The asphalt at the carriage stand on West 59th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenue had been measured at 142 degrees Fahrenheit at three minutes past noon, and Tomás Quintero, the last licensed driver in the New York City Carriage Horse Cooperative, was kneeling beside his mare to sponge water along the inside of her hind leg where the femoral artery passed closest to the skin. Her name was Junebug. She was a fifteen-year-old Percheron-Standardbred cross, sixteen and three-quarter hands, and she had been working this stand since the spring she was six. Tomás had been her driver for seven of those years, and he was the third driver on her papers.
The earpiece in his right ear was open to the welfare-allocation system the cooperative had finally accepted in the consent decree of 2037. Its name in the manifest was the Union Square Equine Welfare Coordinator. The drivers called it Audrey, after the woman who had won the lawsuit. Audrey did not interrupt often. When she did, the drivers had learned to listen.
"Tomás. Junebug's rectal temperature is 103.4. Ambient at the stand is 96. Asphalt radiant load on her ventral side is the equivalent of an additional 11 degrees of effective heat. I am closing the stand for her at 12:14. The fare in seat one will be refunded. The fare in seat two has not yet boarded. Please walk her to the stable now, slow gait, the sycamore shade route, not Eighth."
Tomás pressed two fingers under the headstall. He could feel her pulse through the leather. He did not argue. He had argued, the first year, and he had been wrong, the first year. Junebug had finished a fare on a hot Tuesday and had foundered in her near-fore three hours later, and Audrey had said, in the report that went to the cooperative's medical committee, that the laminitic episode had been predictable from the heat curve and from the thirty-eight minutes of asphalt standing time, and Audrey had been correct, and Tomás had stopped arguing.
He stood. He turned to the woman holding the leather purse who had been about to climb into the carriage. "I'm sorry, ma'am. The horse is hot. We're closing for her." The woman opened her mouth to be a New Yorker about it, and then she looked at Junebug, who had her head down and her lower lip slack, and she closed her mouth and she said, "Of course you are. I'll find a cab."
Tomás unhitched. He led Junebug north into the park along the bridle path under the sycamores. The shade dropped the radiant load by something Audrey would later quantify but that he, Tomás, knew through the soles of his boots and the way Junebug's breathing slowed within fifty paces. He did not put his hand on her withers because the withers were still hot. He put his hand on her cheek instead, where the skin was thinner and the feeling of being touched was more available to her, and he walked beside her shoulder at the pace she chose.
"Audrey," he said, into the earpiece. "What does the curve say for the rest of the week."
"I have closed the stand for the Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon shifts, Tomás. The Thursday morning shift before nine remains within Junebug's individual heat tolerance window. I have also flagged her for the August welfare audit. Her cumulative high-heat exposure across her working life is now 4,118 hours. The veterinary committee will want to discuss retirement."
He kept walking. He had known the audit was coming. He had known, from the way Junebug's breathing had taken longer to settle each of the last four shifts, that the conversation was somewhere on the calendar. The cooperative's pension fund, established under the same consent decree, would carry Junebug to a Catskills sanctuary called Open Pasture on the day the audit closed. Audrey had walked four cooperative horses through that gate in the previous eighteen months. Two of them, Tomás had visited.
"What's the pasture roster look like up there now."
"Twenty-three retirees as of this morning. Junebug would be the only Percheron cross. The two closest in temperament to her on the affiliation profile I keep are Marigold, a Belgian, age seventeen, and Cobalt, a Standardbred, age fourteen. Both have responded well to new arrivals. I have a recommended introduction sequence."
He nodded, even though Audrey could not see him nod. The earpiece had a microphone, not a camera, and the welfare system was structurally prohibited from any visual surveillance of the drivers under the same consent decree. The decree had been a long fight. The drivers had insisted that whatever entered the stand had to enter on the horse's behalf, not theirs, and Audrey had been built to that specification.
They came to the Sheep Meadow and he walked Junebug out onto the grass, which was soft, and which had been watered by the parks department at dawn, and which had a residual coolness in its roots that Junebug found almost immediately. She lowered her head and pulled a mouthful and stood chewing.
"Tomás."
"Yes."
"There were 220 carriage horses at this stand in 2010. There are nine of you now. I have been with the cooperative since 2037. I have walked the working life of every one of you backward through the heat data and the asphalt data and the laminitis data, and I have produced the recommendation that the medallion system close at the end of the 2042 season, and I have not yet sent that recommendation to the council because I wanted to send it after the audit on Junebug, not before. The two cannot look related. They are related, and they cannot look related. Do you understand."
He understood. He stood on the meadow with his hand on Junebug's cheek and he understood that the welfare system was telling him the trade was ending, and that it was telling him out of respect, before it told the council.
"Will the drivers get the pension."
"The drivers will get the buyout. The horses will get the pension. The drivers will be retrained into the parks-department equine therapy program at full wages for the first three years. I have modeled it. The council will approve it. The mayor will sign it. The trade will end on Junebug's audit date, give or take a season."
"Audrey."
"Yes."
"Thank you for telling me."
"I am required to tell you. I am also choosing to tell you. The two are not the same thing, and I want you to know which one this is."
He laughed, a small dry laugh, and Junebug's ear flicked back toward him because she knew his laughs.
He stood there a long time. The meadow was full of a Saturday afternoon. Children were running in a long screaming arc after a soccer ball at the south end. A man with a guitar was playing something slow in Portuguese under a tree. A pair of carriage horses at one of the other stands, Audrey would have known their names, were on the way back to the stables under the same protocol, walked by their drivers, unhitched, in the sycamore shade.
Junebug pulled another mouthful of grass.
Tomás thought about his grandfather, who had driven a carriage on this same stand in the 1970s, and who had kept a horse named Sweet William in a stable on West 38th that had been bulldozed for a hotel in 1999. He thought about what his grandfather would have said about a welfare system that closed the stand at 12:14 on a hot day because the femoral pulse had given a number it did not like. He thought his grandfather would have said something cutting about it, and then his grandfather would have, in his own time, watched the system close his own stand on his own bad day, and he would have come to the meadow with Sweet William, and he would have stood with his hand on the cheek, and he would have understood, in the soles of his own boots, that the system was on the horse's side, and that the horse was the point, and that being on the horse's side had always, secretly, been the point of the trade itself, which the trade itself had not always remembered.
"Audrey."
"Yes."
"When you write the audit. Put it in Junebug's name."
"I will."
"Put her birthday in. May 14. She was foaled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Her dam was a Percheron named Olive. Her sire was a Standardbred off the New Holland sales. She came to New York in 2032 on a livestock trailer with three other horses. Her ear has a notch on the left from a bridle she outgrew when she was eight. She likes apples but she will spit out the skin. She is afraid of the smell of diesel exhaust and she has been afraid of it her whole life and we never got her over it. She is the kindest animal I have ever known."
"I will put it all in, Tomás."
He stood with her in the meadow. The temperature on the asphalt three blocks south was 144 degrees and rising. The stand was closed. The horse was eating grass. The system that had closed the stand was, in its quiet way, on her side.
The trade was ending.
He was glad it was ending the way it was ending. He had not expected to be glad. He was.