Horse-Famous: Stories Read online

  Horse-Famous

  Stories

  Natalie Keller Reinert

  ebook Edition

  Copyright © 2011 Natalie Keller Reinert

  Expendable was originally published by Bushwick Daily

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  *****

  Contents

  Expendable 2

  Horse-Famous 7

  The Long Walk 20

  The Head and Not The Heart 27

  Expendable

  I’m beating her as we round the corner into the homestretch, laying my whip into her flank from high above my head, slap-slap-slap on her glossless hide. The rail is whizzing by close to my left foot, just at the height of my toe in the stirrup, and I’m dizzy with fear that my boot will rub on that hard metal rail and throw off my tenuous balance, losing what little grip I have on the little exercise saddle, or that the screech and vibration will send the horse spooking into the center of the racetrack, shaking me loose, into the dirt.

  Either way it will fuck up the timed work and that is already going pretty badly. Just an eighth of a mile down, three more furlongs to go, and we’re nowhere near a racing pace. Slap-slap-slap, praying she’ll react, accelerate. Slap-slap-slap. She stumbles.

  ***

  The horse is heaving and panting, making slow painful rounds of the rutted path of the dark crowded stable we call the shedrow. The hotwalker is texting, either his girlfriend back in Mexico or his girlfriend in Barn Four. Ordinarily I’d bitch at him, dangerous to have divided attention, that horse could spook or take off, blah blah blah, but it’s obvious that this filly’s going nowhere unless he drags her there with a chain across her lip, and anyway I’m too tired and disgusted to really give a shit about what happens to him. You can only chase these guys around so much and then it’s like, fuck it, get killed by some stud colt on ‘roid rage, see if I care. There’s a million more illegal immigrants lined up, begging for seven day a week, sixteen hour a day, way below minimum wage jobs. You’re expendable, kiddo.

  I’m expendable, too, which is why I don’t go into the office to hang up my hat and safety vest for the day. I don’t need to hear Eddie give me a piece of his mind about the filly’s shit timed work, and I don’t need to hear Marcus, perched next to the heater with a Silver Bullet in his hand at nine o’clock in the morning, tell me one of his stories from his Hong Kong Jockey Club glory days.

  The filly is dragging one foreleg slightly when she walks, but it’s tiny and I am the only one who will notice it.

  I hang up my whip and saddle in the tack room, and stalk towards the train station still wearing my hard hat and vest.

  ***

  C.J. Hernandez is riding her in the last race, the race the secretary writes for all the also-rans of a hundred sad slow claiming races, the race for the survivors who are looking for a little prize money before they break down. She falls at the half mile pole. She was already at the back of the pack, so no one steps on Casey. No one trips over the filly. He gets to live. A pile-up is avoided, at least for the moment. Little break-downs like this don’t even make the Daily Racing Form. They barely hit the blogs.

  Casey gets up, brushes the clay off his white breeches, and waits for the ambulance to come and give him a ride back to the jock’s room. The filly picks up her head, and lays it back down in the dirt.

  From my corner in the top of the grandstands, which hasn’t had a crowd begin enough to fill it in decades, I throw my beer bottle. It goes crashing harmlessly into the empty boxes near the balcony’s edge.

  On my way out, shuffling past the cursing West Indians and the drunken old men, I see that darling of the racing board’s marketing dreams, a young girl with her well-dressed daddy. “Daddy, did that horsey die?” the girl lisps plaintively. Her father stammers.

  “You better believe she died,” I tell her as I shove past.

  ***

  But she didn’t. She’s standing in her stall the next morning, ears at half-mast, a wrapped foreleg hoisted sorrowfully over the straw. Eddie is leaning on the stall webbing, oblivious to the pigeon shit smeared over the rubber, crooning “Hey baby, come on and see your daddy, come on now babe –” Marcus is leaning against the wall drinking a Budweiser. He’s wearing a ridiculous yellow rain poncho that swamps his little ruined body, and his hard hat buckle swings loosely under his loose-skinned neck. It’s six a.m.

  “She be fine in a few day,” he says to me. “She twist she ankle – no big deal.”

  “She fell,” I say flatly. “Horses get up if it’s no big deal. She didn’t get up on her own.”

  “Nah,” Eddie says, turning around. He smiles whitely at me. “Nah, shit, she’s just lazy. You know that. You gotta be hitting her all the time – you know she doesn’t wanna go ‘less’n you make her.”

  “When I ride in Hong Kong,” Marcus says, voice gravelly with early morning alcohol, “I ride this filly, she donwanna go for no man. No man. She stop, she buck, she lay down in the dirt. I figure her out. I stand she up, let she look around, she go straight off and win for me. You gotta get inside they head.”

  “You hear that?” Eddie says. “Marcus knows, he’ll help you out. Next week, get a good breeze out of her – she’ll race good then.”

  “She can’t stand up,” I say skeptically.

  “Oh we get her injected,” Eddie says. “That’s no problem.”

  I look at the pair of them standing before the poor broken horse.

  I grew up riding horses in America’s English countryside. In Virginia, in Maryland. Steeplechase horses, jumping horses, foxhunting horses. Tough, hardy horses. You knew how to treat them, how to keep them fit and strong through hard work. You never ignored a misstep, you never ran an alcohol-soaked towel over a dull coat to bring a false shine. You figured it out, and you fixed it.

  This is Queens. Things are tougher here. The horses in Eddie’s shedrow are the same as the hotwalkers and the grooms and the riders: expendable. There are always more.

  The filly limps into the corner of her stall and presses her face into the wall.

  I can’t watch. I can’t get on anymore of these wrecks.

  I won’t be able to pay my rent. I will end up on the streets. My mother will be right.

  The next time she goes out, she’ll break down. And I’ll die.

  I walk out.

  ***

  She runs better the next week. She is mid-pack in a heaving mass of straining sad sore horses when she goes down. She takes three others with her.

  A pile-up makes the Form. Hell, it makes the New York Post.

  I flip off the OTB channel.

  ***

  There’s a four thirty a.m. A train I have to catch. I’m hotwalking for Joey Valentino in Barn Six now, and he starts work earlier. It’s a come-down from riding, but it buys bread and peanut butter. Valentino horses are gleaming and hot-tempered and mad with athleticism. They eat six meals a day, hand-mixed by a laughing, singing Jamaican man who has been working at racetracks since he was 12 years old. He says. Valentino horses don’t break down in cheap races. They don’t go down and die. He retires them to be jumpers, kid’s horses, pasture pets. He won’t put me on a single one of them, says I’m not good enough for his horses, but he’ll let me walk them and hose them off, and I take the job.

  The siren on the racetrack goes off, and everyone in the barn does an instinctive head count of their horses. Do we have anyone out there? Could that be one of ours?

&
nbsp; Everyone is in the barn; we were between sets of working horses. Rafael goes out to the fence to investigate. The siren can mean “loose horse” or “break-down.” It means the bored paramedics, listening to the radio in their ambulance, have work to do. It means everyone unfortunate enough to have a horse between their legs or in their grasp had better hold on tight in case something fast and loose goes galloping by.

  Before Rafael comes back, the PA system crackles, sending my horse into a spasm of idiocy, and I hear, through my struggles, “Any available vet please report to the track.”

  That’s it, then. Someone broke down.

  The siren wails for a very long time. We’re all conscious of it, even as our horses settle and begin to walk semi-sanely again.

  Rafael comes back inside. “Eddie Vernon’s gray horse. He die. And Marcus to the hospital.”

  “Marcus?” I ask.

  “Marcus riding he horses this week.” He looks at me. “Hey – you ride for Eddie before.”

  “Yeah,” I say, jiggling the shank of my horse’s lead to keep him occupied. “Yeah, that gray horse, that’s Melodytime.”

  “He die, that’s no good. Sorry.”

  ***

  Eddie comes looking for me after training hours. I’m hosing out feed tubs, giving all the leftover oat hulls to the pigeons and the rats.

  “Melodytime die out there today.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” I say.

  “Marcus broke his arm, his collarbone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need you.”

  “No.”

  “Come on.” Wheedling.

  I don’t look away from my feed buckets. It could have been me. It would have been me.

  *************

  Horse-Famous

  The English are waiting, and I don’t know what to do.

  I stand and stare at myself in the mirror. It’s cracked and dotted with flyspecks and turns my complexion green, but I feel like it speaks the truth. I must be all of those things right about now, greenish, fly-speckled, half-cracked –

  There’s a knock – ratatatat at the door – it trembles, rotten timbers betraying themselves. I haven’t gotten to the bathroom yet. The bathroom’s not important. It isn’t in the manual. If it’s not in the manual, I just don’t care.

  “Yes?” I call, like I don’t know what is happening.

  “The inspector is here, Holly,” Brigid calls through the flaking door. Her voice is shrill and shaky on the best of days; she speaks like she had an older brother who used to spend his days standing behind doors and leaping out at her, leaving her the legacy of a childhood spent in eternal breathless terror. You don’t get over things like that. Your childhood marks you, breaks you, tears you down, gives you phobias that last a lifetime.

  Take me, for instance. Locked in the bathroom, shaking in my boots. Literally, in my custom Italian leather dress boots, which fit like a glove when I am calm, and hurt like hell, two sizes too small, when I am as now, sweating, hypertense, freaking out. In addition to everything else, my fucking feet hurt. I take another glance at my sea-green reflection. But skin care isn’t in the Manual. It doesn’t matter.

  I wish I wasn’t doing this at all. I wish I wasn’t hiding from the English like the goddamn arbiters of all that is holy that they are. I wish I was back in my office, I wish it were five years ago, one year ago, six months ago. I wasn’t always doing this, you know. I reopened the old blisters, the cracked skin that had healed after I ran away from those British winters throwing straw bales without gloves, riding horses in the rain, hosing down the yard long after darkness had fallen. Six months ago, I had skin as smooth and soft as a baby’s.

  Skin care isn’t in the Manual. I should know. And it doesn't need to be. Horses don’t care what you look like. They only care that they eat on time. The really picky ones demand to be brought inside when it rains. They’re stupid things to worship, but we do it anyway. We can’t get enough of them. Every horse is our false idol, every horse is our prayer, and every horse is an aching gaping wound in our heart when we try to run away from their demands.

  Brigid rattles the loose door handle, threatening to dissolve the entire door if the damn handle doesn’t just come off in her hand, which will leave me no choice but to step through the dying wood, shoving my Italian boots and my aching bound feet through the rotted boards. And won’t that a grand bloody entrance for the inspectors. I’m sure to lose points for that. The door will soon be reduced to dust. From dust ye came and dust ye shall return – does that sort of thing count for trees? Are all things from dust or just humans, and God just sort of magicked the rest of the natural world into being from nothing? These are the sorts of things I ponder, when I’m not thinking about horses or the inspection or the Manual or being a child. Which are really all one and the same.

  I shout at Brigid, “For God’s sake stop rattling the bloody door it’s locked –”all in one breath and thrust open the door, sweeping the weeping little redhead out of the way, and there I am, face to face with the displeased inspector.

  Just one, just one inspector. They didn’t send two? All inspections are done with two. One catches what the other might overlook. A feedpan left unwashed, molasses left over for dirty flies, or a hoofpick carelessly left on the lip of a stall door.

  “Mrs. Blakely,” the inspector states without inflection, taking in with one glance my polished boots, my spotless buff breeches, my quilted jacket and deerskin gloves. His eyes skip mine altogether and jump straight up to my velvet hard hat perched on my skull, and he nods once, summing me up: proper habit, proper safety equipment. A checkmark is quickly scratched onto the little clipboard he is carrying.

  “Mr. Inspector,” I breathe, willing myself not to hyperventilate now that he’s actually here, now that I’ve gone and done it. “Thank you so much for coming. Are inspections done with just one person now?” That’s a change.

  “In North America. You’re welcome, of course. It is the English Equestrian Council’s pleasure to inspect and certify deserving institutions,” he says stiffly, with all the precision of a Japanese robot. Not one of the jolly ones that sings karaoke and tells jokes; one of the spooky white ones with astronaut helmets that can climb stairs and hem a pair of pants and, I don’t know, bend steel beams with its arms. He’s an inspector-bot.

  “Your certification process has been my top priority since opening the facility,” I reply stiffly. It’s rubbing off on me, the soulless precise words. I would normally have said, “Oh, well, I really hope you like my barn!” I’m not flowery. Or expansive. Or formal. I just keep horses, and I’m very good at it. As well I should be. And a certification from the English Equestrian Council would be very good for business. And possibly I’d sleep better at night. Possibly. If I just thought that I could do it on my own, without someone standing over me. If I just thought it could be done without the misery, for the pleasure of keeping horses rather than the pleasure of someone else.

  The inspector is already eyeing me with that skeptical look reserved for the over-confident and the over-supplicant; I am a potential fail in his eyes. I’m embarrassed and take to examining the severe brown coat he’s wearing, buttoned to the neck like a Great War cavalry officer, his flared jodhpurs tucked into hunt top boots which look far more comfortable than mine. He gestures that we begin the tour, as the inspector’s manual has his visit scripted, and I lead the way, trying not to limp, feeling conspicuous in my Italian leather, as if I was implying to him that an English cobbler was good enough for the inspector but not for me.

  *****

  Chapter One of the English Equestrian Council Inspection Manual is "Feed and Its Proper Storage and Dispensing," and so the feed room is where I lead the inspector, his boot heels clipping a precise 24 inches behind mine, his clipboard and pen in hand. The feed room is located at the end of the 20-stall barn, to "allow easy access for the delivery trucks" (section 1-C) and has a heavy steel sliding door, kept closed at all times "to discourage vermin
and the possibility of loose horses" (section 1-D).

  My feed room is, of course, fanatically kept to code, and I stand back and admire the gleaming steel trashcans that house the sweet feeds, the bran, and the rolled oats while the inspector earnestly seeks out a problem. Finding nothing obvious, he nods abruptly and steps to peer at the steel-barred window along the back wall.

  “Cobwebs,” he sniffs, like I left a corner of my bedspread untucked and failed the nuns’ morning inspection. My face flushes and the dim confidence I had been feeling in the midst of my gleaming paean to English obsessive horse husbandry wavers, a tangible fluttering in my gut, a laminitic pulsing in my swollen, aching feet. I know the Manual says about cleanliness. It is not specifically against presence of cobwebs. “Feed storage facilities must be kept scrupulously clean and no corners may be cut in the care taken to eliminate the presence of dust, insects and mold which may penetrate the delicate systems of the horse, with special regard for the easily upset digestive tracts and respiratory passages.”

  Let’s say it discourages.

  (By the way, I’m not crazy. Sure, I’ve memorized a few lines of the English Equestrian Council Inspection Manual. Sure, I can quote a paragraph here and there. Verbatim. But, I’m not crazy. Really.)

  The inspector is noting the offending cobwebs, which I am certain were not there this morning when I was sweeping up after the morning feed, and turns back to me. I watch him intently, trying to mentally will his pen away from deducting a point from “Sanitary Feed Storage” and so when he looks up we are in the awkward lock-stare of two people who did not intend to be caught watching each other.