The valet shook at the saddle pommel to test the tightness and then nodded, satisfied. “Walk him out,” I told Gabe, and he shook out the lead shank and walked forward, clucking to Idle Hour as he went. The colt, suddenly back to earth, realized that we had saddled him without his permission and flattened his ears, leaning back on the shank and then leaping forward with a powerful thrust of hindquarters as the chain on his nose tightened. Gabe glanced at him from the corner of his eye but otherwise didn't acknowledge the mini-tantrum. It took a lot to bother Gabe.
There was a person beside me; I turned away from the dark colt and looked right and then down. Kelly green cap, green and white diamonds with green sleeves and two white hoops: Cotswold silks. Our silks. My silks. “Willy,” I said warmly. “Thank you for taking this ride for me.”
Willy shrugged and grinned, a gold tooth glinting. “I see him run in Florida. He got speed.”
I looked back at the colt's massive hind end. He had such wide, muscled hindquarters he was practically jet propelled. “He got speed, all right,” I agreed. “Early speed, late speed. This is only six. He hasn’t had to rate yet. Take him to the front if he wants and keep him there. Too short a race to learn any new tricks.”
The jockey nodded. “He got any problem?”
“My horses don't have problems,” I said levelly. “If they have problems they aren’t in races until they’re fixed.”
“I mean like gate, like whip, like dirt in he face.”
“Me too. Give him a good ride and he'll give you a good race. He likes his job.”
We walked alongside Idle Hour; the groom paused his stride, Willy gave me his knee, and I lifted him up into the saddle as he bounced off the ground. In a smooth motion, he had poked his feet into the stirrups and taken up the reins; a good thing, too, because Idle Hour gave a snort and plunged, sending up a shower of wood mulch with his hooves. The groom shouted and gave him a yank with the chain, and the colt settled into a delicate prance, flaring his nostrils and rolling his eyes.
Willy just laughed. “He feel real good, Alex. You got him goin’ good.”
“See you out there,” I replied, too tense to take a compliment. “Safe ride, safe home.”
Willy nodded and concentrated on putting the knot in his long rubber reins. And then they were walking in a line, all the racehorses together, along the white fence of the paddock, while the constant crowd that was Saratoga even on a weekday leaned against the railings and shouted to the jocks. And then they were crossing onto the track, and then they were handed off to the ponies, and then they were turning left and jogging in front of the grandstand.
I sighed.
Kerri came over from the tree, where I had told her to stand and observe and stay the hell out of the way while I got the horse saddled and underway. “Are we going to watch the race or what?”
I looked at her. She didn’t look drained or worried or stressed in the least bit. She didn’t look like she was going to throw up. She did not, in short, look at all like me. Lucky girl. I ran my hand around the collar of my sweaty blouse. “Do you want to?”
“Of course!”
“Okay. We’ll go down to the rail.”
There was an owner’s box, of course, somewhere upstairs in the clubhouse, but that was no place for me. A big name trainer could sit up in the boxes and let their assistant do the heavy work, coming up with the groom to catch the horse and hose him after the race, walk him back to the barn or, on a lucky day, to the spit box to have their urine tested, but Kerri was new at all this and I wasn’t ready to relinquish the reins to anyone just yet, even if she had known exactly what to do when Idle Hour came back from running his race. This was my first racehorse that I had saddled alone. This was my first racehorse. This was my first race.
Surely I could get through this without being sick.
I took Kerri to the clubhouse entrance and on to the rail. We were down past the wire, and if it was a close finish, we wouldn’t be able to see who won until the photo was posted on the big LED screens. But no matter. With any luck, it would be Idle Hour by daylight. With any luck.
He had already jogged by and was cantering along towards the backstretch, ignoring his pony and pricking his ears at the gate in the distance, growing ever closer with each stride. He was a good loader, he was a good stander, he was a good breaker. He was a good boy. He didn’t have blistering speed, he didn’t have brilliant stamina, but he was a good boy and he was fast enough, and I thought that with a nice trip and the aforementioned luck, he could get some graded stakes wins and set himself up as a Florida sire down the road.
I thought of having Idle Hour in the stallion barn, up next to Virtuous, our darling old boy who was grazing toward his retirement, and Cotswold Ramble, another middle-aged stallion with middle-list progeny. We didn’t have leading sires, to be sure, but we had good ones, consistent year after year, and Idle Hour would fit right in, with black-type on his pedigree, and perhaps he would do better than they had. Perhaps he would be the one we’d been waiting for.
I leaned against the rail and watched him galloping along on the massive, glowing LED in the center of the infield. I thought him unbearably lovely. Perhaps he would.
Idle Hour did everything right. Willy Impreso did everything right. But it wasn’t enough. They broke on top, they galloped along in second, tucked in close to the rail. A horse from the back of the pack swung wide at the top of the stretch and began to fly along the outside of the leading horses, jockey hammering away with the stick. He lugged in to the left under the punishing blows, bumping the horse running in fourth ever so slightly, and the jock switched hands and started striking him with the left hand, pushing him away from the other runners. The horse responded to the change with a leap forward, swapping leads as he did so, and he pushed past Idle Hour, still running solidly a neck away from the lead with his ears swinging, and past the front-running colt who was now laboring, ears pinned, tongue hanging out, and took the race by a red-rimmed nose.
The Photo sign went up, and everyone waited and watched the finish again and again on the screen, gasping in unison whenever the last strides were meted out in laborious slow motion, while the actual horses went galloping by in real time and cantered around the clubhouse turn, jockeys standing in the stirrups to pull them up.
I sighed. Kerri sighed. The finish didn’t matter. We’d gotten third. “First time off the layoff can be tough,” I told her, and she nodded. We knew. But you always want to win.
The photo sign turned off and there was a roar from the grandstand. The hard-ridden outside horse had won the race. I shook my head. Mary Archer, looking over at me triumphantly, was standing just outside of the winner’s circle, waiting for her winning horse to come back for his photo.
“Come on,” I said, ignoring the clear challenge from Archer. “Let’s go catch our horse.”
Idle Hour came back with bright eyes and pricked ears, barely puffing at all. Gabe was already there with the lead shank and halter, slipping it over the colt’s ears while he lipped at Gabe’s shirt. “Why, you brat,” I told the colt. “You didn’t run at all.”
Willy jumped off and started pulling at the girth. “That it,” he said, panting a little. “He wear me out, asking him for run. But he no run today. He just look around and say no.”
“Son of a bitch.” I stood back and looked at my horse. He looked back at me and his nostrils rippled a little in recognition. “I love you too, Idle. But I need a little more out of you before I can justify sending you to the stallion barn.”
Willy laughed. “You hear her, stud colt? She want to give you all the girls you can handle. A girl every day! But you got to run first!”
Idle snorted, and we all laughed like loons. It was third place, after all. It wasn’t so bad.
Then there was a dreadful sound behind us, and we turned away from our comedian horse to see the first place colt jogging up.
It was a spectacularly poor ride by anyone’s measure, all that whipping dow
n the lane, and the horse didn’t come back in beautiful shape at all. His sides were heaving and there was a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth where rough handling of the bit had torn the sensitive skin. We could hear his labored breathing deep within as he jogged past us. The jockey stood up in the stirrups and hauled against the reins to pull him up in front of Mary. The horse nearly sat on his hindquarters when he felt the pressure on his ripped mouth.
The jockey jumped off and Mary clapped him on the back. She didn’t say a word about the excessive whipping or the bleeding mouth. And she didn’t actually look at the horse. She did look back at the four of us, standing and staring at her. She smiled and turned back to the rider, arm on his shoulder as they walked towards the winner’s circle for their photo.
“Who is that jock, Willy?” I asked as we started the walk towards the spit barn. “I don’t recognize his name at all.”
Willy shouldered his tack. “That guy Bruno? He come down from Canada. Mary, she like him.” He shrugged under his burden. “She the only one,” he added.
Gabe, Kerri, and I began the walk next to Idle Hour, looking for the ruts of the ambulance to walk in. Racetrack clay is lovely for a horse to gallop on, exhausting for a human to walk through. Idle looked cheerful enough, swinging his head to look around at the other horses in the march, at the cars driving by out on Union, at the picnickers at the top of the stretch. It was the people in this party who were lost in their thoughts, none of them cheerful: why he hadn’t wanted to run, why Mary Archer had brought in that Canadian jockey to a meet with some of the best jocks in the world already in the jockey colony, why she had thought it was acceptable to run that horse past the point of exhaustion. I thought again of the sound his wind had been making, and sighed.
“What was that horse’s name?” Kerri asked suddenly. “Gotcha Bro?”
“Yeah,” I said. I watched Idle’s hooves sinking into the clay.
“What kind of name is that?”
“A racehorse name,” I said.
“He’s really messed up, right?”
“I’d say so.”
Idle walked on, eyes bright, ears pricked, as if he was still looking for the race.
***
I wanted that to be my last encounter with Mary Archer, I really did, but I just couldn’t catch a break. Saratoga was not on my side. And so the next morning, after Idle had been walked and his stall had been cleaned, and the slight filling in his left ankle had been observed, and poked at, and bandaged, and the worry had been left to stew in my mind along with a thousand other worries, I went to the track on Personal Best. I needed to climb up on a horse and feel powerful again. I had been on the ground for too long, seeing everything from human eye level for too long, and it was depressing down there. Let’s face it … there’s a reason we climb up on horses, and at its most basic level, it’s because we feel greater up there on those four legs than we ever could with two feet upon the earth.
Manny rode alongside me on Bonnie Chance, and the colt and filly were just thrilled to have partners for the walk over to the track. Having a friend alongside meant that they could spook at the same mailboxes, bolt at the same noises, snort at the same discarded plastic bags. It was an ideal situation for two young horses; less than ideal for two tired riders. But Manny sat deep in his saddle, legs dangling past his stirrups, and let Bonnie Chance do what she needed to do, let her act silly if that was what made her happy, and I did the same on Personal Best, kicking him forward whenever he got too balky, arching his neck to stare at the same rock he passed every day or a newspaper left in front of someone’s driveway to crinkle in an ominous, horse-eating manner.
“Idle Hour run good yesterday,” Manny said eventually. “Not big, but good.”
“He did,” I agreed. Personal Best snorted at a wet patch of ground and cavorted sideways; I stopped him with my right heel before he could bump into Bonnie Chance and set her off.
“He run better next time,” Manny said complacently. “He just want to look around. Smart horse.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. We take him out to jog tomorrow, you see, he be a different horse. He down to business tomorrow. He forgot what he was supposed to be doing.”
Manny had been galloping horses for twenty years. He ought to know. “Sounds good, Manny. If the filling’s gone, you can take him out.”
We came to Nelson and the Saratoga crossing guard stopped traffic to let us cross. Personal Best did it sideways, snorting at the cars waiting to continue on their way. A girl stuck her phone out of her car window and took a picture of us.
“They saying Gotcha Bro come out of that race bad,” Manny said, low, as we rode back onto the gravel path to the track. “Don’t ride that boy from Canada.”
“I won’t,” I said fervently. “No fear of that. I’m riding back Willy.”
“Willy’s a good guy. You got me, you got Kerri, you got Willy, you got Gabe. That’s all you need, Alex.”
I looked over at Manny and our eyes met. He knew how low I was feeling about this meet. He heard the gossips over here on the backside talking about how I wasn’t content to be a big trainer’s wife, how I had to come up here with my nose in the air and play at training like it was a game, how I had bought my way into the backside of the most prestigious racing meet in the country, how I was going to fail and go back to Florida with my tail between my legs, put on my apron and cook Alexander dinner.
“We gonna prove them wrong, Alex,” he said quietly. “Now, you wanna gallop with me?”
I nodded, thankful. That was exactly what I wanted. We turned our horses onto the track and jogged towards the wire, as the orange sun began to burn through the Saratoga mist.
***
“Look over there!”
“What? What?”
We had galloped a long, easy two miles, and had just backed the horses off, noses over the inside rail so that we weren’t riding them straight off the track after their work-out. You had to be quick doing something like this on the busy Saratoga main track, looking for a break in traffic, jogging to the rail, and then turning the horse away again after just a brief motionless pause, but rituals were important enough to keeping the horses happy that it was worth the trouble. And now I was in danger of getting run into by an oncoming cavalry charge of working horses. Manny clucked to Bonnie Chance and turned her, and Personal Best followed right after. I was still so distracted that I scarcely noticed we were jogging across the track to the gap.
Manny pulled up again at the gap; Bonnie Chance disagreed with him, sidling around to try to get to the gap, and he corrected her with a sharp tug at the bit. She flung her head and subsided. “Why you stop out there? What?”
“That filly … look over there, in Mary Archer’s saddle blanket.”
And there she was: my chestnut filly, galloping like a madwoman down the center of the track. Her jockey was standing upright, leaning back on the reins in a bid to rate her, but she merely used his weight against him, counterbalancing so that she could run faster.
“He letting her run away with him,” Manny snorted. “No good.”
“He rides her every day,” I told him. “And this is what it looks like.”
“She a fast filly,” Manny said. “But maybe she crazy.”
“I want her.”
He looked at me as the filly pelted around the far turn and headed towards the stretch. “You gonna make me ride that crazy filly?”
I grinned. “You could ride her, Manny. Don’t be shy.”
He shook his head. “Maybe I don’t want to.” He paused. “And she maybe no good. Archer let her run herself down.”
I knew what he meant. Gotcha Bro, running himself unsound in the stretch yesterday. This filly, running flat-out morning after morning. Maybe it wasn’t a problem for Mary. Maybe it was a training strategy. Maybe it was a tactic to keep cheap horses moving through Dennis’s barn and on to someone else’s. I didn’t know. But I hated to think of Archer’s rough hands br
eaking down that beautiful filly. There was just something about her.
I wanted her.
“Tell me when you hear she’ll be entered,” I told Manny. “Keep an ear to the ground.” I chirruped to Personal Best and we went through the gap. The chestnut colt took exception to a leaf on the ground and jumped six feet to the left. I sighed. “We already know we can handle crazy just fine.”
***
Manny called me around noon.
“That filly in on Friday. Third race. She name Luna Park.”
“That’s an odd name.”
“Don’t know. They all got weird names.”
I laughed. He was right. “Thanks for finding out for me. You know the conditions?”
“Naw, I just hear from Tommy Hernandez. He work in Mary’s barn. Say the filly always hot. Always looking for trouble. Big eyes.”
She sounded like a little nightmare. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was something special. That nagging idea of destiny. “He say if she’s sound?”
“Naw. He say she fine. Just crazy. You really want her?”
“I do. Don’t say anything.” I started flipping through my condition book.
“I won’t. But Tommy, he might remember I asked.”
“That’s okay. We can deal with that. Thanks, Manny.”
“De nada.”
I found Friday’s page and studied it. The third was a six furlong sprint for fillies three years old and up, non-winners of two. And it was an allowance, not a claimer.
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 15