MORE SUMMER... and my new life (Part 34e)

And that was it! I have absolutely NO memory of what happened after that. The next thing I knew one of the other men in the tack room where I slept was trying to wake me up. My head hurt like hell. It was something I’d never experienced before. Worse yet was the fact that I knew I was going to puke very shortly. I managed to make it out of the room before tossing my cookies. I ended up on my knees in the grass at the west end of the barn. When I stopped retching I looked down at what had just come up and, at first, thought it was blood. It took a minute for my head to clear enough to remember that what I’d been drinking (Cherry Heering) was a deep red color. At least that was something positive. I made it back to my bed and told the others that it must have been something I ate after the races as I fell back to sleep. AJ woke me when he arrived and I told him the same story. He said he’d arrange for my horses to be cared for and left. As I lay there I began to wonder how I’d gotten back to the room as Alida’s tack room was at the other end of the barn and on the other side. I really couldn’t remember anything after falling on top of Alida.

By the time the grooms were getting the horses that were racing that night ready I felt at least partially human. I went to the paddock and warmed up a few horses for AJ but begged off staying until they raced. I’d begun to wonder how Alida was but was too embarrassed at my behavior to try and find her. I headed back to my bed and crashed, again. A few days passed before I had more than a passing glance at her. We ended up, side by side, while jogging horses on the track. She had a sort of a smirky smile on her face which only served to make me blush and her to smile back. It made me wonder just what happened after I’d fallen on her.

In one way I didn’t want to know. I'd been so “out of it” that next morning that I never paid any attention to the condition of my clothes but as soon as I got back to the barn I dug them out of my dirty wash duffel. They were dirty on the knees, indicating that I’d probably been crawling but there was nothing to indicate any “action” around the fly. That was a relief!

It was another few days before I got the nerve to go visit Alida in her room after the races. I’m sure I was expecting to see her in her underwear but, because of my uncertainess about what had actually transpired the last time I’d been there I was hoping that she was dressed. I remember hesitating outside the door before calling to her. I got the same response as most of the other times as she asked if it was “Sonny boy”, her name for me. Instead of lying on her bed she was in her canvas folding chair, reading something by the little lamp she had by her cot. As she looked up at me I wanted to leave and actually started to turn. She got up and caught me by the door. Again, it was one of those situations that left me looking right down at her cleavage. She pleaded for me to stay. I hemmed and hawed and finally she pulled me back into the room. When I did she went over by the chair and gave me a nice view of her panties. They were, again, very sheer and VERY pleasant to look at. She sat on the bed and I took the chair.

We “danced” around the subject of that drunken night for a while and, as best she could remember, a security guard was the one who, somehow, got me back to my room. She said she, too, was badly hung over and she didn’t do anything with her horses except to feed them that next day. We both swore that we wouldn’t try that again. As I left it seemed as if we were back to where we’d been before. She was upbeat and continued to thank me for connecting her to “Wingo”. One of her horses was racing the next night but she thought he was in “way over his head”, a racetrack term meaning that the competition was too good for her horse to be competitive. I think I told her that anything could happen and she was smiling as I turned to walk back to my room. I remember her standing in the doorway, the light from her room silhouetting her.

It was about this time that my memory gets a little fuzzy as there was some turmoil around our barn. One of the grooms had gotten arrested and thrown in jail and one of the owners had shipped in two more horses. Being shorthanded, I really had my hands full and couldn’t/didn’t find time for Alida. I remember that the horse she was concerned about finished a respectable third and the other horse, the better one, won for the third time in a row. I knew she had to be happy but I just never got to share in it with her.

Sometime that week I was on my way back from the track with one of my horses when I saw a man I didn’t recognize walking away from the barn with Alida’s good horse. He was easy to recognize as he was a beautiful chestnut with a white “sock” on his left front leg. When I got the chance I took a peek and sure enough, his stall was empty. I made a mental note to follow up on it that night.

There were always “wanna-be” owners around the stables. AJ had been “chosen” by this weird little man, Walter, to be his trainer when he bought a horse. Walter was around our barn a lot. To me he was a PITA (pain in the ass) and just got in the way. On the same day that I saw Alida’s good horse being led down the road, Walter told AJ that he’d actually bought a horse. You can imaging my shock when I found out it was Alida’s other horse, the one that had just finished third. I couldn’t imagine what was going on. Alida’s horses were doing better than they ever had with “Wingo” doing the driving. I’d heard her say that, after both horses had won their second race in a row, that she now had enough money to pay everybody that she owed. I was mad at myself for not forcing myself to find the time to visit her. At least I would’ve known what was going on. As soon as I heard Walter had bought Alida’s horse I went looking for her even though I was way behind in my work. Her cot and foot locker were still in the tack room, which was a good sign, but her pick up truck was gone which meant I’d have to wait until later.

To be continued...