Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “Why do the big horses have the bad feet?” I asked, with an awkward attempt at whimsy.

  Lacey looked at me like I was an idiot, eyebrows raised in disbelief. “They’re your big horses. You chose them. Choose better hooves next time.”

  Fair enough.

  I went into the kitchen to peer out the window at the paddocks. The rain was drumming against the glass, but through the streaming cataracts pouring down the panes, I could see that where the fields weren’t underwater, they were colored jungle-green with black splotches — the dark patches where hooves had torn up the grass, leaving only mud behind. To save the grass, the paddocks needed to be left to dry in peace.

  But leaving the horses in would cost us, in shavings for the stalls, in hay to keep them busy, in time spent mucking out, in sanity for everyone. Stabled horses were more likely to develop ulcers and bad habits like wood-chewing, to say nothing of the extra energy and subsequent bad behavior when we were riding them.

  Lacey joined me as a new, heavier squall of rain came rushing in. Rain pounded on the roof above our heads, a roar of raindrops the size of quarters. “And another thing: dirt paddocks look so ghetto.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the waterfall above. “No one’s gonna board with us if we’re turning the horses out in sandpits this winter. They’ll take one look and head someplace with grass.”

  “Yeah, but let’s be practical — horses on no turn-out? Come on. The horses will be a nightmare. Everyone will need an hour to work. We can barely keep up with work as it is.”

  She agreed to that. “Although we’re doing better. Getting a stall cleaner has been a huge help. Even if he is a creepy dude.”

  “All stall cleaners are creepy. They don’t speak English, they leer at the women they work for… that’s part of working in horses, kiddo.”

  “Yeah, like I’m so much younger than you… kiddo.” Lacey gave me a mock-punch in the shoulder, which hurt more than it probably should have. I was muscle-sore and tired all the time these days, practically lifting the horses into frames for their dressage work with my arms and legs, as they protested the heavy footing. Dynamo, never the lightest of horses, had felt like a tank this morning.

  We looked out at the rain, industriously turning the dressage arena into muck before our eyes. If it stopped overnight and gave us a morning break, we’d ride between the puddles. But we were running out of room between puddles.

  Two weeks ago, I had thought the coming fall would be my best season yet. Lacey on board, Mickey beginning training, Dynamo fresh and feeling good off his first Intermediate. We’d compete this fall and winter all over the Southeast, make our way to a two-star level three-day-event and bring home some bling. And then, finally, I’d start plotting our Advanced debut. But it was well into August and the monsoons were stepping up their game right when we needed to step up ours. I couldn’t argue with the weather, though.

  And the entire farm needed to look its best. I was getting a few phone calls now, people who had seen my grinning face in the Chronicle and were shopping for a new trainer for the winter. A nice woman from Aiken, moving to town with her two young horses, seemed interested until she found out I was barely old enough to buy beer. And if I wanted boarders, I would have more to do than just convince people to overlook my age. That was one reason I’d gone ahead and used some of the training fees Eileen was paying to hire a stall cleaner. The horse world respected young trainers with money and flashy horses, but not so much those of us trying to make it on talent and a dime. Glitzy barns and shiny tack trumped all, even solid experience.

  Sandpit paddocks and lakes in place of arenas were not going to advance my cause. I leaned my forehead against the cold glass of the window. It was always something in this business.

  “This day’s a wash,” I said finally. “Look at the dressage arena. It could be a tourist attraction, like one of the springs.”

  “Come ride at beautiful Lake Dressage!”

  “Yeah, swim your horse to X, halt, salute the judge, empty your snorkel.”

  “Call the farrier and ask for fins on the next shoeing cycle.”

  We giggled. Sometimes you just had to laugh it off.

  But it was less amusing in the morning, when I was forced to give everyone the day off. The dressage arena was soaked and the paddocks were positively underwater. It was sunny at last, but so humid I felt like my lungs were filling with water. The sky was glistening blue, but treacherous white clouds were already lazing away, innocently fluffy. They’d be monster storms in a few hours.

  We gave all the horses an hour each of turn-out in the little round pen next to the barn. The deep ruts that ran along the wall were full of water, but the center was a high mound of sand, and the horses took it in turns to ignore the hay we threw out for them and instead run around like fools, splashing in the water and rolling in the sand, coming into the barn like they’d been out motor-crossing on dirtbikes. We had a farm of mud-encrusted grays where we once had chestnuts and bays. Even Mickey, who was close to white beneath his dapples, came in the same dark charcoal as the others. The wash-rack drain choked with sand from spraying them down, and I had to pry off the cover and dig handfuls of dark muck from the drain. When we were through, the stable aisle looked like a particularly polluted beach, the kind where syringes and broken bottles tend to wash ashore.

  “This is more work than riding them would have been,” Lacey spluttered, spitting dirty water out of her mouth after Mickey shook himself off like an oversized dog, sending mud everywhere.

  I ignored her complaining. Lacey’s complaints were just background noise, pointless and harmless. “I want to ride Mickey this afternoon, anyway,” I announced. “I think the rain is going to pass us by this afternoon.”

  “Oh, the meteorologist has spoken!”

  “Shut up, nag, I know plenty about the weather!” I gave her a friendly shove. “Look, everything is building up to the east… if it does rain, it won’t be until late.” I pointed at the midday thunderheads, their peaks reaching up towards the sun, so high that I could see ice crystals wafting down from their billowing heights. It was hailing somewhere over the Ocala National Forest, beating down on the fishermen and the four-wheelers and the Rainbow People in their tents, if there were any camping out there this time of year. “We get storms earlier when they blow out of the west. Don’t you pay any attention to the weather?”

  “Why are you going to hassle Mickey?” Lacey asked disagreeably, ignoring my dig. “Can’t we just go in the house and lay in the A/C until it’s feed time?”

  “We have to stop doing that.”

  “It’s almost September. I’m sure the weather will give us a break in a few weeks.” Lacey’s voice turned cajoling. “You’re worn out, you could use the break…”

  I shook my head. A break would be nice, but championships weren’t won through naps. If they were, Lacey would be an Olympian. “No, he needs it. Come on, I need to be getting this horse going baby novice by winter. He’s been sitting around the barn for months already. I’m thinking of taking him to Lochloosa in two weeks.”

  “Lochloosa? In two weeks? Are you crazy?”

  “He already knows how to jump. All we have to do is get him going every day, work that fat off, balance him up with some gymnastics, and let him start looking around at the shows. I’m not saying he has to compete.” But naturally, I was thinking that maybe he would. Lochloosa, which wasn’t recognized by any national organizations, had some fantastic introductory classes — even a crossrails class called Very Very Green.

  “I think you’re both going to work too hard,” Lacey said firmly. She unsnapped the cross-ties from Mickey’s halter and led him out of the wash-rack. “It’s still too hot and it’s way too humid. The ground is probably like quicksand. I think you should just listen to Mother Nature and take it easy until this weather breaks.”

  I watched Mickey’s hindquarters moving in rhythm, his catlike grace, his long easy stride, and admired the angles of his hoc
ks and fetlocks. He left a pattern of wet horseshoes on the concrete aisle; his hind hooves reached ahead of his fore-hooves by a matter of inches.

  Lacey was right, of course. The prospect of even riding here at home, let alone putting on the glitz in boots and breeches at any horse show, sounded appalling right now. If the weather didn’t kill me, the vampiric mosquitoes, as big as hummingbirds, might. Lochloosa was along the edge of a vast swamp, and its bloodsuckers were legendary.

  But now, with the pressure of having two potentially top-level horses in my barn, I knew I had to suck it up, get the tack on, and ride. You couldn’t just give a good horse time off because it was hot out. You couldn’t sit under the vent of the air conditioner and drink margaritas in front of the television because it was hot out. Not if you were expecting to win. There wasn’t any time to waste. You put on your big girl breeches and you sweated it out.

  “He has to be ready for Novice this winter,” I told Lacey firmly. “He’s not my horse, and he’s not a pet. He was sent here for me to compete. If I don’t do well with him, someone else will get him. And it isn’t just him — Dynamo is going too. And anyone else we think could pin and maybe sell this fall. We have to be at the top of our game by the time summer’s over, not just getting started because we were scared of a little sweat.”

  Lacey latched Mickey’s stall door, hung up his halter, and came back to the barn entrance to look out over the green and black paddocks, sloping to the tree line. She was quiet for a few moments, looking out at the clouds, heaping themselves up over the eastern sky. Out here on the flatlands west of Ocala’s hills, there were certain days when the sea breeze from the Gulf of Mexico would suddenly wash over us, a sudden cool caress around our sweaty necks and our bared shoulders. That heralded a dry day, when the western winds pushed the storms back east, and rained out the tourists on the Atlantic beaches.

  Other days, when the Atlantic sea breeze was feeling mighty, it slapped into the Gulf’s humid gusts right over our heads and blew up into a fast little storm that went skidding west, growing as it flew towards Otter Creek and Yankeetown and Cedar Key, its spreading anvil promising us an afternoon of hot, dry shade.

  And then this past week, they had simply been sitting over us, drifting (that’s weatherman-speak for going nowhere) and raining and rumbling and raining and rumbling and raining. It was new behavior in a previously predictable world.

  “I have to be honest,” I said eventually, watching the clouds stack up higher and higher. “I can’t really predict the weather like I used to.”

  “It’s definitely getting weirder,” Lacey agreed fervently.

  “But the calendar isn’t going to change. Dynamo and Mickey work every day. Non-negotiable. Everyone else we fit in between raindrops and lightning.”

  We watched the clouds somberly, as Florida horsemen did every day from May to October, determining distances and movement, weighing our chances.

  “You’re right,” Lacey said. “But I really wish it wasn’t like that.”

  “Like what?” As if I didn’t already know what she was going to say.

  “So, I don’t know? Financial. Like he and Mickey are just an investment. They’re big business, so everyone gets a day off but them. The weather’s bad, but they have to work anyway. That’s just a sad thing to say about a horse.”

  I sighed. The amateur’s dilemma. Lacey was going to have to learn to make these decisions with her head, and put her heart in the backseat. Even with Dynamo, I had to be sensible and remember, nothing was going to happen if these horses didn’t work, compete, and win. “Those are the kinds of decisions you have to make if you’re going to make a living with horses. They’re horses, yeah, and we love them, but they’re definitely investments and business deals. Some more serious than others.”

  I’d worked this out in my head a long time ago, and if I was not exactly thrilled with it, I’d rationalized it enough to get through my days and sleep through my nights. I thought that might be a line of demarcation, between the perpetual amateurs and the true professionals: the ability to conceive of a horse as an object, as a commodity, as a product, without ever forgetting that they felt pain or had very real emotions.

  The folks that couldn’t accept that notion often fell into two camps — they either saw them as pets, or as fashion accessories. And the latter camp? They really pissed me off, even more than the cold-hearted cretins who treated them as profit margins and tax deductions ever could. A horse was not a status symbol. A horse was himself, and that was more than enough.

  There was a dull rumble of thunder to the east. Against the blue sky and the blazing white of the midday sun, the sky over Ocala suddenly looked like a volcano has erupted, the storm clouds piling up on top of one another, tall and skinny and ominously dark within, like a little black dress laced with brilliant white cumulus.

  I turned back to Lacey. “Do me a favor and tack Mickey up as fast as you possibly can.” Lacey nodded and headed for the tack room to grab the saddle and bridle while I darted into the house for my riding boots and one more bottle of water — thunder or not, it was hot out there.

  There’s a feeling you get when you’re sitting so deeply in the saddle that you’re part of your horse’s back. It’s a sinking and it’s a rising, it’s a thrill and it’s meditative, it’s sensual and it’s otherworldly. Your legs are wrapped around his body, your calf muscles quiver against the long abdominal muscle which stretches from chest to flank, simultaneously lifting him into your seat and pulling your seat down into him, and you can feel your spine sync up with his spine, locking your motion together. His neck arches before you, his mouth is so soft on the bit that your fingers barely stroke the rein before he responds.

  It’s a oneness, a perfect sensation that negates all the heat, and the worry, and the exhaustion, and the loneliness, the sheer damn loneliness of it all, that you refuse to admit even exists. It’s perfection, it’s the whole purpose of riding, and it is fleeting.

  Mickey gave me one perfect twenty-meter circle, perhaps a half-minute in temporal terms, and it stayed with me for the rest of the evening, even when the rains fell, even when the lightning flashed, even when the rest of my day was washed away.

  But, hours later, sleepless in bed, I was feeling the opposite effect. Perfect moments have their price, their absence reminds you of everything imperfect.

  At night, I knew that despite everything I said, or did, or believed, I was lonely. And so I did what was becoming a very bad habit for a trainer who needed her sleep — I put my feet into a pair of flip flops and went padding through the wet grass to visit with my horses.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lochloosa was hot, so much hotter than I could have been prepared for, both in temperature and in competition.

  There were about fifteen other horse trailers in the big field where I was directed to park, mercifully on high ground so that none of us would get stuck in the muck of the flooded lowlands, and they were all huge rigs. Six and even eight-horse trailers, and most of them packed to the gills with gleaming, sweating, fit horses of every description.

  A Clydesdale, white-feathered legs brilliant in the early-morning sunlight, was backed out of a trailer and into the dewy grass, only to be followed by a medium-sized paint pony, and then by a nondescript brown Thoroughbred with a head like an anvil and hindquarters like a Quarter Horse. Pony Clubbers milled around, children of all ages and a few teenagers, wearing brightly colored outfits advertising their stables and riding clubs. The only adults appeared as chaperones and riding instructors, and a few loners, like myself, who were here with prospects who needed experience before the show season. I saw more than a few familiar faces as I looked around the show-grounds. I wasn’t the only one who was putting training before comfort on this broiling hot day at the end of August. It meant I certainly wasn’t going to win anything without effort.

  Lacey took Dynamo’s lead shank as soon as he came down the ramp and silently walked away with him, her hand loose aro
und the flat leather so that he could turn his head and look around at his new surroundings. Her stiff shoulders and set jaw said it all: she wasn’t happy that we were going to work the horses on such a brutal day. But she was the student, and I was the trainer. “Bring back the registration packets!” I called after her, and she lifted a hand in acknowledgement.

  Lochloosa put on a pretty bare bones show, with no stabling. I took Mickey down myself, bringing along the trailer tie so that I could fasten it to a ring on the side of the horse trailer and tie him there. He was anxious, swinging his head back and forth, whinnying for Dynamo, who had already disappeared in the maze of trucks and trailers. I hoped Lacey came back soon. I hoped she was up to today’s challenge. Two horses wasn’t a lot to manage, but each had three phases to get to — and Lacey had never done this before. I was relieved, running over the schedule in my mind once more, that I hadn’t brought any other horses.

  Lacey probably would have killed me if I had.

  She’d been quiet about it, but it was obvious she still wasn’t comfortable with how hard I was working Dynamo and Mickey. There was a silent protest to her taut face when she tacked up the geldings these days, and I had caught her looks of reproach when she took my slick reins and ran a washcloth over their sweat-foamed faces after a hard ride.

  And all of our rides were hard lately, I had to admit that. I was watching them both carefully for some sign that they might need mental-health breaks, but neither horse had given any indication of anything other than blooming health and happiness. Mickey’s pale coat gleamed with well-being, there were dark circles of dapples across Dynamo’s chestnut flanks, and their ears were always pricked and alert when they saw Lacey or myself walking around the farm. They were ready to work every day, no matter the soaring mercury or the sopping wet air that made us all feel as if we were trying to breathe underwater. But the overall philosophy was still weighing on Lacey, bringing down the chipper girl I had been so happy to have in my barn every day.