Read Online A Tiny Piece of Sky by Shawn K. Stout - Free Book Online

steady trot when Mr. Canard, as he fumbled the key to the door of his shoe repair shop, dropped a box of cast iron cobbler form molds. They made a terrible clang when they spilled out onto the brick sidewalk, causing the girls to jump and Dixie to take off at full gallop. Joan lost her grip of the reins as Dixie tore down the street. The girls held tight to each other as their spooked pony ran wild. Joan was in tears, beggingDixie between sobs to stop, and bribing her with promises of carrots and lumps of sugar. However, it seemed as though Dixie had other things on her mind. What are carrots and sugar lumps compared to freedom?
    On they sped over the cobblestone streets. On and on. This pony did not tire easily. In her younger years, before she came to live with the Baums, Dixie was a rodeo pony whose job was to warm up the crowd by doing “ one-of-a-kind, amazi ng tricks you’ll nev er see anywhere else .” She was billed as “The Pony With the Human Brain,” not because she could wave good-bye with her hoof, say her prayers, and count to ten. She could do all of those things, but so could most of the other horses in the rodeo. There were even some potbellied pigs in the show that had those tricks in their repertoire. Yes, that’s right, I said
pigs
. But Dixie, she was a horse of a different color, you could say.
    Rodeo Stan, who owned the traveling rodeo, would bring Dixie into the center of the arena before the main performance—barrel racing and brahma bull riding—and ask the crowd to shout out numbers. “Any number between one and fifty!” he’d say. “Don’t be shy! Let’s hear ’em!” Then, after he had two numbers from the audience, he’d ask them if they wanted Dixie to add, subtract, multiply, or divide. “Divide!” the crowd would often yell, because division was the hardest, and those rodeo-goers, well, they loved a challenge. Then, Rodeo Stan would tell Dixie, loud enough so everyone could hear, “All right, Dixie girl, let’s see if you can handle this one. How many times does two go into eight?”
    After a few seconds, Dixie would nod her head enthusiastically. “I think she’s got it!” Rodeo Stan would say, cheering her on. “Ohboy, oh boy, she does think she knows this one! What do you say, folks?” Then, after fervent applause, Dixie would tap her hoof on the ground four times, giving, of course, the correct answer. “She did it! Amazing! Incredible! The Pony With the Human Brain has done it once again, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s hear it for her! And tell your friends, because you won’t see her anywhere else but here, at Rodeo Stan’s Wild Rodeo!” Dixie would then bow and wave, and perhaps add a spinning waltz or two, if it pleased her, sending the audience into a complete frenzy.
    The point is, Dixie was a performer. She could work five shows a day, sometimes six. Even years later, after she had left show business and settled down to a quiet retirement, she still—every once in a while—yearned for applause. And this ride around town with Joan and Frankie? Well, she saw it as her chance to take center stage once again.
    Certainly, there was no question she was gaining a significant audience in the streets. Shop owners rushed out of their stores and gaped helplessly as the trio raced by. The few cars on the road swerved to miss them, and some pulled over to watch. One tried to block the road in an effort to stop Dixie, but that human-brained equine easily maneuvered around the car by cutting over to the sidewalk.
    She had no plans to stop anytime soon. None. In fact, the farther she ran, the more people lined up to watch her, and it seemed to Frankie that their wild ride would never end, or end badly, she wasn’t sure which. At this rate, they would be in Virginia by suppertime. Dixie rounded the next street corner with such speed that the cart tilted up on one