I’d always been in love with him, since that first moment. Since that day I’d driven into Ocala, desperate for a job with Thoroughbreds, and seen him getting into his truck at a barbecue joint, and lost all sense or inhibition and just ran over to him to announce my undying devotion to his training skill and to beg for a job—ever since that day, I knew even as I agreed to be at the training barn at four thirty in the bloody morning, that I wasn’t going to work for him just because he could teach me everything that I ever wanted to know, but because I was hopelessly in love with him, with his legend, with his face, with everything about him. Maybe it was just that I was in love with that posh English accent. At the moment, so tired of my life, so tired of these horses and this heartbreak, this exhaustion and these bruises, this monotony of sun-up to sun-down labor, it was good to blame my choices on something foolish and superficial, because it felt like a foolish and superficial decision. Falling in love with your boss, with your much older, worldlier boss, when you are a girl in your early twenties, is always a mistake. It has to be. Doesn’t it?
I still loved him, though, for whatever reason. It kept me here. I looked out at the barns, felt a shudder of revulsion at the afternoon of holding up mare’s tails for the vet so that he could check a dozen sets of reproductive systems, and thought that nothing else could keep me here anymore.
I leaned over and stroked the back of his neck, gently, and he reached out and pulled me to his lap. I lolled across him, arms behind his neck, hands clasped, and smiled up at him. He looked down with those crinkled eyes, as if he was looking always at the sun, and smiled back. “Lovely girl,” he said softly. “Lovely little groom.”
CHAPTER THREE
Vet Checks
It was hot by one o’clock, another little annoyance of Florida life—there were no guarantees in temperature in the winter. The summer was predictable as clockwork—it will be humid, it will be hot, it will storm, your power will go out—but the winter was anyone’s guess. This morning it had been sixty and foggy, now it was sunny and eighty, and by tomorrow it might be thirty-five and sleeting.
I was standing in a stall door, a horse’s hindquarters behind me, a bristly black tail draped over my shoulder. The mare had an annoying habit of clenching her tail down with astonishing strength, and I had an unpleasant vision of being strangled to death, pressed close against a horse’s fat rear by her vindictive tailbone wrapped around my neck, rather like a boa constrictor. It probably wasn’t physically possible, but you have lots of time for random daydreams when you’re working your way down a row of broodmares, checking them for impending labor, or ovulation, or a confirmation of pregnancy. The tail hairs get in the way and can introduce dirt into the mare, so someone has to hold the tail securely out of the way—it just so happens that draping it over your far shoulder and holding it there tightly is the best way to do this.
The vet withdrew his arm from the mare and stripped off the manure-fouled glove that ran up to his shoulder. The sweet smell of lube mixed with the stench of grassy manure never failed to hit my gag reflex, and I had to swallow hard. It was just one of those things that I never got used to, right up there with roadkill skunk and the aroma of cooking mushrooms. At least those two I managed to avoid most of the time. There weren’t an awful lot of skunks in Ocala, and Alexander wouldn’t touch mushrooms with a ten-foot pole.
“Well?” I asked, untangling myself from the mare’s tail. The groom inside the stall maneuvered her away from the open stall door and unbuckled her halter.
“Foal’s still sitting pretty low,” he said, fumbling with his ultrasound machine for the next horse, an open mare who hadn’t been bred yet this season. “In the next few days, probably, you’ll see a change—but I wouldn’t expect him tonight.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I said dryly. “A full night’s sleep on a full moon in February.”
He laughed. “You hate early foals, don’t you?”
“I hate being cold,” I corrected. “And February nights are usually freezing. I like a nice warm April night for foals. But then I have a colt who is two months younger than the February babies, so what can you do?”
“That’s the business,” he said, shrugging along with me. “We breed them at the exact wrong time, when the grass is bad, when the nights are cold, and cost ourselves twice as much as we should in hay and worry about keeping the foal warm enough when it freezes, just so they’ll be born as close to January first as possible. What can you do? If they’d change the birthday system, maybe we could have foals when nature intended, in May and June when there is grass and warm nights.”
Like everyone else in Ocala, even the vet was in on the racing game, with three broodmares of his own, grazing in his big backyard, and he lived by the same arbitrary rules that we did. Thoroughbreds celebrated a mutual birthday on January first, and if your horse happened to be born later than another horse that spring, well, then you’d just have to accept the fact that your horse was younger and possibly less mature than the other one. They’d still have to race in the same age division. Horses change a lot in their first three years, and a matter of weeks could make a huge difference in their maturity and athleticism, so it was a very real problem: the question of how early you could get a mare bred, when their reproductive systems still argued that it was the dead of winter, too early to bear a foal.
“They’ll never change the birthday system. Thoroughbreds will always age up on January first, because that’s the way it’s always been done, and those old Kentucky boys never change anything.” I was sick to death of horsemen who did things a certain way because that’s the way they’d always been done, and sometimes that seemed like it applied to every horseman in the world.
We went to the next stall and the groom slid open the heavy wooden door, where a petite little maiden mare was looking at us apprehensively. He went inside and haltered her, walking her around and backing her into the open doorway so that only her hindquarters peeped out. It was the traditional stance for breeding work—the doorway kept the horse from sidling back and forth while uncomfortable work was done on her nether regions. It meant that I saw so much more of the broodmares’ hind ends then I ever did of their faces. I could identify them by the curvature of their rumps and the length of their tails.
“If you had a colt with just a little shortness behind, probably from turning an ankle, would your initial thought be turn-out?” I asked suddenly, gripping the bristling tail hairs expertly.
“Well,” the vet thought for a moment, squirting his glove from an industrial-sized tube of generic lube, “I suppose I’d have to look at it, do some X-rays of the fetlock, ultrasound the tendons. Did… did something happen?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Just this morning. And I was just thinking that it’s weird that he would decide to turn him out without taking pictures of the joint first.”
“That is weird,” he mused, putting his arm into the mare’s backside with an unpleasant sucking noise. The mare wiggled, alarmed by the intrusion, and the groom hissed to her “Hush, hush,” from inside the stall.
“I don’t know what to think,” I admitted. “I’m not even sure I should have mentioned it.”
“Probably not, knowing Alexander,” he said, feeling around inside the mare. He was up to his shoulder and we were eye-to-eye, nearly nose-to-nose. “If he’s turning out the colt without asking me to look, there’s another reason. Is it yours?”
“Yeah, it’s ours.”
“Is it that gray from his old mare?”
“Yup.” This was Doctor Eddie, after all—he’d been the one who had put the needle in her vein and pressed the juice in.
“Okay then,” he said. He straightened and pulled his arm out with a long slurping sound. “I think that she’s got something going in there. . . I’ll ultrasound and tell you if it’s ready for breeding yet.” He grabbed the little wand of the ultrasound, added more lube, and went in for a second exploration. “As for this colt—listen, Alexander isn’t goi
ng to make rational decisions about this colt. He loved that mare. You’re going to have to let him do his own thing here.”
As if there was any option but Alexander’s decisions. “It’s not like what I say has any bearing—”
“You think that?” Eddie was surprised. “He listens to you. Believe me, he relies on you. Just—trust him on the colt. He’s not a sentimental guy, you know that, but don’t get in his way on this one. He’s thinking with his heart and not his head. As long as he doesn’t run the whole place that way, you’re fine.”
The heart and not the head. You couldn’t run a business that way, Dr. Eddie was telling me, and I needed no reminder. We all knew that. He saw it every day in his rounds, people making sentimental decisions and spending small fortunes on horses who would never recover, and people making sensible decisions and putting down the horses who would forever be out of work. Businesses are run with the head and not the heart. That’s just harder with horses, but that’s the way it has to be.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cast
The phone buzzed in my hip pocket at nine o’clock that night, when we were both yawning in front of the television in the living room, and I pulled it out with uncharacteristic urgency. Not many people called my personal line—it was possibly a family emergency, more likely a stable emergency.
“TRAINING BARN” blinked on the display. “Shit!” I told the phone. Alexander looked over and lifted his eyebrows, waiting for me to answer it.
“Alex?” It was Raul, the night watchman.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s the gray colt—Saltpeter. He get cast and he bang up his leg real bad. No weight on it.”
“Oh my god.” I slapped the display, the twenty-first century equivalent of slamming the phone in the receiver, and leapt up from the sofa. “Come on, Saltpeter got cast and he’s not putting weight on one of his legs. No, I don’t know which one!” I ran for the front door, pausing to slip on my boots bare-footed, feeling with disgust all the hay and straw and gravel that had worked into them throughout the day, grinding into the soles of my feet. I held the door open for Alexander and we ran for the golf cart together.
The barn was lit up and all the horses were in a state, awakened from their sleep and upset by the break in their routine. There was whinnying and neighing between the stalls, between the barn and the paddocks, between the paddocks and the further pastures. The whole farm was a din of shouting horses, wanting to know why on earth their peace had been shattered. Pretty soon it would spread, farm to farm, across the whole countryside. One cast horse could mean square miles of alarmed herds, whole ZIP codes of equines on alert.
Raul was waiting for us in front of Saltpeter’s stall, his friendly face drawn. He was the nicest of our grooms, the best-spoken, the best-educated, the best horseman of them all, and he chose to work nights, when ninety-nine nights out of one hundred he spoke to no one, shared his knowledge with no one, displayed his impressive skill with horses to the stars and the moon alone. We dreaded seeing him, because we only heard from him on the hundredth night, when disaster struck, in the form of colics or fevers or the ridiculous, stupid disaster that could result from a cast horse.
“I hear banging and run down, see him up against the wall,” he explained rapidly, standing aside so we could get into the stall. “And he been banging his left hind up against the wall. I grab his forelegs to pull him away, but he been there kicking and—you see—”
We did see. Three-legged-lame, the gray colt stood with the toe of his left hind hoof just delicately scraping the surface of the straw bedding, which had been thrown wildly around the stall by his thrashing attempts to get away from the wall. Twelve by twelve feet, the standard size of a horse stall, still isn’t that much room for a thousand-pound, six-foot-tall animal; anyway, a horse can lay down to roll in exactly the wrong place and find himself trapped against a wall even in the largest space. Getting “cast” was usually heralded by a succession of bangs as a panicking horse slammed his body against the wall, trying to get enough space to get his legs beneath him so that he could rise, and most of the time we would come running into the stall just in time to see the wild-eyed horse gain purchase against the wall and shove himself away so that he could get himself up. But if they couldn’t help themselves, someone had to go in and grab whatever leg was handy, to drag the horse’s bulk a few feet from the wall. When you had to go to this extreme, the horse was usually in enough of a state that he’d already hurt himself—as Saltpeter clearly had.
And it was the left hind. The one he’d gone off on early this morning, after the runaway incident. I watched it, frozen with horror. I felt like I could see the fetlock swelling before my eyes. As for Alexander—I hazarded a glance to my left, where he still stood in the doorway—he looked frozen, his face blank, as if he wasn’t able to take in this deepening disaster surrounding his favorite horse. Everyone has their limits, I thought. Red Erin last year, Saltpeter’s dam the year before—all his favorite children were being struck down. There was a sudden silence in the barn; the horses stopped neighing, Raul’s Labrador stopped barking, the whip-poor-wills in the woods behind the barn were silent. We waited for Alexander. The whole world was waiting on Alexander.
“Will he walk on it at all?” Alexander snapped out, breaking the spell. A yearling in a far paddock shouted for his mates and started the cacophony up again. “Step him forward for me.”
Raul took the horse’s halter and gave a gentle tug. The colt leaned forward as long as he could, resisting the pull, before taking a hopping step forward, keeping the hind leg as immobile as he could. It wasn’t just the leg—it was the joint, that bulging little ankle. It wasn’t just that he wanted to keep weight off of his leg, he didn’t want to flex his leg.
Alexander shook his head. “No more, stop,” he told Raul. He went forward and ran his hand down the leg, wincing as Saltpeter flinched but stopped short of kicking at him; kicking would have required too much movement. “He’s not a delicate horse,” he said from down in the straw. “He’s not the kind of horse to think he’s dying when he’s got a little scrape.”
“He’s got heart,” I agreed. It was one of our favorite things about him, his big heart, a will to keep moving, a desire to win. Racehorses needed it, show jumpers needed it, polo ponies needed it—it was the most essential quality in a good horse, and the most indefinable—heart.
Alexander stood up and rested a hand on the colt’s hip. “Ice boot, please, Raul,” he said. “I’ll have the vet out directly, but in the meantime, put some hay in front of him and get that ice boot on as gently as you can.”
Raul nodded and ducked out of the stall. I watched him go with regret. He was an incredible horseman, but he only used his gifts when things went wrong.
CHAPTER FIVE
Another Ending
I cried.
Alexander cried.
We buried him in the cow pasture. Red Erin had died after a tropical depression had soaked the ground for days; we couldn’t dig a hole to bury him in without dipping into the bursting water table, and we’d had to cremate him. But now it was the dead of winter, the dry season, the ground rock-hard and cold, and Manny took the backhoe out and dug the hole. Like last year, and the year before, we watched as the handyman and the grooms removed the front wall of the stall, wrapped the corpse in a tarp, and dragged away our favorite to be slid into the grave that was waiting for him.
“It’s a freak thing,” Dr. Eddie had said, looking at the X-rays. “It’s just one of those terrible things. But the bone here is absolutely in pieces. There’s nothing to screw together. It might fuse. . .”
“If he can get through the cast and the stall rest, you mean,” Alexander said, finishing his sentence for him.
“Yes,” Eddie said, laying down the photo. “It doesn’t look good.”
“Red Erin didn’t get through it,” Alexander said softly, shaking his head. He leaned across the desk of the spotless tack room, rubbing his hands
on the mahogany top, following the swirls of the grain. I sat clutching the arms of the wooden chair in the corner, my feet against the desk leg, my head in the corner of the walls, looking for a nest where I could hide. Alexander was distant from me, more my boss than my lover, and I felt cold and tired and lonely. It was three o’clock in the morning and all I could think of was Red Erin, and the day he had died, gray and wet with the hot humid wind off the Gulf of Mexico blowing into the stall, and the dirty, weeks-old cast that still encased his foreleg, from the crazy, freak injury to his foreleg. That leg didn’t kill him—the other three did, the hooves slowly dissolving inside as inflammation broke down the tissue, rotated the interior bones, and pierced the sole of the foot. He had died in agonies, with our tears mingling with his sweat, and I knew that would never be allowed to happen again. Saltpeter would die quietly, before the sun rose again.
Eddie went out to his truck to put away his X-ray machine and get out the syringe and the bottle.
“There’s no time or reason for a second opinion,” Alexander said to me. “Look at that bone. It’s in little pieces. He’ll never stand on that leg again.”
I gazed down at the ghostly image of the colt’s inner workings, all the detailed little machinery of joints that slid together so flawlessly to create the perfect athlete. Something so strong and so fluid! Horses could never be reproduced by a man’s hand; no artist could ever do them justice, no machinist could ever engineer something that married beauty and efficiency so perfectly, but that beauty was marred by its own delicacy and perfection: one tiny jolt to its lacey structures and everything collapsed like dominoes, like a demolished building, one long terrible implosion, and all that was left was a ruined animal waiting to be put out of its misery.
The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1) Page 3