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His nasty owner had said he was saddle trained (of course the guy had said Smoky was ‘broke,’ but Phoebe had detested that term long before she’d made rescuing horses her job), but she wouldn’t put that assertion to the test until Smoky was at full strength and health. She imagined he’d be a good mount, at least for people he knew he could trust.
He was lonely, though. He couldn’t see the pasture where the other horses were turned out each day, but he could hear them, and he spent a lot of his days at the fence of his turnout nearest the other pasture, calling out to the others. Titan usually called back, and Phoebe knew the big fella well enough to hear comfort in Titan’s tone. He was letting Smoky know everything was going to be okay.
Even so, and despite her experience with rescuing horses, Phoebe’s heart cracked a little with every plaintive wail. Smoky got extra apples as often as possible.
She was washing her hands after giving him his afternoon meds and apples when she heard unfamiliar voices in the stable. The ranch wasn’t a petting zoo, it wasn’t ‘open to the public’ like that, but Phoebe partnered with various rescue organizations, sharing the burdens of their work, and she, like most of the others, adopted out those rescues who were healthy enough, and emotionally resilient enough, to accept new owners. There were four adoptable horses at the ranch at the moment.
That said, people interested in adoption had to go through a series of steps to be deemed acceptable adopters, and that process was by no means a ‘drop-in’ sort of thing. Phoebe had no acceptable adopters at the moment and no appointment to meet with anyone who might be one.
So who the fuck was in her stable?
Warily, wondering if she should grab a pitchfork or something else weapon-like, she stepped out of the stable bathroom and crept to the end of the wall, where it formed a corner with the tack room and she could see most of the main aisle. Two women, maybe in their forties, stood about halfway down the aisle, hanging over the door of Amos’s empty stall. Phoebe could see only their heads, shoulders, and arms, but she could tell they were the other kind of horse people. Both women wore English-style riding jackets.
Phoebe was a western rider. As a girl, with her first horse, Homer, she’d been a barrel racer and had placed second in the state junior championship when she was fifteen. She’d learned English-style as well and had learned to jump, but never competitively. She felt most comfortable and natural in a Western saddle (or bareback), holding a set of Western reins, but as far as she was concerned, any kind of riding was good riding. As long as the horse was treated well and happy to be ridden.
However, in her experience, Western and English ‘horse people’ were two entirely different breeds. She had a strong preference there as well. Probably there were lots of nice English riders, but she had yet to meet one. All the English-style horse people she’d ever met were entitled, affected, and downright obnoxious. Even if they treated their animals well (Some didn’t, even at the highest levels. An Olympian had punched her horse right there on camera a few years back, so there was no doubt that bitch was even shittier to her horse in private.), they treated people according to a scale of value. If you were as rich as them or richer, you were worthwhile. If you were not, you were beneath notice, if not an outright target of scorn and abuse.
There was, Phoebe thought, an obvious reason why there were few working-class English riders, and it wasn’t simply that all the tack and gear was twice as pricey as it had any right to be. It was that the snoots liked it that way, so the ‘poors’ were priced out of that world.
Trying to tamp down her irritation at the interruption of her day by two of the wrong kind of horse people, Phoebe squared her hat on her head and went into the aisle.
The women were in full riding regalia, jodhpurs and thousand-dollar black boots completing their fits. She was surprised they didn’t have their black velvet helmets on, too.
“Hey,” she said, taking a few strides toward them before she stopped. “Can I help you?”
One woman stepped back from Amos’s stall and headed toward Phoebe with her hand out. “Hello. I’m Lydia Copperman.”
Phoebe let her come all the way to her before she offered her own hand. As they shook, she said, “Hey, Ms. Copperman. I’m Phoebe Davis. Can I help you with something?”
“It’s Mrs. My husband is Reynolds Copperman.”
Phoebe had no idea who that was, so she kept a vague smile on her face and waited.
“The founder and CEO of Copperman Resource Management?”
Phoebe was a lifelong Oklahoman. She knew that resource management meant drilling for oil. Her husband’s name might be ‘Copperman,’ but here in OK, he was an oilman, no doubt. Though the boom times had ended well before her birth, oil was still a pretty damn big deal here. The drillers had had to get a lot more aggressive and earth-destroying to get to it.
She was no radical Greenpeace type, spiking trees and vandalizing equipment. She used natural resources to fill her truck, cook her food, and keep her house warm and bright, just like most everybody else, and she wasn’t a hypocrite about it. But she also thought there had to be a limit to the fuckery humans did to the earth. They weren’t the only creatures who needed it, but a lot of them sure acted like they were.
But really, the main strike against Mrs. Reynolds Copperman wasn’t that her husband was apparently some bigshot oilman. It was that she was therefore really rich, and Phoebe pretty much hated rich people. The richer the worse. If these brunched-up broads thought they could swan in and take a horse because they wanted one, Phoebe had news for them.
Her response to Mrs. Copperman’s assertion of her husband’s importance was not a response at all. She simply repeated herself: “Can I help you with something?”
While Mrs. Oilman (probably his second or third ‘trophy’ wife, Phoebe thought, not even sorry about her pettiness) sucked her teeth, her friend—dressed almost exactly the same, even her hair the same expensive blonde, but without quite the magnitude of regal entitlement in her bearing—stepped up. “Our riding club is looking to support a rescue organization, and you were recommended. Oh—I’m Carolanne Thompson-Greene.”
Phoebe shook with Rich Bitch Number Two. “Hey. Phoebe Davis.” As she took her hand back, she asked both women, “I’m sorry. Did we have an appointment for you to visit the ranch today?”
Obviously, being sponsored by a chichi riding club would be a help; every little bit of support she could scrape together was a help. But Phoebe would sooner pack up and quit before she’d let somebody tell her how to run her ranch, and at least one of these women was very strongly giving uberbitch. They’d be all up in her business if she let them. She had no intention of making things easy on these uninvited guests.
Mrs. Oilman drew herself up tall. She was thin and angular, and about three inches taller than Phoebe, so she succeeded in literally looking down her nose at her. “I would think you’d be happy to meet with prospective benefactors, appointment or not.”
Phoebe was not shy. Nor was she naturally insecure or reluctant to stick up for herself. Her experience in Afghanistan and the lasting issues from her injury had introduced some anxieties and doubts into her psyche, but even so, she did not feel like she was any less worthwhile a human than any other. Money should not be a consideration of human worth. Period and exclamation point.
Another thing that her injury had introduced into her psyche: impulsivity. Where once she’d been ready to stick up for herself when it was called for, now she sometimes jumped whether it was called for or not, or whether she’d done a risk-reward analysis or not.
She stepped right up to Mrs. Oilman, so that they were chest to chest, and she stared straight into this platinum hag’s brown eyes. “I would think you’d have learned the manners not to stomp into someone’s home unannounced. I was actually raised in a damn barn, and I know better than that. Please get off my property.”
Mrs. Oilman paled to near translucence. She stepped back and smoothed the lapels of her fancy riding jacket. “Do you understand that I can ruin you with a single phone call? One call, and the sponsors you do have will disappear. A second call, and I can have this rathole crawling with inspectors.”
