“It rained?” Jenny asked confusedly. She looked up at Aidan, who was gazing down at her with some concern. “When did that happen?”
“Are you okay?” He guided her back from the crosswalk, to a relatively quiet spot in the flow of humanity near an overflowing trash can.
“I’m fine.” She rubbed her eyes, suddenly realizing how tired and sore they were. “I went down a horse search rabbit hole again.”
“Oh lord. That always leaves you fuzzy, doesn’t it?” Aidan had witnessed a few of her searches in the past.
“There are just so many variables. Imagine if we had a central database or a national registry for all Thoroughbreds that actually tracked their ownership and whereabouts even when they’re not entered in a race—”
“Easy there, innovator. Save it for the column.”
Jenny laughed. “I don’t even know if I’m brave enough to put the words ‘national registry’ on the Internet. The anti-government hordes have special pitchforks just for that phrase.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m on your block?” Aidan asked abruptly.
She blinked at him. It was odd, come to think of it. “Aidan, why are you on my block?”
“I wanted to take you to dinner,” he said gallantly. “Sushi?”
“Where’s Lily?” Jenny asked, and then wished she’d bitten off her tongue or plunged into traffic instead.
“Working,” Aidan said off-handedly, taking her arm and guiding her into the flow of pedestrians. “A gallery opening tonight.”
“Shouldn’t you be there? That sounds important.”
“Oh, not for her art.” Aidan laughed. “She’s working for a catering company now.”
“Oh,” Jenny said. A secret part of her she was not proud of did a triumphant little dance. If she could just have one thing in this life, she thought, it would be nice to be more successful than Aidan’s girlfriend. It was bad enough she was hopelessly in love with him, but if he was dating some rock-star artist, things would just be unbearable. “Well, good for her. Dinner sounds great.”
Chapter Eight
Amelia wasn’t yet awake when Jenny got up the next morning. She tiptoed through the apartment, wearing jeans and paddock boots, and slipped out the apartment door as quietly as a secretive ghost. The building was so quiet in the pre-dawn twilight, she could hear the pigeons on the window-sills of the stairwell, cooing to themselves with throaty rumbles.
She stopped for coffee in the expensive cafe on the corner, where the baristas were still yawning themselves. She considered the bake-case, then added two bagels to her order—Aidan was always hungry but never thought to do anything about it, so he’d be starving all the way to Belmont… and complaining about it, too.
The trains were generally extra-unreliable this early in the morning, but she hammered down the stairs to the subway anyway and felt one of those rare bursts of New Yorker triumph when a slow-moving train lumbered up to the platform and stopped, with an exhausted sigh of relief, right in front of her.
“Thank you,” she said to the train, stepping into the car as the doors slid open… then stepped right back out again and ran to the next car, where she exchanged knowing glances with the other early-morning passengers who had already encountered the neighboring subway car’s evidence of a very rough night for someone. There was nothing quite like the stench of vodka vomit at five thirty in the morning, Jenny reflected, and possessing that knowledge first-hand was just one of the many charms of New York life.
She met Aidan a few stops away and handed him a foil-wrapped bagel, trying not to bask too much in the adoring look he gave her in return. “I’m excited,” she said, settling into a hard plastic seat next to him. “We haven’t done Belmont together in forever.”
“And the backside!” Aidan bit into the bagel and smiled. “Oh, this is a little piece of heaven. Did you know Lily went gluten-free? We haven’t had bagels in the apartment in a week. I’ve been dying.”
Jenny imagined a world in which Aidan got through a single sentence without bringing up Lily. Truly, a better place, she thought darkly. “Let’s just hope this backside thing works the first time,” she said, unwrapping the foil around her own bagel. “I haven’t tried it yet.”
The security guard looked at her press pass without pleasure, then back at Jenny’s face. She strongly suspected her expression was too eager for a six thirty a.m. encounter with a racetrack guard, but she could smell the familiar scents of the backside, hay and molasses and liniment and manure, all of them rolled into one intoxicating blend, and the feelings that perfume stirred up in her after a few weeks back in the city, where exhaust and garbage and sweat and the lingering sharpness of urine were all the rules of the day, were hard to tamp down. Every sense in Jenny’s body was tingling with a sense of belonging. No matter how far away she ran, the stable would always be home.
If only the security guard would agree!
“This pass is for the front side,” the security guard said finally, slowing his words to give them an extra layer of authority. “Paddock, yes. Press room, yes. This gate you’re at is for horsemen. You got a horseman to let you in, that’s another story.”
Jenny swallowed. “I know quite a few horsemen here,” she said, also using the unisex term for racetrack equestrians. “The Vargas barn, the Elliots, Millicent Overtree, I’m sure any one of them would vouch for me.”
The guard raised his thick eyebrows. He was an older man, his black hair grizzled with white and his expression rendered permanently skeptic. “Miss, do you see any of them standing down here signing you in? This is our problem.”
Jenny sighed. “What about this?” And she dug down in her purse and pulled out her ace.
The guard looked at the ID card in her palm, then back at Jenny. “Now, Miss Wolfe, why didn’t you show me this first?” And he stood back, gesturing for both of them to walk through the gate he’d been blocking. He leaned into the guard shack, his face splitting into a grin. “Can you believe this girl is holding a horsemen’s ID and she’s out here trying to use a press pass?”
Red-faced, Jenny scurried through the gate, Aidan close at her heels. They walked in silence for a moment through the leafy backside of Belmont Park, where low green barns lined with hedges were nestled beneath a canopy of trees. The early morning horse paths were filled with Thoroughbreds in various states of excitement heading to and from the track for morning training. The sound of traffic on Hempstead Turnpike quickly faded, replaced by the crunching of hooves on gravel, shrill whinnies from the barns, the splash of water from buckets emptied over concrete.
“Jenny?” Aidan asked, his voice low. “Did you really have a horsemen’s ID in your purse the whole time?”
“Yes,” Jenny sighed. It was from last fall, when her parents had sent up a horse to run in a stakes race. She’d come out to help with him, but he’d ultimately hurt himself during a morning gallop and shipped back to Florida without running his race. She’d kept the ID in the back of her wallet ever since, because her mother had once told her she’d never know when she’d need special access and if she had a pass, she better hold onto it. She had passes for Gulfstream Park and Tampa Bay Downs as well.
“Then why were we trying to get in on a press pass?”
“Because being a trainer’s daughter isn’t the credential I wanted to use,” Jenny said impatiently. “I wanted to get in as a journalist.”
“What difference does it make?”
“It makes all the difference, Aidan. If this is going to be a legitimate site, we have to be taken seriously… this can’t be the fun project that the Wolfe family daughter does.”
“Well, why not? If the trainers think it’s cute, they’ll want to help out.”
“I will not be cute,” Jenny said darkly. “That is not why I’m here.”
But whether it was cute or not, Jenny could now clearly see the trajectory of the morning, and their chance at success was all based on who she knew. So she led the way to Tommy Varg
as’s barn, through the main doors, across the churned-up clay of the shed-row, and into the office, where a corgi lifted his head and gave her a thoughtful butt-wiggle before going back to sleep on the ragged plaid sofa pushed against one wall.
“Jenny Wolfe!” Tommy Vargas leaned back in his ancient desk chair, springs creaking in protest, until the frame knocked against the cracked plaster of the wall behind him. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods? Don’t tell me your parents are here already. That dappled beast of theirs is making headlines.”
“Hi, Tommy,” Jenny said weakly, already feeling like she was ten years old again. Tommy Vargas had put her on his track ponies when she was still decked out in pigtails and pink cowgirl boots, leading her around the barns after morning training, while grooms and hot walkers waved and cooed at her. He was one of her parents’ oldest friends. Joseph and Tommy had galloped horses together a hundred years ago, when they were teenagers.
“No, they’re still in Florida. This is my friend—” she stopped herself, regrouped— “my colleague Aidan. He’s a photographer. How have you been?” The niceties would have to be observed. Tommy didn’t know this was a cold call for a new column.
“Never better, Miss Jenny! Come right over here, I have someone I want you to meet! Just a couple of stalls down.”
Jenny followed Tommy’s swaggering steps down the shed-row, ducking into the empty space between stall doors whenever a horse was led past by a hot walker. Aidan, though not used to the backside, was smart enough to follow suit. “FYI, never walk on a racehorse’s right hand side in the shed-row,” she hissed to him between horses. “They kick.”
“I’m following your lead,” he whispered back, “but that feels like essential information you could have given me on the way here.”
“Sorry.” She grinned at him. “I forgot you haven’t been back here yet.”
All of their other trips to the racetrack had been on the front side, where the civilians went. The spring and fall afternoons of racing here at Belmont, or those icy-cold winter days at Aqueduct, the sun sinking before they even got back to the subway station, had been relegated to the same space as the hardened bettors and the occasional group of frat boys looking for a safe place to show off their bow-ties. Jenny had taken notes on trainers and horses while Aidan took photos, and they put together beautiful photo-essays on the blog they’d been running, Racing Public.
Their little site had been beautiful, but it hadn’t gone far enough. Jenny knew racing demanded more of her—of them. There were stories to tell here, and they weren’t up front where dead-eyed men watched monitors and whispered numbers to themselves with cracked lips. The true tales of racing’s finest hours were back here, in the barns.
Those were the stories that Jenny would tell in Full Stride: Horse Racing’s Full Picture. They’d talked about a hundred names for their website before they’d settled on that one. The full picture: her words, his photos. Jenny could see the articles they’d publish in her mind’s eye, the big gorgeous images and the carefully written sentences, the quotes and the back-stories. All starting with today’s visit.
“Here we are,” Tommy announced, stopping in front of a stall near the tack room. Jenny recognized the significance of the stall placement immediately; the horse here would get the breezes off the open doors next to the tack and feed rooms, and would also be fully visible to whoever was working there, or sitting inside on night-watch. This was where you placed your star: your big horse, or the horse you thought was about to be big. Tommy pushed aside a fat hay-net, stuffed full of alfalfa and timothy, and revealed the disgruntled face of a very flashy filly. Jenny’s heartbeat quickened. She was exquisite.
“Oh, Tommy,” Jenny sighed, reaching out a hand tentatively—you never knew when a young horse would decide to devour you instead of greet you. The filly fluttered her nostrils delicately and stretched out to inspect Jenny’s cupped fingers, revealing a long, arching throat-latch which seemed to complement the gentle dish of her profile. Her big white star and long, narrow stripe were offset by a shock of black forelock which tapered over each eye, the fine strands competing with her long eyelashes to give her a demure, yet, coquettish look. This was a star; anyone who knew horses could look at this filly and see it written in her expression and shapely figure. In a game of tiny numbers like racing, when each horse in the field was essentially a cousin to every other horse, and wins were measured by mere inches and half-seconds, personality could count for a lot. “Tommy, she’s really something.”
Tommy beamed, as if he’d been waiting for Jenny to arrive and give her assessment, and now he could feel justified for believing in the filly. “A doll, isn’t she? Her name is Cinnamon Sin. Isn’t that something? Cinnamon Sin. Rolls off the tongue really nice in the homestretch. You should have heard Larry calling her last month when she broke her maiden. And then again last week. That’s two trips to the winner’s circle for this little lady.”
Jenny ran her fingers up the filly’s nasal bone and under her fluffy coif of a forelock; the filly flared her nostrils and nibbled at the loose sleeve of Jenny’s blouse. “You won your race! What a good girl.” She rescued her sleeve right before Cinnamon Sin tucked the whole elbow cuff into her mouth. “What are you pointing her at next?”
“Well, it was a good starter allowance she won. So I’m looking for the right stakes race,” Tommy said. “If not here, then in Saratoga. I’m not going to rush her. She’s still a baby. Her sire’s Maintain, and they all like a little extra time.”
This was the kind of thing Jenny liked to hear, the kind of thing she wanted to delve deeper into. Any turf writer could quote Tommy on that; she’d read the same on-the-spot analysis on bloodlines and training patterns a hundred times. What Jenny wanted to write about was how, exactly, Tommy was taking his time with her. More jogging days, more time spent in a pasture upstate? Short and fast works every two weeks, or long and easy works once a week? How many other Maintain babies had he worked with over the past few years, and what traits did they share, and how did that make them better racehorses?
And best of all, outside of the technical elements of training that she could finesse into a fascinating story, what quirks did she have? What was it like having this filly just off the tack room every day? Did she watch the guys when they sat around watching the races in the afternoon on the little television set atop the filing cabinet? Did she kick the wall and demand attention, or tear down her hay-net and rearrange it somewhere more to her liking? Did she snuggle with the barn cat, or have a special liking for a certain kind of hard candy? What made Cinnamon Sin into a horse just like the horses regular equestrians had in their barns and backyards? What turned her from a racing machine titled Cinnamon Sin into a silly filly called Cinnamon?
Jenny looked at Tommy and realized, with a heart-pounding jolt of horror, that she didn’t know how to ask those questions.
“Can I take her picture?” Aidan was asking, and she thought, we didn’t tell him why we’re here.
“We’re starting a new website,” Jenny said desperately. “Remember our other site, Racing Public? It’s like that, but more of an actual magazine type set-up, with interviews and articles.”
“Well now, that sounds interesting,” Tommy said, stepping away from Cinnamon Sin’s stall door and releasing her hay-net. The ball of hay fell between them and the filly, erasing her from view.
Jenny’s heart sank at the gesture. “It’s to bring racing to the non-racing equestrians and public,” she explained, trying to keep the mood friendly. “One thing that we’ve found is it’s hard to bridge the gap between, say, jumper people or dressage people and racing. We want to show them all the ways in which backside life is just like regular horsemen life.”
Tommy was inspecting his phone. “I certainly wish you well. That sounds like a tall order.” He looked up at her suddenly, wrinkles creasing around his eyes. “Hey now, how is your mother?”
Jenny exchanged a quick, confused glance with Aidan. �
��My mother? She’s fine. Working with my dad, like usual. They have their big colt keeping them busy.”
“That’s right,” Tommy said. “They do.” Suddenly his face crinkled into a grin. “Why don’t you do a story on him?”
“On—my parent’s colt? That’s not really great journalism, though, doing a story on my own family,” Jenny said quickly, trying not to stammer although she could feel the urge rising up, her tongue twisting over itself in its desire to freeze her words, close her throat, get her the hell out of there before Tommy told her to leave. She knew he was thinking about it. She’d seen him do it before, the day of the Florida Derby five years ago, when he’d been sitting on a rabbit who would end up winning the race in a massive upset. He’d thrown out an entire press group who had been crowding into the barn the morning of the race, saying in a jovial but firm voice that a magician never revealed his secrets. Why had she thought Tommy was a good place to start? She never should have come into his barn in the first place. She’d just been so disoriented by the nature of her mission, she’d gone straight for the first familiar face she could find.
Aidan bravely spoke into the silence. “Your filly is so beautiful, Mr. Vargas. A few shots of her profile would really make my day, as a photographer. She’s a born model. I’ll send them to you for your website. What do you say?”
Tommy leveled his gaze on Aidan and studied him for a moment. Jenny’s stomach turned over once, then twice. She had thrown up at the track before, she recalled, but that had been on her home turf and thanks to a bad choice at the track kitchen, not as a suddenly unwelcome guest in someone else’s barn.
But Aidan’s flattery worked. “What the hell,” Tommy decided. “Go ahead and take the pictures. She is beautiful. Most beautiful damned horse I’ve ever had.” He stood back and let Aidan walk around to the other side of the hay-net, where Cinnamon Sin was tearing into her alfalfa with enthusiasm. She pricked her ears at Aidan, as if she’d forgotten him when he’d disappeared from view, and was surprised he had reappeared so suddenly in her space. Aidan, ready with the camera, started snapping, and the filly enjoyed the digital beeps and clicks of it so much that she leaned forward, her nostrils and eyes wide to take it all in. All of which, of course, lent itself to fantastic captures by the camera.
The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Page 9