'Move Over Mike Dover' by Brent Kerrigan

The sun settles behind the green grandstand, bathing the fairgrounds in a golden glow that gives even the cheapest and dirtiest of rides twenty minutes of respectability. Carnival barkers pull their hats over their eyes and gaze into a crowd that will walk with their children for perhaps another hour and then return with fists of beer and arms around women, all eager to spend, fight and win. Grandmothers shuffle out of fair buildings carrying pumpkins and pies bearing the burden of judgment. Some of these items make it into old Fords while others are tossed unceremoniously into garbage cans by the door where they will later be resurrected and used as projectiles against mailboxes. Old men check their watches, hold them to their ears and then rise to fold lawn chairs and think about supper. The smell of grease and melting sugar from BBQs drifts across the grounds, nauseating kids who hold their stomachs after a day’s gorge, and acting as a scent beacon for those who have been forced to work in the fields all day and are only now arriving, their denim shirts tucked deep into their jeans, hair slicked backwards and faces red and peeling from the sun.

They are here for the main event of the Elmira Fall Fair; the annual race of horses. They surge through the grandstand entrance and already there are children at the top, banging their feet on aluminum benches, while their parents shield their eyes and look back at them from where they sit below with their own parents. Across from the grandstand is the three-legged green broadcast tower where Jimmy Johnson calls the race each year. From the stands the spectators can see the grizzled old reporter with his ever-present flask, hunched over a 1940s-style microphone and studying the names of the riders. The spectators try to remember who called the races before Jimmy. Names are suggested, but one man says they simply built the tower around Jimmy’s crib. They talk of weather, crops, politics, those who have died and those who have moved away. And they complain, as they do each year, that the race is always late to begin.

A light blue eye and tuft of red eyebrow peer through a crack in the stable doors. The boy focuses on members of his 5^th grade class at the fence circling the track, one of whom, a smaller boy, holds a poster that originally read “Get Over For Mike Dover!” Somebody has crossed out the “get” and replaced it with “Its”—the grammar betraying the culprit. Others clench noisemakers that had earlier been thrust into their hands. They twirl them now halfheartedly, balancing from one foot to the other, turning wistfully towards the midway.

Mike Dover checks names against faces. All but three. He’ll deal with them later. On the sidelines his father, alone and leaning against a post, takes a nervous drag of a cigarette. Then the sound of a needle scratching across a record and the blurt of a trumpet calls the racers to action.

He jerks Sandy’s halter.

“Get up.”

Sandy snorts and yanks back. She grunts, stands and shudders off the straw sticking to her coat, along with a few chunks of manure plastered to her right hind quarter. He brushes her off with his hands, slaps her in the rump and takes a deep breath. There is no saddle to strap on, nothing to prepare. His heart drums as he pulls Sandy to the doorway, passing the other riders busily prepping their horses and snickering at him.

“Hey look,” says the man in the stall beside him, “one jackass leading another.”

Mike has been placed in the barn for the out-of-town riders at his own request. The men are loud and full of laughter which began that morning when Mike and his father arrived at the fairgrounds in their wooden tin-topped trailer. As Mike’s father registered and paid the reduced local-entry fee, the other horses, black, brown and sleek by precise feedings directed by weigh scales and growth charts, were led out of long silver-bullet trailers advertising American ranches by men wearing cowboy hats, bright shirts, and jeans with creases. They puffed cigarettes while Mike struggled to get the harness on Sandy, who was covered in the shit and slime of the trailer that had been used the previous day to transport a Guernsey to her death.

“Hold on son,” said one of these men, walking up to the door of the stable Mike was about to enter. He pointed to the midway. “Pony rides are over there.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mike. “Are you in this race too?”

The man grunted, eying the gray Shetland pony nosing her way towards a rubber tire filled with hay.

“You must be the help,” said the man. “So why don’t you get your ass out of here and get me some water.”

“After I win,” said Mike, calmly, “you’ll be kissing this ass.”

While the others guffawed, Mike led Sandy past them and tied her with baling twine to a steel railing at the far end of the long barn. He tossed a faded blue blanket taken from their living room couch over her and placed a picture on top of a battered wooden box of grooming tools. The woman in the picture, smiling through a shock of red curly hair, has the same name as the one written on the board that hangs from a wooden beam above the pony: Sandy.

The Sandy in the picture has a galaxy of freckles across her high cheeks and heavy springs of red hair tucked behind her left ear. She smiles an urgent smile, a teeth-grinding, mouth-only smile revealing her hatred of the camera. Her eyes are blue, but Mike has always thought of them as being red. Red to match her hair and red to match the tear blotches around her eyes that first appeared five years ago, the winter the picture was taken.

It was on one of those winter mornings she had shaken him awake and said they needed to go to Detroit—fast. Her eyes had been very red that morning, as they always were on mornings following late-night discussions with Mike’s father. Mike, wondering if he was the cause of the redness, would put his ear to the old stove pipe in the bedroom of the farmhouse and listen to his parents in the kitchen below, but their voices were low and the words they used were not the words of his Grade 3 classroom. The old pipes would rattle with the wind from Lake Huron whipping against the house and Mike’s ear would grow sweaty and black as he hugged the pipe and felt his heart pounding into it. It continued to thump that morning as they drove the gravel road past their farm, through small villages, the City of Sarnia and across the Blue Water Bridge separating Canada from the United States. They drove for an hour and his mother stopped beside a plain white building. He followed her to the waiting room and remained until she returned an hour later clutching papers and her eyes redder than when they left.

In the car, there was no conversation. Mike fiddled with the radio and watched her face. She adored country music and they would often sing along—The Gambler their favourite, he on verse, both on chorus—but she snapped off the radio just as Mike sucked in his breath to deliver the opening lines. Her knuckles, battered from years of heavy work, were white on the wheel as they approached the border to Canada.

When the customs officer asked about the purpose of their trip, she raised herself out of the car window and whispered to him. The guard winced. He leaned in and looked at Mike.

“Don’t worry, he looks like a strong boy,” said the guard with the same tight smile Mike’s mother used at the bank, and waved them through.

But they had not driven home directly. Instead, in an unexpected detour, they stopped at a racetrack they’d often passed on their way to the grocery store. The visit was announced with a sudden swerve of the wheel and march up to the front gates. Once inside, she directed his darting eyes to the giant, smooth track that circled around a pond and a large black board with white numbers. Beside them sat old and grizzled men who smoked cigarettes, talked of horses and stared at his mother’s legs. She pulled Mike to her, explaining the numbers and the reasons for racing, her arm around him and kissing the top of his head.

Then came the horses. The beautiful, majestic horses. Mike had never seen race horses before, only the old nags that Mr. Dempsey kept on the farm where his father got his tractor fixed. Those horses were droopy-eyed, dumb and dozed in the orchard all day. These horses were different. Through the cigarette smoke Mike could smell their sweat and excitement. He could see their muscles flicker and nostrils flare, easily carrying the small and determined-looking men who sat upon their backs and concentrated on the track ahead.

He heard the gates clang open and the thoroughbreds tore away, picking up speed as they turned the quarter-mile. The men beside him were standing and swearing. Mike cheered for Number 6, the lead horse, who was in yellow and one half the number of his favourite hockey player. The noise in the stands grew louder as the horses got closer. Number 6 was challenged by Number 9, but the latter horse lagged at the three-quarter mile. Just as the noise in the crowd grew deafening, Number 6 burst across the finish line and the jockey pumped his fist into the air and Mike felt his heart beating, his hands shaking, and the air flexing his lungs. He turned to grab his mother’s hand, but she was sitting and staring at him, as she had been throughout the race.

She hugged him again, saying she hoped he had enjoyed the race but his father was waiting. As they climbed the steps to the mezzanine, her in front of him, he ran hands along the railings, feeling the smooth, cool metal. He turned one last time to see men in suits attempt to place a green wreath on the neck of the shrieking jockey. Mike turned back to his mother and saw a small white betting slip drop from her hand and flutter down beside her leg. Mike picked it up. She had bet on Number 9 to win. Mike’s heart resumed its beating and he put the ticket into his pocket.

When they reached home, his father met them at the door and Mike was told to go to his room. Halfway up the stairs he turned and saw them hugging. They never hugged. The voices in the pipe were lower that night and he fell asleep beside it, the dull murmuring bringing vivid dreams.

Months later, as she lay dying, she told him not to be scared.

Months after that he was alone with his father.

After his noisy aunts and uncles had departed the farm, taking with them a red-haired herd of cousins, he and his father would sit on the front porch of the house in the dark, listening to the cattle ripping grass from the earth with their rough tongues and to the cars passing on the lonely road at the end of the long driveway. She had been the conduit allowing them to communicate with each other. Nights previously passed listening to her stories now became nothing more than the necessities of conversation. She was the bridge between father and son. With her gone, a chasm stretched wide between them.

On the one-year anniversary of his mother’s death, Mike looked out the kitchen window at the short and stocky pony looking miserable in the blowing snow of an early winter.

“One of your mother’s ideas,” said Mike’s father. “I couldn’t afford a horse.”

The pony’s mane blew sideways in a wispy salt-and-pepper Mohawk and it glared back at them standing in the warm light of the kitchen as if challenging them to come out for a ride. It stared at Mike, its coat covered in the slime of the barnyard where the cattle had broken through the goopy brown ice and harassed the newcomer throughout the night. The boy stared hard at the pony, as if trying to comprehend the meaning of why the fat gray runt in the pale red halter was roaming their pasture field.

“What the hell,” said Mike, “is that?”

As it adjusted to its new surroundings the pony—it was a she—contented herself by eating through the farm’s feed budget. Not the same rough corn and concentrate mixture the cattle ate; she would only eat the greenest hay and Purina calf starter, which she discovered on one of her numerous escape missions to the feed room. In the spring, when the cattle came too close in the pasture, she’d snap at them and they’d stampede over the tall grass and burst through the barn door, breaking hooves and gashing legs. Mike’s father locked her in the old chicken coop.

She was just as stubborn to ride and it took the thumbs of father and son to get the metal bit of the bridal into her mouth. She refused to wear a saddle. When Mike finally managed to get on, she would plod to the bush at the back of the farm, her head bobbing furiously up and down, white foam flecks falling from her mouth. Mike always braced himself as they got closer to the tree line. Once there, she would turn agonizingly slow and suddenly throw herself into a furious gallop. When he managed to stay on and she raced across the hay fields at full speed, Mike could imagine how the winning rider felt in the race he had seen with his mother. More often, she would throw him off at the bush and Mike would stomp a long march back to the farm, cursing his lack of control and vowing revenge. He would walk up to the pony, who never seemed to be concerned with repercussions, grab her halter and tie her with a rope to the hitch of the tractor. He’d rev the engine, put it into high gear and run her until he saw froth in her mouth.

Mike struggled with the pony for a year, his mood darkening and his methods growing more severe. When she misbehaved, and when his father wasn’t watching, he’d deliver a kick to her midsection, or slap her across the nose if she refused to stand still. Once, after she had ridden under a low branch of a tree and knocked him off, he picked up a stick from the ground and beat her. She had run off angrily. Later, when the blood had slowed in his ears and the guilt had come on sudden and strong, he placed sugar cubes in the wooden window sill of the chicken coop. His father found them still sitting there the next morning.

His temper had also brought changes at school. Mike had always been a model student, his mother returning from parent-teacher interviews with handfuls of chocolates and words of praise. Report cards were placed on the refrigerator. They were still there—the high grades had remained—but it was the schoolyard where the changes were most noticeable.

In only one year, he’d grown taller than the other children, beyond what the doctor said was normal for his age. His legs felt detached from his body like he couldn’t control their movement, and his arms had grown thick. He began to carry a wooden Sherwood hockey stick and would wield it as a club, realizing his strength over the other children. Like his father’s cattle, they now instinctively herded together at recess to avoid him, the weaker ones scrambling inside the circle as to not be picked off. Later, inside the classroom, he would wait until the teacher was out and he would walk over, pick his nose and smear it on the cheek of a trembling boy or girl. He would sit with his elbows on their desks, daring them to say a word. They never did. There was talk of rebellion and revenge, but this usually occurred during sleepovers where Mike was never invited and where woolen covers were wrapped protectively around them.

One day, following Mike’s routine beating of a boy as the students walked home, the defeated boy raised himself from the ground and screamed at Mike.

“What have you ever done that’s any good?” shouted the boy, crying and flinging handfuls of gravel at Mike.

Mike ignored the gravel and began to turn down the dirt road to his farm, where children hadn’t been invited since his mother died. They knew nothing about the pony.

“You’re nothing but a loser.”

Mike turned around.

“What did you say to me?”

He marched up to the boy, who had again collapsed in the dirt and was spitting blood into the grass, his left eye already half-shut and purpling. The others formed a semi-circle, hands behind their backs in case they needed to push away quickly. Mike pulled the boy to his feet.

“I said,” said the boy defiantly, “that you’re no good at anything other than beating people up. You’re not going to be big forever. You’re Irish. Sean is almost as tall as you are.”

Mike glanced over at Sean Murphy who stood out slightly from the semi-circle. Sean folded his arms, quickly unfolded them and then put his hands in his pockets.

“A loser huh?” growled Mike, pulling the boy forward, his face red and spittle flying from his thick lips. “Who wins at all the hockey games? Me. Who wins at baseball? Me. Who gets the highest grades? Me. Who does the teacher pick for class president? Me, me and bloody me.”

“But you’re afraid of anybody older than you,” said Sean, suddenly appearing at their sides.

“Says who?”

“You’re not the same around them,” said Sean. “The teacher only likes you because you beat up anybody who gets out of line in class.”

Mike threw the boy to the ground and walked slowly to Sean.

“I can beat anybody. Any time. Any sport.”

Sean spit into the ground.

“I hear you have a horse.”

Mike glared with his fists clenched, daring him to say the word pony.

“Bet you couldn’t win a horse race,” said Sean.

Mike glanced at the other kids who had crowded in.

“The hell I couldn’t,” said Mike.

“How about the Elmira fair?

“Against the Americans?”

“Now you’re afraid of Americans?”

“I’m not afraid of anybody.”

“So it is then.”

Before Sean returned to the group of kids, he looked again at Mike.

“It would make your mother proud,” he said.

The anger rose in Mike so hard he almost gagged with its force. He grabbed Sean, threw him to the ground and punched him hard in the face until the blood soaked the dirt. He continued to kick him in his back and legs until a group of girls begged him to stop.

Mike turned to the kids who had been watching in shock. This anger was rare, even for Mike.

“I want all of you there to see it,” said Mike. “Be at the race and be at the front. Or what happened to Sean will happen to all of you.”

And they promised they would be. Every one of them, including Sean, who went home that night sporting two black eyes caused by, he told his father, a hockey fight at recess coupled with an errant stick.

Mike returned home, tore an advertisement from the newspaper and slapped it on the table.

“Don’t be stupid,” said his father. “You can’t race a pony against horses.”

“The hell I can’t,” said Mike. “And her new name is Sandy.”

A ripple of laughter begins in the grandstand and rises to a roar as Mike now walks proudly in his cowboy hat through the stable doors to the racetrack, leading Sandy, a white towel around her neck with “#9” spray-painted in yellow upon it.

“I heard the Dover boy was in the race,” one man shouts over the din, “but a pony?”

The spectators clap and whistle and approve of this development that will provide weeks of gossip in coffee shops and kitchens. They watch for details that will give them the right flourishes when the story is later told.

Sandy’s ears perk up and Mike hears a rumble behind him. Four massive horses mounted by enormous riders trot past them looking dark and foreboding with small whips and thick round goggles, giving them the appearance of giant insects. They are wearing checkered shirts, sit high on polished saddles, and glare down at him as they trot past, the heads of their horses twice as high as Sandy’s. They ride in formation towards the starting line, turn around and began to position themselves.

Mike realizes he should be on top of Sandy, not leading her. He stops, steadies her and tries to jump on, but she moves forward and leaves Mike sprawled on her back. Sandy begins to walk towards the grandstand and spies a boy picking at a light blue twist of cotton candy. Before Mike can sit properly, she snaps at the cotton candy with her teeth. The young owner of the candy howls his fury and Sandy, not expecting the liquefaction of the sugary substance, snorts and bobs her head, the blue cloudy floss sticking to her whiskers and melting into her nostrils, as if she had dipped her nose into a water bucket of blue food dye.

The microphone crackles to life over the grandstand.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome the Blue Stallion to the race!”

The crowd cheers and Mike looks angrily up to the tower where Jimmy raises a silver flask to Mike and then his mouth. Mike yanks Sandy to the starting line where, after some struggle between Sandy, a Palomino and a cursing rider, he forces himself into the outside lane, close to the grandstand. Lined up like this, the crowd in the grandstand begins to hoot and whistle at the size of the pony in relation to the horses.

Yet encouragement is heard.

“If anybody can do it, you can do it, Dover!” shouts a man.

“Make us proud!,” yells a woman.

“Nice ass!” screams a voice from the top of the stands.

“They won’t be laughing once it’s over,” thinks Mike. He glances at the line of children from his class whose clapping enthusiasm has ceased as they gauge the shifting temperament of the crowd. Mike points at them and they clap faster. The other riders adjust their straps and boots and check their equipment. Mike does the same. He pulls his hat tight and checks again to see if his boots are tied. He sees a rider lean over the ear of his horse and he does the same.

“Run fast or I’ll beat the hell out of you,” whispers Mike.

Sandy doesn’t seem to hear him and sniffs the air. Mike closes his eyes and imagines the race as he has a thousand times. He pictures the methods of the other riders; how they’ll hug the inside on each corner, how they’ll fight for position and how they’ll make the final push when the distances are tightest and the crowd its’ loudest. He also pictures himself in the winner’s circle, one fist in the air and the other clenching an oversized cheque. Mike hopes Sandy is considering the same theory he is—that a pony closer to the ground can beat a lumbering old horse any day.

“The time has come ladies and gentlemen,” shouts Jimmy, clearing his throat into the microphone as it whines over the ancient speakers. “Riders into position!”

Mike feels his heart in his throat as he watches the other riders lean forward in anticipation. He sees a man with a starting pistol in his hand in front of them. Mike leans over Sandy, the sweat dripping from his thick eyebrows into her stringy mane.

“READY…. SET,” Jimmy chants and pauses for what seems to Mike like an eternity. Then the sound of a pistol pierces the fairgrounds.

The boy feels the horses explode around him as they burst from their positions. He hasn’t prepared himself for the dust, didn’t think of goggles, and he closes his eyes momentarily. When he opens them again he sees in the distance the rear ends of the horses as they pursue each other. It’s at that moment he realizes he’s standing still.

“Son,” he hears Jimmy bellow, “I think you better get moving!”

The crowd roars with laughter and he hears the kids yelling “he won’t go!”

Mike jams his boots into Sandy’s side and she grunts, almost a burp, and starts a light trot after the other horses.

“Hurry up!” Mike screams into her ear and she breaks into a lazy gallop. She runs for approximately 100 yards and slows again into a trot, distracted by the odours wafting from the food stands and the colours of the midway. He can tell she can’t remember if she’s supposed to be running at full speed to the barn or dragging her hooves to the bush.

“Come ON!” says Mike, slapping her rump. He realizes why the other riders have whips. Sandy however, had long ago grown unresponsive to his complaining and wanders towards the infield. Despite his yanking on her reins, she chomps at the grass.

“Looks like Sandy’s a bit hungry,” he hears Jimmy joke to the crowd. “Come on son, let’s get that stallion MOVING!”

There’s nothing Mike can do. He’s alone with hundreds of faces watching him and laughing. He turns his head and sees the posters that had been held high now sitting in the dirt. Sean Murphy stands alone at the fence. The blood rises in the back of Mike’s neck and he feels tentacles of anger creeping higher. His hands shake and he suddenly feels nothing but hatred for this town, these people, those kids, that announcer, and this stupid, ugly pony. He wasn’t going to be a winner at all. Instead, he was going to be something very different. He looks miserably down at the “#9” towel tied to Sandy’s neck. He leans over, rips it off and throws it on the ground. To hell with them. To hell with her. He spreads his arms wide and boxes Sandy in the ears. Some in the crowd gasp. Sandy rears her head and breaks into a run, the muscles shifting thickly in her back like an old machine warming up. They grind with a sense of urgency and they quicken into a hard gallop, as when she’d run back from the bush. Mike clenches the reins, grits his teeth. She follows the quarter-mile turn and although there is no longer a chance to catch the horses now—Mike can see the dust cloud far ahead at the three-quarter mile mark—there’s always respectability.

“He’s got it now!” screams Jimmy.

And then Sandy stops. She doesn’t gear down as a horse might. She doesn’t break stride, ease into a trot and then walk. She simply digs in her front feet and skids to a stop. The movement throws Mike forward and he feels himself launched into the air, somersaulting into a current of nothingness. In his weightlessness Mike watches as the grandstand and the people turn, and he feels as a satellite circling the dim orange sun. His descent is not graceful. He smashes shoulder-first into the ground, his head rebounding off the gravel, his face scraping along the track, and he hears Jimmy say “Oh my god folks, somebody give him a hand out there.” There is excruciating pain on his right side. For a moment he lies on the ground and then he raises his head, the blood dripping down his face like somebody has poured a can of paint over his head. It drips into his right eye and he sees the skin torn from his arms and he feels it on his face. He tries to raise himself but his legs wobble.

He turns his head and sees Sandy. She has trotted into the grass infield and is again munching on the soft grass, calmly eying him while she chews. She watches Mike struggle to his feet and walk towards her. While walking, he wraps the leather straps twice around his fist as to not break his fingers, and, upon reaching Sandy, punches her viciously across her soft nose. Startled and snorting, she stumbles back against a track railing, but Mike’s thick fingers grip her mane tightly and there is little room for escape. Fists are joined by curses and kicks, but his face grows flushed and Sandy, sensing his waning strength, shifts her weight on her hind legs and lurches forward against him. Despite being knocked back, Mike keeps his grip on her mane, feeling the hair rip from her body. Sandy whinnies, stumbles and struggles to free herself. He wraps his arms around her neck, pulls her down and bites into the tender cartilage of her left ear. She squeals and with a burst of rage, rips free of Mike’s grasp and gallops to the farthest side of the pasture and through the group of men who are running towards Mike. The entire grandstand is now quiet and sees the boy rise from the dirt and stumble towards Jimmy’s tower, crying and holding out his hands to which were stuck clumps of mud, blood and mane.

“Start the race again,” the boy cries up at Jimmy, “start the goddamn race again!”

Jimmy recedes into the darkness of the booth.

Turning, Mike sees he’s surrounded by a dozen fair officials who have run from the stables and now form a panting circle around him. They move to tackle the boy, just as Mike’s father shoves through the center of them.

“Leave him be,” he says.

He marches to where Mike is standing, grabs him by the chin, his rough fingers pushing the boy’s cheeks together, and looks into his eyes.

“Enough,” he says.

Mike stiffens momentarily and stares back at his father, not knowing whether to fight back or give up. He sniffs, slumps and surrenders.

They both turn to look at Sandy, who has returned. She holds her head high, eying them as she did the day she arrived on the farm. She whinnies and makes a jerking motion with her head, a sign of forgiveness.

Mike’s father glares at her and pulls his son close.

“She isn’t coming back, is she,” says Mike.

“No son,” says his father. “She stays here.”

If it’s possible for an entire crowd to go into shock, it was during the time of the beating that they did. Many were hardened farmers, conditioned to dealing with the sometimes brutal and unfortunate lives of animals. They were the ones who had rubbed their faces against dying cattle, or had buried dogs that had served them well. Other animals had died giving birth, or had contracted diseases that left veterinarians baffled and the dead stock trucks in business. They’d seen all of this and more, but the one thing they, true farmers, could never abide was cruelty to an animal.

Some in the crowd tried to stick up for Mike, hoping to brush away the race before it had a chance to implant itself in the myth of the town. Others said it wasn’t the pony but the owner and if you knew that boy, he deserved what happened. He was a troubled boy, they said, and he had other secrets. Same with the father, who had never remarried. The kids who had been standing at the railings boldly proclaimed that the boy was a loser, had never scared them and that ponies were for sissies.

Their parents, seeing that the sun had already set behind the cattle barns and hearing the rising music that brought the evening portion of the fair, quickly gathered sleeping children, stuffed animals and souvenirs, and packed them into vehicles for the long ride home. There would be questions in the car and still more when the adults discussed the race that night. They would remember the name, remember the face, know what had happened.