Gee Whiz

by Jane Smiley

  Mom did ask us whether we want to come back home next year and go to the high school. Alexis and I have NO idea. I think you’ll have to take us on a tour of the campus so that we can decide.

  Miss you,

  Barbie

  That was something to look forward to—a meeting between the Goldman twins and Sophia. They were like creatures from different planets.

  The next day, I followed Leslie out of the lunchroom after we’d eaten, making sure first that Gloria and Stella were already on their way to their next class, which was swimming (I didn’t have to take swimming until after Christmas vacation, but everyone had to pass a swimming test before the end of the year). I caught up to Leslie and we walked along for a step or two, then she glanced at me. I said, “Can I invite you to something?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Alexis and Barbie are coming home for Christmas and they want you to come to their slumber party. It’s the twenty-first.”

  “I haven’t been to their place since Julius Caesar.”

  I’d forgotten she’d done that with us. I said, “Who did you play?”

  “Messala. Man with a torch. Woman with a torch. I don’t remember saying any lines.”

  “You must have said something.”

  She smiled. “Maybe. But I don’t remember.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what had happened to her, how she had gone from being the quiet, sort of sad and plump girl we thought we knew to this tall, self-confident, athletic girl in front of me, but I said, “I wish you’d been here for their party before they went to school. It was fun.”

  “I was here. But I wasn’t ready to appear yet.”

  “Will you appear at the slumber party?”

  She didn’t say anything. I put my hand on her elbow. I said, “Barbie asked me specifically to ask you and Sophia. I’m sure there will be great food and good games and … I don’t know. There’s no one like them around here now.”

  “Okay. It might be fun.”

  The next day in history, I asked Sophia. I half expected her to say, “What’s a slumber party?” but instead, she said, “I’ve heard of the Goldmans. They used to have parts in plays. I saw them in something years ago. They’re blond, right? One of them played the child in the play half the time and one of them played the child the other half. Maybe it was Peter Pan? Did they go to your school?”

  “Yes. Now they go to the Jackson School.”

  “I thought of going there.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, my dad thought of me going there. Let’s put it that way. Some client of his got him all excited about it, and it took several slammed doors to talk him out of it.”

  I laughed.

  Sophia laughed. Then she said, “Okay, I’ll go to the slumber party, but maybe only as an observer.”

  I never knew what to make of Sophia.

  A few days went by, and we didn’t hear anything more from Mr. Matthews, or from Roscoe Pelham. I thought it was funny that his name was the same as the name of a type of bit. It was as if my name were “Abby Snaffle” or “Ruth Abigail Eggbutt.”

  On Thursday, though, the call came. Dad answered, and said, “Yes, yes. Oh, sure, that sounds fine. Let me get her,” and then he handed the phone to me.

  I said, “Hello?”

  A smooth Southern voice said, “Is this Abby Lovitt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, Abby! Nice to be speaking to you. This is Roscoe Pelham over at Vista del Canada. I wanted to consult with you about your colt.… Let’s see, the Jaipur colt. What’s his name?”

  “Jack.”

  “Jack?”

  I said, “So far.”

  “Jack So Far. That’s a good name. I like it. Let me write that down.”

  I said, “But—”

  And he just kept going on, smoothly. “Well, now. I’m looking forward to meeting you. You know your brother, Daniel, has done some shoeing for us this week. He ought to work out fine, splitting his time between here and the Marble Ranch. He’s a bright kid, good hand with a horse.” He paused. “Jack So Far. Jack can go sooo far. Good racing handle. Jack So Far.”

  “Mr.—”

  “Now, here’s the deal. We’ve agreed to break the horse for Barry Matthews. He’s a friend of mine, and he’s got a couple of horses down there in Texas that my owner here, Mr. Leamann, wants to send to Kentucky. We normally train for the California tracks, but if they got to go east, then they got to get used to the humidity, no two ways about that. So I don’t mind a little back-scratching between friends, and as we see how he goes on, well, we’ll get to that, but I understand you’ve maintained the colt all this time, since he was born. All right, then. Daniel can just bring that young man over here, and we’ll take a look at him. All right?”

  “I gue—”

  “Hope to meet you, too.” I could hear him saying good-bye as he took the receiver of the phone away from his mouth, and then there was a click. Roscoe Pelham seemed like a nice person, but there was not going to be any getting a word in edgewise with him.

  Dad had gone upstairs, and Mom had been out on the porch petting Rusty. When she came in, I said, “I guess Danny’s going to take Jack over to that place.”

  Mom said, “I don’t understand this racing business, but if …”

  “Maybe it’s just for a month or two.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, Mr. Pelham said they would see how he gets along.”

  “You seem worried. What are you worried about?”

  Dad came down the stairs. He said, “Putting her horse in the hands of crooks.”

  “Is Mr. Matthews a crook?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “What are you saying, then?”

  Dad shook his head, then said, “I wish I knew.”

  Mom laughed, and then Dad said, “It’s not like we never knew any horse-racing people. We did. My mom had an uncle, back when we were kids, Uncle Bart. Uncle Bart would give you odds on whether there would be bacon for breakfast, or whether a horse who had gotten down to roll would roll all the way over. If you had a nickel, Uncle Bart would promise you a dime if two crows took off from a tree limb at the same time. If they didn’t, you had to give him your nickel. He went to racetracks all over. I think he ended up in Chicago. After a while, no one ever talked about him.”

  “Was he saved?”

  “About a hundred times,” said Dad. “He liked that, too.” He shook his head. “And I’ve seen some old racehorses, not the kind that win the Kentucky Derby and go to a nice farm for the rest of their lives, like Jaipur, but some of the ones who race twenty times a year until they’re eight or nine, then go to the sale yard and can hardly walk. It’s not a blessed world.”

  I said, “But Sophia knows a horse, a son of that stallion they have at Vista del Canada, who left the track and became a great jumper.”

  Mom said, “We’ll take it one step at a time.”

  Anyway, Jaipur had won the Belmont Stakes, not the Kentucky Derby, but I didn’t say anything. Had we talked about money? I thought over what Roscoe Pelham had said, and decided that what he meant was, since we’d had Jack his whole life, it was even-steven for them to give him his early training. That was enough for now.

  Then Danny called that evening, and said that there was a stall opening up at Vista del Canada, because one of the two-year-olds was going to the track in San Francisco—I guess that was called Bay Meadows. So could he take Jack over the next day when he went to do some work? And then Mom said that I could take a half day off from school in order to watch him get settled. Danny said that they would keep him out in a paddock for the first week, only putting him in a stall a little bit each day for him to get used to it.

  Jack hadn’t been in a trailer for a month or two, not since the one time we trained him to go in with Nobby, gave him a few handfuls of oats in a bucket while he was in there, and then drove him out, just down the road and back for twenty minutes. But
when Danny showed up the next morning (a sunny day!), Jack walked right into the trailer like he knew all about it, and that’s what you want them to do—it shows that they figured it out. I got into the passenger’s side of Danny’s truck, and we set out.

  With the rain and then three days of sunshine, the world we lived in was a different place—cool, bright, and breezy. Vista del Canada was in an area I had never visited—out of the way. You had to be going there to go there, and we had never had a reason to go there. All around it was a little wild—the mountains were right behind it, and the landscape wasn’t open, as it was around our place. There was a locked gate—you had to press a button, and when you identified yourself, the gate swung and let you in. There was a long road that ran through a stand of trees and crossed a river. It was wild until you crested the hill, and then the place spread out before you, its own hidden valley, with paddocks and pastures and a white curving stable. The fences were not wire, either—they were board fences painted white. And the grass was thick. In California, this was a startling luxury—around our place the hills were just beginning to green up. Out by the stables, the oaks gave way to giant pines, and there were plenty of pine needles, but even the polo field wasn’t very green yet. We had oaks dotting the hillsides, but here the oaks were bunched, as if this were the one spot that was rich enough and wet enough for them to gather in a forest. We passed the first stable and crested another hill. Now there stretched before us one of the most beautiful pastures I had ever seen, undulating along the side of a mountain, but not steep or rocky, just rich grass like a blanket thrown over a bed. It was divided into four parts, and several horses grazed in each one. Past the hillside, the road dipped and then turned, and went down a hill to a broad plain that ran along the river, and on this plain were three more barns and the long oval of a racetrack. One barn was quite fancy, with a small steeple and a double fence. Inside the fence, a horse was standing, looking out toward the track. Danny said, “That’s the stud. His name is Encantado. He’s by Stymie.”

  The racetrack was empty, but some more horses grazed in the center. There was grass everywhere. I said, “How do they keep it so green?”

  “They irrigate, silly.”

  “How can they afford that? Mr. Jordan doesn’t do that.” The Jordan Ranch was the biggest ranch in our neighborhood, and Mr. Jordan had plenty of money.

  “Well, he isn’t by the river, for one thing, and he doesn’t own lots of banks, for another.”

  “What’s on that hillside?”

  “That’s a vineyard. They also grow grapes, olives, and almonds.”

  The racetrack drew my eye, even though there was no one on it. Between the two green fields, the one in the middle and the one around it, was a silver oval, level, with tiny, even, lengthwise lines. Next to the gate at one end was a large green tractor with a harrow attached to it. They must groom the track every day.

  No doubt there were bigger farms in Kentucky, but this farm was nestled so perfectly and beautifully in the mountains that you could not stop looking around. Next to every beautiful thing that there was to look at was another beautiful thing to look at, if only an oak tree surrounded by a hedge, or rosebushes climbing over a fence, or the dark hillside rising from the green meadow. The oaks were streaming with moss, and because of the mountains, the sky was more like a perfect backdrop to the picture than real, hard sky. Maybe it rained and stormed here, but it looked like paradise.

  The barns were two rows of stalls. All the stalls opened onto a neatly groomed gravel path that was shaded by an overhang. There were pots of geraniums at the corners of the overhang. In the V formed by the two barns, there was a circular track with footing like the racetrack’s, where the horses could be walked by grooms. This track was surrounded by a thick hedge, maybe three feet high and two feet wide, with three entrances—one facing the racetrack and one facing each of the barns. There was a flower bed just below the hedge with marigolds blooming. The horses looked out over their half doors, or they could go to the back of their stalls and step out into individual runs. This meant that they basically had two stalls—one inside and one outside. If it was raining, the door to the outside could be closed. Everything was very neat, and looked like perfect luxury to me—most stables you see, no matter how fancy, look at least a little run-down from horses breaking the fences or kicking their stalls or just making a mess, but not Vista del Canada.

  A man was waiting beside the barns. He stepped up to my side of the truck as soon as we stopped. I rolled down my window, and he put his hand in and said, “Well, you must be Abby Lovitt. A pleasure to meet you, ma’am. I am Roscoe Pelham, you may call me Ross. Beautiful day today, horses were out a little later than they are in the summer, we don’t have a lighted track, not like down south, where they get ’em out by five, no matter what time of the year it is. So, let’s see this young fella. Anyway, glad you could bring him over on such short notice—we don’t like an empty stall. Makes everyone lazy.”

  I said, “Hi.”

  Jack had been good all the way over—no rocking, no getting his foot caught, no blood anywhere, and no sweat when we backed him down the ramp. His coat was as smooth and dry as when I brushed him that morning.

  Once down the ramp, he lifted his head and his tail, pricked his ears, gave a loud, sharp whinny. Six horses answered him back, including Encantado, which made Jack snort and prance a couple of steps in place. He didn’t act scared—he acted ready to take over.

  Ross said, “Self-confident young fella, and big for his age. What’s his birth date?”

  “January twenty-second.”

  “Very good. Very good. As old as he can be. You know, there was a time when the official birth date for Thoroughbreds was May first, rather than January first. Could be it was better that way.” He smiled. “You’d be surprised how it is in Kentucky. Some of those newborn foals come out of their stalls on the second of January quite muscular and active.” He laughed. Danny led Jack over to an empty paddock and put him in there, carefully turning him and taking off his halter. Jack reared up and twisted away, then did a high-stepping trot to the other side of the paddock. He stopped there for a moment of stillness, then he leapt, kicked up, and galloped back toward the gate, twisting and turning just as he got there, and then running to the right in a big circle. He was only a yearling, but he wasn’t going to tell them that. I said, “Will he be okay?”

  Mr. Pelham said, “He moves like a cat. He’s not going to get himself in trouble, and there’s no one in there with him to get him into trouble. I’ll watch him.”

  Danny nodded, then said, “I can come over every day.”

  This was reassuring. I didn’t see how I would have left Jack there if Danny had not started his new job, partly shoeing and partly working with young horses. Lucky again.

  I said, “My friend was telling me about Incantation.”

  “Oh, he was slow. He only had three starts. If there was something worse than last place, he would have found it. But he’s good-looking. Looks like his pop. He found himself a niche as a jumper; not all of them do.”

  We walked over toward the track and the stallion pen. Encantado had gone inside, but when Mr. Pelham gave a whistle, he emerged. Mr. Pelham said, “We have to admire him from a distance. He bites a lot even for a stud. But he could jump out of that paddock if he only realized it.”

  The fence was at least five feet high.

  Mr. Pelham said, “Course, studs are a little more chicken about jumping than geldings.”

  Encantado whinnied. His whinny made Jack’s whinny sound puny and childish. Then his tail went up and he arched his neck and sprang in a very bright trot along the length of the fence, bringing each of his four feet high off the ground, as if he were trotting on hot coals. He snorted.

  Danny said, “He has a very good opinion of himself.”

  “Well, he won the Hollywood Gold Cup and the Santa Anita Handicap, so he would. What’s your Jaipur colt’s name again?”

  I said,
“Jack So Far.”

  Danny glanced at me.

  “Oh, yes. You told me that. Nice one. Warn Matthews told me how you got him. Amazing story.”

  I said, “I never know whether it makes me feel unbelievably lucky or unbelievably sad.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Roscoe Pelham. “Well, I got a bit of work to do, but here’s Ike. He’ll answer any questions you have. Very pleased to meet you.” He shook my hand again, then strode across the grass to his truck, pausing to give Encantado the once-over (Encantado pinned his ears and snaked his nose toward the fence; Ross laughed). You could tell he was the boss by the way his eyes moved here and there, focusing on this cracked fence rail or that piece of machinery not parked properly. Things to be fixed.

  Just then, a man walked out of one of the barns with some bridles in his hand. He hung them on a hook at the corner of the barn, then waved to us. Danny said, “That’s Ike. He’s the head groom.”

  Ike trotted over, his hand out for a handshake. Danny remembered his manners. They smiled and chatted for a minute, then Ike said something, and Danny nodded, and they smiled again, and Ike shook his head. Then Danny gestured toward the car, and Ike came around to my side. My window was down, so Ike stuck his hand in for me to shake it. He said, “Well, now, hello there, Abby. I’m Ike. Pleased t’ meet ya. How are ya t’day?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Now, I hear ya own yerself that yearlin’?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s startin’ young, I’ll say that for ya. Ya mighta waited till ya had some sense, but what fun is that?”

  I didn’t know what to make of this.

  “Well, he’s a good-lookin’ youngster. Not a speck of white on ’im.”