Down Sand Mountain by Steve Watkins

Author:Steve Watkins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780763654313
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2008-11-12T22:00:00+00:00

Nobody else said anything mean about Dad and his campaign, but I guess that was mostly because nobody much was home. It took us forever, almost a whole week, to get the flyers delivered to everybody — except for the Boogerbottom.

One afternoon after Wayne and David Tremblay took off for JV practice, I went back over to Darla’s and she invited me to ride bikes with her out to Moon’s Stable, where she kept Bojangles. I don’t know what made her change to want to do stuff with me again, but I was glad about it. You get tired after a while of just hanging around hoping somebody notices you’re there.

Bojangles wasn’t anything like I expected, which was a beautiful pony like My Friend Flicka. Instead he was old and had a sway back, but I guess Darla didn’t see him that way because she hugged his head the minute she saw him and gave him a carrot and a sugar cube and brushed him for about an hour like a maniac, then braided his tail and his mane, even though he seemed to be missing clumps of his hair. His eyes leaked some kind of stuff that Darla kept wiping off and not mentioning anything about, and when it was time to ride him, she got on bareback from the top of a fence.

“Come get on behind me,” she said.

I wasn’t so sure. “Don’t you have a saddle?” I said. It didn’t look safe to me, plus I wasn’t sure how I could sit behind her without us being squashed together at the lowest point of Bojangles’s swayed back.

“Sometimes I do,” she said. “But today I don’t.” I asked her what that was supposed to mean, and she said she didn’t exactly own a saddle but had to rent one from the stable, which usually she couldn’t afford on top of the boarding fee. When I asked her how much was the boarding fee, she said they paid in kind, and when I asked her what “paid in kind” meant, she said her mom took care of that and I should stop asking so many dumb questions.

We hadn’t seen anybody since we’d been there, just some other horses that looked a lot nicer and happier than Bojangles, running around in a pasture they had, and a few more in their stalls in the big barn. The barn had a new paint job of green with a red roof, but you could tell it was kind of run down, since there were boards missing or half-hanging, and weeds — a lot of weeds. Somebody was in the office, or what Darla called the office, which was just a shed off the side of the barn. I smelled cigarette smoke. “Come on and get on,” Darla said again, so I finally climbed on Bojangles and immediately slid right down his back until I was pressed up against her, which made me nervous, but which I liked, too. Darla took us for

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