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

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  There was a collection of half a dozen horses standing between the clubhouse turn and the far end of the grandstand. Their riders pulled them up, made them stand still so that they could observe the other horses and the activity bustling around the backside, and then, after a few minutes, sent them off into a gallop the right way, counter-clockwise, around the track. The Tiger Prince, who had been standing like a statue at the wire, looking around at the busy track and waiting for a good gap in traffic, now was sent off into an easy canter down the center of the track. Despite the distance, I could see the ease of his motion, the gentle rhythm his head and neck made as they rocked back and forth with his gait. I liked him. A lot.

  In no time he was turning onto the backstretch and made a quick clean flying lead change as he came around the turn, jumping so that his leading, more hard-working legs became his outside, right legs, saving his left legs for the turns, both for balance and for rest. He would change to his right lead once again at the top of the stretch, and those fresh legs would give him the extra leap in his step he’d need to make a bid for the win. A horse who didn’t have to be constantly reminded, who knew to change his leads on turns and when he got tired in the homestretch was a very clever horse, was a winning sort of horse.

  His action was low and close to the ground—he didn’t waste energy picking up his legs very high. He was a very American sort of horse, very well-suited to skimming over dirt tracks, the kind of horse who would go straight to the front and run away with the race. He’d be a lovely sprinter, just as Red Erin had been. No Derby horse this, but we could run him in Florida very happily, have some fun with him, enjoy his big personality.

  I pulled out my phone again and set the timer, ready to hit the button the moment the horse started really galloping. My finger dropped at the three-eighths pole, which is nearly at the head of the homestretch, when the jockey let loose and the horse exploded forward, as if he’d been standing still before instead of merely cantering. I raised my eyebrows, careful to be quiet. The heavy man in the corner was less circumspect. “Wow,” he said. “Dickie—that’s some breeze.”

  “Gonna be a good time,” Dickie agreed. “Go on, go on!” He had a stopwatch in his hand.

  They flew down the stretch, passing other horses like an express train passing stations, and as the horse went under the wire Figaro slapped his stopwatch, and I brushed a finger on the surface of my phone.

  My eyebrows went higher. 37.7 seconds. A ridiculously good time for three furlongs on this track. A bullet work.

  “Oh damn!” said the heavy-set man, who had also been circumspectly timing the breeze. “Dickie, you got a live one there!”

  Figaro laughed, looking triumphant. But he sighed after a moment. I knew why—he knew we’d buy the horse now, one way or another. Another lost stakes horse for Dick Figaro, claimer extraordinaire.

  “Will you stay and see a few more go out?” he asked. “I have some live ones.”

  “I have a flight to catch,” I said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “You could get on him in the shed,” Figaro suggested suddenly. “You do the riding down there, is that right? I thought that’s what someone told me. You’re Alexander’s foreman.”

  I paused. “That’s right,” I admitted. I was tempted by the thought of getting on the colt. I remembered the way Red Erin had felt beneath me, such an easy sway to his movement, and how I had been able to swing aboard and instantly sink down into him, past the leather of the saddle and the foam of the thick saddle-pad, and feel his muscles move my muscles, so that we danced in tandem. And practically speaking, I had to see how the colt cooled out. I couldn’t just leave. That had been a very fast work—almost too fast. What if he came in with a misstep? What if he’d strained something out there? I wanted nothing more than to gather up my things from the hotel and race back to the airport, but it was going to have to wait until work was over.

  I went reluctantly out into the cold, and we picked our way across the hard, frozen ground, dodging horses and riders on their way out to the track, and back into the barn. “He’ll be right back in,” Figaro said. “There’s a spare hard hat in the tack room. I’ll just throw you on and you can give him a couple of turns, see how he feels to you.”

  “Okay,” I said, ducking into the tack room. The walls were festooned with bridles, martingales, yokes, and a dozen different kinds of noseband. I saw the black hard hat and snatched it down, shaking it out for potential spiders and mice (skipping this step is a mistake you will make only once) and then putting it on right over my fleece cap. It was a snug fit, but it would be only be on for a few minutes. I could take it the squeeze, and heaven only knew who’d had this hat on last. I pulled off my coat, because I’d need some ability to twist my body, and slung it over a saddle, before heading back out in the shedrow.

  The horse was there, coming around the corner, his head up, his ears pricked, his nostrils fluttering red. Figaro met him in the center of the barn and explained the situation; Marco nodded and hopped down. He took the reins and Figaro gestured for me to come and get a leg-up.

  “Hurry, he’s hot,” he said, and I came down the aisle, set a knee in Figaro’s cupped hands, and grasped mane and saddle. He pushed up with his arms, I pushed down with my arms, and then there I was in the little exercise saddle, just as I was every morning of my life, and I took the wet washy rubber reins in my hands as Figaro walked the horse forward again. He looked up at me. “Is it okay if I let him go?”

  I nodded, sitting down deep in the saddle and taking the neckstrap of the yoke in my left hand, just as I did at home every morning, as an extra little security handle against unexpected spooks and bolts. The horses along the shedrow shook their heads and pinned their ears at us, the pigeons flew from the rafters in front of us, and I was riding The Tiger Prince around the Aqueduct shedrow as if I belonged there.

  It was a funny thing, being on a horse in the city. To look out through the dirty windows and see the expressway a little way beyond. To hear the airplanes shrieking and roaring overhead, so loud that conversations paused with each interruption from above. To wake up in an apartment building and take a car through the dirty streets in riding boots, put on a hard hat and get on a horse. It couldn’t have been any further from my green mornings in Ocala, with the air so fresh it ought to have been bottled, noisy only with whinnies and birdsong. And yet the horse felt the same. Horse between my legs, reins between my fingers, everything familiar and normal, just placed in this alien landscape, almost as if to confuse me, and only me, on purpose.

  The feeling of sitting on Red Erin, feeling his same mannerisms and characteristics of gait, made it even stranger.

  I gave him three turns of the barn and then Figaro came up to catch him. We went into his stall, me ducking my head to avoid rapping it on the top of the doorframe, and the trainer took the reins so that I could dismount and take off the saddle. We went through the ritual; I took the saddle over my arm, took the bridle over the horse’s ears, dipped the bit in the water bucket to wash it clean of saliva and leftover hay, and went across the shedrow to the tack room to put it all away. Figaro grinned at me as he took the horse out and flung a cooler over his sweaty back. “Some things are the same no matter where you are, I’ll bet!”

  A hotwalker came up to take the horse, and off he went down the shedrow again. I watched him carefully, but everything was perfect. His movement stayed just as even as it had when he’d left the stall. A perfect machine, a lovely clone of his red brother. I had to have him. Alexander would put him on the next truck headed south. I would send him a message the second I left.

  “Can you call me a car, Dickie?” I asked. “That was wonderful, but there’s something that I have to do.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ask Parker

  “I specifically requested the bay Thoroughbred that was used in the lesson last night,” I said stubbornly, eyeing the chestnut Arab who was standing tacked up for me. The instructor squared her jaw and looke
d annoyed.

  “We can only honor horse requests if they are placed with a little more notice,” she said icily. “And if we are certain that your riding abilities are up to the challenge of the requested horse.”

  “Oh, please!” I snapped. I’d been up for more than thirty hours and I was in no mood to be polite. “I’m wearing riding boots and I stink of horse. I came straight here from Aqueduct—look, here’s my receipt from the driver! I just got off of a racehorse, I have to go back to Florida to deal with my other two hundred horses, and it’s just really bloody important that I ride this one Thoroughbred before I go back. So please do me a favor, charge me extra, do what you want, but send this pony back up and bring me what I want.”

  The riding instructor narrowed her eyes, but she did look me up and down, inspecting my worn paddock boots and the tell-tale dark stains on the inner seams of my jeans, where The Tiger Prince’s sweat and hair had rubbed off during my brief ride. “We’ll have to charge you,” she said finally. “If you’ll go back to the office, Diane will write it up for you. We’ll have Parker down in a moment.”

  She took the Arab’s reins and pulled him around, shaking her head. I went back into the little office and smiled congenially at Diane. “We’re going to do a horse request,” I said conversationally. “I would like to ride Parker. So if you’ll just add that to my bill...”

  “Without an evaluation lesson? Are you sure that’s right?” Diane looked dubious. She pushed her hair behind her ears and thumbed through a lesson log. “I thought you said you’d never been here before.”

  I leaned on the desk. “Diane, I’m a professional trainer. I’m going to ride that half-broken-down Thoroughbred that was carting around some old novice like he was her personal bounce castle, okay? So please just let me pay you so that I can ride this horse and then make my flight?”

  It’s entirely possible that after spending a night out, an excessive amount of alcohol, and the ride at the racetrack, I was looking insane and dangerous. Whatever it was, Diane leaned back in her chair and nodded. I went back out into the arena to await my steed.

  And then there he was, the darling boy I’d seen the night before. He stepped into the arena at the instructor’s side, looked up at me, and pricked his ears delightfully. The instructor didn’t waste a glance on him, just walked up and handed me the reins. “The mounting block is over there,” she said, gesturing to a corner.

  I led Parker over to the mounting block. I could mount from the ground with these long stirrups, but who needed to? His back wouldn’t thank me. Although, in retrospect, the damage was already done to his back, and there probably wasn’t much more I could do with one mount from the ground, not after all the years of riding lessons pounding up and down on him.

  The dressage saddle felt good, like it was hugging my legs and seat, and I kicked away the stirrup irons so that I could sway with the horse and get to know him. The instructor kicked at a clod of dirt and looked bored. She’d already written me off as a rebel, not worth her time. Which was good, because all I really wanted to do was ask Parker a very important question.

  I closed my knees tight against the saddle and rose out up into a very un-dressage-y pose, nudging Parker into a trot, and after a couple turns around the little arena, I pressed my hands into his neck, close to his withers, and clucked in his ears. He burst into a lively little canter, almost too big right away to be confined to the tiny space, and I laughed delightedly.

  “What are you doing?” the instructor snapped. “Slow him down! You haven’t warmed up!”

  “Alright, alright,” I conceded, sitting down in the saddle again, and Parker immediately tucked his chin in and came down to a springy walk. “Give me a riding lesson now, will you? I promise to behave.”

  On the way out, I picked up a card with the stable’s phone number. If they were going to be closing, the horses would be for sale. Parker had answered my all-important question about where souls like ours belonged, and I intended to put two horses on that truck to Florida.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Finding the Winner's Circle

  “He’ll do fine, he’ll do fine, he’ll do fine.” I was muttering under my breath, fully aware that I looked and sounded like a crazy person. There weren’t that many people in the paddock, though, and the horses hadn’t been brought around from the stabling yet, so the only person that caught my insane mumbling was Alexander. He quirked an elegant eyebrow at me.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  I gulped and nodded. “I am in total control.”

  He nodded back, looking skeptical, but he stood a little closer and put his hand on the small of my back to draw me close. Far down at the clubhouse turn, at the other end of Tampa’s little grandstand, the horses were emerging onto the track to be led up to the saddling paddock. We stood in the lawn of green grass between the walking ring and the covered stalls, awaiting The Tiger Prince. There was half an hour to the fourth race, and the beautiful bay, our darling after nearly a year at the farm, was leading the parade, his ears pricked and his head high, inspecting his new surroundings. His mane stood straight up in the stiff breeze off the Gulf of Mexico, giving him the look of an ancient warhorse. But I knew better. He was my baby, and I was going to kiss that sweet little white spot on his nose when he got to the paddock.

  I’d kiss him for reassurance and for good luck. I’d kiss him to protect him, to be his patron saint, to be certain that nothing would touch him as he went winging around the oval here for the first time. I was keenly aware of all our lost loves. So was Alexander. But we couldn’t help investing our hearts in this horse, as we had in Saltpeter and in Tiger’s brother before him, as Alexander had in his gray mare. With everyone else, we were sensible, we were practical, we were cold. We thought with the head and not the heart, as Alexander had always preached.

  But you can’t always be sensible.

  He came dancing into the paddock, all twirls and flourishes, like a startled bird on the verge of taking flight. We had schooled him here last week, the whole routine, loading up on the trailer at five a.m., driving him down I-75 in the ridiculous snowbird traffic that clogs Florida’s roads in winter, tacking him up in a stall in one of the low green barns and letting the jockey gallop him on the oval. In the afternoon we’d had a groom walk him over in leg wraps and a white scrim sheet, walk around the paddock as if he was going to compete, letting him look at the half dozen horses entered in that race, and then took him back to the stable to chill for a while before loading him up for the trip home. He spent that night in his little paddock with Parker, as always. We wanted to add to his routine, not entirely alter it. Alexander wanted to run him from home as long as the Tampa meet was in session.

  “He hates being indoors,” Alexander had reasoned. “You have to work with a horse’s quirks, not try to cram a square into a circle. If a horse wants to be turned out, for god’s sake, turn him out.”

  And it had worked. The horse had been like a wild animal when he’d come off the truck last March, jumping off of the loading ramp before the handler could get him to walk down, getting loose and running around the training barn like a crazy thing before I caught him with a bucket of sweet feed and a cooing voice that he seemed to enjoy. We turned him out with Parker, the New York school horse, with whom he’d bonded deeply on the long truck ride to Ocala. They had special nickers for one another, and we would sit on our porch in the evenings and look down the hill to where the two grazed nose to nose. They were only separated for the mornings, when Tiger had to come in for the morning work and spent some time in his stall, so that he wasn’t entirely dependent on freedom of movement and friendship. Parker was eating hay in the backside barn now; Tiger had come to understand that at work time, Parker stayed behind.

  Getting a horse over quirks like that can take a long time, and Alexander had been in no hurry to race him, anyway. The summer race meeting at Calder came and went. “Too far,” Alexander said. “I could ship him down the night before, bu
t what’s the rush? Tampa will be here soon enough, and it will be cooler. I’m tired of racing horses in the summer anyway.”

  And with that, he slowed down our work pace. The grueling summers, where we crammed our mornings with endless work, so that it was done before the afternoon thunderstorms brought an abrupt ending to outdoor chores, had always been a bad reward for getting through the sleepless nights and endless days of breeding season. “We’ve been working too hard,” he said to me one morning in late May. We were slouched over coffee at the kitchen table, dreading going back outside, knowing that there were broodmares and their growing foals to check on, and two dozen yearlings to groom for the end-of-summer sales. “You’re riding too many horses and you’re exhausted. And I’m about fed up with training horses in this heat. Half of them aren’t sweating anymore and the other half are close behind. Humidity’s killing them.”

  “Horses are from Siberia,” I agreed, regarding my empty coffee cup with regret. I got up to put another pot on. “They’re not evolved for tropical climates.”

  “Neither are humans,” he grumbled. “Certainly not this human.”

  “Evolved on the shores of the cold North Sea,” I teased him. “Hell, I grew up here, and even I think it’s too damn hot to work.”

  He slapped his hand on the table. “That’s it, then!” he announced. “We’re going to start taking summers a little easier.”

  And so we had. And it felt wonderful. How much unhappiness can be caused by just working too much, especially when you work with the person you love? We were spending time together, all the time, as a matter of fact, but we were working the whole time. Alexander turned out everyone for the month of June, split up the training barn grooms between the broodmares and the yearlings, who had to be handled and groomed everyday so that they could be transformed from sunburnt hoodlums into model citizens who would parade at the sales with style, and we took the whole damn month off.