Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Maybe that was his answer—screw you, lady, I’m not ready for the retirement pants yet. I could buy that. I could see Tiger’s point in that—he’d gone from the favorite child to forgotten in five days flat, and he wasn’t about to just get used to it.

  So fine, maybe the ninety-day lay-off wasn’t going to fly for Tiger. Not every horse was the same, right? If he needed to be in work to be happy, well, then, I could arrange that. But then, I could ask him one more time, in a different language, just to be sure—I stuck my hand in my pocket and crackled some candy wrappers left in there. If he wanted attention, if he wanted to come back to the barn and get tacked up and go to work, wouldn’t he hear those wrappers and make the connection? I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t given him a peppermint after a gallop.

  But he just went on grazing, taking short, vicious bites from the browning grass, ripping up dirty roots from the soft ground and brushing his mouthful from side to side to knock the sand from them. He was as ferocious to grass as he was to hay-nets. Tiger approached everything he did in life with vigor that often crossed the line to aggression. Look at how seriously he had taken competition as the years went by—even the ponies weren’t safe from him anymore. Every horse he saw was there to take attention away from him, and that he could not countenance.

  It must have been heartbreaking for him when he went for his final run and the speed just was not there. To trail all those horses… the ego-bruising he must have taken that day made my own pale in comparison.

  He needed another chance at being a star, I thought. He had so much competitive energy burning within. He’d make a hell of a jumper, with that attitude, taking it all out on the course, flinging himself at the jumps with brash confidence. I was looking at him now with the sort of hungry appreciation for a racehorse’s sport potential that I’d had when I was a teenager, looking for slow horses with nice movement and intelligent eyes. Something I’d shrugged off along with riding jackets and black hunt caps years ago.

  But now I could see it again—the trainer’s vision of a changed horse. Turn that heavy neck upside-down, losing the thick pad of muscle developed while the racehorse ran against the bit, and relocating it to the crest, to rise up beneath a braided mane. Lower the head, lift the spine, and develop a top-line that would streamline the hindquarters into a graceful slope from croup to delicately lifted tail. Add an inch or two of height and a full hand of movie-star presence as he learned to move from behind and carry himself with pride.

  With all that energy and muscle and outright aggression—if aggression was the right word, for what he had was less violent than that implied, more a hybrid characteristic made up of dynamic athleticism and an overbearing need to win, to be the best of everything (Thoroughbred. That was the word for that characteristic.)—with all that Thoroughbred contained between hands and seat, like a rocket fueled and ready for launch the moment the rider signaled ignition—well, what couldn’t he do? What jump couldn’t he jump, what movement couldn’t he make?

  I was starry-eyed with his bright future.

  “You could be the best,” I breathed to the rough-grazing, tail-swishing, hoof-stamping horse in the paddock. “You couldn’t have been the best of racehorses—we always knew you were just a good runner, a workhorse, someone who could bring home a check, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, bud—but if you could jump? If you were trained properly? If you loved it? What couldn’t you do?”

  Tiger looked up at me at last, his ears dark silhouettes against the electric-blue sky.

  I was a teenager in love. A child in a dream. I sighed like a moonstruck high school sophomore who has just discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets and read far too much into them. Standards set impossibly high, I waited for him in a breathless state of anticipation that could only end in disappointment.

  Until I closed my fist on those candy wrappers once more.

  The crackling sound of thin stiff plastic made its impression on Tiger this time, perhaps because he was actually paying attention to me now. He shook his head, as if making up his mind at last, and then began to amble across the paddock towards me in an unhurried stride.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “So let’s say I were to ride Tiger. Where would I ride him?” I settled down at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee, the tenth or twelfth or twentieth of the day; I’d lost count. Outside the tall windows, the winter sun was streaming across the hillsides and illuminating the mares and foals in the broodmare pasture. I could see the vet’s truck bouncing along the drive. I’d forgotten to join Kerri and the broodmare grooms to help out with the visit. She’d manage just fine without me. Probably preferred it that way.

  “You could use his paddock for a while. And then we’ll sort it out if you need more than that.” Alexander was placid and happy with his decision; he sipped at his coffee and flipped through his issue of The Blood-Horse without any real concern. He paused at an advertisement for a stallion standing his freshman year at a farm just down the road, and frowned over the copy for a moment. Then he was back. “Or you can hack him out in the fields to start, just like we do with the yearlings. You don’t know if he was started like that. I sincerely doubt that he was, considering who his connections were when we bought him. They weren’t exactly the most sympathetic of trainers.”

  Since that particularly charming ex-trainer of Tiger’s had boasted that one of the best ways to prep a horse for a race was to shut both his stall doors and keep him completely penned up and isolated from society for days, until he was going out of his head with energy… no, sympathetic his past trainers were not. The easy pasture rides that our babies went on every morning for their first month or two of training weren’t exactly an industry standard, either, but they were enjoyable, and taught the horses to look forward to riding as a pleasant diversion. Since Tiger needed to learn that there was more to life than running headlong in a circle, jogging the fence-lines around the property could be very good for him. A nice hour every morning, while the broodmares and yearlings were inside eating their breakfasts…

  Which somehow I would have to accomplish during training hours, when everything else was already going on. I needed to be out on Parker or galloping a problem horse, not gallivanting through the fields with Tiger like a teenager on summer vacation. It was a nice idea, but terribly impractical.

  “When am I going to find the time to do this? Especially on days when you’re in south Florida? I have training, I have the broodmares and yearlings to keep on top of, I have a full day’s work as it is.”

  Alexander sighed. “It’s a shame we haven’t any staff and you have to do all the work and don’t even have time to ride a horse every day. Alex, this is our slowest year yet. We have no more than ten foals coming. We are sending half the two-year-olds to the spring sales. The stud books are wide open. For once, you have all the time you could want. Why not use it to enjoy yourself? Go play with your horse. Don’t even call it work.”

  “But it’s not what I do anymore.” I had no idea how to explain what was stopping me here. I wasn’t sure what it was myself. Out there in the paddock, I had handed Tiger the one loose peppermint I’d had left and I had known that we had a brilliant future together. Driving back to the house, looking out across the racehorse training center where I had centered my career, all my hopes and dreams, the future as a trainer, I was afraid that it was a huge step backwards, towards a job I wasn’t sure I even knew how to do anymore. “I know you think this will make me look great when I turn out a gorgeous new show horse, but I haven’t done this work in years. I’ll screw it up. I’ll screw Tiger up. And then things will just look worse than ever.”

  He went back to studying the ad for the new stallion. I craned my neck to see what was bothering him so. Lots of flowery italics. Fairwinds Farm was proud to present Avenging for his freshman year. Millionaire winner of two Grade 1 stakes races, three Grade 2, Florida Stallion Stakes winner. From dam of champions, etc., etc. The usual hype for a horse who had run a fe
w nice races, retired after his three-year-old year, and was untested as a sire, but had the bloodlines to do great things… if bloodlines played out the way one hoped. There was no way to tell if he’d sire champions or duds, but he’d get the ladies this spring. Pinhookers went gaga for foals from freshman sires, so breeders lined up for these young stallions, got their mares in foal, then sold the colts and fillies as yearlings to the pinhookers. The pinhookers trained them up, and sold them at two-year-old in training sales. Then the wealthy owners stepped up to buy the first-borns of a horse they remembered from the Derby trail or the Breeders’ Cup three years before.

  It was all about name recognition, really, I supposed. Especially if the money in the room wasn’t really coming from a horseman’s wallet. As a general rule, I didn’t think any of it was good for the breed, and Alexander had always agreed.

  Yet Alexander had been looking at these ads quite a lot of late.

  I wondered again what he’d meant when he said something could change before the breeding season was over. None of our good horses were anywhere near retirement, unless there was a lameness. God forbid. Knock on wood. If they did retire, they weren’t anywhere near this sort of freshman sire hyperbole that Alexander seemed to want to build up for them.

  But I didn’t ask. I had enough going on.

  I left the table.

  Upstairs, I changed out of my dirty jeans and pulled on a clean pair. The clean pair, the ones I called my going-to-town jeans. The one pair I hadn’t ridden in, staining the inner calves black from rubbing against a horse’s sides. I decided that I would pay a visit to Lucy Knapp at her training farm, and for that I was going to look presentable—if only to make myself feel more like a professional adult person than usual. Lucy and I would chat about Tiger, and she would agree that he needed more time off, and that it would be silly for me to try and retrain him when I had been exclusively riding racehorses for the past six years. Obviously I would be giving Tiger all the wrong cues, confusing him, making things worse. We would come to the conclusion that the original plan was still the best plan—Tiger would continue to be turned out for three to six months, and then when she had room for him during the summer, he’d come to her farm for training.

  It was all going to turn out for the best.

  Although it didn’t sound very exciting.

  “I’m going to Lucy’s,” I said when Alexander came into the bedroom, looking inquisitive. “To talk about Tiger. Figure out a game plan.” As if I didn’t already have one settled in my head.

  Alexander nodded. “Good idea.” He glanced out the window, where sunlight was pouring in as if the morning’s cold fog had never happened. “It’s going to storm this afternoon,” he announced gravely. “Big cold front coming, you know.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Weather Channel.”

  “I just mean, don’t be gone too long. You don’t want to get caught on the road if there’s a big storm rolling through.”

  I smiled at him, unreasonably touched. “I’ll be careful.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I drove the half hour out to Lucy Knapp’s farm with the radio loud and my windows down, soaking up the cool winter air. I was full of confidence—Lucy would solve the Tiger problem for me. She had always handled our retirees. She had always had room for a Cotswold horse. She would see the correct answers immediately, maybe even have a better idea for how to work out my little P.R. problem without trying to retrain a horse myself.

  Once Tiger was dealt with, I’d be free to deal with Alexander’s little power play, maybe even take a few public swings at the rabble saying I was responsible for Market Affair. Maybe I’d roll up my sleeves and do a little rabble-rousing myself. I wasn’t exactly a person who spoke in public, or even in mixed company at small dinner parties, though, so that part of things looked a little cloudy. I was sure it would all work out.

  I saw Lucy as soon as I pulled into her barn’s little parking lot. She was riding in the ring just beyond the barn, clearly trying to beat the dark wall of cloud that was hanging ominously in the northwest sky, threatening to end our few sunny hours today. The cold front Alexander had mentioned was getting closer; the DJ on the radio station had cut in with word of a tornado watch for our part of the peninsula. Another nasty winter cold front, spinning up cyclones and leaving us shivering afterwards.

  Strictly speaking, neither of us should have been out with the heavy weather threatening. Lucy should have been helping her grooms pull in the jumps and pulling tarps over the shavings bin. I should have stayed closer to home so that I wouldn’t be out on the roads when the weather grew dangerous. But we were both hard-headed women, typical horse-people, and sometimes we just did what we wanted and damn the consequences.

  I parked the car by the barn and left the keys in the ignition. Jenny, Lucy’s barn manager, came to the entrance of the barn aisle to see who the visitor was. I just threw her a casual wave hello to spare her the trouble of tolerating me—Jenny wasn’t a racing fan, although she was professionally nice to me anyway—and then turned for the riding ring beyond the barn, where Lucy was cantering a leggy bay horse in tight circles between a scattering of brightly-painted show jumps.

  As I approached, she swung the horse into a collected canter, keeping its haunches deep beneath its body, and turned the horse expertly in a tiny fifteen-meter circle before popping, with only a few strides’ warning time, over a vertical bar at least three and a half feet tall. The horse lifted her knees to her chin and cleared the fence in a back-breaking bascule, arching her spine perfectly from nose to tail.

  It was an impressive sight. I halted in my tracks without realizing it, watching the horse flip her tail on landing and skillfully swap leads before cantering away to the right, still in tautly held collection, and then Lucy turned the horse in another tiny circle and took the fence again from the opposite direction.

  After another beautiful bascule, Lucy stopped her seat’s motion three strides after the fence, sitting deep in the saddle, and lifted her hands slightly. Instantly, the bay horse came to a tire-screeching halt, four legs balanced perfectly, and held a statue-worthy pose for a long moment. I stood still and watched the expert performance, entranced, until finally Lucy looked over and saw me.

  She smiled immediately, and, dropping the reins onto the horse’s sweaty neck, waved a gloved hand. “Alex!” she called, letting the mare walk towards me with her ears pricked in anticipation of potential treats. “Just the person I want to see.”

  “Really? What did I do now?” Besides make the local news for abandoning horses in the Everglades? I leaned on the fence and watched her mount, a splendid bay mare, approach with a gorgeous swaying gait. She was like a very tall and very athletic leopard. “This is some bronc,” I joked as they grew closer.

  “Mohegan is the comfort of my old age,” Lucy said with a wink. “The last horse in the barn that can perform a dressage test without terrifying the judge and taking out the arena chains.”

  “Everything’s that bad? Tough winter.” The last time I’d been out, in the fall, she’d been happy about her improving client base. She’d been getting close to having a barn full of mature show horses, instead of a barn full of babies and problems. For a little while, my silly racehorses had been her only headaches, but I’d heard that she’d been getting a few more Thoroughbreds lately. Maybe someone had been sending her their un-broke warmbloods again; once a breeder had sent her a half-dozen five-year-old Hanoverians who had never been so much as stabled since they were weaned. That had been a frazzled Lucy. “Hanoverian-nightmare-bad?”

  “Not quite that bad,” she admitted with a rueful laugh. “You love to remind me of that! I never should have taken those horses. But it’s close. I have nine off-track Thoroughbred in there and all of them have borderline personality disorders. Their owners, too. Three came from the Western Oaks sale, so you can guess what sort of animal they are.”

  “Yeesh, that’s always bad news.” Western Oaks, which was even further west of he
re, out in some real hillbilly country, was a fairly grand name for a dusty collection of cattle pens that hosted a monthly livestock auction. Every third Thursday evening you could drive out there and fill your trailer with goats, chickens, stolen tack, and traumatized, half-starved horses. Plenty of which were Thoroughbreds, abandoned or dumped when they failed to make money at the track, their papers thrown away and their lip tattoos blurred by age to a blue smear beyond recognition. Some of those horses had been bred on million-dollar farms not thirty minutes away, and they’d go to slaughter or to live in ramshackle sandy corrals behind rusty mobile homes, dwindling away to skin and bone, without their breeders ever realizing what had happened to them…

  …Or end up in the Everglades, or running in tight circles at bush tracks, I reflected. I’d learned a lot over the past few weeks, none of it anything I’d really wanted to know, about Where Slow Horses Can Go.

  “Yeah, yikes is right. One of them I won’t even get on. He flips over when you put your foot in the stirrup. I have to have Teddy Wilkins out to get on him and see if he can be fixed. Otherwise. . .” She shook her head. “Pasture pet. Hopefully with a forever home, so he won’t kill someone by accident down the road.”

  “Why would the owner even bring you a horse like that? That’s not what you do.” Mohegan thrust her nose at me and I ran my fingertips down its velvet softness. “They should’ve taken it to Teddy in the first place.” Teddy Wilkins, an Ocala fixture, took in the truly dangerous horses and taught them the facts of life. There wasn’t a trainer in Ocala who didn’t have his number in their phone.