Dante of the Maury River (8 page)

My groom’s other job was to put a fly sheet over me at turnout. Gary liked to keep my coat black.

“Tall, dark, and handsome, that’s for sure. Let’s keep him that way.” He instructed the staff to cover me at night to keep me clean, and on turnout to stop the sun from bleaching me out.

To his abounding credit, the young man tried. Oh, how he tried. Dancing around me, holding his inhales till his faced darkened. I could hear his heart beating so loud that I could see his pulse a-thump-thump-thumping in his neck. His eyes bulged, exposing the whites, and those inexperienced hands shook something fierce.

When a man is showing as so blatantly afraid, I have to wonder,
What in the world is he about to do?

When my groom came after me . . . Let me back up here. When my groom
charged
toward me with the fly sheet, I figured I’d best jack up my back left leg in order to demonstrate I wasn’t taking any mess from him.

“Put it down,” he said, and his heart beat wilder and faster. Out. Of. Control. This guy.

So, I put my left back foot down and swapped it out for the right one. Just stretched my leg out to test if I was within striking distance, should I need to be.

He put in a mountainous effort to no avail. Let’s just say I eventually got bored and turned away from him. Same way a barn cat eventually gets bored of batting around crickets. The groom bolted from my stall, leaving my sheet half on, half off. And presently, it fell to the ground.

Come evening time, though, somebody different tended to me. A girl.

“
M
ay I come in?”

I blinked. Not that I straightaway invited her in, but I did give consideration because she was the first to ever ask.

I blinked again, then she did, too, and piped up with, “You gonna invite me in, or make me stand here all day waiting for Your Highness to decide?”

All right
, I thought.
Let’s see what happens next
. I stepped back. She entered my stall with her head down. She touched my neck, and I sensed no fear in her. Zero. A slow heartbeat, regular breathing, normal-looking eyes.

Best of all, from her I felt wonder. Curiosity. Like she wanted to know me.

“What are they talking about? You’re not scary, brother. No way. Not scary at all,” she said softly.

She squatted down and picked up the sheet from the floor. The same one that the morning groom had bolted from. Even the manner with which she shook the blanket clean seemed like a natural, loving gesture.

This smaller person was calmer. I was starting to wonder if the bigger a person got the more chaos they had going on in them.

She stared at me, then looked away. Before I could react, she draped the sheet over my stall door, not over me.

“Let’s get to know each other.” She stroked my neck. Her voice was solid, like the ground. No quiver there or in her hands. She patted my neck again and said, “Beautiful. Never in the days or nights of my life have I met one as majestic as you. Magic like midnight.”

The blanket remained on the door. The more I looked at the soft, supple material, the chillier the air felt around my haunches and shoulders. She walked around to my right, making no move to cover me. “I have met many, many horses, Dante. Yeah, see? I know your name. Aren’t you curious about mine? Filipia. That means ‘the one who loves horses,’ and I love horses like crazy.”

She turned her back to me and fiddled with the sheet. Its buckles sparkled in the dim light coming from the office where Gary and the other men were grousing about something or somebody or such and such. I walked up behind her to get a look and a sniff, because I like sparkly things, and because I thought I detected peppermint on her person. Maybe more than one.

“That tickles.” Filipia lifted her shoulder to her ear, a gesture that sent me away. After a while, I came on back. She laughed again. “Okay, I’m ticklish. You win!”

She started telling me a story, and I got so busy listening that I hardly realized what she was doing. The sound of her voice and the effort she was making wrapped me up and I felt safe.

“Let me tell you about my home, Dante. I am from an island where horses roam freely. They walk straight up to the mayor himself. Some of them — the strawberry roan ponies — even belong to him. The tourists call these ponies the wild horses of Vieques. But they’re not really wild. They are free. The opposite of you, Dante from Hades. Ah, you prick your ears? So, you hear the nickname they call you? Well, you are the opposite of the wild horses of Vieques. You are wild but not free.”

As she whispered into my ear, I’ll be honest, I tried to find a good reason to hold a grudge or at least start up a new one. But there was something honest and true about Filipia.

She and I got off to a good start. Heck, a great one. ’Course she helped her cause immensely by keeping her hands free of crops, needles, and other sharp, pointy things.

I even looked forward to her mucking my stall, so I could stand in there with her.

One day, she told me, “I know your racing name is Dante’s Inferno. But that’s just what the Jockey Club says. All those numbers tattooed on your lip? If I trace those numbers I can then discover your birth date and place, and also your parents’ names. I could find out where you were born, though I know you are Kentucky-bred. A true Thoroughbred.”

She was talking about the code that Gary had arranged to have tattooed onto my upper lip, shortly after I had arrived to train. There exists, for all Thoroughbred racehorses, a code in the form of one letter and five numbers. Get a look in my mouth, which I’m nowise suggesting will be easy, and there’s the gateway to my pedigree.

Filipia stopped picking at my bedding and leaned on the pitchfork. Sounding all dreamy, she said something else. “Some people think that everything they need to know about you is carried right here.” She tickled my upper lip. “But I know there is something else about you. You are special, so I’m giving you a special name.
Monkey
. Okay? When you hear that name, you can relax and come to me when I call you. That way, you’ll be like the horses of my island.”

After that, with Filipia taking good care of me, everything seemed to be unfolding exactly according to Gary’s ticktock. That is, until they tried to mount me.

A
round my second birthday, Gary brought over a saddle and a rider. I should’ve seen that coming. After all, everybody knows Thoroughbreds don’t race by themselves. Running takes two — one horse, one jockey.

I don’t know what I had expected, but, sakes alive, I sure hadn’t wagered that the man would fling himself on top of me without first looking me in the eye, asking permission, and coming to know me.

Now, there’s plenty of respectful ways to communicate with a horse. Even if your mind can’t accept the possibility that words can be understood, universal languages do exist between nearly all species.

For starters, try making a soft sound that is not a growl or a bark or a yowl. For instance, those calico cats that like to hang around barns? They can purr or they can screech. Every animal on earth knows the difference and what means what.

A respectful pause at the stall door? What a nice way to greet a horse. The equivalent of saying, “Hello! Do you care to receive company at this hour?”

These methods, combined with a good-intended heart, surely will help when approaching a horse for the first time. And, of course, planting yourself where you can easily be seen.

The long and short of it is that many men at Gary’s facility tried to break me. Every one of them came at me like a twister in an open field, in a storm of force and emotion. And some of them seemed to have had anger issues.

Well, I had issues of my own.

Off, off, off. I wanted each of them off, so not one succeeded in staying on.

No, sir, I wasn’t about to let a man sit atop my back who wouldn’t look me in the eye. Every one of them that tried failed because they didn’t care a lick about me. What they cared about was payday.

So, off they went. This went on for several months. While winter turned to spring, the other two-year-olds went breezing around Gary’s track, and I fell behind. My tick wasn’t tocking.

“Dante.” Gary shook a fist at me, more out of frustration, more to make a point, than to hurt me. He wasn’t intending on striking. He jabbed me with his words, though, sure enough.

“You’re going to have to work this out. I’m burning through exercise riders right and left. The racing community is small and people are talking. Speculating you’ve got bad genes. A fella down in Texas says you’re a danger and that your head’s not right.”

Now, that made me mad. I didn’t care for Gary or all that drib-drab he was spouting about the fat-cat Texan. I snaked my “not-right” head right at Gary.

About that point in my training, I surely could have used some advice from Marey. I would have sacrificed a hundred breakfasts to visit Grandfather Dante again, and that’s no lie. I tried everything I could to imagine him standing there, off in the distance. Nothing doing. The bloodlines had left me to figure this out all by my lonesome.

One morning, while I was resting, good old Gary started up about my being more cooperative. Truth be told, he liked to never stop.

With his face all contorted, Gary flapped and honked like a goose. He blurted out, “You’re reflecting badly on Edensway. On your mama, too, for that matter. I’ll tell you what, Dante. That’s a crying shame because she’s a great horse. You think her foals will be much in demand if you’re a fiasco at the track? The legacy rests on your shoulders, my friend.” Then for added dramatic effect, he threw his hands up. “Here’s the deal. I got nobody else willing to even try to break you. Nobody.”

Filipia stirred behind me.

“Excuse me, sir, Gary,” she said from the corner of my stall. “I can do it.”

Sour-faced Gary and me, we both whipped our heads around right fast. Neither of us could believe what we’d heard.

Filipia stood well within my field of vision and paused her hand on my rear end, a good sign of respect. She wanted me to be one hundred percent certain of her location. There was nothing in her hand or heartbeat or her breath to make me think she was anything other than what she purported to be. A girl who loved horses like crazy.

“You? I doubt that,” said my trainer.

She insisted. “Dante knows me. He likes me, and I like him. I’m in here every day. I can get a saddle and bridle on him with ease.”

“What’s your name again?”

“Filipia,” she responded, with more than a touch of annoyance. I thought about popping Gary hard with my tail, but I didn’t want to undermine whatever case the girl was about to make.

“You can doubt me if you want to, but I know I can ride him. Back home, on the island where I grew up, I worked with horses all the time. My brothers used to doubt me, too. But not anymore.”

“How old are you?” Gary asked.

Oh, glory. Did I ever feel her heart skip and her breath stop just then. A little quiver, hardly detectable to a less sensitive being, but an indisputable tremor.

I’ve never been able to tell a person’s age — probably because I’ve never really gotten a good look at their teeth. Filipia did look fairly, what I’d call . . . youthsome.

“Nineteen,” she finally said. She shrank back against me.

All I could see of her was the toe of a cracked, worn-out black paddock boot beside my hoof. Now, Gary could see her the whole time.

With those two steely, predatory eyes in the front of his head, he peered into her. Then he barked, “I’ll ask you again. How old are you? The truth this time.”

She wrapped her hand around my tail, anchoring herself to me. “Eighteen. I just turned eighteen, sir.”

Gary grunted. He spun on his heels and shut himself up in the office for a good little bit. Filipia let out a big sigh. Her breathing returned to normal, and she kept on with cleaning out my stall.

A few minutes later, though, who’s standing at my door but Gary. That’s right.

“I don’t know what to say. This is the craziest idea I’ve ever heard. What’s even crazier is that I’m seriously considering a yes,” Gary said.