The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Most of all I loved our middays, the early eleven o’clock lunch hour, where we hid from the sun and the work waiting for us outdoors. In the kitchen, we sat drinking coffee, and Alexander slumped over the high counter top of the bar between kitchen and breakfast room, poring over the print-out of the Thoroughbred Daily News that the secretary placed there, between the fruit bowl (early oranges from the trees in the yard) and the candy dish (today she had filled it with wrapped dark chocolate squares—which I would cheerfully eat until I couldn’t sit a horse but would just wobble like a Weeble. I believed our secretary was jealous of me and wanted to ruin my figure). I loved our bright kitchen: a high-ceilinged white room, touches of gray granite. The room was lit spectacularly from the ten-foot windows in the breakfast room that looked down the hill to the training barn and the racetrack. Opulent in its simplicity, the kitchen was where we lived.

  He looked restless there, unsettled, an outdoorsman in the cool gray room. He was a tow-headed Englishman yet, despite the years; decades in the sun had lightened the blond almost to white, but he insisted that there was no gray in the family, and it looked like he’d prove himself right. Tall, too tall and heavy in the shoulders to gallop the babies himself anymore, but you could see in the strong arms and hands the rider he’d once been, growing up riding to the hounds, a fearless young boy, a ruthless young man, out to win at anyone’s cost, as long as it wasn’t his horse’s. Nothing would ever be as important as his horse. The same sun that had kissed his hair and eyebrows had darkened and damned his pale skin, and he was growing wrinkled—no, leathered—in that classic, long-jawed, aristocratic way of his ancestors. In the pressed khaki pants, polished brown boots, and button-down shirts that he favored, he looked the part of enterprising pinhooker or prosperous veterinarian, in the neighborhood of fifty and wheeling down towards a gin-soaked retirement on a spacious yacht somewhere in the West Indies. In reality, Alexander was simply an accomplished horseman, gambling each day on the things he knew best: Thoroughbreds, in their breeding, their raising, their breaking, and their training. He might have turned down the yacht, in fact; there were no horses at sea.

  I think I would have taken it; at this moment I would have liked nothing more than to walk away from all these horses and their demands and their antics. Alexander had insisted that I go out and look at a yearling in the field, which had set the entire herd of little demons off into ecstasies of kicking and biting and carrying-on. I’d avoided the flying hooves but some little chestnut with a white face and a naughty eye had managed to bite me on the forearm, and I could tell already that the formidable bruise was going to be a work of art that would last a week. Add that to the sore spot on my rear and the necessity of driving down to Winning Edge later to buy a new hard hat to replace the one I’d hit on the concrete wall this morning, add to that Saltpeter’s lameness. . . oh, just keep adding! I was exhausted with it all. I wanted to climb into my bed with a romance novel and forget all these crazy beasts. Of course, I couldn’t. Alexander would remind me that after lunch, the vet was coming to check the pregnant mares. Oh, Alexander. I gazed at him guardedly, hiding my eyes beneath my lids. I still loved to watch him, no matter what his horrible beasts might have done to my life.

  Of course, it wasn’t entirely my fault. If you looked at me, you’d see the truth: I am the the typical American horse-crazy girl, just not quite in my teens anymore. My hair still in a blond ponytail, but the bright gold mixing with darker streaks, like a bale of orchard grass instead of clean straw. Still tall, still slim, still wearing worn jeans and untucked polo shirt with the collar half turned-up and dirty paddock boots, my uniform since I was at least twelve. It all gave me away; I was never really going to go to college, I was never going to get a job in an office, or own a pair of heels. I was a horse girl, the sort of girl that looked too light and weak to ride racehorses—but if you try to muscle a horse around, you’re in for a surprise, anyway. Even my name was fancy and horsey: Alexis, shortened to Alex, which made us, yes, Alex and Alexander. Or, in Ocala parlance, Alexander and His Alex.

  Yes, second, and his, always.

  I suppose being twenty-five years younger and the former groom doesn’t help. Maybe I was his toy, and maybe I only thought of myself as something much more, as a partner, as a friend, as a reasonably imaginative lover. I’d heard Earl Whiting say “Now, now, Betty, she makes him happy,” over the cocktail shrimp at a Florida Breeders Care About Kids charity night at the Ocala Hilton, and I hadn’t imagined her eyes rolling at me from down the buffet line. I was too young for the Ocala society, such as it was, and so it was just me and Alexander, which was fine until we were thrust into terribly awkward social situations like that. Which we tried to avoid. Again, there was a reason why I didn’t own a pair of heels—I didn’t need a pair of heels for this life.

  It had been good for these five years, though; who was I kidding? We rattled around the big house, dirty and disheveled and content, for there was a maid every other day to tidy up our messes and sweep up our mud, and a strange entrepreneurial housewife from Gainesville who cooked things and put them in our freezer every Monday: exotic curried meatloaf concoctions, or neo-Creole lasagna, or whatever else was fashionable and featured on the Food Network, which I imagined to be her pornography. I’d eat anything she made, as long as I didn’t have to touch the gleaming stainless steel appliances, especially that terrifying natural gas stovetop. Sometimes I felt overfaced by the sparkling expense of everything that surrounded me. I was a solid middle-class girl, raised in subdivisions, begging and mucking stalls for the privilege of riding other people’s horses, coming home to macaroni and cheese with a side of hot dogs. This lifestyle, in this big house, on this outstanding spread of two hundred acres, was far more than I could have asked for. I mean, a horse farm! A mansion! I would have been thrilled with an aging single-wide mobile home, if there had just been room for a horse outside.

  Okay, well, maybe it wasn’t a mansion, but it wasn’t far off. Like a lot of Florida farms, it had a history based in the very random time known as the 80s. Ocala had more Follies built in the rush of strange business and cocaine money than all the Romantic ages in England. This sprawling farmhouse looked like it had been dropped carelessly from a helicopter which had been en route to a more suitable location, like Vermont. It had been the farm manager’s house when the absentee landowner was a so-called “Wealthy Industrialist,” the manufacturer of random and unrelated items like breakfast cereals and tires and hair accessories. He had built this beautiful farm and yet lived, inexplicably, in Omaha, and had flown down to watch works on the professional-grade training track before sending his horses to unsuccessful careers at Belmont, at Fair Grounds, at Finger Lakes, dropping progressively in prestige, in ambition, and in cash flow. He had been living proof that you can’t buy horse sense, that all the wealth in the world can’t make up for a lack of breeding, human or otherwise. His horses populated rescue ranches and retired racehorse adoption programs across the country. One of them had competed at Rolex Kentucky last year, a robust fifteen-year-old, leaping unmovable logs and splashing into the infamous Duck Pond. He had come in fourth, the highest placed American team member.

  Alexander slapped down the papers and sighed. “Truly Given had another stakes winner yesterday.”

  This was interesting news. Truly Given’s first three-year-olds were just starting to win races. We had a nice chestnut colt of his in the shedrow now. His owners wanted us to send him with the next group to New York. Didn’t all the owners? No one wanted to pay training rates on a horse at the training center, loafing in the shedrow, lounging under an oak tree during an afternoon’s turn-out. They wanted them at the racetrack, bouncing off the walls, earning their keep. So to speak. Anyway, now they’d really be turning the heat on to Alexander to get the horse to New York. They had too much money and clout to want to run him at nearby Tampa, where the ground was easy on the legs and the races were fun but rather second-class.

  “He could go,”
I said cautiously. I didn’t want him to, and neither did Alexander, so there was no harm in sharing that position. I watched the back of Alexander’s head as he went and looked out the window, down to the training barn. If we weren’t in the shedrow, we were watching it. “He was early—wasn’t he a February? And it’s February already. He’s really and truly two now, but no one will think of racing him until summer. He’ll need to get used to life at the track, get a gate card. . .”

  “Rates paid to a New York trainer instead of to us,” he muttered. “You want another empty stall?”

  “We only have three empty stalls,” I said defensively. “And we always get new trainees after the two-year-old sales. The Hastings’ alone are planning on buying at least six this year,”—naming our newest, wealthiest clients, ready to play the game in a big way, already the proud owners of a new black Lexus SUV specifically for driving to the farm—“And Rick Owen always sends us his partnership’s buys. He’ll buy a dozen. Those are the certain ones. There will be a few stragglers. Why not make the owners happy?”

  Because it went against Alexander’s grain to make training decisions solely to keep owners happy, I knew. He was of a school of thought that owners were senseless louts, good only for paying the bills put before them, signing the checks their accountants wrote out, or however it was done these electronic days. I tried to ignore it.

  “Horses are better off at the farm,” he grumbled, and I recognized one of his pet arguments on the way. “We need a better track to ship to. I’d rather ship them in and then bring them home for turn-out than send all the good ones to Kentucky and New York to get locked up in stalls. Good horses go lame from lack of exercise. Ten minutes a morning on the training track is no way to keep a horse sound and fit, to say nothing of their brains.” He shook his head and went back in for another assault on the coffee pot. “You can’t explain that to these owners, a bunch of accountants who think of nothing but money and ignore the sport. When I was a boy this was the sport of kings, and now it’s the sport of bankers. You can’t pinch pennies and keep horses—it can’t be done.”

  “I know, you’re right,” I said, trying to be soothing, before he sank into a muttering, bitter sort of mood for the rest of the workday. “We just have to do the best that we can. But Alexander, we have to have clients. We can’t own them all. If it was our horse, we’d do it differently—but we don’t own the horse.”

  “If I could change one thing about this business,” he growled, “I’d get rid of all the people.”

  I never had much love for people, either—that was why I surrounded myself with horses—but I had enough sense to know that clients pay the bills, and if a horse was sound and going to a good trainer, at a good track like Belmont, there was no reason to worry about breaking him down. Sure, he’d miss the paddocks and a roll under the oak tree, rubbing the sand into his back, but he was going to give all that up sooner or later anyway, and it was only for a few years. The faster he ran, the shorter he’d be there. The clever horse would run like the devil was at his tail and secure himself a good stud farm position before he turned four. I tried to explain that to all my colts. But you know colts. They’re boys. They never listen.

  Alexander started a headcount of all the horses in the training barn, emptying the candy dish and lining up the foil squares in long rows on the countertop. “We’ll send up six then—the Truly Given, the Smarty Jackson, those three colts of Owen’s, and. . .” he paused, finger on a chocolate, trying to determine a horse’s fate. “If that Holiday colt goes. . .” he faltered, trying to think of the flashy bay colt’s name.

  “Beachside,” I supplied. It was one of my unwritten job requirements to know all the horse’s names and spout them off at the correct times. Sometimes, when the barns were full to bursting before a sale, I actually had to sit and study lists of names, breeding, markings, and birthdays.

  “Beachside,” he agreed, nodding. He looked at the diagram he had made for himself, shook his head with displeasure, and walked back to the breakfast table, which was set prettily with white china dishes and coffee cups, as if I were going to don a gingham apron and serve biscuits and homemade sausage and scrambled eggs, instead of shoving the dishes out of the way to make room for an oversized mug of black coffee and a copy of The Daily Racing Form.

  “And Saltpeter,” he muttered, as an afterthought.

  “We’ll do fine with what we’ve got,” I said, pouring more coffee. “The barn doesn’t have to be full to pay for itself.” One hundred and fifty dollars a day plus veterinary expenses tended to pay our training barn bills. The fee was more for Alexander’s expertise than for the overhead, alarming as equine expenses always are. I topped off Alexander’s cup and sat down across from him. His last sentence made its way into my brain and sat there, worrisome. “Wait—where’s Saltpeter going?” That poor colt, and poor Manuel, too, icing the ankle down in the barn while we idled in the kitchen.

  He just looked at me and shook his head, and I knew: he’d written the colt off for the season. My confidence that it had been just a little set-back suddenly wavered. Alexander knew more than me, after all. He’d been conditioning horses when I’d been sitting up until midnight to catch the bettor’s program “Calder Report” on my parent’s television, up too late on a school night, trying to sort out long-shots from favorites and the mysterious phrases like “drop in class” and “percentage off a lay-off.” He’d been winning purses and end-of-year awards when I’d been learning to jump cross-rails on a school pony. Wearing me down with an excess of knowledge was never really a problem for him.

  “I’ll turn Saltpeter out,” he said finally. “He’s not mature enough. This little injury—he needs more time. That shouldn’t have happened.”

  His face grew long, the wrinkles in it deeper than I’d seen in a while, and he looked his age. And I thought for a desperate moment that I was in love with a man too old for me.

  “Don’t—” I said falteringly, but there was nothing I could say. He loved Saltpeter. He had bred him for the two-year-old classics. Saltpeter was supposed to go Saratoga this summer, make us proud. I thought fleetingly of purse money and future stud fees, mercenary, because the Thoroughbred business only pays in green linen paper, never blue or red satin rosettes. A little rest, he’d be good as new. We could catch up on lost time.

  But no, it didn’t matter about the money, because Alexander didn’t do this work for the money. The money was a lucky happenstance of getting good horses, getting good owners, and the unlikely concurrence of doing the right thing by a horse and getting stakes winners. Turning out Saltpeter was certainly an overreaction to the little shortening in his stride this morning, but it was more than a trainee suffering a set-back. It was about falling in love with a horse, and that was something Alexander had rarely allowed himself to do. But Saltpeter was special. Every year, there was a horse that wriggled its way into our affections, despite all our best efforts. Last year, it had been Red Erin. Oh, Red Erin! I still couldn’t let myself think of him, and I never mentioned him to Alexander.

  This year, the beloved son was Saltpeter, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. Saltpeter was Alexander’s pet—Alexander had loved his dam, a gray mare he had imported from England, and ridden himself in the mornings. She was flawless—sweet-tempered, sound as a dollar, and fast as the wind—winning races until she was six years old. That had been fifteen years ago. She died last year, a terrible colic during her pregnancy, losing the foal that would have been Saltpeter’s little brother. A chestnut with four white socks and lungs which were not ready for air. We had been up all night with her. The vet had advised euthanasia. Alexander had wiped tears from his eyes and held her wet head while the vet depressed the plunger on the syringe, while she closed her eyes and breathed her last. Great horsemen may not be sentimental, but they still love the special ones.

  Saltpeter was all that was left of her. Of course Alexander wouldn’t risk the gray colt, a facsimile of his perfect mother. H
e’d give up all the dreaming of Saratoga and wait it out until the horse was a three-year-old. Kentucky Derby, I thought idly. We always thought of Kentucky Derby when we looked at Saltpeter. It was an affliction, this desire to win this one silly race every May. All horsemen had it, though, the Derby disease. And what prep race? He’d like the tight little turns at Gulfstream—maybe the Florida Derby. I daydreamed in workouts, in breezes, in nomination fees and purse money, of smiling for the photographer in the winner’s circle. A pay-off now or a pay-off later. It was worth waiting, I supposed, though painful to sit out a season for nothing more than a twisted ankle. One dainty ankle, expected to bear a thousand pounds at forty miles an hour for a mile and more.

  I shrugged it off as if it didn’t affect me, as if I wasn’t a partner in the farm, who was entitled to some sort of input on financial matters. And sending a horse back out to pasture when he ought to be prepping for a race was certainly a financial matter. No matter how much you tried to sugar-coat it, if your business model contains the word “horse” in it somewhere, then those horses are going to have to earn you money. They can’t always gambol in shady paddocks when there is work to be done. Like people.

  Anyway, my opinion would not be solicited in this, or any other matter, once he’d made his decision. Being a partner was solely on paper. It always had been, and I was feeling it more than ever. Alexander had given me a partnership two years ago, because he thought he was being kind and generous, as a reward for my hard work and slavish devotion, not because he thought that I’d make some kind of meaningful contribution to the business of breeding and training racehorses—although he did have to admit that my eye for conformation was natural and precise, and that I ran the place to perfection—perhaps not his celestial level, but pretty damn good anyway. If I didn’t always feel appreciated, or respected, I didn’t care—that much. I was in love with him.