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

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Hey, there’s my friend Samuel,” Ryan said suddenly, and he shouted across the porch. “Samuel! Samuel! Come meet this girl!”

  Samuel was a tall lumberjack sort of fellow who didn’t look like he had touched a razor to his face since he escaped from the pack of bears who had raised him deep in the forests of Canada. He grinned knowingly at Ryan and offered me a paw to shake. “How do you do?” he said in a parody of good manners. I laughed. The whiskey and beer were doing their job. Dinner had been a long time ago.

  I put on my most terrible southern accent for the occasion. “Well bless me but the manners in New York City have to be seen to be bay-leeved!” I brayed. “Aren’t you a sweetheart?”

  The lumberjack bear laughed. “Ryan, where did you find this one? Where are you from?”

  “She’s a racehorse trainer from Florida,” Ryan said proudly, as if he had constructed me from glue and popsicle sticks.

  “You’re kidding! What are you doing here?”

  “I have to go look at a horse at Aqueduct in—” I looked at my phone. “About six hours.”

  “What’s Aqueduct?” Ryan enquired. “Is that like, a riding stable or something? Is that that crazy place by Prospect Park? They ride horses in the streets, man—”

  “It’s a racetrack,” I gasped, genuinely horrified. “You don’t know there are racetracks here?”

  “For horses?” Samuel asked, looking confused. “For horses, not cars.” He shook his head. That didn’t sound right to him.

  “There aren’t any car racetracks here,” Ryan chided him.

  “So you know that.” I was pissed.

  “Hey, hey, come on, you know neither of us are from here. I’m from St. Louis and Samuel is from Cleveland.”

  Samuel laughed. “No one in this room is from here.”

  I sighed. “Well, New York City is the heart of horse racing. The term ‘The Big Apple’ comes from horse racing, did you know that?”

  They shook their heads and waited for an explanation.

  “It was the big treat—coming to the New York racetracks was the prize grooms looked forward to all year. Anyway, there is a racetrack in Queens and another one just over the border in Long Island. I’m going to the one in Queens to look at a horse for our farm.”

  They didn’t ask about the “our” and I didn’t enlighten them. No need to lose my audience just because I happened to be in a committed relationship with Alexander. He wasn’t here and—I took a deep swig of Rolling Rock to quell the sudden lump in my throat. Damn, I missed him. Damn and damn and damn. I could feel my little New York fantasy dissolving around me.

  And yet here I sat! Surrounded by interested men in a nightclub! Okay, nightclub wasn’t the right word for this warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn, but, even so, both of these guys seemed quite fascinated by me, and I liked it.

  Samuel had gone across the porch and was dragging two more people over. I recognized the taller girl from the group I had followed here from Manhattan. She clung to the hand of a skinny redheaded guy, wearing the universal uniform of plaid shirt and tight jeans, wisps of scraggly beard clinging to his chin and cheeks. “Dude, that bear is messed up,” he was drawling as he came up.

  “Amy,” Samuel said, “This girl trains racehorses. How crazy is that?”

  She smiled and looked me over without a flicker of recognition—although it would have taken superpowers to place me as the woolly Eskimo I had resembled out on the cold streets—and held out a bony hand to shake. “I’m Amy.” She paused. “And this is Skyler.” The redhead gave me an arresting look with startlingly pale blue eyes, and then his eyes wandered back towards the teddy bear, who overlooked the proceedings with blank detachment.

  “Bear’s creeping me out,” he murmured. Amy shook her head.

  “Don’t mind him. Tell me about horses.” She sat down across from me and looked expectant. Amy was used to being in charge.

  So I told them. I told the group about riding racehorses at sunrise, about pulling on a foal’s legs as a mare strained in a midnight foaling, about driving a truck and hauling a rig, about how hard the ground was when you hit it, and about putting your face close to your horse’s ears when he was galloping flat-out, about the judicious use of the whip and how it could be used as an “ask” instead of a punishment, about the feeling of fog droplets on your bare arm in the mornings, about the heat of the afternoons and creeping indoors to sleep through a thunderstorm.

  And then in the midst of describing all the beauty of my life, hauntingly gorgeous with the nostalgic tinge of miles and miles of separation, my phone buzzed, and I pulled it out and looked at the text message from Alexander, that said “Can’t sleep alone. I miss you, little love,” and I had to wipe a few stray tears away.

  “And what do you think of Brooklyn, then?” Amy demanded.

  What did I think of Brooklyn? The dark streets, the hulking warehouses, the biting cold, the one brief sparkling street full of kids back at the subway, the glass-eyed teddy bear gazing out over us all with regal disinterest? The crowd of people gathered around me at a little metal cafe table, on a plywood balcony in a glorified garage with a band playing on the stage below us, their urgent questions and unqualified interest in me? I hadn’t really seen Brooklyn, but Brooklyn I’d seen sure seemed to like me. “I could live here,” I said experimentally, even though I knew I couldn’t. The stories I had just told them ensured that. I was ensnared by my own life.

  “And do what?” Amy asked. She seemed fiercely practical. “There aren’t any horses here.”

  “There’s the racetrack,” I pointed out. “I could go and work there.”

  “Well, that’s Queens, though,” Ryan said, and everyone nodded in agreement. Queens was not at all the same thing. “And you said it’s all really early mornings. That doesn’t sound very fun.”

  “Wouldn’t you miss the farm and the fields and all the space?” a girl asked, leaning over Amy’s shoulder. “And Alexander?”

  “Yeah, what about Alexander?” Amy asked expectantly. “You’d give up all that and your relationship and everything?”

  “Guys, guys,” Ryan said. “That’s so none of our business.”

  “It kind of is,” Amy retorted. “Now that we’re all interested in her life.” She smiled at me. “You’re our new favorite soap opera, sweetie.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Religion and Politics

  “So what you’re saying,” Ryan said to me, setting down his beer on the bar and raising a hand to the bartender for another, “Is that you think you could be a writer if only you left everything you ever knew and your boyfriend of several years and moved here.”

  We were sitting at the bar of a very loud, very small club somewhere near an elevated expressway in another part of Williamsburg. I had four hours until my appointment at Aqueduct, another hour before the bars closed. I was in a weird haze, not quite sober and not quite drunk, somewhere closer, it must be admitted, to regaining the buzz I’d acquired at the warehouse back by the river. “You have a way of making it sound foolish,” I said morosely, studying the dying suds in my beer. “And selfish.”

  “Well, it is!” he laughed. “Forgive me for saying it, but it’s both. Listen—everyone you met tonight is an artist or a writer or a musician. We’re all practically the same person. We eat the same food and wear the same clothes and listen to the same music. We read the same books. The bookmarks on our computers are all the same, for god’s sake. And let me tell you something else—none of us are from here, and none of us, or very few of us, will stay here. Because after a while, it’s very tiring being the same as everyone else.”

  I thought I could commiserate with that. “It’s the same in Ocala, though!” I protested. “We’re all horsemen, all we ever think about are horses, we go to Starbucks and there are pictures of horses on the walls, we go to the bookstore and look at books about horses—”

  “You don’t, though, do you?” he asked. “You read other stuff. You think about other st
uff. That makes you different.”

  “No one really knows that.”

  “Well,” he said, sitting back and smiling at me. “That’s on you. But I bet someone knows.”

  “Alexander.”

  “He must know, or he wouldn’t choose to spend all his time with a girl twenty years his junior, am I right? I mean, a sexual attraction is one thing. But he spends all his time with you. He must like your brain, too, Alex.”

  I let my mind run back over the things we talked about. Just horses, right? All I could remember was horses, horses, horses. But no. Wait. Just two days ago, but a million years ago, in the broodmare barn, we’d talked about the last couple of books we’d read, while I held the tail of a pregnant mare over my shoulder to keep it out of the vet’s way while she leaned, shoulder-deep, into the mare to check the foal’s progress. Last Sunday, we’d read the paper and drank coffee and sat in a deep, content silence. A few days before, he’d asked if I wanted to join the museum of art’s membership program, so that we could attend their parties and talks. We hadn’t been close since Saltpeter had died, true, but we were still a couple, still interested in the same things, not all of which had four legs and swishy tails. Somehow, I’d thought everything in our lives had dwindled down to horses. I’d confused things. I’d rewritten our history, and left whole chapters out. “I thought they were the beginning and end of everything. . .” I said slowly. “I thought we didn’t have anything but horses. . .”

  “Maybe they are the beginning and end of everything,” Ryan suggested. “But there’s something else in the middle.”

  We thought about this, a matched pair, chins on fists, gazing down at the water-stained surface of the bar. The din around us was nothing but a buzzing in my ears, all the shouting voices and the roaring jukebox in the background blurring together into an incomprehensible mess. There was no turning it off, here in this city. It was noisy in the bars, it was noisy in the streets, it was noisy in the empty hotel room, the sounds from the sidewalk and the pavement floating up and intruding through the glass and bricks. It was probably noisy in Ryan’s apartment. There was never a perfect silence.

  There was something to be said for music and conversation when you wanted it, and silence when you didn’t.

  I closed my eyes.

  I had my forehead pressed against Saltpeter’s skull, the swirling patterns of his white and gray hairs a spiral between his dark eyes, and his forelock parted on either side of my head and tickled my ears, and I could feel his warm, moist breath on my hands, cupped beneath his chin and holding him gently, gently, so that he wouldn’t get claustrophobic, overwhelmed by human affection, and would just share that simple, silent moment with me. Horses only spoke when absolutely necessary, and wild horses would never speak at all; sound would give away their location, and horses only want to be known to their kin. A barn full of confident, foolish young horses was alive and rowdy with whinnies and neighs; a horse alone with a human was often quiet, protecting them both from the outside world.

  The noise was unbearable; there was safety in silence.

  Saltpeter was dead, dead, dead.

  I opened my eyes and the sound assailed me, voices defining themselves again, the songs pulling back to cover their own sonic territory; the clink of glasses and the sliding of a bar stool across the floor added themselves to the general din.

  My friends were dead and I was alone in this noisy place.

  Ryan had been reflecting on mortality, too.

  “Hey,” Ryan said suddenly. “People eat horses, don’t they? Why don’t you use their bodies?”

  “Oh, god, Ryan. Gross.” I took a drink; the spell was broken.

  “It’s a reasonable question—wouldn’t you eat a horse?”

  “Of course not, Ryan, Jesus—how could you ask me such a thing?” My darling Saltpeter, my gleaming Red Erin, hadn’t they earned a dignified rest? I thought of their dark eyes watching me, of my hands grasping their coarse manes. Saltpeter’s gentle nips if you were standing close by but not paying him your full and undivided attention; Red Erin’s insistence on licking my hand like an oversized Golden Retriever.

  “Look at it like this,” he said, looking extremely put-upon for having to explain himself. “Horses die. They have tons of meat on them. People are starving. What would be wrong with eating them?”

  I slammed my beer glass down on the bar, hard enough to attract the disapproving glare of the bartender. Whatever. I had tipped over the line again, grown too drunk to care. “Ryan, you’re absolutely right. Horses die. Would you like to hear how they die?”

  Ryan looked pale.

  “First, you notice that they seem a little off, so you give them some bute—that’s like aspirin, only it’s toxic to humans—to see if it’s just a little ache, not a big deal. Then you take them off of the bute and they seem fine, so you take them out and give them a little work out. The next day they’re worse. You have the vet out, the vet takes X-rays, finds a fracture. Not a huge fracture, but a fracture. Or maybe he just laid down in his stall wrong and busted his leg that way. Horses are too damn fragile.” I paused long enough to polish off the beer. “Yo! Another beer!” I shouted. The bartender looked aggrieved. The racetracker in me was in full control of the situation now.

  “So he puts him down. Right there in front of you, he injects the horse and that’s that. He’s dead.”

  The beer was put down in front of me and I took a swig to sustain my anger. The dead were crowding around me; their stories were vivid in my mind.

  “Or, you find a bone chip, not a fracture, and you end up doing surgery. You put the horse under and do arthroscopic surgery. This takes some heavy-duty sedatives and of course after that you have to load the horse up with antibiotics. During this time his leg is in a cast and he’s stuck in a stall. He isn’t getting to walk around enough, which means the blood flow to his hooves is compromised, because the hooves act as four additional heartbeats—did you know that? Most people don’t—and he ends up lying on his side, groaning with pain like a human, because the insides of his hooves are inflamed and pressing against the hard outer walls.

  “And so, after lots more drugs and sedatives and painkillers, all of which are toxic to humans in varying amounts, the horse is finally euthanized, to spare him further pain, and his body is dragged out by a tractor and burned, because if you bury that bio-hazard of a body in your flooded fields, you will contaminate your groundwater. And that, Ryan, is how horses die. Still wanna eat one?” I craned my neck around to glare at him.

  Ryan looked down at the water-rings on the warped bar. Then he looked up at me. “Who died?”

  I sighed. “Two horses. One last year, one a few weeks ago. I guess you can say ‘just another horse.’ That’s what you’re supposed to say. Because they die. But I loved them. I love them all.” I sniffed. All the alcohol was making me emotional. “I hated seeing his body burn. We couldn’t do that with the horse a few weeks ago. We took the risk and buried him in an upper field. . . the water table was lower. But still—he was alive and happy and then he just wasn’t.”

  “But you had to put him to sleep. . . right?”

  “Of course!” I said firmly. “There was no other option—he was in pain and he wasn’t going to get better. I just hate these stupid decisions—you have to make way too many of them. They’re hard. They break your heart, and you have to just take it. A person has to think with the head and not the heart, in horses. . .” I trailed off and examined the beer before me. “It’s hard. Not everyone can do it. Not all the time.”

  Ryan leaned over and put his hand on mine. I looked at it, so pale and alien against my dark calloused skin. He worked on computers all day while I was out wrestling with horses; he sat in bars all night while I fell asleep over supper at eight o’clock at night. But I had great loves, such great loves, in my life.

  “You can’t live without horses,” he said to me, and I nodded.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Aqueduct


  The wind was absolutely bone-chilling at Aqueduct. I shrank back against the cushions of the town car’s backseat, not willing to get out of the heated sanctuary, but there was nothing for it, the security guard was leaning down chivalrously, a hand extended to help me out, and I had to bite my chapped lips and go out into that gale. I was sure there would be a blizzard at any moment—with this wind, with this cold!—and I would be stuck in it, stuck in some tack room hovering over a space heater with a couple of grooms and some hunchbacked retired jockeys and a leering, wise-cracking trainer making awful jokes about how I was the only female for miles and men had needs. I’d already paid the driver and he was looking back at me in the rearview mirror. His radio crackled. He was late for a pick-up at the airport. He lifted an eyebrow at me, and I sighed and took the security guard’s hand.

  “My dear lady,” the security guard said in a strange accent, something between New York and Mexico City, “I am so happy to have you here at Aqueduct.”

  I stared at him, unprepared for this speech, while he continued to clasp my hand and gaze into my eyes. He looked like a parody of a state trooper, in a dark green polyester guard’s uniform with a New York Racing Association badge and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and a great bushy mustache bristling over his mouth, possibly modeled on the inimitable Sam Elliot’s.

  “My name is Romeo,” he continued, “Because I have great love for all women.”

  I looked at his chest—anything to avoid eye contact, which he was strenuously attempting to hold—and saw that his embroidered nametag did, indeed, say, “Romeo.” Oh, dear god, Romeo, I hope that there is something lost in translation here.