The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Well, today was Thursday. Jenny chewed at her lip. There was no question of skipping the sale; the only thing she wasn’t certain of was whether she should tell anyone—namely, Aidan. She couldn’t tell Caitlin, because keeping her friend’s name clear was simple as long as Caitlin simply didn’t know what Jenny was up to. She couldn’t tell Lana, because this was the absolute opposite of everything she was supposed to be writing about for Full Stride, and anyway, Lana had already told her to steer clear of the story.

  Why tell anyone? It was just a horse auction. A perfectly innocent thing to want to attend. And yet something told her she was courting danger by going to this sale, out here amongst rural people she knew nothing about. Was upstate New York like north Florida? There were still plenty of insular communities around Florida where she wouldn’t wander around without the reassuring escort of a local resident. Not because she was necessarily afraid of being shot or robbed or something, but because she didn’t belong there, and the residents of that community had made it clear they weren’t welcoming to strangers. She’d once been in a town in the Big Bend of Florida where just eating breakfast in a roadside diner had made her feel like her every bite was being watched with beady eyes, while the locals waited for her to get back into her car and get the hell out of their town.

  What if this part of New York was the same?

  She decided to test her theory, and got out of the car, heading into the country store. If the cashier was friendly, or even apathetic, she’d know this was just a normal wide spot in the road. If she was treated with suspicion, well, then maybe coming back tonight wasn’t the best idea.

  A bell chimed as she went into the store, and she glanced around at the shelves. Everything edible seemed artificial: not much local or country about the country store, she thought, when the metal shelves were laden with priced-up Wonder Bread and bags of Doritos. She went to the back wall and took a bottle of water out of the cooler, then turned around, running her eyes the room. The cashier, a young woman with a fringe of black hair and a raccoon’s face full of makeup, flipped a page of People and sighed. Well, no danger there, Jenny thought.

  By the register there were a couple of small pies, carefully latticed, with dark berries showing through the plastic wrap. They looked handmade. “Are these made locally?” Jenny asked, having decided the country store cashier was not going to chase her out with a pitchfork for being a stranger in their midst.

  “I make them,” the woman said, lifting her gaze to meet Jenny’s. She looked world-weary and tired, an odd expression for someone who was manning the gas station on a desolate highway in upstate New York, and who passed the time making beautiful pies. “Made ’em fresh last night. Picked the berries myself, too, with my sisters.”

  “That sounds amazing,” Jenny said. “I’ll take two, please.” A fresh blueberry pie sounded like the perfect peace offering to smooth over the unpleasantness at home with Aidan. They’d eat pie, she’d tell him not to worry about the other night, scold him a little bit for not making a better effort to get in touch with her and with Lana, and they’d move on. Maybe he’d come back out with her tonight.

  “This is really good pie,” Aidan said through a mouthful. “Wow. Thank you.”

  “This girl said she made them with berries she picked with her sisters. It was wild.” The pie was amazing. The crust was so buttery, she was reminded of shortbread. “They don’t have pie like this in Florida.”

  “Also, it’s like, totally illegal, I’m sure.”

  “Oh, definitely. There were no health inspectors approving this girl’s kitchen. But we’re not in the city anymore. I think they do things differently up here.”

  Aidan put down his fork with a satisfied sigh. “This is the best lunch I’ve ever had, I think.”

  “Wait. What about that meatball sub from that pork shop in the West Village?”

  “Oh god, you’re right! But for the sugar category, this pie wins.”

  They smiled at each other across the kitchen table.

  When Jenny had come home, Aidan was finishing up his photo edits at the dining room table, and the sun was glaring overhead with a sub-tropical flare, picking up where it had left off before the storms rolled through the evening before. It was the kind of afternoon that just cried out for a relaxing nap with the shades drawn. But she’d put the pies on the kitchen table and told Aidan they needed to eat all this sugar whether it kept them awake or not, because she needed to talk to him. Aidan, to his credit, had not asked what about, or why now, or picked into her reasonings at all. He’d just closed his laptop and followed her into the kitchen.

  Now, Jenny supposed, she’d better give him the talk she’d rehearsed.

  “Aidan,” she began, “we acted out the other night.”

  His smile faded.

  “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not mad. But Lana would kill us if she found out. Especially since it led to a disruption in the editorial calendar and that’s like, her worst nightmare. So we have to move on. But I felt like it was important to say all of this out loud, instead of tiptoeing around it. I had a lot of time to think today, and that’s the conclusion I came to.”

  “Why would Lana kill us?” Aidan tipped his head to one side. “I would think Lana would be happy for us.”

  “Happy for us, for what?” Jenny asked cautiously. If Aidan had suddenly decided they were an item, she had missed the referee call… but she wasn’t going to protest it. “For… hooking up?”

  “Well, I mean, yes. I guess so. For finally making a move. She was always joking with me that—” Aidan dropped his gaze to his empty pie plate.

  “She was joking with you about what?” Jenny couldn’t help the upward trajectory of her voice.

  “About… nothing, you know, just that we were a cute couple, or something, that we hang out constantly so when were we just going to do something about it. She said it to me a couple times. Maybe it was only once. I don’t know. I shouldn’t… don’t read too much into it.” Aidan’s backpedaling would have been comical if it wasn’t so frustrating.

  Jenny sat back in her chair and cast her eyes to the ceiling. So this was how Lana saw the two of them. Worse, this was how Lana and Aidan talked about her, when she wasn’t in the room! “I don’t like to think we—this—was a running joke, Aidan.”

  “It was just because we always hang out without her.” Aidan leaned across the table, his hands out pleadingly. “You’re right, though, it wasn’t great to joke without letting you in on it.”

  “It makes me look pathetic,” Jenny pointed out.

  “And you’re not, and that’s why we shouldn’t have done it,” Aidan agreed robustly, nodding his head emphatically.

  Jenny regarded him impatiently. “Stop agreeing with me like that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s just—can we just be friends again and make it through the summer? I don’t want this to come between us.” She watched his face closely. If he looked the slightest bit hurt, or disappointed…

  “Absolutely,” Aidan said. “Even though you just told me to stop agreeing with you.”

  Jenny wished she could beat her head against the table-top. Instead, she changed the subject. “Want to come out to a horse auction tonight?”

  At that suggestion, at least, Aidan looked shocked.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  They were in their seats by six thirty, settled in a back corner of the mostly-empty bleachers. The stands were raised up around a small arena floor, where the uneven surface was pock-marked clay that hadn’t seen a rake or a manure fork in months. Men and women wearing hats of the cowboy and trucker variety were slowly filing in, most of them carrying cans of beer or soda, laughing together, enjoying an evening’s socializing at the livestock auction. Aidan, afraid that the pair of them stuck out like sore thumbs with their tight city jeans and hatless heads, went down to the front hall concession stand and bought them both cans of Bud Lite, a flavorless, sticky drink that made Jenny wince every ti
me it touched her lips.

  “Stop that,” Aidan whispered. “You look like a society lady slumming it to write an expose for the New York Times.”

  This was so alarmingly close to the truth that Jenny put the beer on the bench next to her, to be used as a decoy only.

  “We’re looking for a guy in an Australian duster and cowboy hat,” she whispered to him.

  Aidan looked impressed. “Really? Is he a secret agent?”

  “He’s a guy who buys thoroughbreds out of the kill-pen. My friend Janice told me about him. He’d know more about the horse we’re looking for.” Not to mention, who else amongst the Saratoga crew were sending their horses here.

  “I don’t see anyone like that,” Aidan sighed. “You’d think he’d stick out. He’d be the only guy not in a camouflage hat or jacket, for starters, so theoretically he’d be the only person we’d see, right? Isn’t that how camo works?”

  Jenny had to cover her mouth to hide her giggles. She elbowed Aidan and he scooted closer to her in response, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. “None of that,” he growled mockingly. “No beating up on Aidan during your super-secret spy mission.”

  She subsided, reflecting hopelessly that if she was going to turn into a jellyfish every time he touched her, she was never going to make it as a spy.

  The first horse was brought into the auction ring just after seven, and was turned in tight circles around the tiny arena floor by his rider, a broad-bottomed woman wearing a cowboy hat and a glittery western pleasure blouse. The horse was liberally spotted, with a half-black, half-white mane that seemed to get a few bidders really excited. There was some enthusiastic bidding, the auctioneer pattering away in that signature rhythm of their tribe, and after a few minutes, a cowboy in a white hat raised his arms triumphantly, having won the horse for thirty-five hundred dollars.

  “That’s not a bad price,” Jenny whispered to Aidan. “Maybe we were wrong about this place.”

  The next lot that came through was a big draft jenny-mule, with long flopping ears and a heart-stopping bray. She went for two thousand dollars to a man with a rather Amish-looking get-up, from his round black hat down to a long, bushy beard. After that came a long-backed palomino mare with a history of summer camps, who warranted fifteen hundred dollars after a lot of loud pleading from four children who were hanging off a tired-looking couple in matching orange hunting caps.

  “This is not the worst,” Aidan agreed. “Those are decent prices for all of them. The mule maybe could have gotten more, but I don’t know much about mules.”

  A new horse was ushered in, this one a light gray Thoroughbred with enough dark dapples and a hock-length tail to give away his youth. He wasn’t being ridden; instead a bored-looking man with a scruffy mess of brown hair led him into the ring and gave the lead a few sharp yanks whenever he wanted the horse to stop or turn around. The Thoroughbred put up his long neck, gazed anxiously around the tiers of bleachers and beer-drinking crowd, and whinnied plaintively, his ribcage shaking with the effort.

  “Poor thing,” Jenny whispered. “He’s scared to death.”

  “This is a nice riding prospect, gelding, just three years old, broke to ride, no papers, who will start the bidding at five hundred dollars?” The auctioneer asked pleasantly.

  “No papers,” Aidan murmured. “This is where it gets interesting.”

  The crowd muttered to itself, unimpressed. Someone called out for the man to get on the horse and prove it was broke to ride.

  The man rubbed his thatch of brown hair. “I ain’t ridin’ him,” he declared. “Youse were welcome to try him before the sale but didn’t see any of youse out there.”

  “Not going to just take Florence’s word for it he’s broke!” jeered the man who bought the paint horse. “You must think we’re new at this!”

  “Do we have a bid or not?” The auctioneer asked, her voice annoyed. “Three hundred?”

  “I’ll bid three hundred,” said the man. “Not a penny more.”

  Jenny had to restrain herself from raising her hand with a bid of her own. Three hundred dollars for that nice young Thoroughbred! And where were his papers? Who was he, and where did he belong? It sure as hell wasn’t here. With his rippling muscles and tucked-up wasp-waist, it was clear as day he was fit enough to run a race. Maybe he wasn’t enough to win, but he was clearly coming straight out of daily training.

  Beside her, she felt Aidan’s spine stiffen and knew he saw the same things she did. What they were witnessing was something they had both earnestly believed to be an overblown, rumor-driven problem, not really the monstrous, all-encompassing crime of the racing industry that so many outsiders claimed it was. And yet here they were sitting, just half an hour from the most prestigious racing meet in North America, watching one of the track’s own get yanked around a cheap auction house floor, all for a few hundred dollars.

  The auctioneer knocked her gavel on the desk in front of her. “Sold to Quimby Richards for three hundred dollars. Good luck with him and get him out of here tonight, got it, Q?”

  Richards twisted his face into a mocking grin. “We know who to call if he’s a bucker!” he shouted, and a few people laughed along with him.

  A few more grade horses, some ridden and some led, came through the ring and were sent out for similarly low prices, but somehow, every one of them garnered more enthusiasm than the Thoroughbred had. Jenny couldn’t understand it. The Thoroughbred had everything the grade horses didn’t: elegant lines, fantastic muscling, youth, beauty—and yet the shaggy sorrels and pintos with sagging spines and unkempt manes were getting all the attention. Maybe it was their bored expressions as they were led into the arena, giving the distinct impression that they had all found themselves in these situations before, and knew it meant a trailer ride to a strange new barn or paddock, and there was nothing to be done about it. Indeed, the quieter the horse, the higher the price was bid. The audience here was clearly in search of the perfect deadhead.

  Then the bay gelding was led in.

  Jenny leaned forward, her breath catching, as she recognized his little star and stripe. “That’s him,” she whispered, turning to Aidan. “That’s the horse from the Lawson barn that I wanted for Ryan.”

  “You’re kidding. Are you sure?”

  “Dead sure.”

  But the little bay horse received no bid, not even from Quimby Richards, who had apparently lost his taste for young Thoroughbreds. The gelding was led out of the ring after a few minutes of bored silence.

  “Hey, Florence, I might have looked at him,” someone whined from the doorway, and the auctioneer turned her steely gaze on the complainer.

  “Round two is at nine,” she said. “You know that. See you there.”

  Jenny blinked at Aidan. “Round two?”

  Round two didn’t take place in the main arena, but out back, in a long pole barn where the sales horses and some assorted livestock were stabled. Here, every horse who hadn’t sold in the front ring, and a dozen or so more they hadn’t seen before, were all milling around a corral.

  One by one, the previously rejected horses were led out in front of a small cluster of men and women. There was no microphone here, no P.A. system, and no shouting. Round two was done quietly, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

  The evening had turned chilly, and everyone had donned hoodies or jackets for the outdoor segment of the auction. Everyone except a man standing close to the auctioneer, who was looking rather menacing in a long Australian duster over his Wranglers and boots. If Jenny hadn’t known that this was Jay Ames, she would have pinned him for the kill-buyer in the group—because this was definitely the right venue for kill-buyers to show up. She was edging closer to him, trying to decide on her opening line (should she just go with: “I think you know my friend Janice”?) when the woman from Lawson’s barn, the one who had walked the bay horse into the trailer and boasted that no one was flipping lips at her pens, showed up alongside a pair of youngish, hard-faced men in camo
jackets and yellow work boots. She scowled at the man in the duster.

  “You better not cause any trouble tonight, Jay,” she said tersely. “I want to get home to my babies before midnight for once.”

  The man in the duster spread out his hands in a who, me? gesture. “I’ve never caused a day of trouble in my life,” he said. “You must be thinking of someone else, Bev.”

  “Oh, you’re just so charming,” she sneered. “Stand in the back and leave me alone to do my job. Florence? You ready?”

  What followed was like a parody of the auction scene they’d left behind. An awful parade of horses and donkeys, most in various stages of falling apart due to age, neglect, injury, or all three, were led past the cluster of spectators. There were no calls for riding demos, no questions about soundness or age. Everything was presented in the most basic of terms by Florence, who had left behind her arena patter for a bored role-call of the buyers on hand: “Ames, you interested in this one? Looks about three-fifty? How ’bout you, Lizzette? That’ll do. Next!”

  She seemed to know which horse would go to which buyer, rarely having to shift her sales pitch from one purchaser to the next. An emaciated draft horse went to Lizzette, who was a skinny middle-aged woman, her lips pursed from chain-smoking, her brows furrowed at each horse from as she looked out from under a kitchen-sink perm, lines of anger and disappointment etched into her bony face. In addition to the draft horse, Lizzette also took a skinny yearling colt, a pair of ponies with wormy pot-bellies, and a skeletal old camp horse who walked as if he had lost every last jiggle of cartilage between his aged joints.