Horse Heaven (46 page)

“You want to hear how I talk?”

“I do.”

“Girl! What you know about this party—” and then there was something eloquent and completely incomprehensible to Deirdre. Tiffany went on, “Ho Ho loves me to talk like that, or he did. He would write it all down. I never saw a horse before I was with Ho Ho. But now that’s all I think about.” Deirdre felt
herself smiling and smiling, but she covered up in the habitual way, saying, “What, class are they running?”

“Well, I told Dagoberto that, even though Ho Ho was taking care of things and at that point those kinds of expenses were nothing to him, the horse had to support itself, so he got me some good claimers, and we do that, trading around and mostly trading up. But, you know, two horses aren’t enough for me to think about. I want to think about twenty horses or thirty horses. I don’t want to go out there and just watch my horses work. Now I go out there every day, and Dagoberto has other owners to see and other things he has to do, and he thinks I know enough already. Dagoberto has kept my stable in the black since day one, but I’m bored with that now.”

“Well, training isn’t boring. But horses are tragic beasts, especially good horses, especially good Thoroughbreds. I used to ride jumpers, ya know. You can have a good jumper of any breed or no breed. Lots of warmbloods are good jumpers. Jumping isn’t all that hard on them, contrary to appearances. They can get around the jumps before they know they’re working, if they’re not afraid. But racing, now, there’s always a moment in a race when a horse has to decide to press on. A Thoroughbred is likelier than not to press on. That’s what we ask of them. But, I ask myself, at what cost? We rely on them not to consider the cost, but to press on anyway. That’s heart, you know. They have great hearts. But it’s their downfall, that they don’t feel the cost until they’ve paid it. Every day, especially when I have a horse running, I wake up and I say to myself, Can I ask this horse, this day, to pay that cost if he has to? I don’t know what I would do for a living if I didn’t do this thing, but—” She sensed someone behind her and turned around. Tiffany turned around, too. It was George. He smiled at Tiffany but not at her. She said, “Och. I thought you were occupied, Cousin.”

Tiffany regarded him, and Deirdre took the opportunity to regard her. Talk about beauty. Nor was it merely how she was shaped, or her pretty mannerisms or her delicious style (she had on an amethyst linen sundress and a necklace of gold suns with jolly faces etched into them; perfect cornrows sculpted the shape of her head, then fell to her shoulders with a tinkle of gold glass beads). It was that beauty was a continuous flow within the boundaries so delicately defined by her skin. You could almost follow it with your eyes, eddying here, surging there, as she said to George, “Do you train horses, too?”

“With Deirdre. Have you some horses, then?”

“I have two. Three, with the yearling.”

George caught Deirdre’s eye, then said, “And a Democrat, then?”

“Not exactly. I’ve never voted.”

George came over and sat down. “No doubt she’s been going on about the horror of it all.”

“I want to do it,” said Deirdre. “My horses have won ninety-four thousand dollars since April.”

“Where are they?” said George.

“They’re stabled at Belmont. They run there and at Aqueduct and Saratoga.”

“If you brought them to Maryland, you could step them up in class—” suggested George.

Deirdre put her heel on George’s toes and ground it in hard, until in spite of himself he yelped, then she said, “If your horses are making money on that circuit, you don’t want to be moving them to Maryland, believe me.”

George made a noise in his throat, very Irish, a combination of disgust and resignation. Deirdre tossed her head and continued to Tiffany, “Keep your horses in New York, dear. That’s where the money is, and the good footing, too.” There, she had done it again, sent away the very thing that she most wanted for herself. She glanced at George, who was looking annoyed again. “But if
you
come to me, I’ll teach you some things. We’ll see how far we get.” Then she turned to George. “You go away, George, you can take me to task later.” He heaved himself out of the depth of the sofa and went off, but not without cuffing her on the head. She knew that cuff. It was more affectionate than angry by now. She smiled to herself. It was not at all pleasant to be on the outs with George. Meanwhile, here was Tiffany. She said, “Now. You tell me whether your friend Norman is going to break up this fine establishment, because the best part of my livelihood depends upon Mary Lynn and Skippy, and I can’t do without either one of them, and if she moves to Seattle, well, they call it racing out there, but—”

“She’s already told him no.”

“But her eyes were rolling back in her head.”

“That’s why she told him no.”

“Marriage kills passion?”

“Lots of people think so.”

“They do, don’t they?”

“It’s almost a rule.”

Deirdre nodded, having never been married, and having never, she supposed, felt passion. Tiffany turned her head away, and looked across the room, so that Deirdre could see her profile. What she saw was that moment you saw rarely enough in a child, not often in an adult, the inner warmth of true happiness infusing the features quietly, one by one. Then Tiffany turned to her—the girl couldn’t have been more than twenty or so, half Deirdre’s age—and said,
“Thank you, Deirdre, I’ll be there in a week,” and kissed her on the cheek. Later, when she was driving home with George, she said about meeting Tiffany, “That was fucking well almost worth venturing into Washington society and having to listen to them talk about Clinton all afternoon,” but she actually didn’t feel nearly so ironic about it as that. What she felt was simple, and certainly ephemeral, certainly fleeting, certainly momentary, and certainly fickle joy, groundless and feeble-minded and gormless. All George said was, “Ah, Cousin, you take everything to heart.” She saw that he was no longer angry at all, but resigned. That was perhaps not the best of omens, but it was all the more convenient for pursuing her contrary way.

J
USTA
B
OB LEFT
Golden Gate Fields in a shipment of horses headed for Arapaho Park, in Colorado. He was claimed away from the Pisser by Lily Dodd (aged twenty-three), whose father and grandfather were trainers before her; she had a second and a third with him out of three starts. He was then claimed away from Lily by Hakon Borgulfsson, an Icelander, the only trainer in America of Icelandic parentage, who had a six-horse trailer and liked to combine racing claimers with supporting his daughter Thora’s career singing opera. She was rehearsing
Judith and Holofernes
in Denver, which Hakon considered a difficult and depressing piece of work, but not nearly as bad as
Wozzeck
, which she had been in last year, in male costume, in Houston, while Hakon ran some horses at Sam Houston. He tried to get her out to the track as often as possible just to give her some relief. Justa Bob had several infirmities. He had a tiny chip in his left knee, and both his ankles were beginning to get a touch of arthritis. He had a stress fracture in his pelvis. The dry weather in Colorado could do him a world of good.

Colorado was an education, especially for a Cal-bred, like Justa Bob. You couldn’t say, and Justa Bob didn’t say, that Hakon wasn’t a horseman, but, for all his good intentions, Hakon wasn’t a horseman. Hakon was a reader, an esthete, a charitable human being who never failed to give something to a homeless person. Hakon could whip up a nutritious meal in a half-hour over a Coleman stove, something he often had to do when he was trying to save money for books by living at the track, and he always had some to share. Hakon had kept that Dodge truck of his going for fifteen years and three hundred
thousand miles, but horses were a divine mystery to him, and no amount of reading, discussing, consulting, observing, and receiving tips from well-meaning friends could shed any light upon that mystery. He gave Justa Bob so much bute over the course of their time together that the horse’s stomach was beginning to know it. He fed only a little alfalfa hay, because he couldn’t afford anything more, so Justa Bob hadn’t had much to do all day. He fed bran mashes that were too hot, water that tasted poor, soy oil rather than corn oil. He wrapped all his own horses, because he couldn’t afford a groom, and he wrapped them unevenly, so that too much pressure on one part of the leg alternated with too little on another. He almost never called the vet, because he had his own theories about how horses got better and because he usually didn’t quite understand what the vet was telling him. Living with Hakon, for his horses, was an exercise in gratuitous survival, and other horsemen Hakon knew always cited, in his regard, the old racetrack adage “Lucky is better than good.” Hakon was lucky. He almost never worked a horse fast enough for its accumulated minor damage to result in a breakdown, but when his horses got claimed and went off to other trainers, who were not so lucky, the more normal sort of work sometimes did break them down. Hakon considered himself a natural-born genius, his very unconventionality a testament to his talents.

After an eventful month, in which Justa Bob loafed around the track during training hours and then loafed to a win and a third in two starts, Hakon Borgulfsson, Justa Bob, and Thora parted company—Hakon back to the Bay Area, driving his empty six-horse trailer, with some money in his pocket to claim a couple more horses, and maybe take them to Arizona for the winter; Thora on a plane to St. Louis, where she was to sing all the parts of all the female leads in a compressed version of the
Ring
cycle; and Justa Bob to Chicago, where his new owner, William Vance, had a stable at Sportsman’s Park.

William had twenty-seven horses in training, all of them jointly owned with an assortment of friends and relatives. When Justa Bob arrived at the track on Cicero Avenue in the midst of a heat wave, he had already gotten fairly dehydrated. Nor was William there to greet him, since William’s son Alphonse was being honored for work he had done in a state-sponsored summer program at the local high school. When the groom put Justa Bob in his stall, deeply bedded but with an unusual-smelling straw, and well provided with hay but timothy rather than alfalfa, Justa Bob turned away from all of these unfamiliar sensory experiences and manured in his water bucket as a gesture of despair. He was tired from the long van ride. He was thirsty, but now that he had manured in his water bucket, he no longer cared to drink from it. He looked around. Everything was unfamiliar. He closed his eyes.

The groom checked the horses one last time and then decided to leave
early. William didn’t like for the horses to be left alone, but he was due to arrive himself in less than an hour, so the groom thought it was all right to leave. Justa Bob wasn’t the only horse who seemed lethargic. A few were sweating in their stalls, even though they had fans blowing right on them. The groom, unfamiliar with Justa Bob, of course, didn’t realize that he was a horse who rarely failed to take an interest in his surroundings.

And then, leaving his son’s high school, William Vance’s car blew a rod, and was rendered undrivable. William thought everything would be fine, though. He had no one running that afternoon, as if anyone would be running with this heat index; his groom, Homer, was on the job; probably those new horses hadn’t arrived yet; and, all in all, he wasn’t worried about a thing, and he was very proud of his son, who had a scholarship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and a nice girlfriend who was going to Connecticut College for Women, and he decided to go home and take a nap and get to the track later in his own girlfriend’s car, but she was at work until four. He took the bus to her apartment to wait for her, which was why, when his buddy Romero saw that Justa Bob was groaning and looking at his flanks, indicating colic, he couldn’t reach William at home.

And then the power browned out, and Romero got busy with other things.

Inside Justa Bob, his large intestine was beginning to increase the frequency of its peristaltic contractions, which gave him a little pain. He began to pace around his stall, stopping every few minutes to paw through his straw. Sometimes he stretched out his head and neck and opened his mouth. The pain increased. He took a look at his flanks, but there was nothing visible on the outside that gave any evidence of what was going on on the inside. He pawed some more, then lay down. For a while he curled his legs and hooves under him, trying to relax. But he found that he had to look with increasing fixed intensity at the bland expanse of his side. It was such a mystery, this pain. Finally, about an hour and a half into his ordeal, he stretched out on his side, and then rolled over, a time-honored way of expressing and sometimes relieving belly pain—what you did was roll back and forth, back and forth. However, Justa Bob was unfamiliar with the dimensions of his new stall, and after he had rolled over, he discovered that he was cast against the wall and couldn’t get back onto his other side. He had been cast before. His natural inclination, which had saved him innumerable times in his life, was to wait. There are horses who wait and there are horses who can’t wait. Those who can’t wait get into more trouble. Justa Bob was a waiter, but when he rolled over and got cast, something else happened, which was that his large intestine flipped over 180 degrees. A bit of the hay from the van that he was still digesting stopped
moving and began to compact. It hurt very much more even than before, but Justa Bob kept trying to wait.

“Almost dead” is a relative judgment. Justa Bob’s heart was still fine and his brain was functioning, but purely in terms of time, Justa Bob was much closer to death by five in the afternoon than he had been at noon. At noon he had been in one country, the country of good health, and death had been in another country, and the two countries had shared nothing, but in the course of the afternoon, colic had made a bridge between them. Justa Bob was beginning to go into shock. His eyes were half closed. He was groaning. Once in a while, purely involuntarily, he hit his feet against the concrete blocks of the stall, and scraped his own legs with his own hooves. Horses stalled nearby watched him and whinnied from time to time. They all noticed when William Vance finally showed up about five. William would have noticed their higher level of anxiety—it wasn’t all that subtle—but he was still groggy from his nap and lethargic from the ordeal of driving through the streets of Chicago in a car without air conditioning in this heat.