Horse Heaven (33 page)

“Ah, well.” It could not be said that she felt better, Deirdre thought, but it could also not be said that she felt worse. It could be said that she felt Ellen’s friendship, a taxing but pleasurable feeling that she had felt many times in the past. Well, she was an inward-turned sort of person. Why that was didn’t bear investigating. It was an Irish thing, no doubt, pursuing her around the world in the way of Irish things. She sighed.

“I bet you could ride again.”

“God in heaven, girl!”

“I bet you could.”

“I bet I could poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick, too, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it!”

Ellen laughed, then said, “Well, you never change, dear. You just make me laugh.”

“I’m leaving now.” Deirdre stood up. “Don’t breed that filly and we’ll stay friends.”

Ellen stood up, too, and they wandered out of the lovely tackroom. The aisle was full of horses and ponies standing on crossties and little girls attending them. Every one of them had that look of a girl infatuated with horses, the happy, fated look of a passenger setting sail on the
Titanic.

At Deirdre’s car, Ellen opened the door for her and said, “We’ll stay friends.”

“Ah, well, I’ll think about it,” said Deirdre. But it was true. Ellen was one of those steady ones you couldn’t shake.

A
FTER
R
ESIDUAL
broke her maiden in her second race, defeating a Seattle Slew filly, a Gone West filly, a Storm Cat filly, and an In Excess (Ire.) filly by ten lengths wire to wire, all of her connections, past and present, were in full agreement about her final destination: Churchill Downs, Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies, November 7, 1998.

Well, yes. Breeders’ Cup. Buddy had a hundred horses in training at any one time, and a certain proportion of those were going to be looking at the Breeders’ Cup, at least from a distance. Jesus, though, who had revealed himself to be a tricky fellow, had put this Breeders’ Cup flea in everyone’s ear. He heard it fifty times a day, from everyone who had anything to do with that filly, and there was the trick, because normally people were so superstitious at the racetrack that they never said anything about plans or hopes. That’s what the newspaper people were for, raising hopes so that they could be dashed at the last minute. When they asked you about your plans, and you told them that this was horses and you couldn’t count on anything, they always wrote about your modesty, as if the single most important lesson of a life at the track was not that you couldn’t count on anything, as if this was news and they, the newspaper people, had never learned a damn thing. Well, yes, these tricks Jesus had up his sleeve did make Buddy irritable. But, of course, then he was required to find even more patience to counteract, or at least cover up, his own irritability. But at least he could soothe himself with the knowledge that he had learned something, and what he had learned was that, the smoother things went, the more careful you had to be. When you were in the shit, you had only one choice, which was to get out of the shit. When you were in clover, you had choices every minute, and for a man like him, a man who had acted on impulse every day of his life up until the last few months, choices were always dangerous.

One night, when he was praying his usual prayer, he suddenly got up from his knees and sat down on the bed. He looked out the window, up toward the full moon, in whose region he imagined Jesus to be, and he said, “Okay. Here’s the deal. I thought I was saved. That was what was advertised. I would accept you as my personal savior, and there we were. And, you know, I felt it, too. I felt saved and everything. I was happy. But I find out all the time that I’ve got to keep getting saved. Am I saved? Am I not saved? What do I do now? Did I do the wrong thing? Should I be remorseful, or just go on and try to do better? Are you talking to me? Are you not talking to me? Am I good? Am I a sinner? Still a sinner? You know what? I’m tired! I’m only fifty-eight years old! My father’s eighty-six, and he’s still alive, and his father died at ninety-three! That’s thirty years of this! I’m exhausted at the thought! I can’t do it!” And he did something only a loser would do, he burst into tears.

About a moment later, of course, his wife came into the room. Buddy loved his wife, probably. She was a nice person, like his mother had been, but not very interesting. She had been a good mother to all those ungrateful children they had who never stopped expressing their opinions about everything, as his own mother had been. He had stopped having sex with his wife a long
time ago, and didn’t have sex with anyone else, either. What with all those horses in training, and his anxieties, and the fax machine starting to spit out reports at four o’clock in the morning, what time was there for sex? His wife went over to the closet and opened the door. She didn’t let on that she knew he was in the room. She kicked off her shoes and then bent down and set them on the shoe rack. She unzipped her dress down the back, took it off, and hung it up. She slipped off her hose. They had been married thirty-two years. She looked it. After she had put on her robe, she said, “What’s wrong, then?”

Buddy, who realized that he had stopped crying in the course of watching her, said, “Oh, nothing.”

“Buddy, you’re crying. I’ve never seen you cry in all these years. What are you crying about?” She didn’t sound all that sympathetic.

“Well, I don’t think I’m saved, after all, to be frank.”

“Why not?”

“Because things just get harder and harder, not easier. Do you feel saved?”

“I don’t know. I like going to the church. The people there seem to take an interest.”

“In what?”

“In me.”

“Oh.” Buddy himself felt an immediate lack of interest in this idea, and looked out the window again.

She said, “Why did that make you cry?” Her voice was softer now, and she put her hand on his leg.

“Well, you know something? When the Lord came into me, it was such a good feeling, I thought, Well, I can do anything because of this feeling, but then there was all this stuff to do and to think about, and I don’t remember the feeling all that well.”

His wife was smiling at him. She said, “Doesn’t that remind you of something?”

“Yeah, the first time I ever had a horse win a stakes.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s the deal here. Everything is a test.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it a test. It’s just that what you said reminds me of marriage.”

“It does?”

“Yes.”

“I never thought of that.”

She looked at him, first coolly, then warmly, then, well, she looked like she was about to laugh. At last she said, “Buddy, sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever experienced our marriage at all!”

“Of course I have! We’ve got this house, don’t we? We got four grown-up kids and we go on vacations.”

“We haven’t been on a vacation for a long time.”

“You come to the track.”

“I haven’t been to the track in a long time, either.”

“We go to church together every Sunday, and I’ve been to a couple of those get-togethers they have there, too.”

“Yes, honey, but that doesn’t mean you’ve experienced being married to me.”

“Who else would I experience being married to?”

“That’s my point. I don’t think you’ve experienced being married.”

“We’ve been married for years. What else would I have experienced?”

“Some idea about being married that doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Is there something you want?”

“You mean, is there something I want from you that would show me that you’ve experienced being married to me?”

Buddy found this sentence confusing, so he said, “Yeah.”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I want something from you that would show
you
that you’ve experienced being married to me.”

Buddy felt very confused now. It was like she was throwing words at him in long strings, and just as they got to him, she twisted the strings so that they changed meaning. The best thing to do was maybe to just throw the whole thing back in her lap. He said, “Well, what makes you think you’ve experienced being married to me?”

“I don’t know that I have. I mean, I’ve experienced having you in the house. It’s like living with a loud motor running all the time. Up, down, into this room and that room, eating supper, jumping from the table, cursing all the time, yelling over the telephone about things, laughing, making deals all the time. You take up a lot of space and make a lot of noise.” She looked at him, and he must have had some look on his face, because she smiled a bit and said, “You know, you’re very lively, Buddy, and you are always exactly who you are. Everything about you shows on your face.”

Buddy thought of his anger and his dishonesty and his cruelty and his carelessness with animals and people, and he said, “I know.”

But she said, “I still love your energy. Life doesn’t seem to have diminished you the way it has me. You are like a rubber ball that can’t be held underwater for more than a second.”

“I am?”

“Sure. It doesn’t matter what happens, you always go back for more. Most of the time you don’t even seem to notice what’s happened. You don’t seem to take anything to heart.”

“I don’t?”

“You’re very reliable.”

“I am?”

“Sure. The motor never stops running, never seems to need a repair or a tune-up. Don’t you realize how unusual that is?”

“No.”

“Well, Buddy, I know you’re not very introspective. That’s why being saved is so hard for you. But I think you’re doing a good job.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do.” She kissed him on the forehead, the way his mother might have. It was a little disconcerting. You married someone and then ignored her for thirty-some years and then it turned out she had all these opinions about you, and she kissed you like your mother did, and that was okay, in fact it was fine. He sighed. But he still felt disconcerted, so he said, “You think I can get this filly to the Breeders’ Cup?”

“Why not?” she said.

“There are two or three of them. That horse Epic Steam, too. This could be my best year. I could be like Baffert or Lukas,” said Buddy.

“Ah, honey—” she said, but he interrupted her, as always. He said, “Why would I, though? That’s what I don’t understand.”

A
S FOR
R
ESIDUAL
, early the next morning, attached by a tie to the eye-bolt in her stall, being groomed and tacked up, she was one of those beings in whom all good things combine. The front end of her pedigree was good but not fashionably great. However, back past the five generations provided through the Equine Line by Bloodstock Services, and purely coincidentally, she was inbred many times to St. Simon, many times to Stockwell, many times to the great nineteenth-century mare Pocahontas. Added to that, Baba Yaya had been a lovely broodmare—attentive and experienced, kindly and firm, high up in the hierarchy of the mare herd. And everything all of Residual’s connections thought about her was true. Her owner spent money freely—on supplements, vitamins, massage, all the good things. Leon, whom Buddy tended to call “the idiot assistant trainer,” paid special attention to her, making sure her legs were stone cold every day, watching every step she took, checking her in her stall many times, giving her carrots and apples. She got to like
him—whatever
his
program, her program was to make him her very own human, and she did. So shining red and silky, so kind and large of eye, who could resist her? She was made for love, the way she laid her chin upon his shoulder and looked into his eye. And she did mesh perfectly with her exercise rider, Deedee, with the woman’s easygoing femininity, her light weight, and her soft voice. She gave herself to her exercise rider, and was a pleasure to ride. The jockey enjoyed her, too. What the filly had learned from racing was a simple thing—every time she had drawn upon herself for the extra something that it took to flow through an opening and get in the clear, St. Simon, Stockwell, and Pocahontas had supplied what she needed; anatomically, it was a higher volume of oxygenated blood passing from her large heart into the rest of her body, preventing the buildup of lactic acid in her muscles—but she felt this ease as a larger ease, as the kindness and interest that she sent out returning to her from every direction. Everyone saw it. What they said to each other was that she was easy on herself, but what they meant was that she was easy on everyone. And so, when her groom led her out of her stall, everyone around her stepped forward with a smile.

Which did not mean that she had any plans whatsoever to go to the Breeders’ Cup.

I
N REVIEWING HIS LIFE
after he developed a painful quarter crack in his right front hoof wall, Justa Bob could find no precedents for either the place he now found himself or the people he found himself with. There was indeed a fence, though it was low and mostly made of vertical slats. The space it ran around was small and contained no grass. Rather, there was a house that people of all sizes went into and out of, there was another small house, containing chickens, and there were several unusual objects that the smaller denizens of the house ran to every day and climbed about on. Justa Bob’s corner of this compound contained his buckets of water and feed and his mound of hay. It was divided from the rest by only some slender boards. He remained inside it more out of courtesy than anything else. Every day, though, a very small old human who appeared to be female came to him four times, fed and watered him. Twice a day, she snapped a shank onto his halter and led him carefully around the compound, scattering the children and chickens if she
had to. All of this was quite different from the racetrack and from the studfarm where he was born and the training center where he received his education. Other than this woman, there were two men who attended to his foot. They touched it, looked at it, nodded at it, smiled at it, talked to it, put something into it that was rather soothing for a moment. Justa Bob did not have the sense that they recognized him except insofar as he was attached to his foot.