Still I didn’t panic.
We were out of the jump-off, but I didn’t care about the jump-off. Just finish clean. Or with only one more knockdown.
Just no more than that.
The toughest rollback in the round was coming up, followed by a quick combination. I cut the turn perfectly, squared the horse up, gave him the exact right distance.
Five.
Six.
Cleared the first jump.
And then, damn damn damn, clipped another rail on the next one.
Heard it go down. Sometimes you clipped them like that, or even rattled them, and they stayed up. Not this time.
The drop on this one sounded to me like a bomb going off.
Now there was no margin for error. Eight faults still got me to Saturday. Another rail—or a time fault—and we were out.
I had to be under 74 seconds. If I went over by a tenth of a second, I got a time fault and some other horse would be the last qualifier for the Grand Prix.
We had just passed the big screen. This time I would have looked at my time on the way by. Too late for that now.
Maybe too late for us, period.
I didn’t know where I was against the clock.
But Daniel did.
“Go!” I heard from the in-gate, as loud as I’d ever heard him with me, or Mom, or anybody.
“Go…go…go!”
Then I was the one shouting “Go!” at Coronado.
Let it ride.
We were both running hot now.
One last combination.
One jump after that.
But the horse was flying now.
Nailed the combination.
“Come on!” I yelled, as much at myself as my horse.
In other sports, the players could see the clock when they were trying to beat it at the end of a game.
Not me, and not now.
Seven strides to the last jump.
Coronado took them so fast it felt like one.
Cleared it with ease.
Big screen was behind us, far end. I jerked my head around, saw our time up in the corner: 73.9.
Tenth of a second under the number.
Boom.
THIRTY-SEVEN
DANIEL ORTEGA, WHO never liked to let his guard down, who never wanted you to know what he was really feeling, looked as happy as I felt.
He walked up and took Coronado’s reins, smiling broadly, and planted a big kiss on the side of Coronado’s head.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “He gets a damn kiss.”
Then Daniel reached up for a high-five and I slapped him one as hard as I could.
“Holy mother of God,” I said.
“I may have said a prayer myself,” he said. “In two languages. I watched just about every horse out there today. And I knew their times going into the last three jumps. You and Coronado beat them all by two seconds.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, by the way.”
“I might have scared people on the side rings.” He grinned and said, “Other than that, we had it all the way.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Piece of cake.”
Results were posted on the monitor next to the in-gate. While Daniel went to check them, I turned Coronado back around, walked him a few yards back into the ring. Daniel always told me that a deeper understanding of the course comes from looking back at it when the round was over.
One tenth of a second.
We’d made it to Saturday night by that much.
When I turned Coronado back around again, I saw Steve Gorton standing with Daniel, nodding as Daniel pointed at the ring, Gorton’s face looking slightly flushed, another glass of champagne in his hand.
Daniel extended his hand to Gorton then. Gorton either didn’t see it, or simply ignored it.
“I got it, okay?” I could hear him saying to Daniel. “I don’t need a tutorial on the scoring.”
Then Daniel said something that I couldn’t hear.
“I told you, I…get…it,” Gorton said.
Then he was walking out on the course as Coronado and I walked toward him. I actually thought he might be smiling. The round hadn’t gone the way I would have drawn it up. But that didn’t matter now.
“So what did you think?” I said.
“Not good enough,” he said.
THIRTY-EIGHT
DANIEL AND EMILIO walked Coronado back to our barn. I told Daniel I’d see him down there later, then went looking for my mom and Grandmother in the tent. No one was going to be celebrating, or as Grandmother liked to say, spiking the ball. We’d live to fight another day. Still a good day for us. We’d had enough bad ones lately.
They were still at their table when I got there.
“Well,” Grandmother said, “that was certainly fun for the whole family.”