Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  We unwrapped them later that night and cooked them in Joan’s kitchen. Her husband was impressed. “These are as good as the market kind,” he said. I coughed, and a bit of garlicky butter dribbled down my chin. Later, I sat in a lawn chair on the porch and watched the traffic drift by: round headlights and fluttering moths. Deeds joined me after a while. He’d taken a bath, and his skin smelled incongruously of the perfumed soap he’d borrowed from his sister. He lit a cigarette, and cupped his hand and used it as an ashtray. This was a civilized gesture to make, but a sudden breeze came up and ruined everything by scattering ashes all over the furniture. “We should never have left the river,” he said, flipping his cigarette butt into the yard.

  Deeds’s words were prophetic. We descended from the sublimity of the Deschutes into unseasonably warm weather that promised another drought. During it, I consulted a biologist about the future of the steelhead in the Russian. We met in his office at the California Department of Fish and Game, in Yountville. Behind him on a shelf were several jars containing specimens of fish commonly found in California streams—bass, squawfish, even suckers. The specimens were bleached and rubbery-looking, as though they’d been made in Hong Kong for the express purpose of filling large jars in offices. When I stared at the jars, I perceived a sort of whiteness. I don’t know how else to put it: a whiteness.

  The biologist told me first about salmon and their evolutionary efficiency—how in their run upstream to spawn they literally consume themselves, digesting even the protein in their scales in an effort to continue. Salmon fingerlings are nourished by microorganisms that feed off the corpses of spawned-out elders, in a macabre yet elegant loop. Because salmon have attained such perfection, they cannot easily adapt to changes in their environment, whereas steelhead, being less highly evolved, are more malleable. But this doesn’t insure the steelhead’s survival in coastal rivers, the biologist said. A myriad factors combine to threaten the fish with extinction: poor timbering practices, which cause erosion and siltation; pollution, both industrial and agricultural; gravel extraction from creeks and streams; development, and the demand it places on the watershed; dams; greater fishing pressure; and so on, through a catalog of familiar woes. The steelhead trout was not an endangered species, but its existence at present was decidedly precarious.

  I conveyed none of this information to Deeds. He was already morose and taciturn. One evening, he informed me that he was thinking of selling his land to some pinhead (his word) from the city, thereby earning an enormous profit, which would let him relocate in the Pacific Northwest—probably in Washington, not Oregon, because Joan was in Oregon and, though he loved her dearly, he could not abide sharing a state with her.

  “Why not Canada?” I asked. “Why not a cabin on the Babine River? You could eat berry pies and talk to the loons.”

  He grumbled something about pissant fishermen and played his Bessie Smith album, rather loudly.

  A few days later, I saw a realtor’s car parked in front of his house. I phoned him that night and asked if he was serious about selling. “I don’t wish to discuss it,” he said, hanging up. I lost touch with him then.

  In October, the first frost hit the valley. The grapevines performed their annual elegiac wilt, as brilliantly as maples. The month of November was unusually dry, but on December 2nd a huge storm roared in from the coast. The sky was dark and ominous for hours. Then five inches of rain fell, and the creeks started flowing. Early the next morning, Deeds knocked at my door. He was wearing a yellow slicker and an old-fashioned rain hat of the type favored by New England sea captains. He invited me to accompany him to Jenner. We drove there in his truck, with the wind blowing intermittent showers across the glass, filling the cab with the scent of fecund earth. We parked above the river; junk and scuds of foam drifted toward the Pacific. There were sea lions at the river mouth. “I had an offer on my place,” Deeds said, “but, with all this early rain, you know, we could have a terrific season.” I agreed. It was the best thing to do. Dire prophecies were swept to sea; the steelhead were returning.

  Revenge at Golden Gate Fields

  Horseplayers are like old soldiers. They never forget the terrain of losing battles. A map of it gets tattooed into their skin. The tattoo I had of Golden Gate Fields was on the order of Queequeg’s decoration, covering almost every inch of my body. I’d once holed up at the Terrace Motel on central but inelegant San Pablo Avenue, a stone’s throw from the track over in Albany, California, and had spent ten spring weeks trying to sort out my life and simultaneously beat the horses. The life-sorting went pretty well, but the horses refused to cooperate. Their behavior was strange and idiosyncratic; it didn’t conform to any of the systems I devised to handicap them. I proved to be a first-rate loser, capable of betting an entire nine-race card without having any of my choices finish in the money. That wasn’t easy to take. At the end of the season, I vowed never to return to Golden Gate, but, as they say, vows are made for breaking, and when the steelhead fishing on the Russian was once again disastrous, I found myself tooling down the highway toward Albany on the opening day of the midwinter meeting.

  My excuse was that I was honoring a promise to some friends—a writer and his wife who’d asked me on several occasions if I’d go with them to the track. Neither of them had ever been before, so once we were in our grandstand seats, I wasted about an hour instructing them in the basics. I didn’t mind doing it, but it put an added stress on my already fragmentary consciousness. I had no time to consult the Daily Racing Form and made my daily-double bets in a daze. The tickets I later held in my hand were a record of anxiety—of the lack of grace under pressure. I could have plucked them at random from a trash can, and probably should have, because I was soon out thirty bucks.

  The writer was doing fine, of course. Racetracks seem to reward innocence. If babies were permitted to wager, they’d ultimately win so much money that management everywhere would bar them. NO BABIES ALLOWED, says a big sign at Hialeah. At Belmont Park, it reads, BEAT IT, BABIES. Anyway, I bumped into the writer just as he was collecting eighteen dollars on a two-dollar bet. Happiness beamed forth from his bearded countenance, and his fingers fumbled with slick new greenbacks. The sight upset me, and I did something fiendish. “Why don’t you put it all on some horse in the next race?” I asked, insinuating by my tone of voice that any die-hard plunger would feed the excess back into the machine.

  The writer is an intrepid fellow—he’d searched through Mexican jungles for the ghost of B. Traven—and he made an on-the-spot selection and shoved his money toward an abashed ticket seller. Maybe the writer’s gesture was really bravado, and hence lacking in the necessary innocence, because his horse lost. I still felt guilty about prodding him, though. In atonement, I guess, I started betting dumb hunches, which sent forty bucks more spiraling down the chute. After the seventh race, I was fed up, and I talked everybody into leaving early. We went over to Spenger’s Fish Grotto, across the freeway, but even the sweet fresh clams and oysters couldn’t sway me from an unalterable sense of defeat. It seemed that I was destined to repeat my mistakes over and over again, with the grievous alacrity of a novice.

  For nearly a month after this episode, I sat at home and moped, refusing to even look at a racing paper. The more I moped, the angrier I got. Why was I letting the track push me around? My waffling attitude cast me in the role of victim. I always approached the betting windows too timidly, as if I wanted to ask a favor. Once you’ve isolated a flaw in your handicapping technique, it’s easy to view it as a flaw in your character, too, and I did, recalling timid incidents from my past. The faces of beautiful girls I’d failed to ask out in high school loomed above me in accusatory fashion, followed by the faces of obnoxious people I’d meant to tell off, and then by the sad equine faces of good horses I’d neglected in order to play improbable renegade nags. I saw my whole life as a form of missed experience, of chances dispersed in the wind. I am as open to self-pity as the next person, and I fell to it now with a veng
eance, until one night, in the throes of despair, I vowed—another vow!—to go back to Golden Gate and teach it that I wasn’t going to be bullied anymore.

  I picked a Friday for my return trip. The morning was limpid, auspicious, spoked with rays of sun. I bought a Form downtown and read it over breakfast. I could see immediately that the track was planning to make things tough. A horse named Fitch Mountain was entered in the first race. I knew the actual Fitch Mountain quite well, having lived near it for almost five years. It’s a cone-shaped mound that should really be called a hill. There’s nothing spectacular about Fitch Mountain, but I had a sentimental attachment to it, and I was afraid the attachment would carry over to the horse and force me to bet with my emotions again. I wanted to avoid sloppy emotional errors at all costs. My strategy, such as it was, depended on a hard-nosed belief in simple cause and effect. Things got trickier, and even more tempting, when I noticed who owned Fitch Mountain—a member of the Pedroncelli family, in Geyserville, whose jug wines I sometimes drank.

  Fortunately, I was able to exercise some control. I glanced away from all the intriguing names and connections, and examined instead Fitch Mountain’s past performances. He had turned in a fair race and a few nice workouts recently, but he didn’t compare with a more talented speedster, Al Who. On the basis of the figures, Al Who appeared to be the Form’s classic “candidate for graduation”—easily the strongest horse in a field of maidens. (Maidens are horses who’ve yet to win a race.) I was determined to play him, no matter how seductively Fitch Mountain tugged at my heartstrings.

  I walked through a turnstile at Golden Gate at a little past noon. The grandstand was not as packed as it had been on opening day. Dreams of million-dollar exactas had been filed away until next winter. The grounds looked clean and tidy. I wondered if somebody’s aunt had taken up residence in the janitorial suite. The restaurants and snack bars had expanded their line of wares since my internship, and now offered fancy items like hand-carved pastrami sandwiches and cream-topped cups of Irish coffee. It was funny to watch bedraggled touts balance the plastic cups like bone china on the palms of their ink-stained hands. Even the racing strip seemed to be in better shape. At the paddock, I overheard a trainer say that it was the best surface he’d run stock on in a year or so, softer and more yielding than the strips in southern California, which are fast but can be hard on horses’ legs.

  I should probably have avoided the paddock, since it’s where the most dangerous flirtations occur. Time and again, I’ve fallen for gleaming horses only to see them lose their shine as soon as they stepped into the starting gate. I was trying to resist Fitch Mountain, but he looked awfully good, brushed up and tossing his mane like a competitor. Al Who was less impressive. He had the muscular, vaguely criminal look of a retired boxer who’s been hanging around the Mob. I just couldn’t bet him—it would be like endorsing something corrupt. I couldn’t bet Fitch Mountain, either, not after vowing to be serious. Instead, I scanned the Form once more—rather desperately now, with post time minutes away—and succumbed to paranoia. Every number was part of a code; every word had at least three meanings. The charts began to slip and slide before my eyes, and from their elliptical jumble I developed a bizarre theory that a thirty-to-one shot was going to steal the purse.

  I will not dignify this nag by mentioning his name. He had been shipped up from Santa Anita., and that gave him (I thought) a touch of class. Roberto Gonzalez, a top jockey, had been engaged to ride him, and I interpreted this as another indication that a real bid was in the offing. Would Gonzalez’s agent accept a worthless mount? I doubted it. I became convinced that a conspiracy to make a killing was under way, and I wanted a piece of the action.

  When I placed my bet, I did so with an intimation of superior intelligence, but the race was horrible to watch. My conspiracy theory went up in smoke quite early, along with any notions of superior intelligence, when the nag in question failed to leave the gate until after all the other horses had left. This was certainly a polite gesture on the nag’s part, but it didn’t improve his chances, especially since he’d also broken in the air. His front legs flailed about. He seemed to be climbing an invisible ladder, and was firmly out of contention before the first quarter of the race was over. From his position at the rear of the field, he couldn’t even see the leader—predictably, Al Who. Old Mr. Who was sprinting clear, several lengths beyond everybody else. As for Fitch Mountain, he was smack in the middle of the fray, keeping just off the pace but making no attempt to challenge. Fitch Mountain was miles ahead of the Santa Anita nag, suggesting that an emotional wager was better than a paranoid one. It was simple to figure what Al Who represented in such a scheme: Logic. The Big L was always a front-runner. It drove a BMW because of the high resale value, got to the supermarket early to take advantage of unadvertised specials, and kept its shoes polished in anticipation of a visit from the boss. But, for all its preparedness, Logic did not necessarily obtain in every situation—it had a nasty habit of collapsing. Favorites (the logical choices) seldom win more than a third of the races at any major track, so it came as no surprise when Al Who faltered in the stretch, and was passed by Shado Matt and Bobo’s Prince. Al Who was just conforming to type, disappointing brokers, bankers, and positivists, even as the Santa Anita nag was destroying the intricately constructed fantasies of suckers like me.

  After the race, I exiled myself to a cold, dark, inhospitable corner of the grandstand. The afternoon was young, but I was old. Why did I continue to overcomplicate the transparently simple? I’d done it all my life, courting revelation in the most trivial of exchanges. That the world was neither more nor less than it appeared to be was an idea I’d yet to grasp. No doubt a few centuries on an analyst’s couch could cure me of my stranglehold on coincidence and synchronism, but I was a little pressed for time. Already the entrants in the second race were being led by their grooms from the barns to the paddock, disclosing with each step subtle aspects of their potential.

  I liked Kona Gold, who’d been running poorly of late, because I’d noticed something interesting in his past performances. Last year, his trainer, Eldon Hall, had sent him off in a couple of long route races over a mile and three-sixteenths for which the horse had seemed ill-suited. Kona Gold had done a rotten job in those races, but they’d helped to build up his wind. After Hall rested him, Kona Gold had come back to win handily at a shorter distance—a mile and one-sixteenth. Hall seemed to be repeating the tactic this year: Kona Gold’s recent trouncings had occurred in long routes; he’d rested for about a month; and he was entered in a race at the distance he preferred. I thought the horse couldn’t lose. Other bettors didn’t agree. They’d made Sterling Drive the favorite, and I understood why. Sterling Drive had suffered bad racing luck his last time out. He’d gotten caught in a tangle, blocked from his purpose. Moreover, he was from a hot stable, and he was taking a nose dive in class for the present race. I had to admit that the horse looked good on paper. It would have required only a minor imaginative leap for me to join Sterling Drive’s supporters, but, for once, I held temptation at bay and stuck with my own reasonably substantiated version of the actual. I put thirty bucks on Kona Gold to win, somehow managing to bite my tongue in the process.

  Given the historical bias of my wager, I should have been able to watch the race dispassionately, with a kind of Viconian calm, but I was up and dancing on my toes even before the track announcer shouted “They’re off!” Sterling Drive broke from the rail, with infinite care, and headed directly for the parking lot, going so wide on the first turn that several fans groaned. “I need a Bromo,” said a chunky, dispirited man as he deposited a handful of tickets on the floor. I was treating my own ticket like a splinter of the True Cross, because Kona Gold was sitting right where I want my horse to sit in a route race—third, on the outside, and moving steadily forward. There was something inexorable in his progress. He was three lengths ahead at the top of the stretch, but he kept accelerating anyway, hammering a wedge of merciless
space between himself and the other horses, and finished seven lengths in front. Sterling Drive loped in last, as gangly-legged as a cartoon horse, while I attempted to calculate how much I’d earned.

  Kona Gold’s victory gave me confidence and also a rekindled tolerance for statistics. I slashed through the third-race entrants in the Form, discarding horses who would previously have attracted me with their names. I had no use anymore for clever rhymes (Jolly by Golly) or bad puns (The Long Ranger). The flagrant romance of Color Me Dashing left me cold. Even the exotic Palapa—mangoes, grass skirts, rum in coconut shells—failed to entice me. Only two horses really had a chance. The first, Palace Arena, had been close in his last three starts, but the second, Mr. B.F., who’d run in tougher company, far outclassed him. Mr. B.F.’s drawback was that he’d been out of action for eleven months, and I decided to look him over before parting with any of my cash.

  Judging a horse by its appearance is one of the most underrated of handicapping skills. The Chinese who frequent Golden Gate seem particularly adept at it. They wait patiently by the paddock fence, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and registering anatomical fine points. They discuss the passing flesh like traders. Arguments about the relative merits of stock are not infrequent. Once, I watched an Oriental man in a shiny black suit as he watched the horses. He held a pencil in his right hand and a program in his left. At three-minute intervals, he lifted the pencil and scratched a name off his list. The mark he made was definitive, indelible. Eventually, the program resembled a hexagram from the I Ching. I’m sure the winner’s name had emerged from its unwavering boldness. My own approach is much less precise. What I hope to find is a horse who straddles the line between docility and wildness. Animals ready to compete give off sparks—you can feel a fire building in them. They walk the paddock in tight circles, their energy barely contained. When they stride onto the racing strip, they do so in a confrontational manner, nudging at the outriders’ ponies with their noses, or sticking their heads forward in a gesture that smacks of teasing. More than anything, they convey a joy at being alive—it shines through. But joy isn’t enough if the horse (like Fitch Mountain) belongs with cheaper company. Mr. B.F. did not belong with cheaper company, and he shone like a beacon. I bet him fifty to win, at odds of six to one. He broke first and never bothered to look back.