“We’re going over to Littlefield this afternoon,” Alexander announced. It was a Tuesday afternoon, six days after the late-night scotch session, six days after we had marked “Ship out to Saratoga” on the calendar for three weeks hence, two days after that most infuriating, most ego-crushing afternoon of my life: the assistant trainer interviews.
Fittingly, the rain had been unceasing in those six days; we were the unwilling hosts of a tropical depression that had stalled over the Gulf of Mexico and sat there, content in its metaphoric state of mind, unwilling to be amped up into a tropical storm, unambitious to move away and bother someone else—Alabama, say, or Texas. The training track was a sea of mud; the hillside pastures were rifled with rainwater rivers. The dark days added to my worry over the lack of interest from any potential assistants: maybe I couldn’t do this, I thought a thousand times a day. If no one in Ocala has any confidence in me, why on earth should I have confidence in me?
I certainly didn’t expect Alexander to have any. He had been looking fairly grave over the whole situation. I reminded myself that if I didn’t think I could do this, he certainly wouldn’t let me try. So I shoved away my dark cloud as much as I could, and mustered a little interest in the world outside my head, trying to figure out why we’d be going to Littlefield. Of all the farms in Marion County, Florida, I thought Littlefield would be the last one Alexander would ever step foot on…
“Mason Birdwell wants us to look at a colt there,” Alexander continued, keeping his eyes on the television. It was raining at Belmont, too. It was raining everywhere, I thought. The whole month of June was nothing but chill and wet and disappointment.
Cheer up, or he’ll change his mind.
“Not that First Hunter colt again,” I said instead.
“It’s all he’ll talk about.”
I sighed, trying to instill into the gust of breath all of my distaste and lack of respect for deep-pocketed owners with zero horse experience or sense who bought expensive horses because they were pretty. It worked. Alexander looked up at me and smiled. The horses broke from the gate without him. The inside horse veered toward the rail and was cut off by the two horse.
“The life of a trainer,” he said wryly, and I nodded. The part that they didn’t tell you about, the part that no one dreamed about: the kow-towing to owners.
Alexander had been putting Mason Birdwell off with one excuse after another, not wanting to say outright to an owner who might have loose lips what he’d say to me: that he wouldn’t want a horse out of Dennis Perry’s Littlefield Farm even if the horse was free and came wearing a diamond-studded halter. Perry horses were hard-used — he only had top horses running, but that was an illustration of the simplest truth: Only the strong survived.
***
Littlefield was on the west side of town, in yet another community of hundred-acre training farms with the same sort of professional-grade tracks and showplace barns perched along the sides of Marion County’s rolling hills that we were part of in Reddick. One of the farms had made the papers when they put in their training track last year; they’d had to dig out a steep hillside in order to level out the homestretch and found, in the excavation process, a perfect Eohippus, curled up like a sleeping foal, endlessly napping in the Ocala soil. Horses have always thrived in these hills.
Littlefield was famous for its great folly: The drive that ran along the training track was lined with palm trees, rustling, troublesome things that were legendary in exercise rider circles for their propensity to send a young horse into a frenzy as he galloped down the long side of the track. It only took one good breeze to rattle their papery fronds together; it only took one good rattle to make a baby racehorse bolt; and it only took one good bolt to send an exercise rider to the hospital. Nicki herself had a crooked thumb she blamed on those palm trees. It was considered typical for Dennis Perry to have put them in and left them there for fifteen years, growing fuller and noisier every year, ignoring the fact that they endangered the very lives of his employees. Dennis Perry did things because he liked them, not because he was concerned about the effects they might have on others.
“His track is just as wet as ours,” I observed, peering across Alexander to look out the truck window. “I wonder if he even sent horses out.” Our horses were going on the covered Equi-ciser now; the mud had just grown too deep to safely run them on the racetrack.
“I’ll bet he is,” Alexander said glumly. “He’ll tell you that it builds them up for wet tracks. He’ll say that you can’t bring up a horse to only run on dry dirt.”
“Well, he’s right to a point!” I was indignant. “But at some point it goes from being sloppy to being downright dangerous.”
“You’re arguing that point with me?”
I subsided. “It’s just upsetting when someone puts a horse’s life in danger for no good reason.”
Alexander turned the truck at the end of the racetrack, pulling up in front of the training barn. Its two long wings with a central atrium were in the classic Kentucky design, all in white, with green box hedges clipped to just below the level of the barred stall windows. Rain dripped from the edges of the gutters and into concrete drains, and there was a paved sidewalk along the front of the barn, instead of the usual patchy grass dotted with fire ant hills, or a rutted horse path. It was all very posh. He nodded to indicate the immaculate barn before us. “Money, to someone like Dennis Perry, is a good reason. The very best.”
We walked with bowed heads through the falling rain, up the sidewalk toward the office. In each barred stall window, a muzzle, two bright eyes, and a pair of pricked ears appeared, watching us with apparent excitement. One of them was the First Hunter colt we’d almost certainly be sending a truck for in the next few days. I wondered when he’d last had any turnout. There weren’t any paddocks around the training barn at Littlefield; Perry didn’t subscribe to Alexander’s more European practice of turning racehorses out for free time.
The office door swung open before we could reach it, and a stone-faced woman with fading red hair under a Keeneland baseball cap appeared. She pulled a raincoat around her shoulders; her feet were already stuffed into Wellington boots that made her jeans puff up in wrinkles around her knees. She was another hard-living horsewoman, maybe fifty years old but looking at least ten years older. The cigarette wrinkles around her mouth made her lips appear to be falling in on themselves. She made an attempt at a smile and the ensuing grimace revealed that she’d lost more than a few teeth, either to a lack of hygiene or lack of equestrian caution.
“Howya guys doin’?” the apparition croaked. “Wet enough for ya?”
I smiled uneasily. Alexander spoke up for the both of us. “Dreadful weather,” he agreed. “But at least it won’t snow on us.”
“Ya got that right, heh.” She lit a cigarette with effort, the smoke hanging about our heads in the damp air. “I’m Mary Archer. Trainer here.”
“Dennis is away?” Alexander tried to hide his surprise.
“He’s back on the road,” Mary Archer said. “Got restless hangin’ around here, I guess. Took a string up North.”
At least we didn’t have to deal with Dennis, the slime ball.
“You came to see the First Hunter colt. Outta Missy Witchy, right?”
Alexander nodded. “We have a very interested buyer. We’re just here to see him move; after that we can go ahead and have a vet check, take pictures, all that sort of thing.”
Mary blew out a puff of smoke; it hovered in the air between us, blurring our vision of her. I couldn’t say that was the worst thing in the world. “He’s a nice colt. I’ll have the boys bring him out and you can see him go in the shed. No use trying to do anything out here.” She didn’t seem to notice that we were all standing out in the rain anyway.
Eventually the cigarette ended and we were able to walk into the atrium of the barn. It had been a breeding shed once and the center-aisle format was a strange way to run a training barn. I wondered how they worked the horses when the weathe
r was bad. We could trot, even canter ours in the shedrow, as a break from the Equi-ciser. The Perry horses wouldn’t have that option. But the atrium was nice enough to ride a big circle in; twenty meters, at least, I thought, measuring it with my old dressage training, from my life before racehorses. I dug my toes into the soft mulch, the first dry footing my boots had felt in days, and waited for “the boys” to bring out the colt.
There was some banging from the aisle to our left. Alexander looked at Mary inquisitively. She smiled encouragingly. A metal door banged.
“Dios mio!”
More banging.
“Mary…?”
Mary smiled again, more tight-lipped this time. “They’ll just be a minute,” she assured us, ramping up her southern accent.
Well, Mary was right. They were just a minute. A minute behind the colt, who came plunging into the atrium like a black demon, his forelock flying up between his pinned ears and his hooves somewhere north of his hindquarters. Mary took one look at the colt and darted for the gate to the sidewalk, slamming it shut — with her on the other side! The grooms came flying after the colt, pelting down the soft horse-safe pavers of the aisle, lead shanks at their side, shrieking in Spanish. I looked at Alexander, who was already ready to spring the moment the horse’s dangling shank came within grabbing distance. It had never occurred to him to get the hell out of the horse’s way; Alexander wanted to stop the colt before he hurt himself. But I wondered what Mary knew that we didn’t, what made her skedaddle out of that ring as quickly as possible …
“Maybe we should—”
“Get out of there!” Mary bellowed. “He’ll run you down!”
I grabbed at Alexander’s arm and hauled backwards, pulling him back to the gate. The colt, snorting like a bull, had zeroed in on the grooms and was leaping in their direction. He was going to attack them, I realized in shock. He was that rarest of horses, a man-eater.
Alexander seemed to come to the same conclusion just as I did, because then he was moving with me, and past me, and pulling me along, back to the gate where Mary was gesturing frantically. We slammed it shut and saw that the grooms had done the same, pulling a heavy wooden half-door across the aisle entrance so that the dark colt was trapped inside the atrium. He trotted around, hooves flinging wooden mulch, with his head high and his nostrils flared, snorting. Looking for someone to kill, I thought. What a disaster.
Beside me, smelling of cigarette smoke and horse, Mary was breathing heavily. “I’m sorry, y’all,” she said finally, gasping to catch her breath. “It’ll be a few minutes. If you lose that horse, you gotta dope his feed to get him back.”
***
Mary made us coffee in the office, a sparkling-clean room decorated like a model home at a retirement community, just adjacent to the breeding shed. There were windows into the atrium and we could still see the black colt trolling around looking for trouble, his lead shank trailing in the mulch. Occasionally he stepped on the lead and stopped abruptly, his head snapping back as his own hoof tightened the shank over his nose. It was sad to see.
“What happened to him?” I asked, sinking into a flower-patterned chair from the “Florida Living” collection at Ocala’s Bargain Furniture Outlet Superstore. The light wood of the arms was cool and damp in the pervasive humidity, even with the air conditioner humming away industriously. “A horse isn’t born like that.”
Mary shook her head. “I got no idea. He come off the trailer like that, like he want to kill everyone in sight. The only time he’s any good is when he’s training. He’s a monster on the track, I gotta tell ya. Real fast.”
“He’s a monster off the track, too,” Alexander said. “Just a different kind.”
“I reckon you won’t be takin’ him.”
I laughed.
“I’m afraid not,” Alexander replied, more politely than I could have managed. “I wish you good luck with him.”
Mary sighed. “Oh, Dennis’ll find some use for him somewheres.”
“How long have you been working for Dennis?” I asked, curious as to how anyone, but especially someone who seemed as agreeable as Mary, could stand working for the man. Her first impressions were not stellar, sure, but she had turned out to be nice enough, apologizing for the crazy death-horse and making us coffee and all. From what I’d heard of him, Dennis would have blamed us for the horse’s behavior, and then run us off the property with a threat of a lawsuit hanging over our heads.
“Too long,” Mary said, and laughed to take away the sting. But I heard it; she was serious. “I was a trainer for years, and then I started working up here because I was tired of the circuit, and now I’m tired of this, but what can you do? It’s a tough business.”
“I remember you,” Alexander said suddenly. “You were leading female trainer at Tampa back in the early nineties.”
Mary smiled. “I sure was! Nice that someone remembers.”
Alexander put his coffee down and leaned forward. “If you want to go back to racing, I can give you a job.”
I gaped at him; Mary gaped at him.
“Alex here needs an assistant. She’s taking six horses to Saratoga.”
I could see Mary’s eyes widen at the magic word: Saratoga. Then the other words started to take effect. Namely:
“Assistant?”
I looked at the coffee table, at the copies of The Blood-Horse and Florida Horse scattered across the wooden surface.
“She has been my assistant for the past three years,” Alexander went on. “But I’m needed at my brother’s farm this summer. She’s fully qualified to train, and they’re good horses. We have a house rented there already, and…”
“That’s awfully kind of you,” Mary interrupted. “But—”
“I’d love to have someone of your expertise,” I broke in, still looking down at the magazines. I couldn’t believe I was going to be turned down by someone who worked for Dennis Perry. Someone who’d just had to flee a marauding colt in her own training barn in order to save her own life. That this sort of bullshit was somehow preferable to working for me.
“I—” Mary hesitated. “I wouldn’t really be looking for an assistant job. Trainer, yes…”
“I’m afraid we already have a trainer,” I began, with an attempt at humor.
“With all due respect, sweetheart, I just don't think I would feel comfortable working for someone with your level of experience.”
Sweetheart. There it was. I looked up from the magazine cover I’d been studying, two horses duking it out in the stretch, typical of nearly every horse racing magazine cover ever printed, except that the inside horse had his ears pinned and was reaching towards the outside horse with bared teeth, grasping for flesh, and I thought, yeah, that’s the way to win a fight, and I picked up the magazine and slapped it on the hardwood of the coffee table with a crack that nearly lifted that hillbilly biddy out of her Wellington boots.
“You haven't stood in a winner’s circle in fifteen years,” I said coldly. “I’ve been riding and training with Alexander for the past five, and you're going to tell me that you're more qualified to run these horses than I am? When’s the last time you touched a horse older than two? When you go visit the broodmares?” I stood up, shrugging Alexander away. “This is a joke. She shows us a horse that’s literally insane and then insults my knowledge. Let’s get out of here.”
Mary Archer, who really had, fifteen years ago, been the leading female trainer at Tampa Bay Downs, and had never quite gotten over it, glared at me with glacial eyes. “You got no call to talk to me like that,” she hissed. “I only said the truth.”
“So did I.”
Alexander stood up and looked at me desperately. “Let’s be civil,” he said helplessly. Mary turned her glare on him.
“Tell that to your little girl here. She needs to learn how to speak to her elders. I’m surprised you never taught her that, Alexander.”
I felt such a surge of rage that I thought I would faint. My vision blurred and my tongue ca
ught on its own insults. And when I recovered, it was only to hear the office door slam behind us, Alexander’s hand across my back hurrying me along the wet sidewalk.
“Did she really—”
“Oh, Alex, please. Have done.”
Alexander was a big fan of just letting things go. Alexander the peacemaker, Alexander the rational, Alexander the unmoved. I wanted to stew over it, let the grudge rankle, have a little play-by-play in which we analyzed all the insults the retired trainer population of North Florida had lobbed at me over the past few days. “Alexander, they all just think of me as your little, I don't know… chippie.”
“Chippie? Where did you learn that word?”
“From all these damn old people I’ve had to live with in Ocala for the past five years,” I grumbled, and Alexander, who was considerably older than me, chuckled.
“Alex, you know it's going to be years and dozens of winners for people to get over … us. And some people never will. It makes for good gossip, that’s all. It passes the time waiting for the vet and sitting on a pony.”
We got in the truck and Alexander backed it around so that we could go splashing down the drive again. Rain splattered onto the windshield from the palm tree follies. “It could just go on raining and I wouldn’t mind,” I said, experimenting with depression.
“Alex, please,” Alexander said again.
“It’s a change from sun all the time, that’s all.”
“There are still a few people we can call. I know we agreed on a woman, but Hank over at Starting Gate might be interested. He’s always liked you.”
I liked Hank. But Hank was slick. He’d agree that I was the boss and then have every groom, hot-walker, and exercise rider answering to him in no time. It would be mortifying. “I’m going to ask Lucy if she has anyone ready to go.”
Alexander sighed. “Lucy trains event horses,” he said, as if I didn’t know. Lucy ran a farm in Morriston and took more than a few retirees from us to train for new careers.
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 5
