by Otto Penzler
The trainer slid carefully into his Corvette, then turned the motor back off and leaned out. “You want a ride?” He’d never offered Michelle a ride before.
“Thanks, but I need to talk to Raindancer, give him his cookie.”
He smiled in his slow way. “Well, just don’t eat it yourself. Tomorrow—you weigh in, one-oh-seven, am I right?”
“You’re always right, Mr. Jones.”
The owner’s son came trotting out of the stables on one of the exercise ponies. He gestured a salute to them with his riding stick.
“Eric’s a nice kid,” said the trainer. “College kid.”
“He’s okay.” The girl shrugged and looked away.
After Jones drove off, Michelle returned to the stables,
where she saw the groom Loopy gesturing furtively with his red cap for her to follow him. To her surprise Loopy led her toward Mr. Jones’s small office at the end of the stables.
The other grooms at Campbell Farms called Luis Rojas “Loopy” because, many years ago, a horse panicking in the starting gate had crushed against his leg, ending his career as a jockey. As a result of the injury, he walked at a quick odd off-balance tilt, one that worsened whenever he’d had a few beers, which was often.
There was nobody else around at the far end of the stables. Loopy held a ring of metal picks in his scarred hand, using one of them with a fast furtive motion to open the trainer’s office door.
Michelle was shocked. “Loopy, what the F are you doing?”
Silently he moved her brusquely inside, locking the door behind them. In the dusky office, he chose another pick from his ring and used it to open a desk drawer. He took out Jones’s metal box and opened it. The box was full of money.
“Jesus, Loopy! You cabron! Put that back!”
But the short man shrugged, pouring stacks of bills, neatly bound with rubber bands, onto the seat of an old leather recliner. He whispered to her, “That’s ten thousand, eight hundred dollars. Just sitting here.”
Michelle grabbed the money from the chair. “That’s Mr. Jones’s! It’s, like, his savings!”
Loopy let her stuff the bills back in the metal box. “Maybe so. Tomorrow, we gonna put it all on Raindancer.”
“You can’t rob Mr. Jones!”
Nodding, he smiled at her. “He never gonna know. You gonna win the Bluegrass, Michelle. That gray horse love you. Raindancer do anything you ask him. You gonna ask him,
come on, big boy, win this thing for me and Loopy’s poor little five baby children.”
They heard laughter just outside the office. Michelle pressed against the door, listening while two of the exercise boys moved past, talking lewdly about the owner Mr. Grandors’s trophy wife, and how she was probably the same age as his son Eric, and how she was probably sleeping with Eric, too. “Assholes,” Michelle muttered. Finally the men’s voices faded.
Michelle returned to Loopy. “So let me get this straight. You’re going to steal Mr. Jones’s money and bet it on Rain-dancer?”
“No, your mama going to bet it for us. Little bit this window, little bit that window. People don’t think nothing. Mama just betting her heart.”
“No way. You’ll get a bonus anyhow if I do win. We’ll both get one.”
“That bonus is a lousy penny. You and Fortune’s Child going off, seventy-to-one, I bet. You and me, this way.” He tapped the metal box. “We gonna win about seven hundred thousand dollars. You know how your mama want that house. You can get it. After we win, we put this money back for Mr. Jones. He never know a thing.”
“You’re loco.” But Michelle kept looking at the box the man was holding out to her. “… You really think I can beat Spats?”
He pushed the money into her hands. “Girl, I know you can.”
• • •
Raindancer and Michelle had met on her birthday, as if the gray colt had been some sort of surprise present. That day in early June, she was hurrying late from school to the roadside tavern where her mother worked as a bartender. A sudden storm caught her as she cut across a Campbell Farms meadow. She went there hoping to see some of the horses that lived at the thousand-acre luxury stables. She’d been watching them for years.
Stung by the hard rain, she raced to the edge of the blue-grass field, where blossoming groves of cherry trees and apple trees grew close together, dark and thick.
It was odd that she felt no fear when the gray colt ran so noisily out of the shadows of the orchard. It was odd because things did scare her then, like when a teacher called her name, or if she suddenly awakened in the trailer in the middle of the night and saw that her mother had not come home.
Rain was beating the apple blossoms into a swirl around the horse as he weaved through the low boughs of the old trees. He looked to her as if he were dancing in the rain, unable to decide what he wanted to do next. Finally, he veered to a stop with a shiver in front of her. They stared at each other, and after a while, she took a cream sandwich cookie from her wet backpack and, stepping toward him, carefully held it out.
There was an arc of wryness in his way of his turning his head a little to the side before accepting the cookie from her outstretched hand. It made her laugh. “You’re funny,” she said. “You’re a Raindancer.” He nodded his head as if he liked the name. Then he butted his nose against her backpack. She found a candy bar for him.
When the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the horse galloped away just when a white van with CAMPBELL FARMS written across the side roared up the dirt road beside the orchard. A small Latino man jumped out, holding a lead line, yelling at the gray colt, “Son of a bitch! Vuelto aqui ahoral”
That was how Michelle had met Loopy Rojas, who’d immediately started complaining to her about the horse as if he’d known her for years and was certain of her sympathy. “Hibridol That bastard son of a bitch colt, he think he king of the world. Since he’s a little baby, he’s trying to get me fired. He run off three days one time. They just now break him with the yearlings and he jump the fence!”
Michelle was sympathetic; she’d run away from home herself several times when she was little, taking off to look for her father, although she had no idea where he might be. She tried to strike a deal. “I’ll help you catch that horse if you teach me to ride.”
“You loca. He got a big buck in him this one, you let him get his head down, you flying to the moon. He’s a mess.”
“No, he’s not.” Michelle saw a gray shimmer as the colt moved in the orchard. She gestured for Loopy to look behind a clump of apple trees. “He’s watching us. I don’t think he likes you.”
Loopy laughed loudly. “That’s the truth. He don’t like me. Mr. Jones gonna fire my ass. I got five babies. Ya ya ya ya ya!” He appeared to realize only now that he was talking to a stranger. “You look like somebody I know. What’s your name?”
“Michelle Harlin.”
He stared hard at her, then shook his head. “No, I don’t know that name.” He held out a soiled hand. “I’m Loopy. This horse gonna be my death.”
“You stay here.” Taking the lead line from him, she started toward the dark trees.
The horse Michelle called Raindancer was officially known as Fortune’s Child, the name she saw engraved in brass on his halter when he bent his head to take another cookie and let her snap on the lead line. Foaled and bred in the Kentucky bluegrass, he had been the star weanling at Campbell Farms until his “acting up” turned his trainer Mr. Jones against him. Fortune’s Child came from a much better family, far better known, than Michelle’s. He was the grandson of the great Fortune, who had never lost a stakes race in his life; his mother was WeepNoMoreMyLady, winner of the Breeders Cup Mile, who’d set a record on a muddy track, who was Filly of the Year. Fortune’s Child could trace his ancestry all the way back to Gallant Fox, the 1930 Triple Crown winner.
Michelle’s parents were nobodies. Her mother, a foster child, had been for twenty years bartender at the Finish Line, a roadhouse not far from the Ke
eneland, Kentucky, racetracks. Betsy “Bits” Harlin had one big dream, to own a house you couldn’t move. She still lived in a trailer. She had named her daughter for the Beatles’ song “Michelle,” looking for a little romance in a hard life. It hadn’t come. Well, it had come a few times, but it hadn’t stayed. Bits had always been, she admitted, a sucker for anyone talking a foreign language. She’d been a sucker for the good-looking jockey from Tijuana, the self-named “El Canon,” who’d spent a month in her trailer while racing second-rate mounts at Keeneland. On the best day of his life, he’d finished third. El Canon had left town without knowing that Bits Harlin was pregnant.
“He was a little man, but he was a big mistake,” Bits told her daughter years later, when Michelle started asking about her father. “Hey, anyhow, he left me the best thing in my life. You.”
It was doubtless because the groom Loopy was from Central America and because he knew all about horses that Michelle had liked him from the first. After he told her that he’d realized that the person she looked like was her father (whom Loopy had met at Keeneland), after he let her hang out at the stables, after he arranged for her to be hired to work in the stalls, after he let her ride Raindancer, she had come to love Luis Rojas.
He lived in a tack room at the Farms, his hot plate and little TV on a shelf, his clothes stored beneath. For years, he had mailed money home to his large family in Costa Rica. He was a good groom. Of all the Campbell Farms thoroughbreds, only Raindancer seemed to distrust him. But Loopy accepted that. And he could see from that first day in the rain that the gray colt had fallen in love with Michelle. A year after they met, watching Michelle hotwalk Raindancer, Loopy told her, “Girl, one day you going to bring your papa back his honor.”
By then Michelle was, in her mother’s phrase, “horse crazy like your crazy dad.” Bits Harlin didn’t worry at first. “I guess a lot of girls go through the phase. It won’t last.” Michelle, however, knew that it would last, that she had inherited a passion from her father El Canon.
Over the next year, Loopy taught her all he knew, and he knew a lot. Grooms, he said, always know the most about thoroughbreds; trainers the next most. Owners know nothing; she should never listen to owners—the thin women wearing hats and pearls, the beefy men in blazers and bright ties. A smart jockey will always avoid owners and listen to grooms. Take Spats in there in the Number One stall, for example. Did his owner, Mr. Grandors, who lived in Naples, Florida, who also owned but cared far less about Fortune’s Child, know the difference between those two animals? And did Spats’s hotshot jockey really know his mount any more than Mr. Grandors? “Spats in there a little funny, faking how he’s sore. Deep down, he don’t care, not like Raindancer.”
The day that Michelle brought Luis Rojas with her to the Finish line to “explain” things to her mother, to admit that she’d been working for more than a year at Campbell Farms, sneaking out of the trailer each day before dawn to clean stables, Bits had blamed everything on Loopy.
Betsy “Bits” Harlin took a draw on her long menthol cigarette that day and sighed out the smoke. With a shake of her blonde curls, she pointed her cigarette at the fidgeting Loopy. “I’m looking at you, I’m looking at trouble.” Closing the real estate section of the paper that she was always studying, she crossed her arms tightly over her turquoise T-shirt. “Don’t let the door hit your backside, Mr. Rojas.”
“Buenos dias, senora.” Loopy smiled, tipping his red cap to the petite woman with hair too big for her thin tired pretty face.
“And, hey, don’t try that Latin salsa on me, man.” Michelle’s mother scrubbed so hard at the bar that she sent a plastic bowl of peanuts spilling down the counter onto a man who didn’t notice; a man with the look of someone who’d lost every race he’d bet on for years. Refilling the bowl, Bits Harlin told Loopy, “No mas, amigo. Adios. Been there.”
It was then that Loopy told Michelle’s mother that he’d known her former lover El Canon and that El Canon’s dream while in Lexington had been to win the Bluegrass Stakes at Keeneland. He had not succeeded, although it was that year,
the year of his romance with Bits, that the Mexican jockey had come in third in the Bluegrass—the first and last time he’d ever been in the money. It was that year that Michelle had been conceived. (It had been, in fact, that very April day, right after the Bluegrass Stakes, as Bits admitted to herself, but not to Loopy.)
Not that night, but a few weeks later, Loopy told Bits and Michelle that El Canon had died years ago from eleven knife wounds inflicted in a jockey room somewhere abroad, stabbed by a fellow rider who was high on cocaine and certain that his wife was cheating on him. Bits and Michelle hadn’t known. The news was no real surprise to Bits.
In the Finish line bar the night he told them about El Canon’s death, Loopy had stood up to Bits Harlin, his arm flung in a paternal way over Michelle’s shoulder. “Someday this girl gonna come in first. She gonna make her daddy proud. She gonna give back his honor.”
“Give back?” said Bits.
But after a month of pressure, Bits succumbed: As long as Michelle kept her grades high enough to get into college, she was allowed to keep working before and after school at Campbell Farms. It wasn’t much of a salary for showing up at five a.m., seven days a week, to help Loopy and the other grooms take off the night bandages, feed and brush the horses, clean out their stalls and tack them up for the morning riders. It wasn’t much money, but although she pretended to her mother that she was doing it for money, she wasn’t. She was doing it for the chance to race.
One day at first light, Mr. Jones saw Michelle galloping Fortune’s Child on the exercise track. His first impulse was to send her packing and to fire Loopy. However, Mr. Jones was not a man who acted on first impulses. Instead he clocked her. The girl and the big gray ran the mile and a quarter in 1:59 and 7/8 ths of a second.
The next day in fresh starched shirt and Harris tweed suit, Mr. Jones paid a formal call on Bits Harlin at the Finish Line to discuss Michelle. Two days later he brought Bits a fair and reasonable contract engaging her daughter as a jockey at Campbell Farms. He always called Bits Mrs. Harlin, although Harlin was her maiden name. “I like his style,” Bits told Michelle. “He’s definitely premier label.”
The next week Jones started to train Michelle to ride the horse he kept instructing her, unsuccessfully, to refer to as Fortune’s Child instead of Raindancer. The trainer was methodical and repetitive, insisting that she study things she thought she already knew, teaching her to change bad habits for which she’d been compensating unaware.
She worked so hard and on so little sleep that she passed out one day in class. Her mother blamed Loopy, telling him he was “the cheap blend,” while Mr. Jones was private barrel single malt.
“Senora,” he said, tapping his cap on the bar. “I’m just trying to feed my babies, like you. That’s all.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, “don’t use my baby to do it.”
When Michelle Harlin ran her first race at Keeneland, Bits told Loopy she wouldn’t come to the track, not to watch her daughter “throw her life away.” But at the last minute she did so, running down the aisle, leaning over the rail, yelling herself hoarse when Michelle finished fifth. The following Saturday, at the ten-dollar window, Bits bet Fortune’s Child to Win. He placed. A week later, on a rainy afternoon, he won for the first time.
Michelle and the gray colt went on to win three of their next four races; the last race again in the rain. Pictures of horse and rider began to show up in the local papers.
GIRL RIDES FORTUNE’S CHILD TO VICTORY
RAIN NO PROBLEM FOR FORTUNE’S CHILD
AND FEMALE JOCKEY
A television reporter sneaked a camera into Campbell Farms; he learned from Michelle that Fortune’s Child’s barn name was Raindancer and that she herself had been named for a Beatles song. He did a little piece about her on the news that night. Racing papers liked the angle. Soon there were headlines like RAINDANCING! above a shot of the
mud-splattered horse and jockey crossing the finish line, alone. And a full-page front cover: OH, MICHELLE MA BELLE! with a picture of the gray thoroughbred nuzzling the girl’s short black curls. The owner’s son, Eric Grandors, gave Michelle a copy of the RAINDANCING! photograph in a nice frame.
Michelle rode the gray to victory up and down the Eastern circuit: a mile, a mile-and-an-eighth, a mile-and-a-quarter. Then in Delaware another horse bumped them so hard in the backstretch that Raindancer fell almost to his knees and Michelle was banged against the inside rail. She broke her collarbone, falling after crossing the wire. Publicly, Jones filed a complaint. Privately, he feared Michelle would be too rattled by the accident ever to race again. It was one of the reasons why so many jockeys got addicted to cocaine; they used the drug to fight off fear after a fall.
But three weeks later, back at Keeneland, in the rain on a sloppy track, Raindancer won a mile-and-a-half stakes race by ten lengths. It was the fastest he’d ever run. In the winner’s circle, Michelle told Loopy that she had been able to feel the gray stallion move his position beneath her, shifting his weight to favor her strapped left side, speeding so far out in front of the field that no other horse could get anywhere near them. “He protecting you. He love you.” Loopy shrugged.
It was there in the winner’s circle that day that Mr. Grandors, Raindancer’s owner, spoke to her for the first time other than to say, “Hello.” He hadn’t heard about her collarbone injury. She’d begged Jones not to tell him, fearing he’d replace her as the jockey. “Nice ride,” he said without looking at her. “But don’t use the Child up; not if you got the lead. One length’s as good as ten.”
“Yes, sir. I think we can win the Bluegrass, Mr. Grandors.”
“Honey, you’re not paid to think,” said Grandors with a smile that moved his mouth quickly, like a trap. Michelle saw that his son, Eric, standing nearby, didn’t like what his father had said.
Then the day before the Bluegrass Stakes race, Mr. Jones called Michelle into his office. As he took a phone call, Michelle, waiting, studied the framed photographs of horses on his walls, in pride of place a picture of Secretariat. Below the pictures were hand-built shelves of paperback books, many of them used textbooks from the college store: Europe in the Middle Ages, First Year Spanish, My Antonia.
