Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “That doesn’t sound interesting, that sounds bad. What do we do?”

  “Supplies first, and batten down the hatches second. Um, we have to get feed.” I was trying to think and talk at the same time, so she would think I already had a plan. Of course I didn’t — we got brochures from the state every year about having readiness plans and pantries full of canned food, but who had time for that? Still, this wasn’t rocket science. I could come up with a plan on my feet. Lacey was looking pretty green around the edges, so I would have to look like I was in control and that I knew exactly how to deal with an impending natural disaster. “Gotta stock up on feed…” Along with the rest of Ocala, I thought, but didn’t say aloud. “You go to the store. Go to the Publix in town. Shelf-stable food. If anyone loses electricity for a month, it’ll be us.”

  “A month? That can happen?”

  “It happened to some people when I was in high school. We didn’t have power for three weeks at home — it was worse further out in the country. I’m not saying it’s going to happen here, but there’s definitely a precedent.”

  Lacey’s mouth was round, like a goldfish. I suspected this was what hyperventilating looked like and initiated damage control.

  “Listen,” I told her in the most reassuring tones I could muster. “It will be fine. Most hurricanes are just big, annoying thunderstorms that don’t want to end. They take forever and you get bored waiting. Then you have to go outside and pick up tree branches and other people’s garbage that blew onto your property. They’re more of a pain in the ass than anything. Let’s just… let’s just flip on the TV real quick and see what we’re up against. Maybe it’s not as bad as my mom is making it out to be. Remember, the other night, this was just a tropical storm heading for Louisiana.” How fast could things change?

  Pretty fast.

  Lacey turned off the weather radio, cutting off Igor as he admonished residents not to drain their swimming pools, and made a beeline for the living room.

  If I was looking for comfort from the Weather Channel, I had been looking in the wrong place. The TV network was wall-to-wall red alerts, storm warning graphics, and beachside reporters. I winced when a meteorologist appeared on-screen alongside the fishing docks of Cedar Key, the little gulf island about an hour to our west.

  She stood against the unlikely backdrop of pristine mangrove shores and intrusive industry, the red lights atop the defunct cooling towers of Crystal River’s nuclear power plant blinking sedately against the yellowish-blue haze of an early seaside morning. Not yet kitted out in the head-to-toe rain-gear she’d sport for the heigh of the storm, she was dressed appropriately for a late summer day at the beach: tank top, baseball cap, cargo shorts, sandals. Did meteorologists really have no dress code at all for work? Audible in the background were slamming car doors, suitcases and coolers thumping along the potholed parking lot — the residents and tourists alike were hustling to get out before the narrow highway through the swamps was bumper to bumper, a sea of brake lights as the literal sea began to rise.

  “And of course we’re just at sea level here and a direct hit from a major hurricane would cause catastrophic flooding,” the meteorologist was explaining, with an enthusiasm that I found questionable, as if she had long held a personal vendetta against Cedar Key and was at last going to see it sunk to the bottom of the ocean. “It’s entirely possible that at this time tomorrow, this entire scene around us will be under water.” She smiled beatifically to the camera.

  When the screen cut to a reporter at a frantically busy Home Depot in a Tampa suburb, I had to call a halt to the disaster porn. It was time to go join the panicking masses. “Lacey, you’re going to have to take the car and go to Winn-Dixie or Publix in town. Not Williston. And don’t go to Wal-Mart, whatever you do.”

  “Why not? It’s bigger.”

  “Precisely why it’s the first place to get cleaned out.”

  In the office, my sleeping computer suddenly came awake and started dinging with incoming messages, boarders wanting to know what was happening with the horses.

  “Head out, Lacey. It’s going to be insane out there. I have to e-mail these people real quick or they’re going to freak out about their horses.”

  Lacey snatched her keys and rammed a ball-cap over her messy ponytail. “If I have to go to the store, where will be you going?”

  “Feed store. We need to load up on grain and hay. If the interstates get blocked or flooded, there won’t be any deliveries.”

  An hour later, I found myself in a sea of humanity at the feed store.

  I was not the only person to rush out for feed and hay. We’d been schooled in the past year, following a big hurricane that struck South Florida the year before. Along with a hundred other horsemen, I’d been at the emergency symposium last fall at Rick’s Western Village, a tack shop/clothing/furniture/feed and hay compound on Highway 27. Under the gaping eye sockets of bull-skull chandeliers (lightbulbs dangled from their horns, macabre earrings dancing in the breeze of the air conditioning), we listened as a skinny little rep from the University of Florida Agricultural Extension and a broad-shouldered and bearded meteorologist from the local branch of the National Weather Service explained the various levels of alert/panic we should be entering into during the hurricane season.

  “We’re in a very vulnerable supply chain,” the UF rep explained nervously, rubbing his forefinger along his pencil-thin mustache as if it was a small caterpillar that itched him. “The feed and horse-quality hay, along with anything else that isn’t grown or produced locally, comes down I-75. If there is substantial flooding anywhere along that route or along I-10 in the panhandle, there will be shortages almost immediately.”

  “Oh, and there’ll be flooding,” the burly man from the Weather Service said firmly, as if we had questioned the possibility. “All those rivers up there will be over the roads within thirty minutes of tropical squall-lines. The local and side roads will go first, so there won’t be any work-arounds from the interstates, which will be jammed with evacuees from the coast.” He looked around the room, at his audience cowering beneath the sarapes and lariats festooning the walls, clearly relishing his power over us. His bulk and accent made him seem more like the foreman at an auto-body shop or a scrap yard than a scientist, but the rednecks in the crowd seemed to like him. It must have been the gaudy pirate-macaw of a Parrothead tattoo peeking out from his shirt collar. “Y’all need to pay attention and be ready.”

  We’d all felt a bit shaken as we filed out of the furniture displays that Rick had organized into a conference room, and in the less chaotic environs of the tack shop we attacked the Dixie cups of boxed wine and the water buckets of iced Bud Light with a vengeance, devouring cheese crackers and green grapes as if the day of judgement, in the form of a Category Five hurricane, had already come upon us. Being surrounded by leather saddles instead of Navajo-patterned sofas quickly calmed me down, however, and after slapping back a cup of vinegary red wine, I went outside, saw all the orange autumn sunshine flooding the strip malls of Highway 27 and felt much better. Hurricane season was a long time away, I’d thought that day.

  And it had been, for me and for all the other horsemen who’d been in attendance that day. It had been nearly a year. Of course, probably none of us had prepared for an emergency in the months since. But now we would all remember our training, that much was for sure. I’d be lucky if there was feed left.

  The feed store nearest to us was as crowded as I had predicted Wal-Mart would be. There was a line of trucks half a mile long, hazard lights blinking along the sandy shoulder of the county highway. I grimly joined the queue, flipped on my own hazards, and leaned my head back on the headrest, allowing the truck to crawl forward every so often. The tires bumped over discarded Coors Light cans. The local NPR station reporters talked about hurricane evacuation zones, bare grocery store shelves, traffic jams on the highways leading away from the coasts.

  It took nearly forty-five minutes before I reached the parkin
g lot, which was oddly empty. I recognized the cars of a couple of the regular employees, but no one else, just the line of trucks heading forward into the loading area. Where was everyone? A sales girl came up to my window and I hit the button to lower the window.

  “Howdy,” she said glumly. Her face was red with heat beneath her Ft. Dodge Pharmaceuticals ball cap, which advertised a brand of horse dewormer. “Loading dock service only. Ah’ll take yer feed order. Need anything from inside? Buckets, halters, meds?” Her accent, like that of a lot of the locals here, was almost comically Appalachian in character.

  “I’m good. You have Omolene four hundred? Maybe thirty bags?”

  “Ah got five,” she said, scanning her legal pad, which was scrawled over with crossed-out items and tally marks. “Ah got Oma-lene two hun’erd left, you want that to make up the thirty?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine.” Christ. I guess I was lucky I’d gotten anything more desirable than the store-brand feed, Lucky’s Pride Horse Pellets.

  She picked up a walkie-talkie and relayed the order to the loading bay, including the color and make of my truck. “Hay?”

  “What do you have?”

  “I got plenty coastal. I got three dozen O and A, some peanut, some hun’red pound timothy and alfalfa…” She trailed off.

  “Twenty of the hundred-pound T and A,” I decided. I didn’t have that kind of cash in the bank account, but I couldn’t take chances with other people’s horses. If we got cut off from civilization for a week or more, I had to have hay for them.

  “That it?”

  “That’s it.” I fingered my credit card.

  She wrote down my account information to ring up later, presumably when they ran out of feed and finally had a few free moments, and waved me forward to the loading dock. The truck groaned as it was assaulted with more than a ton of feed and hay. Days like this, I was extremely happy to have shelled out the extra bucks for the heavy-duty shocks on the truck. I was able to shuttle enough fodder back home for a week at an elephant farm.

  I ended up wasting another twenty minutes’ worth of diesel, idling in line at the gas station, but in the end I somehow managed to wedge two cans of gasoline into the back of the truck along with the grain and hay. It wasn’t really enough to keep the generator going for long, but if we lost power, it would let us cook something on the tack room hotplate, make some coffee, charge our phones. I shook my head at how outlandish these plans seemed. Nine times out of ten, nothing happened but a little wind and rain. I hoped we were still on number seven or eight, at least.

  When I got back to the farm around five, the sun was still hot and blinding in the western sky, not a storm cloud to be seen. The calm before the storm, I thought grimly, and turned the truck around to back it up to the barn aisle.

  I blinked when I saw Manny sitting in front of the barn drinking a Corona. He didn’t usually hang around when he was done with the stalls in the morning, he drove down the road to Marchwood Thoroughbreds and fixed fences. With one hundred acres and nearly as many head of crazy little Thoroughbred babies crashing around, they had a lot of fence work to be done. He was usually gone by nine a.m., and I’d never seen him in the evening.

  Manny gestured with his Corona bottle. “Sky look pretty today.”

  “Yeah. One day without a storm, I guess.”

  “Gonna be hurry-cane. Radio say. I come, see if you need help.”

  I felt unexpected tears prick at my eyes. He’d come over to help me prepare for the hurricane? Who else around here would do that for me? No one. I had no one to help me but Lacey, and she was half-panicked and ready to flee for home. “Thanks, Manny. I really do need some help with this hay.”

  He nodded and put down the beer bottle. His tiny frame hid a tremendous strength, and he hefted the huge hundred-pound hay bales with a great show of bulging biceps, which I knew he thought I appreciated very much. Manny considered himself quite the ladies’ man. I had sometimes seen him in the evenings in town, looking sharp in patterned Western shirt, tight Wranglers, snakeskin boots and a silver bolo tie, leaning across his pick-up in the parking lot of Caliente, a sloping white cabin near the railroad tracks which was a bodega by day and a disco by night.

  (They also sold hay below-market, which was nice if occasionally a little moldy. You got what you paid for.)

  The feed room was bulging with sacks of grain and hay on pallets when we were done unloading the truck. The chore went much more quickly than if it had just been Lacey and I and our beleaguered wheelbarrow, and Manny settled back down on the railroad tie that served as a parking spot curb in front of the barn, popping the cap from another Corona he fished out of a cooler in the bed of his pick-up. I handed him a crumpled twenty that I’d had wadded up in my truck’s cup holder, and he pocketed it with a nod of appreciation. Then he waved his bottle at me. “You want? Help youself.”

  I didn’t usually sit in front of my barn and drink — not exactly the image that I wanted to portray — but it didn’t seem likely that any prospective clients were going to arrive unannounced the day before a major hurricane was predicted to arrive, and it had already been a pretty stressful day, with more to come, so…

  “Thanks,” I said, and reached into the cooler. The sun was sinking behind a growing shield of high clouds, and a breeze had mustered a little energy from the west, making it almost pleasant. I settled down onto the railroad tie with a little groan, twisting open the beer cap with calloused palms. I tipped back the cold, thin beer, looked around my farm, and wondered how Pete was doing on the hurricane prep at his place.

  We were still sitting in silent companionship, watching the darkening skies and their promise of future violence, when Lacey came back half an hour later, unpeeling her fingers from their death-grip on the steering wheel with difficulty. She didn’t even look twice at Manny and I, just lifted her eyebrows at him as she was approaching and, at his nod, dug her hands into the cooler as well. I got the distinct feeling that my hired help were more sociable while I was out riding than they had let on before. She sat down heavily next to me and twisted the cap off with her own work-roughened hand. When Lacey first came to ride with me, she’d had a manicure, and always wore gloves. It was pretty funny to think about now.

  Just now, though, she didn’t look like she wanted to be reminded of how silly her simpler life had been. I didn’t think she’d agree with me on the humor at this particular moment. She looked like… well, like she just went to a grocery store before a hurricane strike. It wasn’t a good look for anyone.

  “Was it bad?” I asked sympathetically.

  I had to wait for her to take a long deep swig from the bottle before she would answer.

  “Retirees and rednecks on a rampage,” she sighed finally. “Overturned displays in the aisles. I had to step over broken wine bottles to get to the bottled water. An old woman in a motorized shopping cart rammed me when I tried to pull the last 12-pack of Zephyrhills off the shelf. I thought she broke my ankle. So we’re drinking store-brand tap water during the cataclysm, sorry. And eating five-dollar organic sunflower seed bread, so I hope you like it. That’s all that was left.”

  “I thought the Winn-Dixie in Williston would be worse,” I said regretfully. “That’s why I said to go to Publix in town. It’s less isolated, there’s more options.”

  “Well, you’re the boss,” she said, taking another long slug off the beer. “And you’ve lived here longer. I did get some food and I got us a steak for tonight — no one was in the meat section.”

  “No one wants to buy meat in case the power goes out. They’ll be eating everything in their freezers tonight. Good thinking, though, we deserve a good supper tonight. We still have to go out and drag everything back into the barn — the jump standards, the dressage letters… everything.”

  “The horses will be out in the paddocks during the storm?”

  “Yup.” I’d had plenty of time to think about it, sitting in the truck and listening to the weathermen and reporters. The winds
, should the center of the storm pass over us, would be well over one hundred miles an hour — enough to threaten the barn roof. We could cover ourselves with blankets if the roof started to go, but the horses couldn’t. So they’d stay outside, and we’d all just have to hope no one was hit with debris.

  “Should we top off the water troughs?”

  “I don’t think that water is going to be a problem.”

  We sat and watched the western sky, where lower clouds were starting to boil up — the wet tropical squalls approaching the coast hundreds and hundreds of miles from the center of the storm. Ten minutes passed, twenty, and eventually there was no denying it — the beers were gone, our slight buzz was already waning, and there was hard labor to be done. I retrieved a few bottles of Gatorade from the tack room fridge to keep us going, and offered Manny another twenty bucks, a pack of hot dogs, and a case of water if he’d stay and help us move the heavy wooden jumps inside the barn. He smiled and nodded. I had no idea if he had his own family, his own place — anyone or anything to shop for before the hurricane — but he seemed content to help us out, and I was thankful we had use of those big beefy biceps he liked to flash around. I hated to admit it, even to myself, but it was the kind of time when I was relieved to have a man around.

  Dragging the jump standards into the barn frightened the horses, and soon they were all jumping around their stalls, snorting and carrying on, looking at the once-familiar jumps like the wooden standards were the vanguard of an alien invasion. Halfway through, I told Lacey to grab lead-shanks and we turned everyone out early, so that they could run around the paddocks like idiots, drunk on fear of change and the unmistakeable threat in the atmosphere.

  To the west, the evening sky grew darker still, and the thunder growled in a low, continuous rumble which had no defining beginning or end. Occasionally the sound grew so deep it settled in my chest and hurt my eardrums, like standing against the speakers at a concert. From the house, we could hear the weather siren squealing constantly, the off-kilter-Norwegian tones of the weather-bot listing off warning after warning for towns just to our west, north, and south. A tornado warning in Otter Creek. Hail in Dunnellon. Flood advisories for Alachua County. Excessive lightning and wind gusts in Bronson. Reminders of the hurricane warning, over and over again. But the swath of fertile oak-lined hills from Ocala to Williston still lay dry and in shadow.