“I’ll take you to get a drink as soon as they get the horse out, yeah? You need something cold.” He turned back towards the filly, who was hot and washed out, sweat darkening across her body. “She needs it, too, but she’ll have to wait, I guess.”
“Johnny—” He looked at me, eyes questioning. I thought I’d never loved someone quite so unsuitable as Johnny: like a brother, the last thing, so they said, guys ever wanted to hear. I wasn’t a girl that men chased; I was too dirty most of the time, and too focused on work to ever be noticed. Or, I guessed, to notice if someone noticed me. I knew Johnny had hoped for a fling, and I hadn’t been able to give him one; I’d been really clear about that much, I thought, when I’d turned away from his lips. But he’d come back to be my friend when I needed someone to lean on. That was extraordinary. I’d never had anyone do that for me before. I took his hands, ready to give him some sort of speech, but that wasn’t what came out of my mouth. “Thanks for coming,” I said lamely, not sure how to put any of my emotions into words. “I really needed it.”
He smiled warmly, and if there was regret in his expression, I couldn’t find it. Perhaps it had all been nothing anyway. Perhaps it had been a fleeting fancy on his part and nothing serious at all, and no harm done. Perhaps we had never been anything more than friends. There was no time to worry or wonder about that now, though. Behind him, the paddock master was calling for riders up. Willy was looking my way and swinging his stick like a baton. It was time to send her to post.
I dropped Johnny’s hands, shook back my hair, and went forward to give him a leg up.
***
Watching your horse run a race is a cross between panic and elation, with dips into horror and leaps into exaltation. It’s like the meters on a crashing airplane in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It’s all systems haywire.
Every time I did it, I thought I should really stop watching the races and just retreat into a restroom after I sent a horse to post. But of course I couldn’t do that. I had to see, had to know, as if my witnessing the race could change the racing luck for good, prevent disaster, bring the horse home safe. In the end, that was all that mattered.
I needed to bring her home safe.
Johnny steered me away from the rail, though, and towards the stairs of the clubhouse. He stopped at the bar and bought me a bottle of water and a mint julep. “You’ll want both of these,” he said. “Water first.” He put his hand on my back and guided me down the steps of the balcony to our box.
“I never watch my horse run from here,” I protested, but it was faint. He was right. I needed to sit down in the shade and have a drink, not press myself up against the chain link fence in the hot sun. He shook his head at me.
“Just drink that.” He pushed the bottle of water towards me, and I uncapped it and obliged him, drinking until my stomach was full and pressing against the tight waist of my khaki pants. Then I started on the bourbon.
The horses went by in the post parade. Despite her attitude in the paddock, it was nothing like last week when Idle Hour went into his fit. Everyone was fairly professional, and no wonder: all of them had long and unimpressive resumes, months and years of racing experience. I’d put her into an allowance-optional claimer with no price tag, to stop Roddy Ellis from coming after her again just out of spite. And it was a long turf race besides, when she had only done dirt sprints before. In a sea of longshots, Luna Park was the longest of them all. At eighty to one, the undistinguished maiden with a trainer who had had only two wins at the entire meet was not getting any respect from the horseplayers. That was fine. I hoped Johnny had a hundred bucks on her. She was cantering like a princess beside her pony, head tucked neatly, hindquarters springing beneath her. I thought I saw a look of surprised pleasure on Willy Impresa’s face. I did that, I wanted to tell everyone around me. I fixed that filly. But I’d let the filly show them. I’d let her do all the talking.
She went into the gate like a star, but that had never been a problem for her. It was the break that would, pardon the expression, make or break her. Would she dart for the lead, tuck in along the rail, and run like her tail was on fire until she was too tired to go on? I shuddered to think of what that might look like in a mile and an eighth race. She’d be so far behind the others that the prior performance would list her as DNF: did not finish.
I didn’t think I could come back from that. Not here, anyway. Maybe at Tampa, maybe if I kept things small. But a DNF at Saratoga, from my first claim and my first project … that would be soul-crushing.
And what would I ever say to Alexander?
“Take it easy,” I said aloud, and Johnny put his hand on mine and squeezed.
“Drink your drink,” he advised. I didn’t think alcohol could solve everything, but what did I know? I tipped the plastic cup back.
A horse broke from the gate, all alone, and I spilled the drink down my shirt.
She was black.
It wasn’t my filly.
“Oh, and Battle Born has broken through the gate!” the announcer cried out. “But the outrider has her in hand. He’s bringing her back.”
“I swear to fucking God,” I said evenly, and Johnny nodded.
“You said it.”
They re-loaded the dark filly, and then everyone waited while the six and the seven went into little rearing fits and had to be straightened out. I prayed no one would bang themselves on the gate and cause a scratch. If one of the horses had to be unloaded, all of the horses had to be unloaded. The stress was too much.
The gates sprang open and the fillies, all of them, burst forward in unison. It was a beautifully clean break. But I prayed for traffic for Luna. Let her get hung up mid-pack. Let her have to think about where she was placing her feet. Let her have to trust her rider. Let her rely on Willy to get her around the course in one piece.
The mad black filly got the jump on all of them and pulled ahead, leading a tightly bunched pack around the clubhouse turn. As they passed us, I saw my filly tucked in along the rail, neatly pocketed into fifth place, exactly where I wanted her to be. The field would keep her slow, keep her humble; the sod in her face would be a shock to be sure, but she was strong-willed enough that I thought she’d out-class a little dirt in her eye. She wasn’t the kind of filly to back down when things got a little messy, I didn’t think.
In long turf races, not much changes for three quarters of the race. A pacesetter goes to the front and tries to slow things down. The pack lies in wait for the turn for the stretch, when they all make their moves and try to pounce on the leader. And this race was no different from the rest. They galloped quietly enough around the backstretch in unimpressive fractions. Near the three-eighths pole, a gray filly made a bid for the lead and took it from the black filly on the rail, Battle Born. Battle Born, perhaps already tired from her fractious behavior before the start, suddenly seemed to run backwards, slipping back into the pack behind her. The horses in the pack began to turn and run wide, seeking to go around the tiring Battle Born.
But Luna, pinned on the rail with three horses to her right, couldn’t go around her. The horses to her right did not move; she was trapped with the black filly slipping back towards her.
I jumped to my feet. The horses were at the top of the stretch now, running six wide. The gray was running along the rail, with contesters coming up in the three and four lanes, down the center of the track. Behind the three leaders, the bunch remained as tightly packed as ever, and I saw Willy turn his head, looking for a way out for his filly.
There was no way out; he pulled back sharply on the reins, standing in the stirrups, as Battle Born seemed to fall into her path. I saw her head go up, her mouth gape open, her ears sweep back. Would she accept him, or fight him, and clip heels with the failing black filly?
I balled my hands into fists. I felt my fingernails pressing into my skin. I couldn’t stop myself from tensing every muscle in my body. I stared down at disaster, Johnny’s hand on my sleeve, waiting for the accident, waiting for the end
, waiting to just turn and go home and never again pretend I was more than a trainer’s wife.
She shortened her stride at last, and then Willy was taking her around the horse to her right, through a little hole that opened as she slowed, and he told her to shove between two more horses and make her own way to daylight.
And she did.
They swept past the eighth pole. A furlong to go. Ten seconds to go. She plowed through the brown-green grass, her hooves digging up great clods of the ruined sod, all the remnants of that dry miserable summer, and sending them flying behind her. I thought the chunks of grass and soil were all our failures and regrets, she and I both putting them behind us, a great big jolly fuck you to a summer of sorrow, and when she put her head next to the embattled gray filly I thought I didn’t care who won the photo, but I’d always tell the filly it had been her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Partners
It rained that night.
I sat in the office with the door to the lawn propped open by a trash can and watched it stream down from the gutterless roof, pouring down in torrents onto the grass and creating reddish-brown ruts where it cut away at the loose turf alongside the barn. It was the most relaxing sight this poor lost Florida-bred had seen all summer long. Amongst all the Thoroughbreds and horsepeople I had expected to find myself at home, but there were certain things lacking, palm trees and thunderstorms amongst them, that I could not be happy without.
The air itself was cooler, breaking the torrid heat that had baked us for more than a month. The horses were happier; I could hear little neighs and nickers out in the shedrow, where they were talking to each other. Thoroughbreds are social animals; they can rarely touch noses and breath in each other’s breath as horses like to do, so they are noisier than other horses. They whinny over the punch line when you’re listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me while you’re raking the shedrow. This barn had been too quiet for weeks. It was nice to hear their chatter, even if tomorrow morning I’d be trying to hear some report on NPR and they’d be carrying on to each other about what their hay tasted like.
Alexander had called right after the rain had started. Johnny took one look at my face and stole away; I didn’t know where he was now. For all I knew, he’d gone back to New York. I felt bad, but not bad enough to go and look for him, or pick up my phone and call him. There were some things you could not choose. Who you loved was one of them.
My darling, domineering, discriminating husband was proud of me, for taking a broken filly and putting her in to win by a nose at the greatest race meet in the world, and in the end, that was what I had set out to do: prove to him that I could do it, that I was strong enough to stand up on my own and race horses as well as he could. I didn’t want to need him. I wanted to want him.
Whatever had happened in Australia… and now I thought nothing, that it was all in my head, that every insecurity I had developed here in Saratoga had been fuel to the fire as I imagined Alexander’s tone softening when he spoke of Polly… whatever had happened, I knew he’d come home to me in another month or two and we’d settle down again to our old lives. I’d already decided we wouldn’t be buying any horses at Keeneland, even if Birdwell made good on his blustery threats to pull all his mares and weanlings from our care. We had enough of our own. We had no need of other people’s horses, other people’s problems.
I could hear Kerri and Roddy in the shedrow on the other side of the barn, continuing an argument that had been going on for the past half an hour. Her voice was raised, his kept getting cut off; I thought she was winning. He’d left her in Delaware, knocked off for Del Mar in California and made a fool of himself chasing around an actress who had bought a couple of grey horses because she thought they were pretty. He’d succeeded in luring the actress to bring her horses to his barn, but he hadn’t counted on how breathtakingly slow the horses would be, or how quickly she would lose interest in him once he told her that her horses were no good. He had come back to Saratoga equally clueless about how outraged sweet little Kerri would be with his callous treatment of her. I listened to her shriek and thought my sweet sunshine and rainbows was coming into her own at last. She might make a racetracker, after all. Lucy would be impressed.
The wind blew the rain in gray sheets across the lawn, knocked over the lawn chairs where they sat forgotten beneath their elm tree, blew a feed bag end over end until it hit the chain link fence around the property and flattened up against the metal, quivering with every new gust. RACE READY, the side of the bag declared in bold black lettering.
Race ready.
Down in the shedrow, I had seven good horses. Two might race again before we went back to Florida. Five would not. But they would all be race ready back at home. Idle Hour would come around, his jagged wound from another horseshoe scraping down his foreleg would heal well enough, and leave only a trail of black skin and white hair as a reminder of his panic attack. Personal Best’s hemoglobin levels were testing normally, and he would be ready to go back into training as soon as we were home. Bonnie Chance was ready to go out and fight one more time before we went home. Shearwater, Virtue and Vice, and Elegantly Wasted had all come close to the winner’s circle without actually making it in. But they were sound and happy and healthy and full of run.
And my filly… she stood pressed against the webbing, ears pricked, gazing into the rainy night. She didn’t know she was going back to Florida in a week, to a stall just miles from that falling-down shed at Littlefield where I’d seen her first. Where I’d known, the moment I saw her, that she was my horse.
The summer had been a success, even if that was all that I went home on. That was all a horse trainer could ask for.
And I was a racehorse trainer.
And these were my horses.
***
My favorite thing was to walk down to watch evening turn-out. There was no telling how long it had been since Luna had seen the inside of a paddock, or been turned loose to alternate between galloping and grazing on her wild lone, without a hand to steady her or tell her no, but it was almost certainly too long ago. I put her in splint boots all around, to keep her from banging her legs with her own hooves; that was how wild she was the first few nights, careening around the little field with an abandon that was sure to get her hurt in the end.
Heidi shook her head over the filly’s exuberance. “You got a crazy girl there,” she said now in her German accent, slapping at mosquitoes as we leaned over the black-board fence. “You ride that crazy girl?”
“I love riding her,” I confessed. “I think she would make a nice dressage horse. You’d like her too, if you gave her a shot.”
Heidi chuckled. “That little thing!” was all she would say. Heidi liked her horses seventeen hands and descended from milk drays; she thought our Thoroughbreds were the last word in silly.
Kerri came out of the training barn leading Personal Best; he was immediately up on his hind legs and she shook her head and gave the lead shank a snap to bring him back down to earth.
“Your boy is feeling better, yah?”
“Much.” I watched her take the chestnut colt out to his paddock. From across the drive, Tiger and Parker looked up with pricked ears, grass sticking out of their mouths; when Personal Best didn’t follow up his acrobatics with anything more interesting than a prancing jog next to Kerri’s raised hand, they went back to eating, shaking their necks free of bugs. She shut his gate behind him and ducked away as she loosened the lead shank; Personal Best tore away from her with an explosion of sod and mud, and galloped across the paddock with a roll of thunder beneath his hooves.
Kerri just shook her head again. She was used to him.
She came over to join us. “The thing is,” she said as she walked up. “He’ll always be that bad, won’t he? Because you think he’ll be a stud someday.”
Heidi laughed. “That leetle thing! A stud!”
“Stop it, both of you,” I said fiercely. “My sweet little boy is going to be the big ho
rse someday, you’ll see.”
“You say that about all of them,” Heidi chortled. “You got big heart, that’s for sure.”
“Well one of them has to be,” I argued, just for the sake of arguing. “I have enough of them.”
I looked around at my kids, at Tiger and Parker, at Personal Best, at Luna, the dark horses and the red horses glinting as the evening sun escaped from the grasping skeins of late afternoon storm cloud, one last orange glare before the day gave up the ghost.
“So many pets, Alex,” Alexander said, coming up behind me and laying his hands on my shoulders. “And which is your favorite?”
“I love all my children equally,” I said stoutly.
“That is to say, too much,” he declared comfortably. “You never outgrew the pony club, my dear.”
Kerri and Heidi whooped. Luna snorted and trotted away from us, seeking quieter grazing grounds. The sun slipped beneath the trees without fanfare and the night was suddenly all around us. A mosquito whined in my ear and I slapped it away.
“Well, I’m going home,” Kerri announced, swinging her lead shank through the air. “Tomorrow is almost here already.”
“Yah,” Heidi agreed. “I haf my own to feed.”
Friends scattered into the damp evening, leaving Alexander and I alone with the horses. The training barn lights switched out; on the hillside, we saw the windows of the broodmare barn and the yearling barns go dark as well. The whip-poor-wills took up their familiar cries from the blackjacks, and in the east, lightning flickered from a dying storm.
Alexander left his hands on my shoulders, though, and we stayed out long after we normally would have, swatting at bugs and listening to the horses crop grass, a relaxing, contented sound that had not changed in thousands of years.
“In Saratoga, it would be cool enough for jackets and jeans,” I said eventually, watching the lightning leap silently through the clouds, too far away for the thunder to reach us.
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 25
