I was talking way too big, of course. This filly that we’d never seen was a yearling. She was not even eighteen months old. She would be, even if she turned out to be as gorgeous as I was hoping and not some mule-disaster of a filly, proportioned oddly, in the throes of a growth spurt perhaps, with her hindquarters three inches higher than her withers. She had never been saddled or galloped or time-trialed. I had no business telling this millionaire across the room that she could go to Dubai in two or three years’ time and run on the grandest stage of them all. But I was annoyed that he had poopooed my choice. I really, really liked this filly on paper, and that was reason enough for me to say stupid things.
Birdwell looked at me with pursed lips, as if he was trying to decide whether I was totally insane or some kind of a genius, and I was glaring back, self-righteous in my unfashionable filly choice, when Kerri knocked lightly on the open door and peeked in from the shedrow. There was a streak of dirt on her face and a delicate dusting of hay from the top of her head to the entire right side of her arm and shirt, from filling hay nets right-handed. Kerri was a whirl of energy and then she crashed like a rock. I decided to let her sit in on the conversation, learn a little something. “Come in,” I said. “Sit down and grab a Coke. We’re talking about the yearling catalog.”
She smiled and pushed back some tendrils of hair from her frizzling ponytail, knotted up in the dark and forgotten about six hours ago. “Thanks.” She nodded to Birdwell. “There are some nice babies in that book,” she offered. “You’re going to have a lot of fun picking out some new horses. The boss really knows her stuff.”
“Oh, yeah?” Birdwell asked, turning toward Kerri. She got herself a bottle of water from the rattling fridge in the corner and flung herself into a folding chair.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “We sat up late last night looking through it. I thought she made some really nice choices.”
“Well,” I said, “late being ten o’clock, until we both fell asleep on the couch and woke up when I dropped the book onto a plate someone left on the floor.”
Birdwell laughed. “You’re not really taking advantage of the Saratoga nightlife,” he admonished. “You should have been dancing the night away and schmoozing at Siro’s with the rest of us.”
I shook my head. “That’s for owners, not trainers. Trainers have to get up too early.” I smiled as if it was a good joke; plenty of trainers went to Siro’s, especially after a big win. But the thought of hanging out at any bar with Wall Streeters and hangers-on like Birdwell was positively toe-curling.
Kerri just laughed. “I don’t think Alex has ever gone out at night in her life.”
And I didn’t really have a response to that, so I went back to the catalog and went on pointing out the hip numbers that I had marked so carefully with Post-it flags and discussed with Alexander over the phone, and pushed out of my head completely the thought that I had become, once again, a slave to horses. I’d chosen my masters, after all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Filly-Crush
“That filly is here.”
There was silence on the other end. Somewhere in Australia, a man was furrowing his brow and wondering what the hell his crazy wife was talking about now.
“That chestnut filly with the blaze and the dots in the middle. The one from that barn at Littlefield!”
“The barn full of rejects?”
“Yes!”
“That isn’t possible.”
But it was. I’d seen her that morning, and there was no mistaking that face, that color, that body. I knew what my filly looked like.
I was in love.
“Remember I said I wanted a filly? Remember? I always have good colts and never a good filly?”
“Remember I said that’s because good fillies are a myth and their brains are simply not wired correctly, ever?”
“Oh, Alexander. Shut up. That is just crazy. You know you’ve had good fillies.”
“I have had very fast fillies who won despite their insanity, yes. Go on. Tell me about your latest filly crush, who just a month ago was ready to be shipped to a livestock auction and has now magically reappeared at the finest racecourse in North America.”
What to say, what to say? Besides seeing the filly that had looked to me with such confidence in Florida, I didn’t know where to begin. I couldn’t describe the feeling that she knew me, and I knew her. So I was left with the physical details. She was chestnut, she was beautiful, she was fast. She had two white socks, a great splash of white between her eyes, a broad stripe of white right down to her nostrils with a two blobs of chestnut splashed in the center. She was a funny-face, not at all noble looking, but sweet and pretty and utterly darling. And she was a little speed demon, pinning her ears and kicking it into high gear in the stretch with a focus that I couldn’t ignore. She was awful until she galloped: She was distracted and turned her head at every little sound during the jog, paying more attention to the birds in the trees and the cars on Nelson Avenue than to the rider on her back. Until he asked her to gallop.
And then she did nothing else.
She’d played a dangerous game this morning. She’d cavorted and squealed and shied all the way to the wire, then stopped on a dime when the rider reined back to ask her to stand up. She stood there like a sentinel, head up, ears pricked, still as a statue but absolutely pulsing with life. Her rider adjusted his hard hat, organized his reins, checked his girth. She ignored all his little movements; she knew which one she was waiting for, and she stood as if she was afraid that if she broke concentration, she would miss it, and lose her chance at happiness.
And then there it was: he stood up in the stirrups, placed his hands on her neck, and chirruped. She bolted forward as if she was leaving a starting gate, and as her mouth hit his hands, her ears swept back, nearly disappearing against her skull, buried in her riot of fiery mane. She went pelting around the clubhouse turn, tracking down the dead center of the track, her rider nearly straight-legged, standing up against her aggressive hold on the bit, and I leaned against the fence and waited for her to make her furious way around the track and come back for a good clip in the homestretch.
Two dozen horses would go by before she’d show up again, all sort of alike in the early morning light. Horses in the morning can be hard to tell apart, and I had a little brochure somewhere deep in my bag that listed all the different saddle cloths of the different trainers, so that big horses could be identified in their morning works. (Well, not all the different trainers; my green towels with the yellow AW were not listed. I wasn’t sure who had put together the brochure, or why they thought my horses weren’t worthy of inclusion, but I was damn well going to prove him wrong.)
But when she came by again, there was no mistaking her. The chestnut filly’s white face was pushed forward as far as she could get her long neck to stretch; I thought she’d never ever allow herself to lose in a win photo. She was stretching and straining with everything she had to get to that wire; her rider perched close above her neck and let her alone to do her thing. There was no stick, no shouting, there was only a racehorse doing what a racehorse wanted to do more than anything else — run!
Alexander listened to my description of the filly. “You make her sound like Ruffian.”
“She’s magical.”
“You sound like a kid with a My Little Pony.”
I remembered Kerri turning on My Little Pony the night before and how I’d left the room in disgust. I wondered which of us was more rainbows and unicorns when it really came down to it. Maybe I just hid my soft side better than Kerri did.
“There’s something about her,” I said finally.
“Is she still Littlefield’s?”
“There was an L on the saddle towel.”
Alexander sighed. “Well, that’s too bad for her.”
I was quiet.
“Is she racing or just training?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know her name.” I sat down on a straw bale and watched
Personal Best attack his hay net as if it had caused him great personal affront. He bit at it with bared teeth, making the ball of hay bounce around his door frame, which only made him go at it more aggressively the next time. Colts, I thought. Colts. He was the same color as the filly, that rich coppery red. I had always loved dark bays, but the chestnuts were stealing my heart these days.
“Dennis is playing around here. He stays home from Saratoga and sends his farm trainer. He’s picking up claiming wins but not even entering the stakes races. This filly was with the culls on her way to auction. Clearly she has a problem. And now Mary Archer has her. Mary Archer can’t fix her if she has a problem. Mary Archer can’t fix anything unless it’s with a whip and a cut in feed. Even money she can’t figure this one out and it’ll be out the door in no time.”
I threw a clump of dirt towards Personal Best. It landed at his feet and he arched his neck to look down at it, snorted loudly. “She doesn’t have any brakes,” I guessed. “No real training.”
“Ah.”
“Her rider can’t hold her. She wasn’t even doing a work this morning … I asked the clocker, because I wanted her name. He said she’s done that every day for a week. I guess she won’t just canter around the track. She got up a head of steam and ran like crazy the whole way around.”
“She won’t hold up,” Alexander said. “She’s crazy and she’s going to kill herself. Maybe someone else while she’s at it. They were going to dump her because she was crazy, not because she was broke down. Then they changed their minds and decided to make a few bucks on her before she causes an accident or is ruled off the track.”
I thought that she had to be fixable. What a silly problem, no brakes. She just needed a sensitive trainer, a sensitive rider … “Maybe it’s the rider,” I suggested. “Same guy every day. Maybe he’s just clueless.”
“I think Archer would have noticed it if the rider were incompetent,” Alexander pointed out. “She’s been doing this for thirty years. She might not know how to fix horses but she sees a lot of riders.”
I threw another clod of dirt at Personal Best’s feet. I liked the big, scopey way he arched his neck over his stall webbing to look at the mystery dirt from outer space. He could have been a show-jumper, if I hadn’t been the one to breed him. In someone else’s hands, he’d still be in a pasture, unbroke, unstarted, just eating grass, just waiting for the day someone brought him in and taught him to jump six-foot fences. I didn’t think one lifestyle was better than the other. Just very different. “Personal Best is looking good,” I said, changing the subject. “He loves it here.”
“And you?”
“I love it here,” I said automatically. There was no point in being homesick. There was no one there. “It’s beautiful here.”
“And you love being a trainer, of course. You’re having a wonderful time.”
“Of course.” Why bother thinking about Mason Birdwell and his shiny car and his lack of respect for my pedigree knowledge? Why bother worrying about the leading trainer at the meet and his undue influence on my naive assistant trainer? Why bother worrying that I hadn’t entered a single horse in a single race? Why bother lusting over fillies on the road to ruin? “I’m going to make a go of it. I’m only just getting started.”
I still thought that might be true.
I better put a horse in a race, and stop worrying about other people’s horses.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Shopping for Babies
One after another, we had the horses led out; one after another, Birdwell discarded my choices and circled his own. He was only interested in the most fashionable sires, the most notable mares.
“That colt is going to go for too much,” I hissed as we walked away from a huge dark bay.
“Size, breeding, body … He has it all,” Birdwell said comfortably. “He’s exactly what I'm looking for in a horse.”
“You and every billionaire in the game. The sheikh is going to be all over him. So are Coolmore. And frankly, I think he’s too big. A yearling shouldn't be that big yet. He isn't going to stay sound and he's probably had enough steroids to pump up an elephant.”
Birdwell just shook his head. “And why should Coolmore go after him, if he's not going to hold up? They’re the top breeders in the world. You're telling me you know better than them?”
“They work with different odds. They have bottomless pockets. They can afford to have one fail, because they have ten to take its place. How many will you have?”
He didn’t answer, and I knew why: This colt, even if Birdwell managed to stay in the bidding to the bitter end, would cost everything and then some from his horse budget. Birdwell told me that he wanted to buy three or four horses. That was the minimum number I thought he needed to spread the risk around, if he wanted to be reasonably certain of having a racehorse next year. But he could only manage that number, working with this caliber and price range of Thoroughbreds, if he made sensible, canny decisions. These were going to be some of the highest priced horses in the country: that was the whole point of the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale. Princes and starlets and hedge fund managers descended upon the Spa to drink champagne in the buyer’s lounge and drop hundreds of millions of dollars on baby horses. Mason Birdwell already paid thousands of dollars a month to Alexander and me to keep the horses that he already owned; he might be fabulously wealthy, but he didn’t have unlimited wealth to throw around like the people who would be bidding against him.
That was what I was there for, then: to use my eye and my knowledge to spot greatness in otherwise ordinary horses. Everyone saw different things when they looked at the same horse. And when I looked at that big colt, I saw overtaxed ligaments and joints that would not mature until he was four or five. In a business where he would be asked for his greatest performances at two and three, I saw a horse that would not hold up.
Birdwell saw only size and, in a typically American businessman mindset, thought big meant better.
I followed him through the barns and to the cafe on the far side of the walking ring: a big covered oval, padded with rubber and lined with a bar at just the right height for leaning one’s elbows and propping one’s sales catalog while watching the horses waiting to go into the sales ring. Later tonight it would be lined with bidders and spectators, agents and trainers, movie stars and celebrity chefs, as they made their final decisions about which dancing, bouncing, neighing little baby they would make their bids on. This afternoon it was empty, save for a Hispanic man in a Fasig-Tipton polo shirt leaning on a broom, watching soccer on a monitor that would later broadcast from a closed-circuit feed inside the pavilion.
Birdwell went charging past the empty ring, straight into the outdoor cafe, and flung himself down at an empty table, rattling the metal chair on the pavement. A waitress came running over, not to chide him for helping himself to a seat, as I expected, but just to hand him a menu and take his drink order. He ordered a gin and tonic and looked over at me expectantly. I slid into the other chair and asked for an iced tea, which instantly made me feel young and gauche in this crowd of middle-aged day drinkers. The waitress cocked her head a little and then flew off to the bar, leaving Birdwell and I to sit in stony silence, each of us no doubt contemplating how to speak to the other without offending them mortally.
The drinks came, sandwiches were ordered, and Birdwell demolished his gin and tonic. He lifted a finger for another. He made an impressive dent in it. Then he spoke. “That colt is exactly what I had in mind,” he said, voice low to avoid eavesdroppers and press. Several racing journals were notorious for their “Overheard at Fasig-Tipton” sections. “I’m going to buy him.”
“And only him?”
“If that's what happens. Why should I buy three inferior horses when I can have one outstanding animal?”
I sighed. That was terrible logic. “Well, for starters, this is the select Fasig-Tipton sale. There are no inferior horses here. The company inspected all of these horses and their owners paid a big fee
just to have them cataloged. Second, buying three horses means you have a better shot at getting a runner. What if he gets hurt? What then? One horse stables are pretty boring when that one horse is taking six months off.”
Birdwell glared at me. “You’re just looking to fill stalls.” He shook his head and took a gulp of his drink. “I know you trainers,” he went on, words running together. “You’re paid by the horse, so of course you'd rather have me buy quantity over quality. Why not? A slow horse costs as much as a fast horse to keep, right?” He guffawed suddenly, as if he had me and my racket all figured out. “You want me to buy cheap horses so I’ll have to buy more later on. You’ll give me some song and dance and say if I want a runner I gotta go buy so-and-so from your buddy down the road … ”
He was getting louder and I looked around nervously. People weren’t turning their heads, exactly, but there were sidelong glances. This wasn’t done in this company. People didn’t shout about money. People didn’t even acknowledge money. If you weren’t in the top one percent, you really didn't have any business at this sale anyway.
“Mr. Birdwell,” I began, still rankling at the use of his surname, “I am here to help you reach your goals. You told Alexander you wanted three or four good yearlings. That you were buying to race, not to sell as a two-year-old. So we put our heads together and found candidates of that description. Horses that will run and hold up. Not fashionable pedigrees. And if you’re not going to sell them as two-year-olds, you shouldn’t be concerned with what sire is hot right now. So that’s all I’ve got. If you have a problem with that, say so.”
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 13