The Head and Not The Heart (Alex and Alexander Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “You are here to see Mr. Figaro, yes?” Romeo said solicitously. “Come, I escort you to him. Come, come.” He tucked my hand more securely in his, holding it high before his chest, and led me across the slushy parking lot, taking me in elaborate zig-zags to avoid patches of ice in the rutted asphalt. If I hadn’t been so miserably cold, huddled up within my two horsey sweaters (the only two sweaters I owned that weren’t completely turned over to the vagaries of broodmares and foals and other destructive equine beings) and my inadequate winter coat, I would have shaken him off, regained a little pride, but it was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other and keep my eyes open in that bitterly cold wind.

  We climbed up a flight of stairs that led up a berm from the parking lot, and there, past an empty guard shack with a fluorescent light flashing on and off like lightning within, was the great asphalt expanse of the stabling area, a quarter mile in either direction of flat-roofed, 1950s era stables, looking like something NASA might have built at Kennedy Space Center in the years before the moonshots, with louvered windows pulled tight against the arctic cold. The windows were pitted with baseball-sized holes, as if there were an unfortunate profusion of home-runs from parking lot pick-up games, and pigeons flew in and out of the barns as freely as swallows would, in a more conventional horse barn, in a more conventional place than New York City.

  I was looking curiously at the first barn we passed, with huge rusting steel doors painted with Aqueduct’s logo, a straining horsehead emerging from a capital letter “A”, when the earsplitting sound of a screaming engine pierced the morning and I looked up to see an Emirates jet, its red underbelly and white letters reading “Fly Emirates” picked out orange in the rising sunlight, buzzing the racetrack from a dangerously low height. It sailed over our heads and on across the street and over the huddled brick houses beyond, disappearing behind the chimneys and leafless trees of the neighborhood that sat sandwiched between the racetrack, the expressway, and, apparently, the airport.

  “Oh my god!” I gasped, after the jet had passed enough for human speech to be audible once again. “What the hell was that?”

  “That’s normal, my lady,” Romeo laughed, squeezing my icy fingers. “We right next to JFK. We in the flight path. You can walk from here to the airport. You didn’t see us waving up at you when you flew in?”

  “I saw the beach,” I said. “Must have been a different flight pattern.” I’d leaned against the window and seen the fog lift just enough to show me New York’s very strange beach, lined with what looked suspiciously tall brick project housing. It didn’t even remotely resemble beach front real estate in Florida. They definitely treated their waterfront differently in New York City, I could say that much. Although with this stabbing, horrible wind, I couldn’t see how beachfront property would be very desirable here. I thought sadly of white sand and blue water, palm trees and hammocks and drinks with umbrellas. I wanted Alexander back. I wanted my life back, muck and mud and bruises and all. I was going to look at this horse and get the hell out.

  “Oh, too bad! Maybe you see us when you leave!” He continued to chuckle in a creepy kind of way and went on leading me past identical barns. I was impatient to get to Figaro’s. There had to be an office and a space heater. Maybe some coffee? Or maybe—I pulled my hat up a little to ease the pressure on my skull—maybe something stronger.

  Barns in winter are never warm places, even though four walls and a roof would offer some supposed protection from the weather, and the Aqueduct barns rattled and wailed with age and drafts. Romeo pulled back a sliding door, and I found myself in the rutted sandy shedrow of a training barn, with dilapidated concrete block stalls running back to back and horses leaning out over stall webbings, pulling at thickly packed haynets that hung from rings outside their stall doors. I stepped back almost immediately to let a shaggy dark horse go jogging past, his mouth foaming white against the bit, his chin nearly pulled back to his chest with the upper-body strength of the straining rider atop him, a wiry little Latino man who found the time to give me a leering grin as he rode around the corner, the horse’s legs swinging out on the turn like a dancer’s.

  “Two more times, Marco!” A small man emerged from a door a short distance down the shed, across from the rows of stalls, and held up a hand in greeting. “Romeo, what did you bring us? Our little Florida bird? You must be Alex! I’m Dickie Figaro. Call me Dickie.”

  Oh, dear god. “Morning, Dickie,” I said, walking along the hard-packed ground close to the shedrow wall. “So nice to meet you.” We shook gloved hands and nodded fleece-capped heads and then he walked me down to a stall where a dark horse was single-mindedly destroying a haynet full of hay. Destroying it. He would rip out chunks with bared teeth, like a wolf tearing the flesh of its prey, and slam his head into the net if it wasn’t positioned exactly as he wanted. He flung his head up and down at us, nodding insanely, before he went back to the hay. He certainly had a lot of stage presence.

  “This is The Tiger Prince,” Dickie said proudly, and I could hear the capital letters in the horse’s title.

  “The Tiger Prince?” I asked, admiring what I could see of the horse. He was clipped and in gleaming good health, but his body was hidden beneath a brown and blue plaid Baker blanket.

  “Yup,” Dickie said. “Tiger Tiger out of Erin’s Princess. Good New York mare but ended up in Florida. You must have heard of her.”

  “Of course.” He didn’t need to play games, I thought impatiently. Anyone with Google could have figured out within two minutes that Alexander and I had owned this colt’s half-brother. He had to know why we were so interested. Of course we’d heard of Erin’s Princess.

  The horse eyed me while he continued to attack his haynet, interested, but not interested enough to give up on the hay. Or, maybe, showing off. The good ones have panache. They want to be stars. The Tiger Prince was certainly giving me that rock star vibe: an impression of royalty combined with a high sense of drama. I laid a hand on his glossy neck, so dark it was nearly black, and was rewarded with his full attention. Ears pricked, he leaned over, delicately gave my gloved hands a deep sniff, and then snorted. Hard. The kind of horse snort that leaves little black sticky souvenirs all over you. The kind of horse snort that can destroy white clothes forever. I looked down at my new black coat and brushed at the specks of snot, destined to cling to the woolen knit until the end of time. Barn coat, just like that. “You,” I told the horse, “are a horrible, bad boy.”

  He went back to his hay. I was already in love.

  “Well,” I said to Dickie, who was looking embarrassed about the nonchalant destruction of my clothes. “He seems nice enough as a person. Can you get someone down here to tack him up and take him out?”

  A groom, idling in the tack room door over a paper cup of coffee, was dispatched to get the horse ready. He came back out with saddle, bridle, yoke, and blankets over his arm and set it all on the stall webbing. He turned his back to find a brush, which gave The Tiger Prince just enough time to grab hold of the saddle and flip it off the webbing, falling with a crash to the straw at his hooves. The groom cursed and looked at me, turned the curse into a laugh, and shook his head, before going into the stall to tie the horse up to the wall, out of reach of the tack, before he picked up the toppled saddlery.

  I watched his interaction with the groom carefully, just to confirm my initial impression of his temperament. A clever joker, that’s what The Tiger Prince was. He was relatively quiet and polite, but little touches of mischief gave him away. He watched the groom carefully, one eye rolled back to see what the poor guy was up to, and took little playful snatches in his direction whenever the groom was in biting distance. He could have bit him a dozen times over, but he never actually reached all the way—he was just looking for a game.

  It was the same with his hind end—he wasn’t above slapping the groom with his tail from time to time, or picking up his hind leg and giving it a little shake as if he was considering giving the groom
a good kick.

  I felt a surge of nostalgia for Red Erin, watching this dark brother of his. They were very like. Red Erin had been a burnished red chestnut, sure, while this horse was a dark bay, nearly black, but there—there was the same little anklet of white on the right hind, with little ermine spots patching his heel, and there was the same white dot on his nose, just large enough for a chiding index finger—or a kiss. And the expression in his eyes was the same—a brainy troublemaker, my favorite sort of horse. I was such a sucker for the clever ones.

  “How long has he been at the track?” I asked Figaro. It looked like he could use some time out in a paddock. His brain was stuck on having fun, not working. Red Erin always needed lots of time outside. Figaro got his horses cheap because they had problems, and I suspected his lack of attention might be the reason for the colt’s fall from grace.

  “Oh, since January,” Figaro said, shrugging. “Not long. He was up in Saratoga as a yearling, though.”

  “So he hasn’t been outside much in a while?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “They got too much snow up there. Got an indoor track for starting the babies on, you know, but it snows so damn much you can’t open the barn doors in the middle of winter. This guy hasn’t been turned out in months, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  I smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m getting at, Dickie. You see it too?”

  “Oh yeah, I see it.” He shrugged. “This is the way it is. They live here, they stay inside. They get all pent up and they win races that way, though, you know? Sometimes you shut the stall door for two-three days and don’t let them see the outside world none at all. They come out and win that race like their tail is on fire. It’s a good trick!” He laughed, and I smiled, but inside I was seething. That was no way to treat a horse, a herd animal who was terrified of being alone. I knew it was common, but I didn’t have to like it.

  The horse seemed nice enough, though, and if his little naughty nips and kicks were nothing more than pent-up energy, I could live with that. As a rule, I didn’t like anyone who wasn’t nice in the barn; I suppose it is a holdover from riding as a child, when it didn’t matter how nicely a horse moved if he couldn’t be trusted in a barn full of children. Some racehorse trainers will put up with any amount of bad behavior—some think it to be an encouraging sign that a horse is ready to win—but I demanded respect and good manners, and so did Alexander. I nodded when the horse was brought around to the front of the stall, fully tacked, and moved to the safety of the tack room door while Figaro opened up the stall webbing to let them out.

  He squealed a little as his hooves hit the soft sand of the shedrow’s rutted track, and threatened to kick out, crowhopping ever so slightly, but if that was the worst behavior a cooped-up, hyper-fit racehorse gave when he left his stall in the morning, we should all be so lucky. Red Erin hadn’t been above the occasional buck. And Saltpeter used to rear unless you popped him on the neck with the stick, just to remind him that you had it, and you weren’t afraid to use it.

  Saltpeter. Red Erin. It was getting depressing, comparing this horse to my dead favorites. I was suddenly afraid I would fall in love this horse and then lose him as well. The groom took him down the shedrow and then they disappeared around the corner, the colt’s tail swishing from side to side with each precise footfall. I sighed. He was painfully lovely, achingly perfect, and my two lost boys swelled up as a lump in my dry throat. I longed for Alexander’s comforting presence, someone to lean into, someone who would have understood such love.

  “And how are you enjoying New York?” Figaro asked, after he had given the rider a leg-up and we had all trooped out from the barn behind the horse. The horse went on up the path towards the gap where they entered and exited the racetrack, while we went up the steep hill to the trackside and went up the wobbly metal stairs of a trainer’s viewing stand, a little wooden hut complete with a heater so formidable I started to sweat under my sweaters and coat immediately. The trainer poured me a cup of suspicious-looking coffee, to which I added several sugar packets and a glug of half-and-half from a stable bucket doubling as an ice chest.

  “It’s been great,” I said, managing not to choke on the coffee. “I met Jim Tilden in Union Square last night and we had dinner.”

  “Oh, Jimmy Tilden!” Figaro said familiarly. “Quite a guy, quite a guy. But something tells me you’ve done more than that, missie. The kids wear sunglasses here for a reason.”

  I stared at him, mystified. The sun was hardly up—why would I need sunglasses?

  “Your eyes,” he clarified. He leaned onto the counter and watched a few horses go jogging past just below us, their heads turned towards the outer rail in a bid to keep them down to a trot. They were going the “wrong way,” to keep them out of the way of horses galloping along the inner rail. A set of three horses came galloping into the backstretch in a tight v, like a flock of geese, and overtook a slower horse cantering along on his own. They flashed past him on the inside and the slower horse went into a series of bucks, flinging himself sideways, before the rider could get him straightened out with boot and whip. Riding on the racetrack was chaotic, all these different horse and rider combinations all going about their own business, whether they were new to the track or old and experienced. I preferred the safety of our own training track, where we rode as a team. In the same direction.

  Figaro wasn’t ready to give up. He’d seen horses before, these were nothing new. It was more fun, I guessed, to bait the country girl. “Your eyes give you away, sweetheart. You haven’t been to bed in a while.”

  “I think just the fact that’s she’s drinkin’ that cawfee gives her away, Dickie!” laughed a heavy-set man with a thick local accent. “That’s rotgut, that’s what that is!”

  It was true, the coffee was appalling but the headache that was threatening to settle in was even worse. Caffeine wasn’t going to take care of the whole job, and I wondered if Figaro was one of those appealing souls who gave his horses Guinness—a little of the feed room stash and I’d be in business. “I met some friends in Brooklyn last night,” I confirmed, and then pointed, to try and get the subject back to the colt: “Is that the horse, right there?”

  Figaro looked. “Yeah, that’s him. Nice trot on him.”

  It was a nice trot. It was Red Erin’s trot, but even nicer. He had a lot of reach from his shoulder. Some horses trot straight up and down, picking up their knees the way a human jogs. They work harder and expend more energy that way. Some horses trot forward and back, swinging their leg from their shoulders and barely bending their knees. I love to see beautiful efficiency of motion in a horse.

  He went past us, nearly right below us, with his head and neck pulled in a taut bow back towards the inner rail. The rider was standing in the stirrups to hold him back. I admired his expression: bright, curious eyes, ears pricked, and then he was past us, sweeping to cut past the open expanse of the chute where the starting gate sat, on towards the clubhouse turn.

  “Watch him right there,” the man in the corner laughed, his wide neck wobbling. “See that tractor? There’s a sliding gate there, just a piece of PVC in the rail, and it wobbles in the wind. Everyone spooks at it. Just watch.”

  As the colt approached the parked tractor, he went into a plunging, sideways gallop and the rider had to work to get him under control again.

  “I told yez!” the man laughed, slapping his knee. “Can’t no one get past that damn gate in the wind.”

  Figaro smiled thinly. “They’re high-strung, Pete, what else do you want?”

  “I just like to watch them have their fun,” Pete chortled. “Make those jocks earn their keep.”

  “He’ll turn back at the wire and gallop around for us,” Figaro told me, turning his back on Pete. “I told the jock to open him up at the three-eighths pole and then keep him going, so you’ll be able to see him moving out.”

  “Great,” I said, and went back to my coffee. I watched the horse go around the sweeping turn towar
ds the grandstand. Beyond him, on a berm just past the grandstand, a silver subway train went rattling by. It was a strange juxtaposition of city and country—I found it hard to comprehend that I was watching a horse with something so quintessentially urban as a New York City subway train in the same picture. But The Tiger Prince took no notice; trains were as much a part of his life as rabbits and foxes were to my horses in Ocala. I wondered what he’d do if he actually saw a rabbit. Lose his mind, probably. Dump his rider and run for miles.

  “Have a nice time last night?” Pete asked maliciously, chuckling. “I hear you kids really tear it up in Brooklyn. We did too when we was kids, but it’s not the same place anymore. Not so rough.”

  “Well, I went to a warehouse down by the East River, to see a few bands,” I said, hoping I could make it sound much more intentional and bohemian than it had actually been, “And then we went and closed down a bar near the BQE.” I liked pretending to be a dangerous night-owl. I liked pretending I wasn’t longing and longing for my bed right now. Our bed, mine and Alexander’s, not the hotel room bed, or the couch in Ryan’s apartment where his roommates had made me coffee and asked me about, what else, horses, until the town car arrived to cart me here. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind now, after that night out, or this bitterly cold morning here amongst these rough-hewn men. I wanted to go home to Alexander, pull the curtains against the Florida sun, and stay in bed for the rest of the day.

  I pulled out my phone and sent him a message, the third of the morning. “Getting ready to watch him gallop. Super nice. A lot like Red Erin. Love you.”

  The phone dinged before I could put it away. “Hurry home. Love you Alex.”

  I was impatient for the horse to gallop. I needed to hurry home.

  “Where is he?”

  “Standing up at the wire,” Dickie said. “Look, now he’s going to take him. Red helmet cover.”