Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Kerri guffawed. “They should! He’s not that bad, though. I doubt he’s the worst in the ring, anyway.”

  “He’s not doing great,” I admitted.

  We had suddenly regressed in our training. Tiger had been behaving so nicely about taking the reins and stretching long and low, then he had suddenly decided it was an opportunity to buck and bolt. This new game had been going on for about four days, which was enough to make me feel fairly despondent about life. This afternoon he’d nearly unseated me, and I’d heard a tinkle of laughter from the barn—a few boarders had arrived early and seen the show. Add in that Alexander was running Luna in a race in about an hour’s time, and I wasn’t having the best day. “I don’t know how to fix this one. Every time I give him some space at the trot or canter, he gets nasty with me. Puts his head down and hops, then takes off.”

  “Does he look mad? Does he pin his ears?”

  “Nope. Looks like he’s having fun doing it.”

  Kerri threw the scoop back into the old freezer where we kept the sweet feed. “Is he bored again?”

  “Crap. Maybe.” Tiger’s boredom problem was becoming an issue. “Now what? We couldn’t even pull off a Training Level dressage test, and he’s already bored and looking for trouble?”

  “Are you going to put electrolytes in those feed buckets, or are you waiting for a higher power to do it for you?”

  “Here, sorry.” I handed off the tub of electrolytes and unscrewed the lid of another vitamin jar. “I’m just distracted. Luna running in an hour, Tiger showing in six weeks and he’s barely rideable—”

  “Jump him.”

  “Sorry?”

  Kerri was sprinkling neon-colored salts over the sweet feed. Then, she took a jug of molasses and gave each helping a few glugs to cover it up. The mares were a picky bunch. “Just start jumping him. What’s the worst that can happen? Plenty of horses go their entire jumping careers without knowing a lick of dressage.”

  “Not my horses.” I threw the vitamin powder into each dark pool of molasses. What was she thinking, telling me to skip dressage? Without learning how to carry himself and round his back, riding Tiger would be just like riding a sawhorse—a plank of rigid wood perambulating around on four uncoordinated legs. He’d have his neck straight out and his nose pointed forward like a lesson horse. How was I supposed to show that off to a crowd of skeptics? “I’ve never skipped dressage. Even the long yearlings get a little dressage schooling before they go the track. Obviously I’m in the minority there, because he clearly has no idea.”

  Kerri put the electrolytes away and started cracking carrots in half, tossing them into the feed buckets. “I’m not saying you don’t do it at all, I’m just saying that riding a flawless dressage test and scoring 78.2% is not the prerequisite for pointing him at a cross-rail and letting him fall over it a few times.”

  I started gathering up the feed buckets. “We skip his lay-off. We skip his dressage. You want me to start jumping a horse who was on the racetrack two months ago. Seriously?”

  “Ever heard of a steeplechaser?”

  I shook my head and carried my stack of buckets into the barn aisle, where I was greeted with a chorus of hungry broodmares. Morning, noon, and night, broodmares wanted to eat. Nothing else mattered. They were a simple bunch, and I loved them for it. Everything in horses seemed so straightforward… until you started riding them.

  The mares were thrilled, as usual, to see their dinners parading out of the feed room. We went down the aisle with our loads of heavy buckets, sliding into stalls through barely-opened doors, pushing away the muzzles of starving mares and curious foals, and hung the buckets in their corners. The job was done in just a few minutes, since the barn was half-empty this spring.

  Only one mare left to foal, and it was only mid-March—I could scarcely believe it. After all the brutal foaling seasons I had experienced, this was the first one that had seemed actually manageable. The downsizing we had done last year had resulted in a lot more sleep and lot less backbreaking work this spring. Come April, we’d have our last baby, and while the rest of Ocala was still rushing around bleary-eyed with foalings, we’d just be wrapping up our foal checks and our breed-backs.

  The training barn was half-empty, too, with the client horses gone to the sales. We’d had a few buyers send us two-year-olds to prep for racing this summer, but other than that, things were quiet. If I’d known how, I’d have done a little relaxing.

  Well, the light workload gave me plenty of time to worry about Tiger, anyway.

  Among other things. Kevin Wallace, for example. Down in Hallandale, Alexander was still courting Wallace, hoping he would retire March Hare to stand stud at Cotswold. The horse was still at Gulfstream, where Wallace was charmingly optimistic that they’d sort out his problematic feet and get him through the summer to race in the Breeders’ Cup championships this fall.

  I privately doubted it would work out. The horse had rotten feet, and I didn’t think they could keep him sound. Not that I wanted March Hare retiring and coming here this season, or any season. I didn’t want Kevin Wallace, or anyone associated with any sort of dumped horse scandal, anywhere near Cotswold. Certainly not now, when the heat was starting to cool off. People had short memories, and they were always looking for new scandals. Since the Market Affair connection to me had no legs, it was still solely in the Facebook pages and badly-written blogs of the animal-rights activists.

  And since Market Affair was rehabbing nicely and we’d sent his adopters a check to cover some of his vet bills, the story was becoming a tale of redemption and big-hearted humans instead. If no one else but me ever had to suffer for Market Affair’s abandonment—his last trainer of record had bills of sale that showed he and the other Everglades horses had been sold to a certain Roberto L. Dominguez of Miami, and Roberto L. Dominguez had recently relocated to his home island of Puerto Rico for personal reasons—well, if he got away with it, that wasn’t fair, but as long as it ended and I could get back to my life and my career, I’d take it.

  Even if everything cleared up and the scandal disappeared, I still thought asking Kevin Wallace to be a business partner was just begging the activists to keep after me. Couldn’t we just let this die a natural death, without giving them fresh fodder to chew and turn into their caustic cud?

  Besides, I thought, looking down the aisle to the empty stalls at the far end, I wasn’t in a big hurry to bring Cotswold back up to full capacity. I could get used to a two-month foaling season. I could get used to sending out four sets in the morning and being done by nine o’clock. As long as we had quality horses, wasn’t less more?

  With hours like this, I’d always have time to ride Tiger, assuming I managed to figure out his latest training issue. Even with the drama of the boarding stable, even with trying to duck Jean and her particularly malicious brand of insanity, I was enjoying riding Tiger for more than a few minutes on the training track. I was beginning to feel a closeness to him beyond what we’d felt galloping together; the way his body would mold to my seat when he lifted his back and curved his neck. It was becoming a familiar sensation, one that I couldn’t wait to feel every day, anticipation speeding my fingers as I tacked him up.

  Or so it had been, before this week’s bucking episodes had replaced those lovely stretching sessions. I leaned against the wall at the end of the barn aisle, listening to the rattling buckets behind me, and gazed out over the pastures. Tiger, I thought. Tiger, Tiger. What I needed, I realized, was a second opinion.

  “You want to ride Tiger?” I asked Kerri, who was staring into the distance herself, doing a little deep thinking of her own.

  “Huh what?” Kerri blinked and looked at me. “Ride Tiger? When?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. I want to see him. I’m always on his back… maybe I can get a better idea of his progress and what he needs if I can watch him being ridden.” It was the same concept as sitting on the pony watching the racehorses train. “Want to give it a shot? You never get to ride.
”

  Kerri considered the idea, then nodded. “Sure. But if I feel like he wants to jump, can I jump him?”

  “I guess.” Maybe if Kerri jumped him, it wouldn’t be me rushing to do the fun stuff instead of the hard stuff. Maybe that made it an official training session, with me on the ground, watching the horse to see his potential. Sure, I could think of it like that. “Tomorrow, two o’clock. Bring your half-chaps in the morning!”

  I was glad of Kerri’s company the next afternoon, sitting next to me as we drove over to Roundtree. There had been bad news from south Florida last night—Luna had been a devil in the paddock, a demon in the starting gate, and a dud on the racetrack. Alexander was starting to think it was time to bring her home. “She can be your next show horse,” he said jokingly, and I hung up on him.

  I called him back a few minutes later, and we argued back and forth about what Luna needed—more training from home, I said; more retirement or claiming races, Alexander said—and finally I was so riled up that I told him I was perfectly fine with retraining every single one of our failed horses, as long as he was the one who had failed them, and then he hung up on me… basically it was a bad evening. Things did not go well.

  Luckily, we did manage to apologize to one another before midnight and grab a few hours of sleep—he called me, knowing it was his turn as he’d hung up last. I woke up at five o’clock feeling hungover from all the arguing, and the feeling had hung around, low in my stomach, all day long.

  Kerri, sensitive as always to my bad moods, had drawn back from her usual jokes and was sitting quietly in the passenger seat of the truck, watching the pastures flash by. So quietly, in fact, that I thought she might be a bit nervous. “When’s the last time you rode a horse?”

  “Like, properly ride? With a purpose?”

  “Yeah. Not on one of the broodmares in the pasture.” Alexander and I had both seen her climb onto open mares a few different times, although she rarely did anything more than sit on them bareback while they grazed.

  “Oh… a year or two.”

  “What? Why so long?” Kerri was around horses literally all the time. How could she just not ride?

  Kerri shrugged. “I prefer taking care of horses to riding them, I guess.”

  “Did something happen?” I persisted. A bad accident, a nasty injury, the loss of a horse—lots of emotional reasons for someone to stop riding came to mind, and I didn’t want to stir anything up by putting her on Tiger unless she was absolutely ready.

  “Not really. There’s just a lot of variables. You trust a horse, he does something stupid, you start thinking, ‘Man, I could actually die without any warning at all,’ and I decided it wasn’t a thing I wanted to do. I just prefer it on the ground.”

  I considered this as we turned off the road and went down the oak-shadowed barn lane. “It sounds like you had your mortality wake-up call a lot earlier than most people. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had mine yet.”

  Kerri laughed. “I’m positive you haven’t had yours yet. And I bet you never will.”

  She was probably right, considering the falls that I’d taken and the fact that I kept putting my boot in the stirrup every day anyway. “Well, Tiger isn’t dangerous. He’s just an asshole.”

  “I know,” Kerri said. “He’s always been that way. And that’s why we love him.”

  The barn was blissfully empty, dark despite the sun’s attempt to shine through the ceiling panels, and when I flipped on the aisle lights there was a general rumble of nickers from dozing horses. They mainly stayed in during the day and went out at night, even in winter when the schedule was flipped at most barns, because Jean liked to keep their shimmering coats from being sunburned. Each stall’s blanket bar had an impressive pile of thermal gear slung over it, made even messier today by the balmy spring-like weather. It was nearly eighty degrees, and the sun’s rays had real heat in them.

  I glanced into Tiger’s stall. He was in the patch of sunlight streaming in his stall window, eyes half-closed. “Hey man,” I called, and he flicked an ear in my direction. “That’s all I’m getting?”

  Tiger shifted his weight from one hind leg to the other and sighed.

  “Big and tough, I see,” Kerri said. “Ready to wake up and jump some fences like a real horse?”

  Tiger turned and looked at her, blinking as he started to wake up, and Kerri burst into laughter. “What did I tell you?” she asked, elbowing me in the ribs. “Let’s grab his tack and get this party started. I’m ready to teach this monster what fun is.”

  Whatever trepidation she might have had about riding again seemed to be gone. Okay then. I led her to the tack room and we got busy.

  Kerri rode with an easy grace that instantly made me jealous. She sat a little too forward, true, but if her posture was not perfect, her balance certainly was. Her hands floated elegantly above Tiger’s withers, dropping to either side of his shoulders when she wanted him to stretch into the bit. Her thighs hugged the saddle, her knees rested against the padding, her toes pointed forward, and no part of her calf touched Tiger’s side unless she wanted it to.

  They trotted around the jumping arena harmoniously, weaving in and out of jumps while she encouraged Tiger to stretch. His head would come up; her hands would drop; his head would follow. For a few strides he would move with an elongated, reaching stride, his nose tipping towards the earth, reaching down as if searching for a blade of grass to pluck while he was in motion, before he’d lose the strength he needed to hold the position and his head came up again. It was the dance of the green dressage horse, and Kerri had clearly danced it before.

  It was after they had done a little canter work that the rot started in. By now Tiger had a sheen of sweat on his neck, and Kerri didn’t have gloves. I could see the wet reins start to slip in her fingers, and when Tiger tugged the reins from her instead of gracefully stretching his neck, she ended up with nothing but the buckle in her hands. Tiger hunched his back and I winced—here came the buck, and she didn’t have any hold on his mouth to stop it from coming.

  Kerri was quicker than I had given her credit for. With her heels shoved home in the stirrup and well ahead of her body, she flung her hands out to either side, the reins zipping through her fingers until they were taut again. Then, she hauled Tiger hard to the left, not bothering to be careful with his mouth this time. Tiger grunted with displeasure, but he went where she commanded, his head coming up, and then his eyes locked on the target she had placed him in front of.

  Just a half-dozen strides away, a tiny cross rail was waiting. His ears pricked and his stride became forward and eager again. Meanwhile, Kerri quietly readjusted her reins to the proper length. She posted easily, keeping him as balanced and even as she could, and didn’t look a bit worried when Tiger darted into a canter just before the fence, and scrambled over the two little poles with all the grace of a baby learning to walk.

  He stumbled and nearly fell flat on his face on the other side, but Kerri was standing in the stirrups, independent of all his clumsiness, and let him figure out his balance without jabbing him in the mouth or falling on his neck.

  She pulled him up to a walk and rode him over to the fence where I was standing.

  “You’ve got some seat, missie,” I called as she neared. “Who trained you, George Morris?”

  Kerri just grinned. It wasn’t until she pulled up along the fence that I saw how tired she was. She was red in the face and panting. “I’m out of shape,” she gasped. “I don’t think I can do anything else with him. But it’s a good stopping place anyway. He tried to be bad, he jumped a fence, he liked it. End of day.”

  She was right—Tiger was bright-eyed and happy despite his sweat-damp coat and flaring nostrils. He side-stepped and snorted, clearly ready to go give that cross-rail another try. I could see Kerri didn’t have it in her, though. If he did anything naughty around the fence, she’d have to just keep schooling him—and riding that well after taking a year-long break meant that her muscles had to be
screaming. “Sounds good,” I agreed. “Let’s take him in.”

  I went over to the in-gate and swung it open so that Kerri didn’t have to lean down from the saddle to do it—always a struggle with Tiger, who wasn’t exactly understanding about side-passing. A trail horse, he was not. We started up the slope to the barn together, my hand brushing against Tiger’s warm neck, and I didn’t even notice that Jean had showed up until we reached the barn entrance and saw her there, leaning against the wall, looking like a particularly beautiful and insane thunder-cloud.

  I tugged Tiger’s reins as soon as Kerri had vaulted out of the saddle, trying to drag the horse into the barn and past Jean before she could say anything. I didn’t know what difference that would make—it wasn’t as if she couldn’t follow us down the aisle, shout at us, do whatever it was she was planning if we were in motion, walking away from her. I had an instinct to get away from her that I just couldn’t ignore. Jean had proven dangerous once before, when she’d fired the shotgun while we were riding. Being alone on the farm with her, even with Kerri there as a witness, wasn’t exactly my first choice.

  Sure enough, she came marching right after us. Tiger dragged his hooves along the concrete aisle, making a scraping sound that I’d always found irritating, but that was quickly drowned out by Jean’s querulous voice, sounding more southern than usual. “What the hell do you think you’re doing out there? These are Elsie’s fences, and I need them for my training. I can’t have you out there wrecking our property because you want to play jumper with your reject racehorse. Now I’m going to march out there and inspect those jump poles, and if there’s so much as a scratch in the paint from his deformed hooves, I’m going to tell Elsie to write up a bill and send it to you. You can add it to your last month’s board, because if that fence is damaged you are going to have to find someplace else to keep that Godawful piece of crap horse—”