Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “I don’t know why you’d even say something like that,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s like you’re new to technology, grandpa.” Johnny laughed and shoved up against me playfully, which was to say, a little too hard, and I fell against the tack room wall and sprawled across the trash cans holding the feed. I squealed, laughing, and came back at him, pushing back with both my arms, and then as he fell against the doorframe, nearly spilling into the shedrow, he caught me in his arms and we were looking at one another, breath coming faster, eyes darkening, and I pulled away just as he dipped his mouth.

  I felt his lips graze my hair and then his arms loosening, and then I was standing alone in the tack room and he was walking down the shedrow; he was pausing at Idle Hour’s stall, he was leaning up against the colt’s webbing and looking in at him, just reflecting, I supposed. I wondered if he regretted his move as much as I did. I wondered if I’d been leading him on when I thought we were just friends. I wondered if life could get much more complicated here at the Spa.

  I thought about calling out to him, but my tongue seemed too large in my mouth, and I couldn’t get it to wrap around the soft “j” of his name. I might have been able to handle an “s” sound, something smooth and sinuous that didn’t require any real work, just a breathing out, as natural as exhalation. But I couldn’t say Johnny, and so I left him to Idle Hour, and retreated back into the tack room. I picked up my sponge and looked at the soft leather of the racing bridle, the dust motes dancing in the sunlight pouring in from the high window, part and parcel of this unending summer of sunlight and sorrow.

  And then I just went back to scrubbing. Because no matter what happened, emotions didn’t matter as much as the pure, simple fact that I needed a clean bridle for the race.

  It was at the moment, I suppose, that I fully became a horse trainer.

  ***

  Manny came over to help run Idle Hour. He’d been a huge help with Kerri gone; between him and Gabe, we were just managing to keep our heads above water with training. He found me a new hot-walker, a stout little Mexican woman who walked horses silently and went home by nine-thirty, leaving Gabe and I alone to finish the shedrow. On the other side of the barn, Roddy Ellis was oddly absent, and I couldn’t very well ask any of his grooms where he was. Kerri was gone, her bedroom empty, her suitcase missing, her keys on the living room table. I felt like I’d lost someone’s child on a field trip.

  Johnny had gone home early the night before, in a funk from what had and hadn’t passed between us, and I looked around the paddock now, hoping that he’d come to visit and cheer us on, but his familiar beard was nowhere to be seen. We weren’t the sort of people who called each other all the time, or made plans ahead of time. He generally knew where I was going to be and if he wanted to hang out with me, he showed up in the right place at the right time. He certainly knew I had Idle Hour in the sixth race today, of course. If he wanted to see me, he’d come and see me.

  And apparently he didn’t.

  I boosted Willy into the saddle as I had so many times this summer; he’d practically become my stable rider. I liked his light hands and his spare touch with the whip. I liked his honest smile. I liked his win percentage, too. “Bring him home safe, Willy,” I said, as usual. There was no point in extolling him to some sort of world champion ride; Willy knew his job was to win, same as Idle Hour did. But if they couldn’t win, they couldn’t. I just wanted a sound, happy horse in his stall tonight.

  Manny led the pair down the path, past the hordes of spectators behind the white board fencing, and passed him off to the lead ponies at the track gate. I waited for him and we filed, solemn and quiet, into the clubhouse area to lean on the rail and watch, as always.

  “Idle feel good today,” Manny observed. The post parade was a little disjointed and wild; several horses, including Idle Hour, were putting on quite a show. Willy sat chilly, feet out of the stirrups and legs forward, and let the pony rider handle the colt’s antics. Idle Hour shook his head furiously at the tight rein and pinned his head, snapping teeth dangerously close to the pony’s neck.

  “That’s not like him.” I leaned forward, pressing my hands into the chain link fence that separated us from the white rail of the track. Manny was quiet. What had looked like mere high spirits was rapidly disintegrating into alarmingly bad behavior. And bad behavior was often rooted in pain or discomfort. Idle Hour loved to run his race. If he didn’t want to go to post, there was a reason.

  I jumped up, eyes roving over the little cluster of officials near the winner’s circle. The paddock judge, her jaw tight and clipboard in hand, was watching Idle Hour pulling backwards, trying to stop the pony from dragging him down the track. She was seeing what I was seeing. “Renee!” I shouted, not caring who saw me and wondered. “Renee! Scratch him!”

  Renee was too far away to hear my words; I guessed she thought it was a heckler, because she only glanced absently over her shoulder before she turned back towards the track. Now past the wire and almost ready to turn back and canter towards the opening in the fence that led to the turf course, Idle Hour was starting to leap and plunge, his ears flattened. Even at the distance, I could hear him grunt as he pulled at the line the pony rider had on the bit. Something was going horribly wrong. This wasn’t my happy racehorse. This was a horse with a problem.

  I got to Renee and plucked at her sleeve. I only knew her as a nodding acquaintance, from running horses and saying hello in passing. But she knew exactly who I was; didn’t everyone? Alexander’s wife, the one who fancied herself a horse trainer. She lifted her eyebrows. “What’s going on with your horse, Alex?”

  “Scratch him,” I gasped. “Tell the gate crew.”

  She tightened her jaw. “Wish you’d done this earlier.”

  “He was fine earlier. He was a saint in the paddock!” I was dumbfounded by her attitude. “This didn’t start until he got onto the track. You were there.”

  Renee nodded unwillingly. I knew what she was thinking: gate scratches were always a mess. It messed up the odds, it was bad for horseplayers, and horseplayers paid the salaries. But they hated accidents and breakdowns more. They had to. Death and dismemberment was terrible for public relations. She lifted the radio and muttered a few terse words to the starter, waiting at the starting gate with his crew. I saw the starter nod, heard the crackle of static that was his response.

  The horses were approaching the gate; Idle Hour still pulling on the leading rein like a balking pony. I saw Willy swing his whip near the colt’s head, a bid to threaten him without actually hitting him. The colt leaned in towards the pony to escape the expected blow, and then things went from bad to worse. How did he get his legs entangled in the leading rein? Did he trip over the pony’s forelegs as he ducked away from the whip? Did he try to rear and get a leg over? I was too far away to see; the hedge was in my way and his lower parts were blocked from view. I saw the rein, though, as Idle Hour went up, foreleg trapped in the loop of leather, the pony rider losing the strap, the pony ducking away from Idle Hour’s flailing legs, Willy jumping clear, or falling gracefully, whatever it was, and then the horse had disappeared behind the hedge, fallen to the ground, and I slipped past Renee, ducked under the railing, and went running across the deep, unforgiving racetrack towards my horse.

  ***

  “Hey.”

  I looked up. I’d been studying the cheap laminate of my desk, all the rings from forgotten Coke cans and spilled bottles of liniment and vitamin supplements, drawings of horses from former tenants, a few scratched-in swear words that must have come from trainers who were having exactly the sort of evening I was. I wasn’t overly surprised to see Kerri standing in the doorway. Somehow, I’d expected she’d come back tonight. I didn’t know if it was to say “I told you so,” or “I’m sorry,” but either way, I thought I would just like to make peace with her and have her as a partner in the barn again. I was exhausted and alone, and there didn’t seem to be any fights worth the trouble of fighting them anymore.r />
  “Hey,” I said back. “Come in.”

  She came in, pushing a few loose strands of dark hair behind her ear. She hadn’t changed; why should she have, when she’d only been gone a few weeks? Her hair still in a pony tail that was tidier than mine, her skin still pale, her face still childish. She could put on a hard hat and a navy blue jacket and canter around a children’s hunter course without looking out of place. It would take more than a summer at Saratoga to harden her into a backside horsewoman.

  I felt like I had been transformed, though. There was no one harder than me.

  She waited, and I waited, and she gave in first, as I knew she would.

  “I’m so sorry about … everything that happened,” she murmured, tongue tripping on words as if they did not come to her mind easily. Perhaps she didn’t feel like she had anything to apologize for. Perhaps she thought I should apologize.

  Let her go back to Roddy Ellis if that was how she felt. I had managed this far. And now, with only four horses in training, with only two weeks left in the meet, two weeks until I packed all this up and went home, not quite triumphant but certainly not with my tail between my legs as everyone had hoped, not as a champion but certainly not without my share of purse money, I would manage the rest with aplomb. Without her, without Johnny, without Alexander, without anyone but myself.

  And that was a victory in and of itself, I thought. A lonely victory to be sure, but it was damned fine to know that I could stand up on my own if I had to.

  But now, to be nice to Kerri, who had apologized, however insincerely. “Thank you,” I said magnanimously, feeling like a queen who might issue an execution order at any moment. “What are you planning on doing now?”

  “Planning on doing?” Kerri’s voice was small. She’d been planning on being reinstated, I’d bet the farm on it.

  “Yes. Did you break up with Roddy?”

  She sighed. “I did. Last night. He’s—I don’t know, he left while we were in Delaware. I just got back.”

  I thought about Kerri abandoned in Delaware. “How did you get here?”

  “Bus,” she said, with a wince that told me everything I needed to know about what a long ride that was. “And I walked here from the casino bus stop.”

  “That must have been awful.” I decided a little sympathy wouldn’t be the end of the world. “Want a Coke? There’s some in the fridge. And there’s stronger stuff at home.”

  “Home?” Kerri brightened a little.

  “If you’re back, you’re welcome home,” I told her. And her smile was enough to cut through my own funk and make me smile in return.

  ***

  We went out and looked at Idle Hour. She admired my wrapping job. “It’s so even … this could be a picture in a veterinary manual.”

  “Maybe it will be,” I said drily. “Dr. Palmer took enough photos of it.”

  “Will he run again?” She ran her hands down his neck. Idle Hour, who was certain that being on half-rations was the same thing as deliberate starvation, nibbled at the hair coming loose from her pony tail.

  “Probably. Maybe. I hope. But it’s going to be a while.”

  She sighed, and I sighed, and Idle Hour sighed. His name was seeming very apropos at the moment. One should be so careful when naming horses.

  “And Personal Best?” she asked, looking down at my other idle racehorse, who was leaning over his webbing and reaching towards her with all his equine want stamped upon his desirous face.

  “Kidney infection. God only knows how he picked it up. I could have sent him to Florida but I was hoping he’d come around before the end of the meet.” I sighed. “That won’t be happening, though. I’ll just ship him home with everyone else.”

  Kerri shook her head. “It’s been a tough meet. At least Bonnie Chance did well.”

  “You saw her?”

  “On simulcast. Everyone shouted when she put her nose in front.”

  “She’s a gutsy mare.” We both admired the dark mare, who was digging with gusto into her hay net a few stalls down. “I think I’ll run her at Tampa this winter.”

  Kerri nodded. She didn’t ask about Miami. I liked that in Kerri; she didn’t have any real aspirations. She was just here because she loved the horses. She got lost a little in the game, sure, but she came back, and felt like herself again. Just horses. It was refreshing, this lack of ambition. “I’m glad you’re back,” I said quietly, surprising both of us. “It wasn’t the same without you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Traffic Trouble

  We took Luna Park to post on the second to last Friday in the meet.

  She was hyped up, like in all of her races before, and I had to work hard to swallow my fear that it was too late to get a solid race in for her before we went home. And it was no use if anyone told me that the important thing was to teach her to run normally, and sanely, in the afternoons as well as in the morning, and that she could still run in Florida — it wasn’t as if she was going to be barred from racing if she couldn’t hit the board in Sara-frickin-toga, for God’s sake! — but there was a part of me that couldn’t be touched and refused to be lucid. I had seen this filly and she had spoken to me. I had wanted this filly and I had moved mountains to get her. I had taken a broken filly and fixed her when no one else could. I wanted her to be my legacy of this season at Saratoga, of my first attempt at being a trainer on my own, as my success out of all these failures, as my talisman in a future of racing.

  I had Manny at her right, I was on her left. The day was stifling hot. The Weather Channel promised it would be the last hot day before the summer broke at last and gave in to cooler Canadian air. That was scant comfort to us, sweating in the paddock, wishing the trees were more dense, that they hadn’t already started losing their leaves, yellow and brown instead of red and orange, due to the relentless drought. No one wanted to move quickly but the horses; they couldn’t be stopped. They wanted to charge forward, leap upward, flip backwards, do anything but stand still. The humans wanted to fan themselves, loosen their ties, collapse into hammocks and drink iced tea. But horse racing was about horses. The horses would win this fight.

  Willy had never ridden her before. We had tried to get him to work her during her last breeze and he hadn’t been able to make it. I’d hoisted Manny onto her back, just to see if her lessons had been learned well enough that someone else could ride her and reasonably ask her rate. She had rated well, we had all rejoiced. But a work was a not a race.

  I handed her off to Manny so that I could talk to Willy before he mounted, coiling the spare leather shank around and around my hand to try to deal with my excess energy. The chain clinked and felt cool against my hot skin.

  “She used to run away, right?” Willy asked, standing in the center of the tiny circle Manny was walking her in. “But she don’t do that no more?”

  “She don’t … she doesn’t,” I confirmed. Sometimes I found myself slipping into a Spanish accent, swapping tenses and conjugations without meaning to. It was a sort of horse trainer’s Spanglish. “She doesn’t run away. But this is her first race since we broke the habit. You have to be ready to rate her. Don’t let her anywhere near the front or she’ll give in to temptation and take off.”

  Willy laughed. He was awfully confident. It had been a good meet and he’d escaped injury time after time, sporting just a few bruises and a cracked rib now and then, even rolling out from under Idle Hour on that drought-hardened ground with an acrobat’s agility just last week. I bit my lip; his cheer only made me more nervous. He was too excited. He had too much energy. She would feed off that and channel it as she wished. She would use it against him.

  “Take it easy with her, Willy, really,” I warned, but from his grin and nod I knew it was falling on deaf ears. I realized that Willy had been far too successful this season, and the hungry young jockey I’d met in July was not the same man standing before me, tapping his whip on his boot. I had a wild urge to snatch the whip from him, and I turned away, lo
oking back at Luna. She paraded around, nodding her head and sending flecks of foam into the air, decorating her red chest with white spots like an Appaloosa’s coat. Next to me, Kerri stood toying with the silver wash bucket, spinning around the body sponge inside, gazing at it with a strange tranquility. We were all insane today, I thought. Even Kerri had let the pressure get to her. We needed someone to steady us. I looked at Manny, implacable and cool, but even he was having trouble with the filly, resisting the urge to give her a good shank to stop her little half-bolts and attempts to wheel, half jogging at times in order to accommodate her nervous jigging, doing everything he could to keep her content and happy.

  Someone behind her lifted an arm. I squinted at the figure walking towards us.

  It was Johnny.

  He was a study in contrasts: looking trim and sweaty and miserable and dapper as all hell in his checked suit, with his beard as scraggly as a lumberjack’s and his neatly parked fedora perched atop his dark brown hair.

  But he looked calm. And happy.

  And that was exactly what we needed.

  “Johnny,” I breathed when he had reached us. “I’m so happy you came.”

  He pulled me aside, nodding to everyone else with a cheerful grin as he did so. When we were alone — that is, as alone as we could be in a tree-studded paddock filled with the rich and famous, with cameras sweeping the area looking for intrigue as much as for fine horses to single out in the betting, with spectators leaning on white fences on three sides — he leaned close and spoke in a low tone. “Are you all right, Alex? You look pale, and it’s like, three hundred degrees. You going to faint?”

  “Is it that bad?” I put my hand to my cheek. My skin was clammy and cool. “I’m probably going to lie down with heat stroke in a moment. That will be embarrassing. I’m from Florida.”