, closed his eyes, and sighed. His reverie was interrupted when the bike toppled over. Caleb stood over it, blinking.
“You mean that guy in pajamas? Yeah, I was wondering what you were doing there so long.”
“He’s a patient. He wanted to meet the donkey.”
Joe, whose collar and shirt were torn, his back covered in slobber, and his legs and bike plastered with mud, didn’t exactly look sane, either. “We’d better get out of here before security catches up with us.”
As we rode down the main street, side by side, I recounted the odd conversation I’d had with the patient. Joe laughed a little and shook his head, no doubt in sympathy with him. “If the poor guy tells his shrink that he saw a big white donkey today,” he said with a dry chuckle, “I’ll bet they’ll up his meds!”