A young man wearing knee-high rubber boots pushes a wheelbarrow with the handle of a shovel sticking out. He pauses near us and uses the wide, flat-bladed shovel to scoop up a pile of horse poop, tosses it into the wheelbarrow, and pushes on with a respectful nod at Theo.
“Miss Auden,” he says, and then moves on to the next pile of poop.
“You have someone whose sole job it is to pick up poop?” I ask.
Theo nods. “There’s more than sixty horses in this part of the barn alone, and they poop alot.But Jared does more than just scrape piles off the floor—he mucks the stalls, grooms the horses if necessary, cleans the tack. He’s a barn hand—he does anything and everything to do with upkeep in the barn.” She sees a man striding across the barn, and calls out to him. “Hector!”
The man stops, pivots, and approaches Theo; he’s on the younger end of middle age, medium height, thickly muscled, with black hair and dark eyes, and a deeply sun-browned complexion; his accent, when he speaks, is definitely Spanish. “Miss Auden. You are taking a ride? I saddle Cupcake for you, huh?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, I am—I have to find Will. But can you have Jared saddle Cupcake? I need you to give my friend Brooklyn a tour of the barn—she’s here to meet with Will.”
Hector eyes me, looking me over: custom Tom Ford pantsuit, Tiffany earrings, rose-gold Bulgari timepiece, and three-inch, patent leather Louboutin’s…and this is my idea of business casual.
“Sure, sure. A tour.” Hector mutters into a walkie-talkie, and then addresses Theo. “Mr. Will, he working with the culls, down south from Alpha.”
“That’s what I thought I’d heard him say yesterday. Thanks.”
“I give Miss Brooklyn this tour. Whole barn?”
She nods. “Is Luis working with Shadow in the arena? She might like to see that.”
“No, not Shadow. Shadow, he get too cranky. Luis is working with Ringo.”
“Luis is our horsebreaker,” Theo explains. “He specializes in the really difficult ones, and right now, he’s been working on both Shadow and Ringo. They were both culls from the mounted police herd since they’re too small for police work, but they’re top-notch horses otherwise.”
Jared approaches, leading a tan horse decked out in a shiny black saddle and reins, the leather polished to a gleam, the points of joined leather sparkling with silver.
“Watching Luis work is magical,” Theo continues. “The man is a genius. Anyway, I should be back fairly soon. Just hang tight and stay close to Hector.”
She takes the reins from Jared, puts a boot into a stirrup, and swings up into the saddle with practiced ease, settling in and gathering the reins, patting the horse on the neck and murmuring to him. I back up as she nudges him forward, wanting to keep well away from the huge animal. Its hooves are massive, its head is massive, its eyes are massive, and even though Theo is relatively small, shorter even than I am, she sits on him easily and confidently, mastering the huge, powerful beast as if it were no more than a small dog.
“Cupcake will no step on you,” Hector says to me. “He is a good boy.”
I glance at Hector. “Oh, I…yeah. I know.”
Idon’tknow. The closest I’ve been to a horse is one in Times Square. Hector just nods, but I get the sense that the only reason he’s not laughing at me is because he’s too polite and professional. He gestures for me to follow him, leading me down the center aisle of the stable to where another hallway intersects the main aisle; this perpendicular hallway features lockers on one side, and a cavernous, wood-paneled room closed in with sliding glass doors on the other—the wood-paneled room contains saddles on stands or racks of some kind each mounted to the wall, with matching bridles and reins on a hook beside the saddles. If I had to guess, I would say the room is temperature-controlled, and that the saddles within are each very, very expensive, made from high-quality leather, hand-stitched. I think about my most expensive leather, handmade shoes, and how expensive those can be, and then scale up for the amount of leather needed for the saddles, and my eyes water at the idea of how much just one of those saddles must cost.
Hector sees me pause at the saddle room, and juts his chin at the glass. “The Audens’ private tack room. Some of those saddles you see in there, they are antiques, from Old West time and older, worth as much as a house. One, belonging to Mr. Henry, it is kept in a vault upstairs, and it was made in Spain for a wealthy vaquero. It cost over a hundred thousand dollars new,then, in eighteen nineteen. Now, it is worth…more than I know the words for.”
I blink at what he’s telling me. “A hundred grand…in eighteen nineteen?” I know some basic currency inflation calculations, and go through them in my head. “That’s like…two million dollars!”
“Yes. Now it is worth much more than that, because it is kept perfect condition.” He indicates a biometric lock to one side of the door. “See? Even these, not so valuable as that one, are protected. This room is proof from water, fire, and theft.”
“What about the horses?”
Hector leads me down the hallway—there are locker rooms on either side, a men’s and a women’s; further on, the hallway opens out into a room something like a waiting room, with couches lining the walls, little tables here and there with magazines, and a counter along one wall featuring a coffee maker, beverage refrigerator, and a full bar facility, currently dark and unmanned. The fourth wall of the room is glass, floor to ceiling, overlooking a raked-dirt arena so big you could probably fit two full football fields in it. The dirt is raked in neat, concentric oval spirals, and there are windows lining the perimeter just underneath the roofline, letting in natural light to offset the rows of high-efficiency LED lights in the ceiling.
In the center of the arena is one man, and a horse. The floor is a full story below the glass, so from this vantage point one can see the entire arena with a bird’s-eye view—for showing off a horse, I realize. If you’re going to sell high-end horses, this is where you’d clinch the sale, with an expert rider putting the animal through its paces. Sort of like taking a prospective client on a tour through a nearly completed development, showing off the fancy technology and architectural details.
Instead of being seated on the horse, the man has the animal attached to a long rope, at least twenty feet long, and he has a long-handled whip in the other. He wiggles the whip near the horse’s hindquarters now and then, keeping it running in a tight circle—the whip never cracks, never touches the horse, I notice, but is merely a visual impetus to keep the animal running. Then, abruptly, the trainer lunges to one side, pivots, and crosses the whip over; the horse immediately reacts, skidding to a stop and pivoting in response. Now the whip snaps with a sharp crack in the air behind the horse, and the man calls out a verbal command I can’t make out, sending the horse into motion, running in the opposite direction.
Hector and I watch for several minutes as the trainer has the horse run this way and that, stop, start, walk, trot, gallop, stopping abruptly in response to verbal commands. There’s another, smaller rope in the dirt near the trainer’s feet; he unclips the longer one and attaches the shorter rope, drops his whip, and takes the horse through a similar series of actions, but this time with the trainer running beside the horse, stopping abruptly and clearly expecting the horse to stop without even a verbal command. Sometimes the horse seems to get confused or just merely doesn’t want to listen, and disobeys, which always results in the trainer forcing the horse to walk backward, his hand on its nose, and then the command is repeated.
Hector gestures at the arena. “Ringo, he is remarkable. Mr. Will chose him himself from the cull herd, and ask Luis to break him special, just for Mr. Will.”
“Cull herd?”
“Ranch talk.” Hector rolls his hand. “You have a herd of horses, yes? Say you are try to breed horses to be the most big, all of them, very big. So, you choose big horse, breed it with big horse, you get a big horse…most of the time. Sometimes, not so big. This horse, the not so big one, you take out of the herd—this is a cull. Then you have a herd of culls, a cull herd. These, you sell to customer, or mix with other herd, or break for personal use, many things. Just because they are cull does not mean no good, just no good for the purpose of that herd. Ringo, down there, he too small for police, too much personality. Too jumpy, yes?” Hector paws at the floor with the toe of his boot and shakes his head, snorting, shoulders hunched and rounding—it is a remarkably accurate little sketch of a jumpy horse. “Like this. It means he is fast, and smart, and spirited, but no good for police. Big, calm, no attitude, no fuss, this is police horse.”
