The Hidden Horses of New York: A Novel Read online

  Then she felt someone tap her on the back. She turned to find a hectored-looking member of staff, holding a manure fork in one hand. “Miss, can you clear the paddock?”

  Jenny looked around and instantly felt guilty. No one else was left. She looked around at the screen in the infield—the horses were cantering up the backstretch, heading for the chute at the far corner of the track. All of the spectators were either finding spots to watch the race or inside, getting their bets in.

  “I’m getting chased out, guys,” she said. “I have to call you back.”

  “NO!” Lana shrieked. “We have to see the race! Keep us on.”

  “Live-stream everything,” Aidan suggested. He turned his head slightly. “Mike, come watch this. Get a taste of what we’re going to offer with our new website.”

  Jenny could practically hear Mike rolling his eyes, but the bartender finally put down his paring knife and came around the bar. Her heart melted a little, just to know he was pretending to care. So he really did like them! She knew he had always thought she and her friends were just a bunch of spoiled college kids, and to a certain extent, he wasn’t wrong. Even though she and Aidan didn’t have a spare penny, being friends with Lana, who was generous with her father’s money, meant living like a trust fund kid… well, part-time, anyway. For Jenny, at least, the experience was still dizzying—even after three years of Lana’s luxurious hand-outs, spendthrift shopping sprees, and expensive meals out. Maybe Aidan and Jenny’s inability to accept nice things as their lot in life, and Lana’s open-pocketed approach to friendship, was why Mike still treated them with a sliver of respect, instead of eyeballing them with the same distaste he reserved for the other college students who came swaggering into the dark little bar. She decided to put on a good show for him.

  “Okay, guys!” Jenny flipped the camera view, held out the phone, and began touring her little audience through the paddock as she headed for the gate out to the apron. She gave it a slow swing for a panoramic view, trying not to bounce the phone too much with each step. If live-streaming from around different racetracks was a key aspect of their audience engagement plan, the art of not making viewers seasick was going to be the most important skill in her toolbox. And commentary, she reminded herself, realizing she’d been silent for the first ten seconds. “So, this is the paddock. Over here is the barn where we saddle up. If I’m quick we can get a look at the shoe board, that’s pretty cool, it shows bettors the shoes that are allowed on the horses—”

  Jenny’s patter was momentarily interrupted as she tripped over a grooming tote someone had abandoned on the walking path, and Lana and Aidan shrieked with laughter. Their howls rang from her phone and she wondered how two people currently located in Manhattan could be so loud all the way down in Tampa. Technology was a mystery she accepted as her master without understanding it at all, sort of like a medieval peasant at mass.

  “Oh, sorry, Jenny!”

  She turned at the sound of an actual, non-digitized voice and saw Luis, a groom from the Lawson barn. She liked Luis; had known the guy since she was just a kid. The Lawsons were neighbors back in Ocala, and rivals here at Tampa, and aggressive, unpleasant humans in both towns. But Luis had always been nice: a middle-aged, soft-faced man with a shy smile and a sweet way around horses. He stooped down to retrieve the grooming tote, his horse’s halter flung over one shoulder.

  “No problem,” she told him, letting the phone dangle from her hand, forgetting temporarily about the live-stream. “You’ve got a good horse in today. Good luck!”

  “Good luck to you,” Luis said, grinning. “Your Mister, he’s a crazy one, huh?” He was ready to settle in for a chat.

  The phone protested Mister’s innocence. Luis looked at the screen with interest. “Your friends are upside-down,” he observed.

  “Whoops!” Jenny righted the phone. “So that was Luis, he’s a groom of another horse here—”

  “Well, this is totally inappropriate,” a familiar voice growled, interrupting her commentary. Jenny looked up from her phone, alarmed. Luis had already scampered for the fence, ducked between the two lowest bars, and disappeared into the crowd gathering along the rail.

  Jenny swallowed, trying to push away a wave of anxiety that would surely show on her face. She didn’t want to give Brice Lawson any hint that he frightened her. The middle-aged trainer was a big, forbidding man, with broad shoulders strong enough to snatch a runaway racehorse out of stride and a frowning face that always found fault with Jenny’s horsemanship. If she was breezing a horse on the main track, he’d find a reason to complain about her to the stewards. If she was walking a horse before a race, he’d protest she was taking up more than her allotted room on the path. He and his wife, Laura, behaved in the same roughshod way with her parents, always pushing their jockeys to claim fouls on Wolfe horses and blowing up over petty nuisances on the backside. It was all the stuff of racetrack legend now. The time Laura Lawson had run over Andrea’s tomato garden next to the barn. The time Brice Lawson had called animal control to remove the Sugar Creek grooms’ hens. The time the both of them had moved a Sugar Creek horse, in the dead of night, to another barn so that they could steal the stall for one of their own shippers. The Lawson-Wolfe feud had been going on for as long as Jenny could remember.

  She made to chase after Benny, but Brice moved between her and the fence.

  “Three minutes,” the track announcer intoned, his terse voice echoing from the loudspeakers. He was talking to the bettors, but it felt like a countdown for Jenny, as well.

  “I have to go,” Jenny said desperately. “My mother is waiting.”

  “You better keep away from my staff,” Brice demanded. “And stop videoing the paddock. This is for horsemen only. You have no business sharing it with your little social media following.”

  This—this was the problem. Jenny felt an unusual courage rise up in her chest, the same feeling that got her around tracks on top of young horses she ought to be afraid of, the way she was afraid of everything else in the world. It was the courage that got her through four years of school in the city, and helped her talk to Aidan and Lana back in freshman English, and gave passion to the thesis statement which would become their website. If these old school horsemen and their fear of cameras didn’t sink everything before it started! Their suspicion of everything tech, their shortsighted denial of everything good about transparency and branding and carefully curated insights into the worlds of their horses that the public was so anxious to see for themselves. They wanted to keep everyone on the other side of the rail; they thought of race-day visitors as bettors and could not conceive that anyone would drag themselves out to a racetrack to see beautiful, powerful horses for the sole purpose of just that, without any financial gain or sporting itch to be scratched. They refused to let any light in, and as a result their sport was dying in the dark. She saw it so damn often, and she was enraged by it.

  “There’s nothing to hide, Brice,” Jenny insisted, waving her phone around the empty paddock, ignoring the shrieks from the speaker as she gave her viewers back in Manhattan a wild ride of their own. “Why do you need so much privacy? Why can’t people look inside? We act like our shed-rows need security details to keep out the fans, so the fans get discouraged and do something else with their time. They’re just horses, Brice. They’re just horses running in circles. We don’t have anything to hide.” She paused, took in the fullness of his anger as he stood before her, clenching his fists at his sides, and wondered if Brice Lawson was really so cruel and stupid that he’d hit an assistant trainer in the paddock before a stakes race. She didn’t care—not yet. That was the glory of Jenny when her blood was up. She was a different person until the moment was gone. “What do you have to hide?” she asked softly.

  There was an ooooooooh of approval and shock from the New York audience, and then Brice moved suddenly, like he was going to grab at her, and Jenny sprang away, turning on her heel and running for the paddock fence. She slid through the
bars and went pelting through the thinning crowds at the back of the concrete apron in front of the grandstand doors, her waves of dark brown hair bouncing through the haze of cigarette smoke hanging over the crowd. The people around her spoke with accents almost entirely Long Island and New Jersey-bred, making her feel like she was back in New York, maybe out at Aqueduct or Belmont for a stolen day of photography with Aidan, but the concrete ran out too soon. Tampa Bay was a comically small track compared to the New York racing machines, but it had a big heart for its racing family. She knew almost every groom leaning on the wall behind the winner’s circle, and most of the trainers as well. She had known them since she was a child.

  Her mother gave her an annoyed look. “What took you so long? They’re in the gate.”

  “Bathroom,” Jenny lied. She glanced over her shoulder; no Brice had appeared through the crowd of blue-haired bettors.

  “Uh, Jenny?” A voice at her side, oddly low to the ground, asked. “Could you like, pick us up?”

  “Oh, sorry!” Jenny lifted her phone; she’d completely forgotten about her little screen crew. “Hey guys, did I give you motion sickness?”

  “I put the phone down on the bar when you started running,” Aidan laughed. “That was quite a speech you gave that dick in the paddock. Was he that guy Brice you told us about?”

  Jenny laughed and put her finger to her lips. “Shhh, you’ll get me in trouble! But yes, that was him.”

  As the horses broke from the gate and the announcer began to call their positions, Jenny went on gazing at her phone, listening to Aidan congratulate her. She hadn’t realized it was possible to miss a person this much. She’d been in Florida for four days, and now she was drinking Aidan in like a lost lover she hadn’t seen in decades. His lean face and sand-streaked brown hair falling over his forehead and his dancing green eyes and his big-toothed grin, so carelessly thrown her way for the slightest agreeable thing she did—bumping him gently on a rocking subway car, catching his shirt in one hand when he pushed too far ahead of her on a crowded sidewalk, bringing him an iced coffee when she came up to the studio to work on a project or quietly study beside him. He always looked delighted with her, as if he didn’t know that she did these things for herself, as naturally as breathing: she could not have stopped herself from brushing against him every time the F train screamed its way through the labyrinthine tunnels of lower Manhattan, or let him get away from her in a crowd, or not buy two coffees as habitually as she had once bought herself one, knowing when he’d be nearby and that he’d always be happy for a fresh jolt of caffeine. These gestures were part of her very being.

  He was looking delighted with her now, but she couldn’t even hear what he was saying anymore. The air around her ears was roaring, there was noise all around. She looked up, and blinked, and gasped. She spun the phone around, held it above her head. “Look!”

  Mister flew past, his gray dapples flashing as he thundered down the center of the track, Manny’s face pressed close to his fluttering mane with his whip hand high. Only a flashing second of her horse was visible, then the rest of the field came pelting after, one flicker-frame of horse and then another, disappearing into the distant clubhouse turn.

  “I have to go,” Jenny gabbled into the phone, but Aidan protested.

  “Just take us with you,” he said. “Give us a view of the winner’s circle when you can. We’ll wait.”

  Jenny nodded, heart too full to speak, and dropped her phone into the pocket of her khakis. She had a fleeting thought, as she followed her mother to the gate onto the track, of Aidan’s face pressed against her ass. But she shook it off. It was time to catch her horse, and lead him into the winner’s circle.

  Her new stakes-winning colt, Mr. November.

  Chapter Two

  Racehorses are always moving in circles and so, by extension, are the people who move them.

  Jenny had been walking Mister in a loop around the shed-row for twenty minutes, her boots trodding the well-worn path in front of the stalls, while the horses within pushed against their stall webbings and pulled at their hay-nets. Nodding along at her right, Mister’s hooves slid through the softer sand at the center of the aisle. His steps would wear a deep rut in the churned dirt there, and after Mister had been put away in his own stall for the night and most of the humans had retired to the barn’s little office, they would be raked away by a whistling groom, while Jenny and her mother blinked at the small television propped atop the filing cabinet until one of them mustered the energy to get up and drive back to the motel room for the night. They always spent the night in Tampa after a late-card race. Jenny’s mother hated making the long drive back to Ocala in the dark.

  When Jenny had been younger, they’d had their own shed-row here. A string of horses would come down from the farm to spend the entire racing season living at the track. Jenny’s father stayed in Tampa to oversee the operation, while Jenny and her mother just came down when a race-day fell on a weekend. Otherwise, the two of them were responsible for holding down the fort back in Ocala. With a hundred and thirty-five acres of pasture which always needed mown, miles of fences which always needed repaired, a three-quarter-mile training track which always needed groomed and watered, and dozens of horses of all ages who needed the same, Sugar Creek Farm was an insatiable monster, never satisfied, always needing more, more, more—more work, more money, more time. For a few good seasons in Jenny’s elementary and middle-school days, the horses at Tampa had paid for it all, and the months Jenny’s father spent away from home were considered worth the sacrifice.

  In those days, every morning saw Jenny walking down the long barn lane beneath a rustling canopy of live oaks, damp hair brushed back, freshly showered after helping the grooms feed the horses in the training barn. She took the yellow bus to a rural school where drying mud flaked away from farm boots between first and second periods, and camouflage was practically the school uniform. In the afternoons she walked back in the shade of those same oaks, or sometimes, if Florida’s ferocious thunderstorms were threatening, ran as fast as she could, heart pounding, backpack thumping, thunder echoing in her ears. She dropped her backpack and clean school sneakers in the kitchen, swapping them out for paddock boots so that she could race back outside—to help with the endless work that came with raising and training Thoroughbreds: mucking stalls, throwing down hay bales, filling up buckets with sweet feed and stacking them on the seat of a golf cart, then rattling down rutted paths between pastures to feed broodmares who lived their days and nights outdoors.

  When the racing moved to south Florida for the steamy summer season, her father would send the peaking horses south with his assistant, and bring home the horses who needed a rest. Then, with school closed for vacation, Jenny’s days would get even longer. Her parents started sending her out with the exercise riders when she was fifteen, and by the summer of that year, she was getting on six horses before nine each morning. At sixteen her riding season extended: she began starting the long yearlings in the cool October mornings, trotting them out in the pastures with the other exercise riders while the sun slowly slid over the horizon, then racing for her little pickup without even changing her jeans, the only way she could make it to first period before the tardy bell rang. She’d kept clean shirts and baby wipes in a tote bag on the passenger seat, just in case she was running too late to stop at the house to rinse off and put on a presentable top. On warm days in the city, she still used this trick, rolling up a blouse which wouldn’t wrinkle in the bottom of her tote bag in case one of the long walks between classes, lunch, and the odd jobs she picked up from personal assistant apps turned sticky and grimy.

  She wondered now if her days of using an app to find some pocket money by picking up someone’s groceries or sweeping a loft before a messy artist brought a date home were finally over. Surely she wouldn’t have time for that sort of thing when she was getting the website up and running. Her heart beat a little faster at the thought. She and Aidan and Lana, working togeth
er as a team. It was going to be incredible. It was going to be everything they’d dreamed. Working that close with Aidan wasn’t going to be a problem for her at all. She’d make sure of it. They were friends, after all.

  Just friends.

  Mister tried to pause outside of the tack room, as he always did when he was being walked around this particular shed-row. Once, a visiting trainer had given him a candy cane as he’d walked past this very tack room, and there was every possibility such a miracle could happen again. Hope springs eternal in the heart of a Thoroughbred. But the only person standing in the tack room doorway tonight was Andrea Wolfe, and she did not believe in giving young horses treats. “They do too much biting as it is,” she would say grimly, and if the inquisitor was lucky, she’d show off some of the scars on her index fingers and thumbs, where she’d been caught over the years by overly eager—or overly savage—youngsters.

  Jenny felt Mister slow his strides and let him, because she wanted to know just what was going on inside the tack room. She knew her mother was holding court with several owners and trainers, men with lined faces who had come by to congratulate her on the colt’s stakes win, and perhaps try to get into her good graces. On an earlier circuit, Jenny had managed to sneak a glance inside, and smiled to herself when she saw the little cluster of men gathered around the dusty desk where Andrea Wolfe was holding court, the queen of her tiny domain—for one night, at least. The Wolfes hadn’t had a big horse in years. Racing was like that, when you were tough and talented but no millionaire. The lean years would always far outnumber the fat ones.

  The fat ones could be very, very good, though.

  And if people were hustling to get on Mister’s bandwagon, Andrea was not going to shove them back into the road—not when they came bearing promises of further riches. After today’s win, everyone knew Mr. November was ready to be a top-level contender. Sure, he’d missed the Triple Crown trail with his shenanigans. But now that he had his head on straight, he was ready to be a summer star, and an autumn champion. The public might not know there was more to racing than the television-ready Triple Crown races, but the horsemen did. They were looking for the horses who would keep galloping right through November, and the Breeders’ Cup championships.