CONTENTS
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Chapter One - Last Horse of the Day
Chapter Two - Horse Country Mornings
Chapter Three - Vet Checks
Chapter Four - Cast
Chapter Five - Another Ending
Chapter Six - Closed Curtains
Chapter Seven - Erin's Princess
Chapter Eight - First Impressions of New York
Chapter Nine - The City and Horses
Chapter Ten - Escape
Chapter Eleven - Brooklyn
Chapter Twelve - Religion and Politics
Chapter Thirteen - Aqueduct
Chapter Fourteen - Ask Parker
Chapter Fifteen - Finding the Winner's Circle
Chapter Sixteen - Horse-Famous: A Short Story
Chapter Seventeen - A Note from the Author
Copyright © 2011 Natalie Keller Reinert
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, organizations, places, events, and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
For Cory — You believed in me.
Acknowledgements
To my Retired Racehorse readers,
who always urged me on...
And to my childhood trainers, who taught me how to sit a horse, and occasionally threw me over one...
And to my parents, who supported the whole madness:
Thank you.
CHAPTER ONE
Last Horse of the Day
I relaxed in the saddle, loosening my joints, in a bid to keep Saltpeter quiet, and tried to enjoy the morning. It was a show-stopper, as usual, all fog winding through the branches of live oaks, an orange disc of sun visible faintly through the opaque gray, just lifting above the rolling horizon, the damp air carrying the sounds of whinnies and neighs from a thousand horses in the fields around of a hundred farms. Oh, winter mornings in Ocala are spectacular. They stretch on and on, the sun coming up late, past seven thirty, when exercise riders and gallop girls like myself have already put in half a day’s work.
We’d galloped a mile and when I turned back to see the horses behind me, I could see the steam was rising off their hot, sweaty backs and necks. My grandmother, never a romantic, once said steaming racehorses looked as if they had the devil in them. I’d been five when I found a book of slick black and white racing photos at the library, and brought it eagerly to show her while she sat studying her Bible. My grandmother had been overly interested in the devil.
We must have looked like that picture now, and I couldn’t have denied Nanna at that moment if she’d risen from the grave and proclaimed every horse there to be possessed by a demon. There were five other horses in this set of advanced youngsters, five other leggy two-year-olds, blowing out their nostrils and snorting at the shadows and the imagined tigers in the bushes, lurking on either side of the gravel pathway back to the barns, lusting noisily for hot young racehorse flesh. Sitting upon them, bodies moving easily with their curvettes and feints, five other riders, identical in our polo shirts and safety vests and hard hats, identical in the whips in the small of our backs, shoved unused through a belt loop, identical in our hard-set jaws and wary eyes.
Luckily our expressions and posture were as far as the resemblances went, and I meant to keep it that way. They were hard men, older than me, and had spent their lives in this outdoor life, with faces like cracked, forgotten leather parching in the afternoon sun. I moisturized and sunblocked frantically, but there was no keeping at bay the Florida sun, and no disguising those little squinting wrinkles next to my eyes.
Saltpeter was the last ride of the morning for me, and his gray hair was all over my black polo shirt. I tried to brush it off and found that the shirt was damp with the fog. The droplets of cloud were slowly sinking through, and I suddenly felt chilled in the cool morning. There’s a moment when all the heat of exertion from galloping the horse gives way to the cold air outside your skin. It feels like sudden-onset hypothermia. But here we were back at the barn, and it was time for a hoodie for me and a knit sheet for the horse. We rode into the open shedrow and I ducked under the doorway as Saltpeter turned of his own accord into his stall. I gave the big gray horse a pat on the neck, nodded to the waiting groom who stood with a leather halter and shank over his arm, and started to dismount. From behind me I heard a noise in the shedrow which gave me another chill, raising goosebumps on my bare arms, unrelated to the weather.
“Horse!” someone shouted frantically, and I saw a blur rushing past the open stall front, big and dark and fast. Saltpeter flung up his head and I caught desperately at the reins, the thick rubber slipping through my grasp. The colt darted forward through his open door, chasing the runaway, and, half-off already, feet clear of the stirrup irons, I went off backwards and hit the ground hard, grunting as I lost the air in my lungs. My head snapped back and my hard hat thudded against the concrete wall.
Just another morning.
The grooms were shouting, chasing the horses, which was nonsensical, because nothing will make a terrified horse run away faster and farther than a shouting person running after them—they find it hard to differentiate between mountain lions and humans sometimes, and I imagine that I would too if I had evolved with my sole chance of survival in the world being a keen sense of hearing and scent, and four very swift hooves to gallop away on. Through half-closed eyes I watched them, and when the tall Englishman who had been watching the horses work turned back to look at me, I waved an arm at him to go on after the horse. I was pleased that he’d thought of me, but I was fine, just winded. And the horse would always have to come first.
That’s just how we live.
I closed my eyes and listened to the melee as if detached from it all. What a life, I thought. What a life I lead. Another morning up at four thirty, another morning spent in boots and kevlar vest and hard hat, whip in hand, wrestling and shouting with barely-two-year-old Thoroughbreds, practically wild frontier mustangs in their feral flight reaction to every object or surprise that came their way—stray candy wrappers, stray leaves, stray cows, other horses, probably even their own mothers. Another morning getting dumped—and how typical that it would be the last horse, the last ride, the last dismount, when you think you’ve gotten through the day unscathed. Another bruised rear end to favor. Another dented hard hat to discard.
What a life, I thought. What a life I lead.
The fog was finally lifting when they came back, leading the two shame-faced horses, who both looked completely winded and sore after their excursion. I could see them through the stall door; I still hadn’t moved. I was too busy grousing, too busy feeling sorry for myself, too busy questioning all my life’s decisions. This is the sort of thing that happens when you get up too early, get dumped off a horse, and haven’t had coffee yet: you start remembering that you had a 3.8 GPA in high school, and that office jobs, complete with padded desk chairs and climate-control, don’t start until nine a.m.
“Up the driveway, on the pavement, right up to the gate, and a huge bloody dent in the iron gate where someone slid into it. There are scrape marks for fifteen feet across the bricks,” Alexander reported in haughty disg
ust, his British accent particularly pronounced and betraying his bad temper. He came into the stall where I sat, arms over knees, still in the straw where I’d landed. “And what the hell are you still doing down? Do you need an ambulance?” He didn’t look alarmed. Either he knew that I was in a foul mood, or he really didn’t care that I could’ve been hurt by such a silly fall.
“I’m fine,” I grumbled, and put my hand up for a lift. He reached out and pulled me roughly to my feet, then pulled me up against him for a brief kiss.
“Silly girl,” he murmured. “Who falls off the last horse in the last set in the stable? Only you.”
“You may laugh,” I said stiffly. I couldn’t laugh about my riding with him; he was the only person on earth with whom I was insecure about my horsemanship. “But my ass is not laughing. My ass is ready for a feather pillow for once instead of this hard ground.” I toddled away from him, tossing my whip to the nearest groom, who snatched it out of the air and grinned laughingly at me. Speaking no English, his toothy smile was thrown to me like a bone to a dog; it was the closest he’d come to supporting me against Alexander, who would cheerfully work me as hard as he did the barn crew, and wonder if I didn’t thank him for the privilege. Hell, sometimes I did. Protégé to a great conditioner, with a born and bred eye for a good horse—a dream come true, of course. Depending on your dream. I was starting to question mine. I brushed my hand thoughtfully across the seat of my jeans, dislodging the pebbles and mud, and thought of a bath and a book. The sort of things normal people, who didn’t run 200-horse farms, got to do when they hurt themselves.
“You fell in the straw,” my lover and boss said from behind me, completely unsympathetic. He steered me away from the golf cart and back into the barn. “We better watch those horses walk out.”
The shedrow had been raked smooth already. Some silly groom had stayed behind and groomed it into a perfect tranquility garden, as if we were done for the morning, while the two miscreants were out being chased down by the rest of the barn crew. The hot two-year-olds, Saltpeter and his delinquent buddy, a bay simply called Max, were being led through the grooved lines of sand while the over-eager groom leaned against his rake and shook his head in despair at his own foolishness.
Alexander stood still in the center entrance, watching them walk away from him down the row, kneeling down in the dirt to get a close look at the way their ankles and hocks and knees flowed and clicked, and shading his eyes against the emerging sun’s rays to see if the hindquarters moved evenly, or if one slouched lower than the other. I watched him, and then the horse, trying to see what he saw, and when Saltpeter went on a second pass, I closed my eyes against what I suspected.
Just then, Alexander turned to me. Bad timing; he didn’t tolerate sentimentality, or hiding from the facts. The heart has no place in the horse business; he had schooled me on my first day. In this business, you think with the head and not the heart. “Open your eyes, girl,” he fumed. “Did you see it?”
I nodded. “I saw it.”
And I had: an ever-so-slight catch in the motion of the left hind ankle, an arrest of motion before the true depth of the ligaments was reached, a tiny shortening of stride. An injury.
He stood up and watched the horse amble away from us before turning to disappear around the corner on yet another circuit of the barn. “The left ankle,” he murmured. “There’ll be an almighty swelling in it this afternoon. If that’s all.” He turned around and shouted down the shedrow. “Hey, Manuel!”
A small man appeared in the doorway of a stall, past a bright-eyed horse pulling hay from its net. He climbed under the rubber stall guard and set his pitchfork against the wall before regarding us silently. He’s thinking that his lunch has just been cancelled, I thought. And he’s right. Poor guy. Horses pay no attention to anyone’s schedules but their own.
Alexander barked out instructions for cold-hosing and bute in the horse’s lunchtime grain, which Manuel presumably understood, because he nodded and said, “Si,” which is about the most reaction I have ever gotten from him. One of the morning riders had been a groom once, but he was a nice guy and I found it hard to imagine him being as taciturn and silent as our training barn crew was. One certainly never got the impression that they loved horses. And this was very hard work to do if you weren’t doing it for love. Very hard. I rubbed at my backside again, feeling the bruise and wincing. I must have hit the concrete berm which ran around the inside of the stall, to support the clay foundation of the floor. Naturally, to fall in a stall filled with straw, I’d hit the concrete. I didn’t usually think too much about tumbles, but this fall offended me more than most. I had started wondering what these mornings were all about, honestly.
Alexander asked Manuel again if he understood. The groom, who had lived in America for seven years, understood perfectly. He nodded sullenly and went on. A good lunch break and nap, spoiled. Because Alexander had hung around the barn and his stupid girlfriend couldn’t sit a horse. Oh, I knew what he was thinking. It was what all grooms thought, and I had once been one. But you cannot deny good horsemanship. Give the man his due—Alexander put his horses first.
We made our way back out to the golf cart. I slid into the driver’s seat cock-eyed, favoring my bruise. Alexander settled down in the passenger seat, sliding aside a sales catalog with a cover photo of a foal peering through its mother’s tail, meant to entice even the most hard-hearted horseplayers that the time was ripe to purchase an in-foal mare so that its get could eat its way through your savings and break your heart, and he sat contentedly, waiting, as always, for me to drive him. “Shall we go up to look at the yearlings now?” The morning routine, first the training barn, then check in with the yearlings, and with the broodmares and their foals. I just wanted to go back to bed.
I took off on the gravel drive, and the cart whined and rattled its way past the training barns, and up the hillside.
CHAPTER TWO
Horse Country Mornings
There is nearly always a fog in these winter mornings, and if you live in the right sections of Marion County, the expensive, limestone-rich swaths of countryside where the live oaks have been growing for hundreds of years, their Spanish moss dripping down over the stable roofs, then the mist twining through the trees, the five-board wooden fences, and the shadowy figures of horses, at grass, or jogging on the track, or being led, hot and steamy, in bored circles after a workout, is simply too beautiful to believe. Saratoga has her summer-green elm trees, but our ancient live oaks are pretty spectacular in their own right, and they have leaves all winter, unlike some northern trees I could mention.
Cotswold Farms was scooped out of a valley in one of these sections, in the rolling hills of a village called Reddick, just north of Ocala proper. Village is a misnomer; it was really a collection of horse farms with a gas station at one of the rural intersections. Our training track was the centerpiece, located deep in a valley, adjacent to the long shedrows of the training barn, with the green hills above it peppered with barns and horses of all ages. The broodmare barn. The weanling barn. The yearling barn. The breeding shed. The stallion barn. And close behind it, riding a high slope and nestled within a grove of oak trees, the house.
Down here in the valley—and please note that I’m talking about hills, here, not mountains like northerners or people from out west might be thinking—down here in the valley is where I have spent my mornings for the past five years, galloping on the track, schooling babies at the starting gate, teaching galloping youngsters to skip to their other lead on the turns, and then riding them back into the training barn, under the overhang of the shedrow, where horses poke out their noses over their stall screens to greet their friends, and hand off my steaming wet horse to a groom so that I can go get on another one.
The middays, and the afternoons, I spent at the top of the hill, running the breeding operation. I spent spring and summer in the broodmare barn, more often than not, gossiping and learning all that I could from the vets that came in
their dually pick-ups, rattling with stainless steel surgical equipment, cabinets chock full of hormones and antibiotics, and bearing strange scandalous soap opera stories from the weirdest place a person could ever live: a racehorse town. I spent fall and early winter in the yearling barn, where the weaned foals, who had spent their summers by their mother’s sides in the fields, were brought in to learn to live as adult horses, with stalls and schedules and halters and humans, and along with the grooms I was pummeled and bitten and dragged by the adolescent miscreants that we would name yearlings on New Year’s Day. In the blinding-white barns, with their wide, airy shedrows like the porches of a plantation house, I was the authority, the queen of the property.
In the house, I would always be less so. I might talk to the vet myself and bring the information back to Alexander for him to digest, but my personal opinion wasn’t really in play. My veterinary opinion, in fact, wasn’t very often solicited or appreciated at all. I was a young female person, raised in America on show horses, and therefore a corrupt presence in his insular world of men—British, one would hope—who cut their teeth on National Hunt horses and marathon-galloping hurdlers, the likes of which we Americans could never hope to ride or breed. Their soundness legendary, their miraculous winning streaks in the face of years of strenuous racing legion, they compared in no way to the toothpick-legged sprinters that we Americans so prized. I’d heard it all before. I could quote it all verbatim.
I let it go because I loved him, without reason, loved the way he looked at me and the way he reached out a hand to brush against me when I walked past him, loved the way he let me run the place (most of the time), loved the knowledge that he gave me so freely, loved his eyes and his face and his smile and his voice, and that lovely accent wasn’t bad either. How could you not love someone who put all of your dreams in your grasp, so graciously and freely? I had run away for this, I had come here for to be with racehorses, and Alexander put it all in the palm of my hand. If he was somewhat old-fashioned, it was a small price to pay.
The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1) Page 1