What I didn’t mention, because it had never been asked and because I’d been too caught up in the moment, in my own importance as the self-appointed ambassador of change, was that it didn’t always work. That horses still disappeared, that cell phone numbers changed and farms closed and fortunes turned for the worst. That some people valued a horse’s life above the price of rubies, and some did not. So when readers looked up from my bold words in New Equestrian and saw my name attached to Market Affair, they couldn’t know what part, if any, of my interview had been a lie—so they could safely assume all of it was.
Of course I could have told them the truth in the beginning: that I’d hit dead ends before, had to accept that a horse I’d once known was out there on his own now, but before Market Affair, I’d never actually seen the disappearing horse re-apparate… not that he’d been on my tracking list, but even so. I’d known what could happen, but living with the photographic evidence that it absolutely had happened was something that I didn’t know how to live with.
“I let him down,” I whispered. “He slipped through the cracks. Who else could end up like this? What about those babies down in the training barn? The yearlings? The coming foals? And what about all the horses I’ve sold over the years? What’s happening to them?”
“This was a freak occurrence. This is not the norm.” Alexander’s voice was steady. He spoke a with conviction I envied. “Most horses live very normal lives. Alex, you know this. You see them every day. In people’s yards, on hobby farms, at boarding stables. Just because they’re not tripping any alarms by showing under their racing names doesn’t mean that the worst has happened. And most of the ones who do show get their names changed anyway.” He handed me my own tumbler of whiskey, the ice clinking musically against the glass, and waited while I took one sip, and then another. He nodded, satisfied that it would soon settle my nerves. “I know it’s all been a shock,” he went on. “And what happened tonight was unfortunate, but maybe not isolated. What you need is some time on the farm. Out of the public eye.”
I had been taking a third sip of the whiskey, but this gently-delivered command in the guise of advice made me choke on the mouthful. I put down the glass. “Stay on the farm? What about the racehorses?”
“I can handle the racehorses,” Alexander said patiently. “I am sure you can trust them to me. I think it’s time for you to lay low and let this blow over. Any time you spend in public is just going to open you up to attacks like the woman tonight—to say nothing of questions and scrutiny that I don’t think you want any part of.”
I faced Alexander sullenly. My mulish nature was asserting itself, wiping away the insecurity I’d been feeling just moments before. Now he was telling me I couldn’t even watch my own horses train? Or, worse, I couldn’t run them myself? “The Mizner is next weekend,” I said icily. “Are you telling me to sit it out while you run Personal Best?” That couldn’t be the case. P.B. was mine. Alexander would never—
“That’s precisely what I’m saying. And any other races we might be dropping horses into over the next few weeks, or however long it takes for some new scandal to pop up and take you out of the spotlight. The Mizner is a graded stakes race and there will be Derby hopefuls in it. There will be press. And you’re in no fit state to be talking to the press. They’ll ask you leading questions and manipulate every word that comes out of your mouth until you’re all turned around again, just like you were tonight.” Alexander’s voice had grown cool as he issued his commands. Now he softened it again. “Alex, this is for your safety as well as the horses. Do you want to attract protestors to the stables or to the track? There’s no shortage of crazies, especially in Miami.”
He was right. Damn him, he was right.
I didn’t want to face it yet, though.
I got up and left the room, walking purposefully through the house, stopping at the front door to pull on my muddy Wellingtons, hopping from one foot to the other as I shoved my bare feet into the resistant boots, then flung open the green door and threw myself out into the night. It was late, and the high moon was wreathed in a blue glow of ice crystals. The goosebumps rose on my bare arms, but I went down the porch steps anyway, awkward and loud in the rubber boots, and across the dewy grass of our scruffy patch of front lawn, down towards the dark line of the pasture fence. I could see the girls out there, the moonlight silvery on their bay and chestnut and gray backs, the colt and the filly dark sleepers in the grass nearby. Heads lifted and ears pricked as I tramped through the grass, and a lilting whinny echoed through the little valley.
I was nearly at the fence and starting to wonder what the plan was—the fence was built of no-climb wire, topped with a flat black-painted board, and couldn’t be scaled—when Alexander, who was taller and faster and quieter and more rational than I was, placed a hand on my shoulder.
“When are you going to stop running away?”
I had been steeling myself to do just that. But he always knew. The longer I let the weight of his hand sink in, the more his touch became all the warmth and comfort in the world to me.
I just didn’t want it. I wanted to rage at him, I wanted to shout that he was taking my horses away, I wanted to accuse him of jumping at the chance to take his old power back after he’d let me take over as their trainer last year.
But I knew better. I knew that we were partners. I knew deep down, in my most rational of hearts, that he was doing everything out of consideration for me.
So, I stood still.
I wasn’t running away.
“I’m not,” I said instead, like a child.
“You always run away,” Alexander chided. He turned me around to face him, to show me that he meant no insult, only concern. His eyes sparkled with silver glints in the moonlight. “You’re half-horse yourself. You think you solve all your problems by just running faster.” Alexander stooped and placed a gentle kiss on my forehead. I sniffled, throat suddenly tight. “This time,” he went on, fingertip at my chin, “You will just have to stop and wait it out.”
“I can’t be still,” I admitted. “ I don’t know how.” If I wasn’t training racehorses, what was I doing? The farm chores and the morning works and the broodmares seemed to fade into little distractions. The frequent trips to check on my horses in south Florida and in Tampa were what truly made me feel like a trainer.
“It’s easier than you think. You just need a project. Or you can think of it as a vacation. You like those.”
I did like vacations. Until I got so keyed up and excited about all the work I was going to do and goals I was going to make as soon as I got back home that I became restless and anxious for the vacation to end. I usually lasted five days.
This was going to take longer than five days. “What kind of project?” Maybe he had something in mind.
Alexander only shrugged. “With enough time sitting idle, something will come to you. Now come back inside. The ice is watering down that nice whiskey.”
I accepted the arm he held out and we made the trudge back up to the house, leaving the mares and foals to their silvery pasture. There would be frost on this grass in the morning, I thought. Whiskey was probably exactly what I needed. My nerves had gotten the best of me tonight, and now I was cold through.
I tightened my grip on Alexander’s arm, thankful for such a strong anchor to cling to.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Morning training had lost its luster.
With my favorites at the training center near Miami, and Tiger in the yearling barn until after training hours, wondering what had happened to his life, the morning rides felt utterly bereft of any passion. I felt like I was just dealing with a succession of forgettable young horses who would pass out of my care and into some other trainer’s barn without ever making much of an impression on my life. Of course, that was a typically dramatic Alex response. A few days ago, they’d all had their own charms for me—personalities and quirks and mannerisms. If I didn’t love them the way that I loved my own string, my
P.B. and my Luna and my Virtue and my Shearwater, well, that was partially because I hardly knew them. After all, I rarely rode babies, and half the new two-year-olds in the barn were client horses anyway. They were here to learn to be racehorses and prep for the rapidly approaching two-year-old in training sales.
But partially, too, it was because I was shutting myself away from them, haunted by the futures that I feared they were galloping headlong towards along with their daily gate lessons and their weekly fast works.
I felt that if I let myself fall in love with any of them, I wouldn’t be able to let them go. It was probably true. When I fell in love with a horse, I fell hard—witness Tiger, witness Personal Best, witness Luna Park. But that had been different—all of those horses had held something special and indefinable for my heart from the get-go. It was easy and getting easier, as the years went by and the horses came and went, to ride and train and condition relatively emotionlessly. To take the logical, rational approach to training and selling horses. While that was as it should be—Alexander considered this essential for one to run racehorses as a business—it wasn’t compelling for me in the way that riding a horse I truly loved and connected with was. One gallop on Tiger was enough to energize me through five uninspiring sets on client horses.
Without that passion for a horse invigorating my brain, the mornings dragged. Now, without even my semi-weekly visits to south Florida to look forward to, the days congealed into a meaningless clump of hours divided between sitting in the saddle, holding mares’ halters, helping scrub foals’ bottoms, mixing feed, and throwing hay.
By the third morning after the fundraiser party that had gone so wrong, I was ready to go back to bed after the second set. I would have, too, but Alexander wanted me to ride a big, burly colt in the third set, a strong two-year-old who either needed a diet or a gelding. His neck and shoulders bulged with beefcake muscle, and his jowls already seemed to be widening in stud-horse fashion. I had suggested that the colt’s owner had lied and sent us a late-summer colt who was actually three on January first, not two. Alexander suspected (possibly more rationally) that he’d been subjected to haphazard hormone doping to get a big yearling for the sales ring, and the pigeons were coming home to roost. Either way, Alexander thought the horse had a lot of promise if he would stop gaining muscle long enough to grow the bone he needed to support his own hulking weight, and wanted my first-hand opinion of how the horse moved before he consulted with the owner about a little turn-out time.
I took a look at the big colt, looming like a bull over little burros in the stalls on either side of him, and decided that this was not the sort of vacation I liked. “Can’t Juan ride him?” Juan was a tough guy. He actually liked riding this brute. “Just tell him what to be feeling for.”
The colt neighed as a filly sashayed past, a stallion’s rumble already echoing in his massive chest. The filly, so close to childhood it would have been pedophilia if he’d gotten anywhere near her, broke forward nervously, her eyes wide as the hot walker tried to settle her down again. The colt bounced up and down behind his stall webbing, watching the panicky filly with excited eyes. He blew hard through his nostrils and took a restless turn of his stall before shoving at the webbing again, but by now she was making her escape, dragging the hot walker down the shed-row. I didn’t blame her.
“He’s a thug,” I said in disgust. “He doesn’t need time to mature, he needs cut.”
“You’re probably right,” Alexander said regretfully. “But he’s from the last crop of Serengeti Sun, and the owner is keen to make a stud out of him someday.”
“Pity the fillies,” I sighed. “And me.” But he wasn’t so terrible under saddle, from what I’d seen, just easily distracted, especially by the ladies. Oh, and once he had his blood up, he’d pull your arms out before he’d slow down, so that was fun. “Put him in an elevator bit,” I told the groom loitering outside the stall. “I’m not going water-skiing today.”
A quarter-hour later, mounted on the giant colt, I felt a little better about the ride to come. I trusted myself on horseback—so many ways to directly influence what the horse was going to do net. Seat, legs, hands—I had all those tools at my disposal, and I knew how to use them. On the ground, I had only my hands and my voice—not much of a fight if a horse really wanted to defy me. I settled my boots into the stirrups just a little deeper home than usual, toes and knees turned in. The equitation of security. I gathered my reins, looping the ends of the long racing reins into a firm knot that made for a nice handle in case of emergency. The colt circled in the straw, restless to get out, but I did all my safety checks before I let him go anywhere, right down to leaning over and tugging the girth up an extra hole. Then I nodded at Miguel to step out of the doorway. He checked for traffic, found the shed-row free of oncoming baby racehorses, and waved us on out.
The big colt hopped eagerly out of his stall, jigging sideways as soon as his hooves hit the churned up clay-and-sand of the shed-row. I had been compelled to lay my cheek against his cresty neck as we went through the stall door, but as soon as I straightened up, I sat down in the saddle and gave his spine a little reminder that there was a human on top, and one that expected obedience, besides. He subsided down to a walk, or close enough, straightening out and stepping out in something just shy of a nervous jig as we rounded the corner. I allowed it. I hated to start a ride with a fight.
We caught up with the rest of the set on the other side of the barn—five colts, no fillies, by design. But even without hormones to inflame my would-be Casanova, there was a tautness to his body that I didn’t like. We filed out of the barn and onto the gravel horse-path, and he was already rooting at the bit, asking to be allowed to lead the set.
“You can’t always be the leader,” I told him, and his black-tipped ears flicked back to catch the sound of my voice. “Sometimes you’re going to get dirt in your face. As long as you pass them before the wire, it doesn’t matter.”
He snorted, blowing so hard that he spooked a flight of mourning doves from a nearby live oak. They quickly evaporated into the thick layer of fog that was resting like a blanket over Ocala, but he used them as an excuse to dance sideways on the path. By the time I had straightened him out, his nose was brushing the rump of the dark gray colt ahead, and said colt’s ears had swept back. He shook his head, hunched his back, and gave a little crow-hop, which got the message across to my colt loud and clear. The cowardly monster showed his true colors, backing right off.
“Uh-huh,” I told him, after I’d waved an apology to the scowling Richard, turning back to see why I was crowding his horse. “You’re nothing but a big fat bully. You can dish it but you can’t take it.”
Chastened for the moment, the big colt just lumbered on, but he was far from calm. I could see a sheen of sweat darkening the taut muscles of his bullish neck despite the cool morning. He was hyped up and looking for trouble. I prayed to the racing gods that he wouldn’t find any this morning.
But trouble will always find a racehorse.
We were cantering along the far turn. All was quiet. The horses were going easily, the colt had settled into a nice pace as the outside partner in the first pair. It was a spot I liked for him because he needed a little extra ground on the turns; those long ungainly legs needed all the room they could get. He would never thread his way up the rail and sneak in on the turn for home, but he could swing wide and make a drive, if he had the stamina and the endurance to run just a little further than every other horse in the race. “It’s like galloping a stork,” I commented to Juan, who was galloping on my inside with a neat little chestnut colt who took his work very seriously. Juan laughed and tipped his whip at me. He could afford to break his focus—his little colt had his head down and his ears back and was working like a professional.
Juan still only had one hand on the reins when it happened. I know, because I was looking right at him, at his grinning white teeth, at his right hand in the air, using his whip to point at me. I wasn’t lo
oking forward, to the track ahead, nor off to the right, towards the foggy pasture next door where our elderly neighbors had long grazed black Angus cattle as they and their parents and their grandparents had done since before the Thoroughbred colonists came south to found their new nation of horse country.
I wasn’t looking, but my big colt was. What he saw emerging from the curling mist sent him lunging towards the inside rail like a car losing a tire.
The chaos was immediate. I saw Juan’s smile turn into a grimace of panic, growing closer and closer until it was gone—disappearing from my view as my colt slammed into his chestnut and sent the little horse tumbling heels over head. I had a death-grip on the reins, but I’d lost my left stirrup when his outside shoulder dropped away from me and sent me swinging to the right, and when the impact with the chestnut colt nearly sent my horse to his knees, I found myself high on his neck, gripping leather and rubber and mane with everything I had. There were other horses streaming across the track, and the fallen colt waving his legs in the air, and I didn’t want to be down in the dirt and in the way of all those erratic hooves, whatever happened. But I didn’t know where everyone was, and I was turning my head to the left, to look back and see where the other four horses had ended up, when suddenly my own colt’s neck was rising before me, and just as I realized that we were jumping the inner rail and hedge, and dug my knees in for grip, something big and heavy slammed into my colt’s hindquarters and he fell out of the air, an ungraceful Pegasus falling to earth, and landed face-first just beyond the hedge, and as the ground rushed towards me I realized we were flipping over.
Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4) Page 7