I shrugged out of my seatbelt and wiggled my way across the bench seat of the truck, to sit up against Alexander. He put an arm around me. “You ruined my reputation before I even had one,” I told him. “And now no one will work for me.”
He smiled. “At least I married you.”
“Eventually.” We sat quietly for a moment. “Lucy will know a girl I can take. Some working student. She always has a few running around.”
“I don't know that Lucy’s working student is enough.”
“Let me give it a shot," I insisted. “Let me make the decision. Everyone in Ocala thinks you make all the decisions. One of these days they’re going to have to learn differently.”
His eyes twinkled down at me. “I do make all the decisions, little groom,” he chuckled, and pressed his lips into my hair.
I just sighed and shook my head.
“What’s that over there?” Alexander hit the brakes and the truck skidded a little. I looked around us; we had gone around a turn in the driveway, just before we went through the dark bracken of hedges and Australian pines that lined the farm; behind us the barn had disappeared behind a grove of oak trees. There was no one around, no horses to be seen, and at first I didn’t know what he could be talking about. And then I saw the little tumble-down barn, huddled against the grasping narrow arms of the Australian pines. And movement in one of the half-doors.
“There’s a barn over there,” Alexander said, furrowing his brow. “I’ve never seen it before.”
I pointed to a raw oval of wood: a new tree stump. “There was a tree in the way. It must have come down with all this rain.” The old live oaks were beautiful, but they could be dangerous, rotten within and waiting for a bad spell of weather to bring them crashing down.
“A hidden barn … hmm.” Alexander pulled the truck over and unbuckled his seat belt.
“Alexander, this isn’t a Nancy Drew novel.”
“Knowing Dennis Perry, it could be,” he said, and hopped out of the truck.
He was right. I clambered out after him, slipping on the muddy grass, and we went splashing over to the crumbling little barn.
It was just six stalls, built out of plywood and long ago painted red, more like the sort of backyard barns you saw in rural Florida than the whopping big showplaces that we were used to as Thoroughbred breeders. I remembered going to barns like this when I was a kid, cobwebby and infested with massive wolf spiders, manure mixing with sand on the sloping floors, leaks in the rusting steel roof, itself just high enough to house a fifteen-hand-high horse if he didn’t lift his head all the way. This barn might have been here for decades, rattling and groaning through storms and hurricanes until now, rotting away on its last legs as we crept towards it.
A face appeared over one half-door, the same place we had seen the flash of motion before, and my heart melted. Melted, fell in a pool all around my muddy boots, so that I had to stop and put my hand to my chest to feel where it had once been. “Oh, Alexander,” I breathed, and he must have recognized in my voice that particularly feminine tone of true pony love, because he stopped and shook his head at me.
But truly, it would have taken a heart made of stone not to fall in love with the sweet face gazing at me over the barn door. Red chestnut, the color I was most susceptible to for some reason, with thick chunks of forelock falling between two pricked ears, divided in the center of the forehead and half-hiding each wide, blinking eye. A white star with a wide stripe beneath, and in the middle of the stripe – oh how delightful – two big bubbles of chestnut appeared again, giving the horse a clown-like look that I thought was simply charming. She – there was something in the delicate narrowing of her face that said filly –
whinnied a thin, anxious whinny, as if she hadn’t seen humans for a while.
“What in the hell?” Alexander shook his head. I pushed past him and went right up the barn.
It was dank and smelly, the air rank with dirty old bedding and moldy hay. The stall hadn’t been cleaned, and there were fire ants milling around in the feed bucket, licking up the molasses in the sweet feed before the filly could finish her meal. I saw filthy, loose bandages on her legs; it was as if she’d been injured and just dumped in this barn. She pressed her lips against my arm and wiggled them along my skin, and I rubbed her funny spots, filling the air with damp white hair. She hadn’t been brushed in a while.
Alexander only glanced in her stall before he went on to the next. “There’s a horse in here, too, Alex.”
I tore myself away from the chestnut filly and went to look over his shoulder. “Oh, God.” A dark gray, coat stained brown and green with filth and manure, regarded us without curiosity from the back of his stall. He shifted his weight from one hind leg to another and fluttered his nostrils, turning his head back to stare at the stall wall again. His right front knee was three times as large as it should have been.
There were two more horses in the six-stall barn, all broken down, all apparently fed but not cared for. It was the barn of broken toys. The last stop before the livestock auction. A nightmare.
Alexander turned suddenly. I heard shouts in Spanish, and a golf cart full of buckets hitting bumps at high speed. We were found out. “We leave now!” he insisted, and we took off for the truck, leaving behind the broken horses in their broken barn.
CHAPTER SIX
Old Friends
The next afternoon I drove out to Lucky Lou Farm, where a few of our retired racehorses had gone when it was time, for one reason or another, for them to find a new career. I made the trip every couple of months, part of my attempt to keep up with as many of our horses as possible, even the client horses that came and went after a few months. It wasn't always easy, but every time I saw a news item about racehorses abandoned out in the Everglades or shipped to slaughterhouses with racing plates still tacked on their hooves and saddle-shaped sweat stains still uncurried from their backs, I felt a little queasy that it could have been one of the horses I had fed mints to, been the first rider on, praised after a good gallop.
It was good publicity, too, as our practical advertising agency told us approvingly. Owners were starting to get antsy about all the bad press regarding discarded racehorses. They wanted their money to make them look like gentry, not like animal abusers. The agency had taken to sending out a press release every time we retired a horse, touting the horse’s future career (“Will be trained to be a jumper! An event horse! A therapy horse for children with special needs!”).
Our old horses weighed even more heavily than usual on my mind, after what I’d seen the day before at Littlefield. I was still haunted by the sight of the broken-down horses in that ramshackle barn. I couldn’t shake off what I’d seen—the damaged horses that had just given up, staring at the walls while waiting for the pain to go away … and then the filly in the dirty leg wraps who had welcomed us with that lilting whinny and those bright eyes. She hadn’t succumbed to depression and pain yet. Maybe she never would. Maybe she was made of tougher stuff than most horses.
It was possible that they would be granted pasture retirement, or even the grace of euthanasia. And yet I knew, with a cynic’s certainty, that every single one of those horses would end up boarding a trailer bound for one of Ocala’s cheap auctions, and from there it was pretty much even money that the next stop would be a feedlot way station for one of the slaughter plants in Mexico or Canada. There wasn’t much market for broken-down Thoroughbreds, especially not ones that had been left in such condition, their coats filthy, eyes staring, spirits broken.
The filly, though. I shook my head. Hard. I had to get her out of my head. Alexander had listened to me rhapsodize and lament over her all the way back to the farm yesterday, and he’d finally asked me not to mention her again. “That filly isn’t yours, Alex,” he’d said sternly. “You can’t be so fussed about other people’s horses. You’ve enough of your own to worry about. And you can’t rescue them all.”
He was right, he was right, he was right … exc
ept maybe he wasn’t. Lost in thoughts of red fillies with undetermined injuries and gleaming, curious eyes, I missed the turn-off to the road to Lucky Lou, and had to do a U-turn on the deserted country road.
There were four of our old racehorses at Lucky Lou Farm, which was far across town in the drier, scrubbier hills of Levy County. There were fewer live oaks out here, and more sandy patches in the fields, thinner grass that supported fewer horses. But there were still beautifully kept farms out here in the scrub, keeping up the Ocala tradition of building barns far too nice to keep horses in, and Lucky Lou was one of them: forty acres of mostly flat land, pastures dotted with the sort of cross-country fences I'd grown up jumping Thoroughbreds over, a twenty-stall barn full of kids and dogs and cats, a dressage ring that Lucy kept raked and even with a drag attached to the inevitable golf cart, and an assortment of horses in every size and color. It was a lovely farm.
Lucy came over to greet me on horseback, riding a delicate bay mare over to the gravel parking lot next to the barn. I recognized the mare once my brain added two hundred pounds and a quiet expression to my mental picture of My Bird in Hand. “That can't be Birdie!” I exclaimed in lieu of a greeting, and Lucy laughed. She was around my age, maybe thirty, with the lines in her face that sun and horses gave us all, and greyhound-fit.
“I’m impressed you know her at all! My mom was here last week and wanted to know why I’d sold that skinny bay mare without giving her a shot at the show-ring. I had to take her to the stall and point out Birdie’s crooked star before she was convinced.”
“I can hardly believe the change.” I walked a slow circle around the mare, taking in her rounding muscles and dappled coat, her neat hooves and flowing tail, while she dropped her head and sucked meditatively at her bit. Where were the spooking and wheeling, the ribs and the hip bones that were never satisfactorily covered? Birdie’s nerves had never let her alone for a moment in all the years I had known her; back home, when she wasn’t weaving she was cribbing, when she wasn’t cribbing she was pacing; she went off her feed and ran mysterious fevers. She never made it off the farm, never even managed to get into a starting gate on the training track, and we’d been nervous that Lucy wouldn’t be able to find a job for her.
And now … ! “How did you fix her?”
“Trail rides,” Lucy said. “And then little jumps, to teach her confidence. She just wasn’t born with any, poor thing.” And she dropped the reins altogether and leaned down to give the mare an extravagant hug around the neck. Birdie let her ears lop to either side; she was the picture of relaxation. If I’d done that to Birdie a year ago she would have panicked and flipped over on me.
“Lucy, you’re a marvel.” I shook my head.
Lucy smiled. “She just needed a little self-esteem. Want to go into the barn? This girl is ready for a carrot and a shower.”
She dismounted right there in the parking lot and gently took the reins over Birdie's head, careful not to let them brush against her ears. The mare was still sensitive about that, then. Well, even Lucy couldn’t fix everything all at once. She started for the barn at the other end of the parking lot and I fell into step beside her, our boots crunching in the gravel.
“So what’s new with you? Getting ready to go to New York, huh?”
“That’s a whole mess.” I quickly sketched in the details of the past week: the change in plans, the attempt to find an assistant trainer who didn’t think that I was a money-grubbing little witch who didn’t know a thing about horses. “And then yesterday we hit the bottom of the barrel, talking to this woman, Mary Archer, at Littlefield …”
“Mary Archer?” Lucy sounded horrified. “You thought about hiring her?”
“Well, the idea was floated, before she shot me down and we got into a really inappropriate fight. You know her?”
Lucy unbuckled her hard hat and pulled it off, shaking short, sweaty brown hair. “She’s the worst. Unless you count her boss, Dennis. But they’re in it together. It’s like they’re actively against their horses having careers outside of racing. Their horses just disappear.”
I thought of the barn and swallowed. “Did you try to get one? What happened?”
“I tried to get three. A breeder was trying to get back her babies after they raced. I traced all three back to Littlefield, drove out there, made it very clear that we would buy the horses when they were ready to retire, and … Jesus, if you could have seen the smirks on their faces! Two of them never started and no one there would tell me where they ended up. One of them broke down in his third start and that was the last anyone heard of him. And I was standing there with cash in hand! Explain people to me, will ya?”
Lucy was red in the face, in a way that had nothing to do with the heat and riding. She clipped the cross-ties to Birdie’s halter and flung the mare’s sweaty bridle onto a hook.
“So yeah, I know the bitch,” Lucy said. “I hope I never run into her again. I might have a few choice words.”
“The kind that will get you banned from the Tack Shack,” I said. “But listen, I saw horses there, Lucy. There was this barn, and there were these horses just dumped there. There was this filly.”
“Put her out of your head,” Lucy advised briskly, pulling the saddle off Birdie’s back. “Half these goddamn big farms have a back barn for their broken toys. But if they sell you one of their breakdowns, they have to admit the whole system exists … and that ain’t gonna happen. Take it from someone who’s tried it.”
I leaned on the wall and sighed. The rough wood pulled at my ponytail, and Birdie craned her neck to get a clear view of me, looking perplexed. “What’s the matter, baby?” I asked her, and Lucy laughed.
“She’s like girl, you got to relax! This filly has turned into a parrothead, I gotta tell ya. She’s nothing like the little crack fiend you sent me.”
“That’s amazing.” And it really was wonderful to see Birdie relaxed at last. She’d just been born on the wrong farm, I guessed.
“I can’t take all the credit. My working student – she’s out on another horse in the back woods right now – did a lot of the early work on her. This kid Jenny, she’s something else!” Lucy pulled the hose off its hook and started spraying Birdie’s legs. The filly fidgeted a little until Lucy sprayed her in the face. Then she closed her eyes and opened her mouth, catching the stream of water. “Nut. So anyway, she’s got a hell of a seat. Gets on anything and makes it look like a goddamn Olympic ride, I swear. All raw talent, her style needs a lot of polish, but the horses go great for her. And she just runs the barn. I don’t have to do a damn thing. That’s what you need in your life. I mean, I actually went to the movies last week. The movies! Don’t try to take her from me. I’ll fight you.”
“I remember movies. I’m pretty sure I saw a movie last fall. And I think I liked it.”
Lucy grinned. “You guys didn’t manage to stay down-sized very long. Remember when you stopped working all the time and sat on your porch to watch the sunset? Get bored? Too many sunsets?”
“No, I liked it, having free time. But the business … it’s like horses just started multiplying. We did a favor or two and all of a sudden we had a full house again.” I handed Lucy the sweat scraper and she started skimming the excess water off Birdie’s dark coat.
“You better be careful," Lucy said. “I remember how you got burned out a few years ago. Don’t do that to yourself again. You were no fun.”
I stayed quiet.
“Horses are tough,” she went on, running a washcloth down Birdie’s lower legs, squeezing water from her fetlocks. “They take a lot out of you. It’ll creep up on you before you notice.”
“I’ll take a break after Saratoga.”
“Will you? Or will you ramp up for some fall meet? Don’t tell me you’re not hoping to get a Breeders’ Cup horse. I know you, Alex! And it’s easy to get hooked on international competition. I look at some of my friends; they practically live in the dressing rooms of their horse trailers, just one event after an
other. Shit, Mike Perrola does live in his trailer. He’s got it parked at Green Meadows as we speak. He showers in the boarder’s barn.”
“I’ll be smart. I’ll take a break,” I said stubbornly, as if I had any history to back that up.
“We always think more about our horses’ mental health than our own.”
I didn't much want to talk about my mental health, because there was probably very little good that could be said of it. I was running every day on coffee and adrenaline as it was. Not to mention Lucy was just as guilty of overworking as I was. Here she was, alone except for a working student, with twenty-five horses, all of whom needed to be ridden or whose riders needed instruction nearly every day. Simple math said it couldn’t be done. But she did it.
We were saved from the mental exam by a slim little figure in denim cut-offs and a tank top, who peeked around a half-open stall door. She had a set of chaps flung over her shoulder and horse slobber on her chest. And she ignored me completely. “Luce, do you want Mohegan tacked? She's groomed and wrapped already.”
Lucy started leading Birdie outside. “You do that and I'll give Birdie a little grass while she dries. Use the old dressage.”
The girl nodded and took off, chaps wagging behind her. “Good afternoon,” she called to me as an afterthought, and I waved back, but she wasn’t looking.
I followed Lucy to the grass outside the barn. “Working student?”
“Yeah. That's the one I was telling you about just now. Jenny. She's got the barn thing down pat. Knows horses inside and out. Good eye for lameness, can run a barn twice this size. I don't know where she came from, honestly. Narnia or something. Middle-earth.”
“You’re lucky.”
“I know it. And don’t try anything. She hates racing.”
“Who could hate racing?”
“Um, sane people?” Lucy laughed, and I had to join in.
“But let’s admit,” I continued. “No sane person would ever stay involved with horses for more than a day or two.”
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 6