The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Although, Jenny reflected, she had never been to Van Cortlandt Park, and she didn’t know what went on up there. To her, the park was nothing more than a massive blob of green at the top of the subway map, in a borough where she had never been. Jenny let the words swim on the page before her while she tried to remember a single occasion in the past four years that had taken her to the Bronx. Nothing came up. She’d never even gone to the Bronx Zoo, and every college student’s mom made the pilgrimage there when it was time to visit her kiddo in the big city. Not Andrea Wolfe, though. There were parts of the city that the average Tyler’s mom from Iowa had visited, but not Jenny. The thought made her a little depressed.

  The 1 train made its way north with innumerable stops and starts, finally emerging from its tunnel as the Manhattan Island hills began to assert themselves with steep peaks and valleys. They crossed over the Harlem River on elevated tracks, golden light shifting through the dirty windows. When the train finally reached the terminus, Jenny had to wander downstairs on half-asleep legs and find the bus north. She was going to Riverdale Equestrian Center and there was no subway up there.

  A half an hour later, she was walking up a driveway lined with hedges and paddocks towards the sort of equestrian center she associated with the big hunter/jumper farms of Florida. She could see flashes of brilliance from the open windows of an indoor arena, where a woman was riding a dressage horse at, if she wasn’t mistaken, Grand Prix level. Horses blinked at her from the windows of a long center-aisle barn, and ponies leaned over their stall doors at a u-shaped extension, their stalls opening onto a central courtyard. The stall doors had been painted by children, decorated with flowers and rainbows, an echo of the huge murals decorating walls out in the city.

  Jenny stood in the center of the stable courtyard until the ponies lost interest in her and went back to their hay. She realized she didn’t know where to go next. Sergeant Wilkes had just said to find her way to Riverdale, and everything else would work itself out. She felt a little shiver of panic work its way into her nervous system, that old anxiety which had accompanied her for years—you shouldn’t be here, you better get out fast.

  But no, she was supposed to be here. She was on assignment, she reminded herself, for an article. She wasn’t Jenny the student or Jenny the neighbor kid anymore. She was Jenny Wolfe, reporter.

  She pulled out her phone to text Sergeant Wilkes and saw three messages waiting on her screen.

  I’m just ahead at the end paddock.

  Keep walking, you’ll see me.

  I’m coming to get you.

  Jenny looked up and saw a tall, lean woman dressed in a green and white uniform coming her way. She took a deep breath and shook out her fingers to try and push away her nerves.

  “You must be Jenny?” Sergeant Wilkes said when she was a few feet away. Her brass name tag glinted reassuringly: B. WILKES. “Have any trouble finding the place?”

  “Not the place,” Jenny said, smiling. “Just your part of it.”

  “Yeah, we hide a little. I’ll show you around.”

  They walked past small paddocks where gleaming show horses were turned out, eating hay or dozing under the June sun. At the end of the paddocks there was one large pen with a small barn perched at the edge. A few horses peered from under the eaves at her. She saw the big white face of a Clydesdale, hiding behind a massive fluff of black forelock, and two wider-set faces which probably belonged to Belgians or crossbreds. But peeking out from behind all of them was the fine-boned head of a Thoroughbred, with tall, pointed ears pricked at them.

  Very tall ears, Jenny saw as they entered the pen and came up to the barn. “I have never seen such ears in my life,” she gasped. “He’s adorable.”

  “That’s Rabbit,” Sergeant Wilkes said cheerfully. “Your average, run of the mill jackrabbit-Thoroughbred cross.”

  They stood in the shade of the barn eaves and talked about Rabbit, horses, and the challenges of keeping horses in the city for more than two hours, moving only to lean against different parts of the barn wall or the columns of the overhang as their conversations required new viewpoints or observations. The hay feeder, the issue of swallows nesting in the rafters, the complications of shoeing for both loose soil and asphalt, the trials of leaving a parking ticket from the back of an eighteen-hand horse: Jenny and Sergeant Wilkes tackled each subject with equal interest.

  The horses came and went as they pleased, clambering up into the barn stalls, which were built a few inches higher than the surrounding soil to keep out rain and snow, or mooching over to their feeder to pull at the hay inside. The Clydesdale was the most affectionate, hanging all over Sergeant Wilkes and leaving a drool puddle on her crisp white shirt before meandering over to Jenny to run casual lips over her hair and her phone, held out to record their conversation, but it was Rabbit that Jenny kept her eyes on.

  The thoroughbred gelding was a handsome dark bay with a round white star and one tiny little snip between his nostrils. A rather narrow but unspeakably elegant forelock fell over one eye at all times. He was sleek and slim despite his slow-paced existence, a life spent alternating between munching hay and taking long, leisurely walks through the improbably pastoral Bronx parkland. He had one anklet of white around his left hind which was dotted with a few black ermine spots, an endearing marking which Jenny had always had a weakness for. She loved watching him wander the pen, and felt delightfully chosen when he made his way over to her for a spot-check of her pockets and tote bag.

  “And you said he had thirty-three starts?” Jenny asked as Rabbit ran his nose through the contents of her bag, pausing when he reached her wallet, which probably had a fragment of a mint somewhere in its folds. “His legs are perfectly clean!”

  “Thirty-three starts, not a single win.” Sergeant Wilkes sounded grim, rather than amused, as Jenny secretly was. “Seems to me they could have gotten the same result with thirty starts, and given him a new career when he was three instead of six.”

  “Well, they clearly took care of him,” Jenny pointed out. “He doesn’t look like he’s ever taken a bad step in his life. That’s probably why they felt safe continuing to run him.” There were a million reasons why owners and trainers felt compelled to run non-winning horses for years and years. Some were bad, some were good. Coming from a family that bred and raced their own horses, raised on a farm where horses with longevity and hardiness were key to a regular paycheck, Jenny saw plenty of good reasons to keep running a sound, happy horse, even if he never saw the inside of a winner’s circle. They paid checks to more than just the first-place horse, after all.

  But she knew there were far more people in the horse world who thought running a horse was detrimental to their health, making out every single race to be a hardship the horse had to hold up against before his eventual redemption as a riding or breeding horse. As if riding or breeding horses never got injured or died! Jenny could feel herself getting fired up, but realized she’d better hold back her arguments from Sergeant Wilkes, who was squaring her jaw in a way that told Jenny she wasn’t an ally.

  “He’s happy here, anyway,” the sergeant said after a moment of painful silence. “Finally found his calling. It’s the same with the others. Those Belgians over there, they’re rescues from an Amish farmer. Our Central Park horses are, too. The Clyde there is the only one we bought from a breeder. All of our other horses came out of difficult situations.”

  Jenny tried to imagine the difficult situation Rabbit had been sprung from. The sergeant had said he had been donated from a retirement organization in the Finger Lakes, who had in turn been given the horse by his racing owner. He’d received ninety days of training from a professional police horse remount trainer. Rabbit had the perfect retirement story, exactly what everyone would love to read on their website. Yet Sergeant Wilkes was making it sound as if he’d been abandoned on the side of the road after being run into the ground by heartless trainers.

  This is why your work is important, she reminded herself.
Your job is to show that the horror stories people love gossiping about so much are the exception, not the norm. She cleared her throat to get her thoughts moving in a positive direction again. “Would you say that Rabbit has any advantages over the other horses when you’re out on patrol, since he was exposed to so much activity at the racetrack?”

  The sergeant looked at Rabbit carefully, as if she had never considered such a question before. Rabbit wiggled his long ears at her. He had given up on the hunt for mints and was now just hanging out by the barn, preferring their company to that of the other horses, who were squabbling at the hay feeder.

  “I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with racing,” she said finally. “But he’s awfully good about machinery and trucks and things. Traffic has never bugged him. Some of these horses take months to get used to buses and tractors and police sirens, but Rabbit doesn’t flick an ear.”

  Jenny nodded, trying to keep a triumphant look from her face. Of course he didn’t, she thought. The backside of a track was an industrial place, horses sharing space with heavy vehicles used for everything from conditioning the track to moving tons of manure and dirty straw away from the barns. They were a riot of beeping and revving and roars. A city bus bellowing up behind an Amish farm horse would sound like the end of the world, but to a racehorse, it would be a Tuesday.

  “You ever get in any riding?” The sergeant was looking at her now. Jenny straightened up without really realizing it.

  “Only when I’m visiting home. My parents have a breeding farm in Ocala. I help out in the summers… or, I did,” Jenny sighed, recognizing that it was now high summer and she was not anywhere near the training track. “Before I graduated.”

  “Now you’re stuck in the city all year.” The sergeant grinned. Her stoic face broke into a thousand wrinkles when she smiled. The effect was unexpectedly softening. “I get it. When I was a kid in Staten Island, we had horses over all the place. Now if you want a horse, you gotta go out to New Jersey. Or be here.”

  Jenny looked around at the suburban equestrian center. A police car went racing by on the main road, the familiar siren and haptic rumble of New York City, making the entire farm seem as if it had been dropped here by accident. “This is nice,” she said. “Homey.”

  “You should join our auxiliary,” Sergeant Wilkes said. “Have you heard of it? You can ride out in the parks with us, help patrol on regular days, work parades… it’s really fun. We have a couple of openings right now, but they fill up really fast.”

  Jenny knew the universe didn’t usually throw so many opportunities to ride horses into one’s lap all at once. Yesterday, Caitlin urging her to pick up a helmet and start taking horses onto the track again; Aidan looking up the phone number for the mounted unit because she’d been upset; now Sergeant Wilkes bringing up the mounted patrol volunteers: could she really be crazy enough to turn this down, say she was too busy, she was dedicated to her job right now?

  Of course she couldn’t. “I’ve heard of it, and it sounds amazing,” she said. “I would really love some time with horses.”

  “Of course you would.” Sergeant Wilkes pushed off from the column she’d been leaning against. “Come on, let’s go to my office and fill in an application.”

  “Right now?”

  “Why not? The horses are on their break. I don’t have an auxiliary officer to ride with today and there’s no one asking for a special patrol, so I’ll probably just do paperwork all afternoon and let the ponies call it a day.”

  Inside the cluttered little trailer that Sergeant Wilkes called an office, and other people would probably call a storage unit, she waited while the officer rattled around inside a peeling old desk and scattered manila folders filled with papers around. Finally, the sergeant unearthed the folder she wanted, and pulled out a wad of papers stapled together. “Just fill this out,” she said, tearing one off so roughly the top corner was left behind with the staple.

  Jenny moved aside a patrol saddle to make room on a lumpy old couch, and settled down amongst the horse-scented dust to fill in the form. It was long, and by the time she had finished, Wilkes had gone outside, made a phone call, and come back in brandishing a set of truck keys.

  “You work in Manhattan, right?”

  “Yes?” Jenny looked warily at the keys.

  “Let’s go down to Central Park. You can take the riding test and then I’ll drop you by your office.”

  Jenny suddenly understood that she was in the presence of a very take-charge lady, and that she had written all of her contact information on the application she was handing over. The idea of this woman with her phone number was a tad worrisome. Something told Jenny that Sergeant Wilkes have no problem calling her at seven a.m. on a weekend morning to demand her presence at the barn.

  She reminded Jenny of her mother, just a little bit.

  “Okay,” Jenny agreed, standing up and knocking a set of polo wraps to the ground in the process. They unfurled colorfully at her feet and she blushed.

  “Forget them,” Sergeant Wilkes said, waving her hand. “Let’s go have some fun.”

  The Manhattan officers were eating sushi in their trailer when Sergeant Wilkes ushered Jenny inside.

  She recognized them immediately as the two women she’d seen riding in the park. Without their helmets, though, their faces were changed: less forbidding and impossibly elegant, more human. Just a pair of New York women, perhaps a bit more tanned and lined than normal, eating their office lunch.

  There was also a solid twenty or thirty years between two of them in age, Jenny noticed. One was closer to her age, while the woman on the far side of the card table had the deep lines and dark freckles of a rider who had been squinting into the sun and riding in the rain for decades.

  The younger one, a bright-faced blonde with round cheeks and a quick smile, was the first to put down her chopsticks and welcome them.

  “This is a surprise!” she cried happily. “Sergeant Wilkes, where have you been? We haven’t seen you in weeks?” And she leapt up to hug Sergeant Wilkes.

  Jenny would not have expected anyone to touch Sergeant Wilkes without express permission, perhaps at the funeral of a loved one, and watched to see how the officer would take it.

  The sergeant merely submitted to the hug with a grim upturn of her lips. “Hello, Becca,” she sighed. “How are you.”

  “Better now that you’re here!”

  The middle-aged officer rolled her eyes and took what seemed like a significantly long drink out of her water bottle before she said anything. Then she shook her head at Becca. “Would you leave poor Wilkes alone? That’s why she doesn’t come here.”

  “I don’t come here because of the traffic,” Sergeant Wilkes said, taking a step back as Becca released her. “But I want you to meet Jenny Wolfe. She’s going to join the auxiliary team. Just needs a riding test. And I thought, who better to take her out than Becca?”

  Becca squealed with excitement. Jenny wondered how old this girl was. She had the body of a woman in her early twenties, but the vocalizations and mannerisms of a five-year-old. This was who she was going to take a riding test from? And what was going to happen in the riding test? She should have asked questions. But she’d been so nervous on the drive down, totally unprepared for experienced Manhattan roads and traffic from the passenger seat of a dually pick-up, that she hadn’t uttered more than a few words, principally “yes,” and “no,” during the entire trip. Well, at least whatever happened, she wouldn’t be expected to speak. She had a feeling Becca would handle all of the words for her.

  “Why not,” the other officer said, sounding disinterested. “Becca, when you’re done with your lunch, you can take her out on Paulie.”

  “I’m almost done, I’m almost done!” Becca screeched, running back to the card table where her abandoned sushi waited. “Hang on.” She held up a finger to Jenny, who watched in astonishment as the girl shoveled down the last three pieces of sushi and a dumpling, then washed it all down with a
power-slurp from a can of Coke.

  “That was alarming,” the Manhattan officer said blandly.

  “Shut up, Ellen,” Becca laughed, then she burped. “Whoops!”

  “This is why I don’t come to Manhattan,” Sergeant Wilkes said to the ceiling.

  “I can’t believe you just told your commanding officer to shut up,” Ellen sighed, turning back to her lunch. “Have a nice ride. Don’t kill anyone.”

  “We won’t!” Becca squealed. “Come on, Jenny! It’s so nice to meet you. Come see our horses!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “No, I’m with one of the officers,” Jenny hissed into her phone. She was standing in the cobblestone courtyard of the Manhattan stable, trying to explain to Aidan why she wasn’t coming back to the office yet. “I’m apparently riding a horse in the park in a minute? The girl is tacking one up for me right now.”

  “I’m coming,” Aidan said immediately. “I need to see this.”

  “No, don’t you dare. This is insane. The horse is like, eighteen hands tall. It’s a goddamn Clydesdale.”

  “What happened to the Thoroughbred?”

  “That would have been better, right? But he’s in the Bronx. For some reason Sergeant Wilkes wanted me to do a riding test here. I think it’s because she didn’t feel like riding, so she came down here to make someone else do it.”

  “Describe the scene to me right now.”

  “Well, I’m standing in front of tiny little stable and there are two horses watching me from the cross-ties, a Clydesdale and a Percheron. This very young officer is tacking them both up at about a million miles an hour. She told me not to help because I’m her guest today and there will be plenty of time for me to tack up her horse for her in the future. Whatever that means. It sounds worrisome. Should I be doing this?”

  “Do all of it. Never turn down an experience. You can always write about it.”