I find Joe Dilly in a stall with Showdown, fussing at him, and the big stallion don’t move so much as an eyelid while Joe licks his hooves with that rasp file. As much time as Joe seems to spend with the horse, which nobody else can touch, he don’t show no interest in riding him. Like it’s enough to just handle his feet and make him comfortable.

“You look like you been up to no good,” he says, right off the bat. “Am I right?”

“Not exactly,” I say. “Except I almost died, and it sure was fun.”

So I tell Joe about the back country and the rattlesnake and the way Lady took off quick as lightning, and how she finally stopped on her own.

“You stuck on that saddle like glue, did you?” he says. “I might have known.”

“You’re the one taught me how to keep my balance,” I say.

“Ah, you had it from the get go.” He lights up a cigarette and coughs a little and says, “Is this pony really as fast as they think she is?”

I shrug and go, “I’m still kind of blurred from it all,” which gets a laugh out of Joe Dilly. “You’re a lucky kid, you know that, Roy? Situation could be a whole lot worse, you think about it.”

He means that crummy foster home, before he come in like a storm and sprung me free, and as soon as he says that, it kind of crashes together inside me, that maybe we shouldn’t be here at the Bar None at all, not with Sally Red Dawn sniffing around and getting official come the fall. The law finds out about how Joe sprung me without bothering to get legal custody, or that stuff in Montana, and we’ll both of us end up in bad places.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Joe says. “You gotta take this life one day at a time. You got the whole summer ahead of you, right?”

“You mean it?” I ask.

“Sure I do,” he says.

But a while later I catch him when he don’t know I’m looking, and he’s got his forehead all wrinkled up and you can see he’s worried, and all that happy talk about the summer was just to make me feel good.

* * *

I put it out of my mind, though, when Mr. Jessup comes into the stables the next morning and asks how do I feel about putting Lady up against the clock?

He wants to know how fast she runs, and when I saddle her up and bring her out, he and Rick have measured the distance they want her to run. They got a sawhorse for a starting gate and another one set up for the finish.

Lady looks it over and gets a little nervous. I know because she’s prancing and pulling on the halter. “Easy there, girl,” I say. “Those ain’t rattlesnakes, they’re just old sawhorses is all.”

“You ever seen a quarter-mile race, Roy?” Mr. Jessup wants to know.

“No, sir,” I say. “Joe took me to a rodeo once, but I was too small to see over the side. I could hear all the people cheering, though, and see the hats flying by.”

Mr. Jessup crouches down and starts drawing lines in the dirt with a little stick. “It’s pretty simple. The bell goes off, the gate opens, and you get your horse to the end of the track as fast as you know how.”

Rick has got a stopwatch hanging on a string around his neck. He says, “A Thoroughbred wouldn’t know how to run as short a distance as four hundred and forty yards, which is the same as a quarter mile. That’s where a smaller horse has the advantage, if it gets up to top speed clean off the start. Is that about right, Nick?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” says Mr. Jessup. “You ready to give it a go, Roy?”

“I’m ready,” I say, hoisting myself up into the saddle and picking up the reins. “What do I do?”

Mr. Jessup squints into the sun until all I can see is blue slits looking at me. “Try not to slow her down too much,” he says. “Try not to fall off.”

Well, you never really know what a horse is going to do before it does it, and Lady don’t seem to be in the mood to run. I get her back behind the first sawhorse and give her the giddyap nudge with my heels, but all she does is amble along like she’s in the mood for a long slow walk.

Rick looks up from his stopwatch and when he sees Lady taking her own sweet time, he kind of grins and shakes his head.

Mr. Jessup, he don’t wait around, he heads into the barn without looking back.

I’m going, “Come on, Lady! Go! Go!” but don’t you know, that pony acts like she can’t hear me, and she’s wandering around sniffing at the sawhorses and generally making herself at home. I might as well not even be there, as far as she’s concerned.

“Lady, please? Don’t you want to be a racehorse?”

Nothing.

I feel like such a fool I’m about ready to start bawling like a baby when Mr. Jessup comes back out of the stable holding something shiny in his hands. I can’t tell what he’s thinking from the look on his face. Could be he’s laughing at me, or he might even be angry, you never know with him.

But when he gets a little closer I see what he’s holding. A small pair of spurs.

“Wasn’t sure if we had anything your size,” he says. “But I found these in an old milk crate. I do believe these were my first pair of spurs.”

They’re the kind of spurs clip right on the heel of your boots. Mr. Jessup sticks them on for me and then he pats me on the knee and says, “You know the trick with spurs, do you?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“The trick is you don’t use ’em much. And you don’t dig them in and hurt the horse, like you see those cowboys do on TV. All you want to do, give this pony a signal she can’t ignore. That rattlesnake surprised her, and so she took off, but the thing of it is, after she got running she ran because she loved it. Some animals will get intoxicated with speed, and they make the best racers. So once you get her moving, I’m pretty sure she’ll go fast because she wants to.”

“What do I do?” I ask.

“Get her behind the line again and stop her. I mean hold back on the reins and tense up, so she knows something is about to happen. Then all at once you relax your legs, nudge your heels into her side, slap the reins, and yell ‘Geronimo!’”

“You mean it?”

“Yell anything you like, just so you make a lot of noise.”

I get her back behind the starting line okay, and she starts to fight me when I pull back on the reins.

“Good, good!” says Mr. Jessup. “That’ll make her want to go.”

He says “tense up” and that part is easy, since I already feel like a watch that got wound too tight. Anyhow, I hold her back and count three to myself and then I kick with the spurs and slap her with the reins and shout “Geronimo!” at the top of my lungs.

Next thing I know, Lady has took off like a scalded cat, only she’s not heading for the finish line like she’s supposed to. She’s headed off down the trail, like she thinks we’re going for the back country.

She’s moving so fast I can’t think quick enough to keep up, and it’s all I can do to hold on.

I get her steered back, but Lady never does cross the finish line. She’s too busy spooking herself with those sawhorses. She acts like they’re alive, like she wants to charge right at them and scare them off.

When I finally get her stopped she’s all lathered up and shiny with sweat and she’s pitching her head around and looking back at me as if to say, What do you think of that, sports fans?

Rick and Mr. Jessup come over and Rick is looking at his stopwatch and shaking his head. “What do you make of it?” he asks.

Mr. Jessup looks at the watch and shrugs. “I’m not exactly sure,” he says. “Of course if this had been a race, she’d have been disqualified for leaving the track.”

Rick goes, “Heck, Nick, you saw the clock, she’s a natural.”

“Maybe,” says Mr. Jessup. “She’s fast, I’ll grant you that.” Then he looks at me and says, “Well, did you like it?”

“We’ll go faster next time,” I say.

Rick and Mr. Jessup look at each other and Mr. Jessup smiles and says, “That’s what I wanted to hear. You feel good?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

It’s the truth. I feel good about everything. Lady and Joe Dilly and summer at the Bar None. But the thing is, you never really know what’s going to happen next. Because anything can happen. Good things, bad things. And scary, crazy things, when the world starts going all to pieces just when you least expect it.