Page 27 of Broken Ride

"She's seizing," I shout at the nearest pickup man. "Keep the ropes off her. Give me room."

He gives me room. They all do, because a person who runs toward a convulsing animal that size sounds like a person who knows what she's doing, and sounding like it is most of the job.

Wade reaches her when I do. He must have come off the chute platform at a dead run, and he drops to his knees at the mare's head without asking me what to do. He already knows.

He gets his weight across her neck and his hands on her halter, pinning her head to the dirt so she can't beat her own skull apart. He shields the space where I need to work with his body, taking a hoof strike across the forearm that would've caught my temple.

"Hold her head down and keep her neck straight," I tell him. "If that airway crimps shut, we lose her."

"Got her," he says. His voice stays flat and even, the kind men keep for frightened animals, and it works on me too, which I'll resent later.

My hands find the kit blind. Over a year of practicing this in parking lots and pens pays off in the dark math of muscle memory. The anticonvulsant comes up into the syringe while my thumb raises the jugular. The needle goes in clean, and the flash comes fast. I push the drug slow while her muscles ripple under the hide like something alive is trying to climb out of her.

Cowboys arrive behind me. They form up without being told, a wall of denim and shoulders between us and the fence line, blocking the phones and the cameras and the rows of people leaning forward in dead silence. Somewhere above us the announcer is saying calm, meaningless things about waiting for word.

The seizure loosens. I seat a catheter in the vein and secure it while her legs slow from paddling to trembling. The convulsions are only the fire alarm. The fire is still burning.

Her respiration is dropping, breaths going slow and shallow. Her mucous membranes are dusky when I peel her lip back, and both pupils have blown wide and sluggish under lights bright enough to make that reading count. Everything presents on both sides, and it's killing her in front of a television audience.

I know what this is. I've been reading quieter versions of it in bloodwork for weeks, and every one of those horses rode the same trucks this mare rides.

The difference tonight is dose. The quiet cases never showed more than off bloodwork and a dull eye. This mare was bucking at full strength three seconds before she went down. Whatever she took on, there's enough of it to drop an animal her size mid-ride, and how it got there is a question somebody will have to answer.

The next vial comes from the side pouch I've carried since the tox panels came back, restocked the morning after somebody went through my truck, and I keep my body between it and the camera line while I load the syringe. The reversal goes into the catheter port with my back to the crowd and the words pitched for Wade alone.

"If she comes up swinging, get clear," I warn him. "Don't be brave about it."

"Little late for that advice," he says. There's blood on his forearm where the hoof caught him, and he hasn't glanced at it once.

Her breathing changes first. The slow shallow drags deepen, her ribs swelling with something that finally looks like effort instead of surrender. Her sluggish pupils sharpen back to life. A shudder rolls through her that has nothing in common with the seizures. It's the shudder of an animal surfacing.

She thrashes once, hard. Wade rides her neck down and holds.

Then she lies still and breathes, ragged and gorgeous. The arena is so quiet that a sold-out crowd can hear one horse breathing. Wade eases his weight off her neck and stays crouched at her head, one hand light on the halter, ready to move if she comes up wrong.

When she lifts her head on her own, the sound that comes down from those stands is less like cheering and more like a whole town exhaling at once.

We get her up in stages. She staggers, plants, steadies. The pickup men flank her, ropes coiled, and Wade keeps her halter. I walk at her shoulder with my hand on her jugular pulse for the long parade to the stock gate. The crowd stays on its feet the entire way.

In the vet pens behind the arena, I draw blood before I do anything else, six tubes of it. Two go in the labeled rack for the treating record. Four go in the insulated pouch inside my jacket, initialed and dated.

By tomorrow there will be people interested in what's inside this mare's bloodstream, and I intend to have samples they never got the chance to lose. The last time I trusted my coolers, somebody opened every one of them.

I'm labeling the last tube when I see the man on the walkway.

He stands above the stock gate with his hands folded on the rail, hat brim level, as unhurried as a man reviewing inventory. Everything else back here is in motion, pen hands and pickup men and officials with radios, and he's the one stationary thing in it, which tells me who the motion is for. A horse nearly died on camera in front of the sponsors, and whoever he is, his face carries all the feeling of a ledger. He isn't watching Sidewinder.

He's watching me.

I hold his gaze for as long as it takes to cap and pocket the tube, because looking away first is a language men like him read fluently, and then I go back to my work.

When I check the walkway again, he's gone, and the space he occupied feels colder than the night accounts for.

The rest arrives in pieces. A circuit official wants a statement. A Thornton hand materializes to ask, with rehearsed concern, whether the mare's episode might be colic. I tell him I don't discuss findings with hauling crews, and he retreats to make a phone call he doesn't want me to hear.

Somebody's already put the footage online. One of the pen hands shows me his phone. There I am in a few shaky seconds of video, a small woman in a ball cap kneeling in arena dirt with her hands inside the crisis while a broad-shouldered cowboy holds down a dying horse three times his size. The caption underneath it is spreading faster than I can think about what it means.

What it means is that Garrett owns a phone.