I’d head to the front entrance and order a cab in just a moment. I would. I leaned my head back against the flaking white paint of the wall behind me and told myself I had to leave.
“Alex.”
I opened my eyes. When had I closed them? I found that I was leaning rather precipitously against a column supporting the upper grandstand. I shook my head, embarrassed to be falling-down-drunk outside of the Jim Dandy Bar. Alexander would most certainly not approve.
But he wasn’t here, was he.
“Alex,” the voice said again, and I turned my head.
“Johnny,” I gasped.
***
“You know, you’re why I came up here.”
I looked over at Johnny. He was leaning back in the lawn chair, eyes half closed, watching me. To see my reaction, I thought. I just shook my head. “Well, that’s creepy,” I said blandly, and took a sip of beer. The thin yellowness of it seemed to tighten my throat. I wished I’d ordered more bourbon, a to-go cup of bourbon.
He laughed, a sudden burst like it had been pent up inside his chest. “That’s all you can say? Come on, man, you want to know what the hell I’m talking about.”
He talked like a kid, like a college student, I thought. He talked like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like sitting in that lawn chair under a Saratoga elm and slowly getting drunk on a summer evening, and of course teasing the weird horse trainer, was the only thing on his mind. Lucky him.
“I know Ryan, right?” he drawled after a silent minute had slowly dragged by. “Ryan from Greenpoint? Well, he lives in Bushwick now. But you know who I mean.”
Ryan! Ryan, the graphic designer whose couch I had crashed on years ago, a lifetime ago, the night before I went to see Tiger at Aqueduct. We were Facebook friends, and I’d had drinks with him on a couple New York City weekends Alexander and I had fit into our schedules, but last year there hadn’t been time, and he had slipped off my radar. “You know Ryan?”
And Ryan was telling people about me?
Johnny smiled, because he had gotten through my defenses. “Yeah, I know Ryan. We go way back. And he was like, way into you for a while there.”
“I’m sorry?” He had to be joking. No one was way into me, ever. Just Alexander. I never even had a boyfriend in high school.
“Oh, yeah.” Johnny closed his eyes, the better to channel his friend. “ ‘Johnny, this chick was just so bad-ass. She rides horses, man. Fucking racehorses! She was something else.’ ” He opened his eyes. “That was Ryan, like, circa three years ago.”
I felt my cheeks grow hot. Despite myself, I remembered distinctly how attractive Ryan was. Not too different from Johnny, really; there was a sameness to these guys, with their T shirts and tight jeans and flimsy canvas Toms, their fuzzy beards and short haircuts. It was like a tribal costume.
I had a tribal costume, too. It consisted mainly of ripped denim and dirty tank tops. I was even a wreck when I ran a horse and showed up in my businesswoman trainer outfit, sweating through my polyester blouses from Kohl’s and getting every sort of equine grit on my trousers. I was a dirt ball, plain and simple. Even in the neat clothes I’d worn to the racetrack this afternoon, I was aware of just how dirty I was from a day with horses. It wasn’t embarrassing most of the time; suddenly it was intensely so.
“I have to go,” I blurted. “Sorry.” And I started to get up, find that cab, maybe go back to the barn, back to my native element, back to my dirt.
“Ah come on,” Johnny cajoled. “I’ve been watching you. At the barn and shit. You, like, never stop working. You should chill.”
“I can’t chill, Johnny,” I said impatiently. “I have a stable to run. It's the biggest meet of the year. I can’t relax until September.”
He smiled slowly, knowingly. “And what then? You gonna take some time off, have some fun?”
I thought. Time off, time off, when could I take time off? September brought with it the Keeneland yearling sale. I’d have babies to sell, might buy one or two for fresh bloodlines in the home herd. Alexander would be agent for several clients. Then October brought the Breeders’ Cup. Would Personal Best run in the Juvenile? We had dreamed of it. I still hoped so. Oh, how I wanted that for him! I pictured the race with such clarity that I was able to turn away from Johnny’s seductive smile with sudden ease. I got up, put down the beer can on the lid of his cooler. Let him deal with the trash. “I might take a day or two off,” I called over my shoulder as I started away. “But there’s no rest for the wicked, right?”
He grinned again, and I thought as a parting shot it was rather more flirtatious than I had meant it to be, but whatever. I had other things to concentrate on, like keeping my feet underneath of me. I was drunk, plain and simple, and that wasn’t something I usually had time to indulge in. I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with. But that earlier plan, about curling up in my bed with the air conditioner turned on full blast? Yeah. That sounded more attractive than ever. I made my determined way through the picnic tables and blankets and coolers, the toddlers and the retirees, the never-ending party that was summer at Saratoga, heading for the red and white awnings of the turnstiles.
I didn’t intend to turn around. But I couldn’t help myself. I paused before I went around the corner of the admissions gate, and looked across the acres of merry-makers. And there he sat, watching me. He raised a beer in a toast and I turned, too quickly, nearly losing my balance, and used the white-painted woodwork as a support as I shoved myself around the corner and out of sight.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Delaware
The horse van went past as I was riding Personal Best to the track. Manny was too busy keeping Idle Hour straight to question its destination; the dark colt went into a little bit of a bucking fit at the roar of the tractor-trailer engine. He’d been looking for an excuse since the minute he’d stepped out of his stall this morning, and Manny hadn’t exactly been caught by surprise. I myself was surprised by my own colt’s quiet. He pricked his ears at Idle Hour as the colt went dancing into the middle of the empty street, and lifted his head a little, but he didn’t respond with a spook or a hop of his own. I ran my hand down his neck, feeling his hot neck as if I might be able to distinguish the simple heat of racehorse heading to the track on a summer morning from the fever of an encroaching infection. Whatever the cause, Personal Best hadn’t reacted with his normal exuberance. He was a horse that fed off of everyone else’s emotions. He should have at least thrown a little buck.
While I was busy wondering if my horse’s good behavior was indicative of some deep ill, the tractor-trailer continued on down our street and stopped, with a great screeching of air brakes and other farm-inappropriate noises, at the gate to our stable. I turned in the saddle to look, while Manny swore at the grunting and snorting Idle Hour, who was clearly feeling like a million dollars this morning. The happier the racehorse, the worse he behaved, I often thought. Idle Hour looked like he’d just had a full-body cleanse. I made a mental note to drop him in the next possible race. He was begging for it.
My own colt, on the other hand …
I looked back at the trailer, clearly parked in front of our stable, and frowned. There was a loading ramp, seldom used, out in front, and the little gangplank from the horse van was now being dropped onto it. Someone was coming? Someone was going? I waited, and then a groom from Roddy Ellis’s stable walked a horse up the grassy ramp and onto the gangplank. The horse balked for a moment, lifting a white-bandaged leg to paw at the wooden bridge, and even though we were several blocks away I knew, with a feeling like lightning through my center, who it was.
The filly.
She walked onto the van after a moment’s consideration, the groom waiting patiently for her to make up her own mind to cooperate, and I saw the big trailer shake gently with her shifting weight within. Then the groom was stepping out, and the gangplank was put back in place and the big door fastened shut again. The groom went to the driver’s side and held out some papers for signing
, and an envelope that would contain her important papers: Jockey Club papers, veterinary examination, Coggins test, whatever feed and drug notes that might have been passed on from her previous trainer, and then that was it. The truck turned back on.
Manny cursed. “Let’s get these fucking horses across the street before that truck come back,” he growled, and kicked Idle Hour into a jog.
Ordinarily I would have yelled after him; I didn’t approve of jogging the horses on pavement. Their shoes were too thin and slick; the asphalt was too hard and jarring for their taxed young bones. But Personal Best tossed his head and went after him, and I let him go, more relieved that my colt wanted to go forward at all than I could say, and just as hurt and disappointed that the chestnut filly wasn’t going to be in the barn after all.
And she was leaving Saratoga! How could I get my hands on her now?
***
I walked out Personal Best myself. Gabe had Idle Hour, who was feeling a little more sober after Manny galloped him for two miles. Kerri was busy mucking out Bonnie Chance’s stall while Manny took her to the track. Business as usual.
Personal Best was cooling out just fine, but I was still unsatisfied by the way he had behaved this morning. His gallop had been even and his breathing was normal, but his ears had been more wiggly than usual; instead of pricking his ears and gazing at the horizon, he had let them swing, as if he was paying more attention to where he put his feet than usual. I knew my colt to be happy-go-lucky, restless, full of run. Thinking, to be honest, was not really in his repertoire.
Something was wrong.
There was always something wrong with somebody, of course; that was the nature of horses. But I had been so ready to put him into a stakes race, start racking up the black type and the earnings, prep him for the Breeders’ Cup Championships in late autumn. All signs had pointed toward one thing: Personal Best was the one. The one breeders wait for and hope for and pray for and scheme for. We’d bred a lot of nice horses, and Alexander had had a few nice hits in the nineties, but since I had started working with him eight years ago, a schoolgirl with nothing but horse show experience, we had not bred a champion. Nice horses, sure; winners, yes, but nothing that would make an international splash, nothing that would sire (or dam) the sort of yearling that stopped the presses when it went through the sales ring. The glowing chestnut two-year-old at my side, his head low and his ears still swinging at that disinterested half-mast; he was supposed to be that horse.
I dug out my phone from my back pocket and left a voicemail with the vet, asking her to swing by after she was done on the backside. He nudged at the phone in my hand, lips asking if it was a treat, or something he could chew on. “Not everything is for your mouth,” I told him. He nipped at my fingers in response and I gave him a smack on the jaw. He snorted and sneezed, leaving black horse boogers on my jeans, which I supposed was his way of getting the last word. “Love you,” I told him, and I meant it.
Hot-walking horses meant spending about twenty minutes circling the shedrow, the entire shedrow, and since I only rented a quarter of the barn, three quarters of my time was spent in Roddy Ellis’s domain. Fortunately for me, he spent most of the training hours over on the backside, binoculars over his neck, coffee in hand, bullshitting with the other trainers, owners, and various racetrack hangers-on who railbirded all morning, every morning. I didn’t have to see him much, and I trudged along in the hot-walker way, head down, eyes on my boots, anyway. But now I found myself looking into stalls, into the office, into the tack room, hoping that I’d see his smug mug for once. I was disappointed, of course. There was no one there but the grooms and hot-walkers, running the barn with quiet efficiency, calling to one another or remonstrating their horses from time to time in Spanish, no one to tell me what had happened to the chestnut filly, and I would not ask Kerri to find out.
I rubbed at my colt’s neck and he leaned into me. We walked and we walked and we walked, setting our boots and our horseshoes into the same places we had on the circuit before, until his coat was dry and cool to the touch and I had no more excuses to spend all my time on him. I hosed the clay off his hooves and fetlocks and put him back in his stall to work on his hay net. He went at it, but not with his usual ferocity, lipping at the flakes instead of attacking the tightly packed ball with bared yellow teeth.
I sighed.
Lost the filly, the colt was sick … this summer was turning into some drag, no doubt about that. A hurricane was beginning to seem downright attractive, especially if I was home alone with Alexander during it. A few Dark ‘n’ Stormys down the hatch and neither of us would ever remember that Australia or Saratoga or chestnut fillies or Polly existed …
“Hey, girl.”
You have got to be kidding me.
“You’re up early,” I said flatly, and Johnny laughed.
“I’m still up,” he said with a grin. “I was just passing through on my way to my bed. Thought I’d see if you were okay. You were pretty sauced yesterday.”
I grimaced. Three naproxens at two a.m. and half a pot of coffee were the only way I was functioning today. That and the going to bed at seven p.m. That helped. Last night I’d slept more than six hours for the first time in what felt like years. Or maybe I’d passed out and it had turned into sleep. Either way. I wasn’t too hungover, and that was what counted. “I’m fine. I just rode this horse a little while ago, in fact.” I pointed at Personal Best, picking at his hay fastidiously. “Nothing fixes what ails you like a gallop on a nice horse.”
Johnny obligingly studied the colt. “Pretty,” he said after a while. “Real red.”
“Yes, he’s a nice color.” I waited for him to state his business. I was okay, he’d seen that for himself, so what else did he want?
“I thought you could join me for a drink this afternoon,” Johnny said eventually, after he realized I wasn’t going to say anything else.
“I join you for a drink most afternoons.”
“Not with Mike and them,” Johnny smiled. “With me. I know a place downtown … it’s quiet on racing afternoons. No one around who knows you.”
I looked down at the dusty toes of my boots. Quiet on racing afternoons. Someplace where we wouldn’t be seen, and gossiped about, by the trainers and owners and riders who knew me. And Alexander. If I was seen out with this guy, someone they didn’t know, there would be talk, all right. I could only imagine: Did you hear about Alexander’s wife, up here pretending she’s a trainer, out with some guy while poor Alexander is slaving away on his sick brother’s farm in Australia?
“Can you promise that?” I asked.
Johnny raised his eyebrows. “That you won’t be seen? Everyone’s at the track at three o’clock. Come then. It’s not a very horsey bar, anyway. It’s, like, cool.”
I shook my head at the slight. “Horsey is cool around here.”
He grinned. “Yeah, well … this ain’t my town, Alex. And it ain’t yours, either.”
“No,” I admitted. “It sure ain’t.”
He moved a little closer, just near enough to set my heart to beating faster than it should, and reached his hand out. I thought he’d caress my cheek, and I steeled myself for a touch more intimate than I ought to allow, but instead, he chucked me under the chin like we were on Leave It to Beaver. “Chin up, kiddo,” he said seriously. “You’re made of bigger stuff than these hicks.”
And he walked out of the barn.
Which was all well and good, I thought, hand to my chin, but the fact was, I was a horsewoman, and all the hipsters in the world couldn’t change that.
They were fun to play with, though. I went down to the end of the shedrow; Johnny was already walking out of the gate. I shouted after him, mindless of what the hot-walkers might hear: “Pick me up, I’m giving Kerri the car this afternoon!”
He turned and nodded, then gave me a wave and slouched off towards his car.
Well, I thought. At least I’m doing something different than watching other people’s horses
this afternoon.
***
I was feeling cheerful enough about my afternoon out, pretending to be someone else, that when Roddy Ellis came back into the barn around ten o’clock, I went right up to him and demanded answers.
He was happy to oblige. “She’s on her way to Delaware. My assistant has the rest of my horses there. She’s not Saratoga material.”
I leaned my head backwards and closed my eyes. “Shit, Roddy.”
“What?”
“Just … shit.” I shook my head and started to walk away. He put out a hand and touched my shoulder.
“Alex, why are you so stuck on that horse? You’re not behaving rationally.”
I looked around me. I hadn’t been quiet, and Kerri was watching silently, rake in hand. Manny was somewhere behind her, standing in the tack room door with a sponge and a bridle in his hand. I felt myself blush. “I just … I wanted that filly for myself, Roddy. For myself.”
He looked at me, eyes narrowed, until I looked back at the ground to get away from his gaze. He thought I was a fool, I knew. He thought I was too emotional for this game. He was probably right. I kept proving that, again and again, didn’t I? But then again, so did Alexander.
Maybe emotion was what was missing from horse racing. Hot, passionate emotion.
“For yourself,” Roddy repeated.
“For myself.” I nodded. “She’s mine,” I added, with enough childish possession to confirm his negative opinion. I turned myself into a little girl with a collection of My Little Pony pieces, but so what? We were enemies already. He could think as little as he liked of me, and he could keep thinking it when he watched me holding my horses’ bridles in the winner’s circle. And I still had a box full of My Little Pony pieces at my parent’s house anyway.
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 18
