by John Dunning
“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” he said bitterly.
I drifted across the stable area and I talked to people. I asked my questions and got nowhere new. Old Geiger and his young, rich bride were slipping from the backstretch consciousness. I felt unusually dejected as the day waned.
Erin finally answered the phone late that afternoon. I told her the developments on my end and I asked how Gail was doing.
“She feels better now. This is something she’s been carrying around a long time.”
This was all very good, we agreed. I told her I might be going south.
“As in San Diego, Mexico, or the South Pole?”
“I think I’m going to Santa Anita with Sandy and Barbara Patterson.”
“When might this happen?” she asked.
“Maybe early next week.”
“Okay. What for?”
“Things are winding down here and my main people are heading that way. This is just one of those times when I don’t know what’s right. I can’t split myself and be in both places at once, and I’m starting to feel like this place is tapped out.”
“So what am I supposed to do if you leave me here? Play solitaire?”
“I wouldn’t leave you, tootsie.”
“Tootsie?”
“You could go home if you want.”
“That’s right, cast me aside now that I have done my heavy work in the trenches.” I heard her sigh. “What are you plotting, Janeway?”
“Right now, just following my nose. Don’t you need to be back in Denver?”
“They’re not gonna fire me, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“And if they did, then what?”
“Then screw ’em.”
“What about tonight?” she asked.
“I want to see Rick again if that’s okay with you.”
“I never tell you what to do, Cliff, I wouldn’t even try.”
“I know. I do hate to leave you, but there’s a desperation in his face that’s hard to forget.”
“Stay with him, then. Hold his hand. You’ll have plenty of time later to hold mine.”
A moment passed. Neither of us wanted to let go.
“What would you do if you were me?”
“Shake things up,” she said. “Be decisive. Be the old Janeway. Let whoever he is think we know much more than we do and then be a moving target.”
I didn’t like the “we” business and of course she knew that. “I don’t mean to be one more problem for you, Cliff,” she said, “but I’m not going back to Denver until you can come too.”
I went over to Cappy’s shedrow to pick up Rick. We walked up between the barns toward the kitchen. “I guess I’m leaving next week for Santa Anita.”
“I’ve never been to Santa Anita. All the years I’ve been out here and I’ve done nothing but the northern tracks and the fairs.”
“You hang tough with Cappy, Rick, he’s a good man.”
“Yeah, I know. He’s probably the only person anywhere who cares if I live or die.” He looked up. “Him and maybe you.”
“Hey, that’s a start.”
We staked out a table in the kitchen and began to eat. He asked if I’d be coming back and I said I’d try.
“You won’t, though. I got a feeling this is it.”
“This is what, Rick?”
“Just one more case of somebody drifting away.”
“It won’t be. I promise I’ll be back.”
Back in the tack room we sat up talking until his words slurred and became repetitive. I stayed with him until he was sound asleep. I turned off his lights and left him there, but the images of his lost life and the feeling of his quiet desperation followed me back to my own shedrow.
In the morning I hit the tow ring and walked horses for five hours with only one short break for coffee. I was feeling good: No aches, no pains, as normal as a madman ever gets. I decided that this afternoon I would go for a run if I could find a stretch of trail or a gym. I needed about five miles to work the kinks out and I still had a few things to do here. I wanted to make at least one more walk through the stable area in case I had missed somebody, and I had to talk to Sandy and see where we stood. He hadn’t spoken to me since Barbara pushed him into a corner but I knew he didn’t like it much.
They watched from the rail as North Hills breezed half a mile, and afterward Barbara sat in the shedrow while I cooled her horse out. No one approached her: even Bob, who apparently would be her lady’s ginney, was cutting her some wide slack. She was a formidable figure with her jacket drawn up around her cheeks and her eagle eyes watching. This morning I kept my distance as well: I didn’t try to draw her into any innocuous chatter like last time, and for a while she gave no sign that she even remembered who I was. Sandy stayed occupied at the track while Obie brought his horses up one after another. They huddled at the gap and I could imagine the last-minute advice going back and forth between them. Sandy might well be uneasy about leaving his horses with anyone, but he had made the decision and that was that.
I didn’t want to let him get away again, so at one point I said, “Could I talk to you before you leave?” But Barbara was up and coming toward us, and the moment was lost. “I’ll catch you later,” he said, and almost in the same breath, Barbara said, “What’s the story, Cliff?”
“Of course he’s coming with us,” Sandy said lightly. “Right, Cliff?”
She looked at me and I said, “Of course I am.”
“Of course you are,” she said, and we all laughed.
Barbara left around eleven and Sandy motioned me to follow him. We walked along the road toward the edge of the stable area and he sat down under a tree. I sat on the grass facing him and said, “First of all, I want to apologize for hemming you in like that. I know you’re not thrilled about this.”
“It’s not your fault. But yeah, I almost quit her there on the spot, before I even got started.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Barbara’s a good woman, but apparently we still have certain things to get straight between us. And I need to do it now, before I move body and soul four hundred miles south.”
“You need her to know that you intend to hire the hands yourself.”
“Among other things.”
“I could go with another stable if I’m causing you any grief.”
“Have you had an offer?”
“Bax Geiger offered me a job if I need one.”
“That’ll be an education on many fronts.” He said this sarcastically, pointedly so. “Is he going south too?”
“Looks like it.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“Nothing yet. He knows I’m working for you. But even without Bax, I think I can get a job now. I don’t need much, nothing really. The main thing is to get on someone’s list and get my license stamped so I’ll have access to the racetrack.”
“So just that quick you’ve become a racetracker,” he said with a trace of amusement. “You don’t need any of us anymore.”
“It doesn’t take long, does it? But it’s been good having a situation like this one, where I’m free to come and go. And I want to thank you for that, and I’m sorry if I’ve caused you problems.”
“Then let’s leave it this way,” he said. “You stay with me, at least till you get settled at Santa Anita. You know Barbara likes you, and the thing about walking hots is the freedom it gives you.”
We sat in the cool breeze a while longer, making civilized and irrelevant talk about the upcoming race meet, rich people with fine horses, all the things he had shown no inclination to discuss earlier with any of us. “Barbara’s an unusual owner,” he said. “She’s been doing this for so many years she actually does know horses better than a lot of trainers.”
“Does that make it easier or harder to work for her?”
“Good question. We’ll have to see.”
“Still, I know it’s got to be clear who the trainer is, who makes the decisions.”
&
nbsp; “I never would have taken it if she hadn’t agreed to that. Even then it wasn’t easy. Always been my own boss, always ran my own stable. But she’s got some killer horses; a man would be out of his mind to let them get past him.”
“That filly sure is a nice one.”
“She’s just one of ’em. Barbara’s got a colt that’s also undefeated, just about to turn three, might go all the way this spring.”
All the way to Louisville, he said.
We’re not running for peanuts anymore, Toto.
Peanuts, I thought.
“Life is strange. Barbara could have her pick of trainers but somehow she wants me.”
He didn’t say anything else for a few moments. Then: “I hope you will stick around, Cliff. I need people I can trust to tell me things.”
Now he trusts me. Now he wants me here. How quickly the worm turns.
“I know you’re a greenhorn,” he said, “but I’ve been thinking about it, and I think your judgment is sound. That’ll carry you a long way. The other stuff you can pick up, but judgment’s not something you can learn.”
“Just don’t forget the real reason I’m here.”
“I’m not forgetting anything. But it occurred to me yesterday how much I’m gonna miss Obie when we head south. He’s been my other eyes and ears for a long time.”
“I can’t be Obie, Sandy. Even if I could…”
“I know that,” he said with a touch of his old testiness. Then, softly: “I know that. I don’t expect you to be Obie. But if it wouldn’t crimp your style too much, maybe you could keep your eyes open and let me know if you see anything unusual.”
I didn’t ask what he expected me to see. He cleared his throat and said, “Do you even know what you’re hunting for? Do you have any idea?”
“I know exactly what I’m hunting for,” I said. “I just don’t know who yet.”
“What, then?”
“I’m hunting a vicious killer, Sandy.”
A sober moment passed. “A fellow who bashed Cameron Geiger’s brains in and tried to do the same to me,” I said. “And there may be other things for him to answer to.”
“Any idea how long it might take you to find him?”
“If I knew that I’d already have him, wouldn’t I?”
He nodded as if that slightly abrasive comment made perfect sense and we sat there a few minutes saying nothing. At some point I said, “The stakes are too high not to find him.”
“When you do find him, what’ll you do about it?”
“Whatever I have to do.”
“Well,” he said, breaking another silence, “let’s walk back. I’m meeting Barbara for lunch. We’ll get some things ironed out.”
We got up and headed back into the stable area together. I could hear the announcer calling the horses for the first race. Off to my right the procession began, the horses being led around the track toward the saddling paddock by the grandstand. It brought the warm afternoon to life. But Sandy poked along, as if he still had things to say before we got swallowed up in the crowd, and didn’t know how. Once or twice I had to stop and wait for him. Whatever it was, he never got to it. We turned into his row and I saw people I knew, either by names or faces, and I thought no, it doesn’t take long to be absorbed into this life when you live and breathe it.
Now, for example, there was suddenly a man I knew in the next barn. I had to blink to be sure, but in that brief moment he looked at me furiously out of the dark, without wavering. It was Junior. He backed around the shedrow and hustled down the other side.
I sat in the chair outside my tack room and watched the horses coming and going. I watched the people leading them and the ginneys in the barn across the way. I watched two birds fluttering and the muck truck scooping out the manure bin. And so I saw the day grow older.
I heard the call of the first race and I knew the horses were charging up the backstretch. Other than that, the stable area looked deserted.
Junior didn’t return.
Sandy was gone two hours.
Barbara was with him when he returned. She smiled affably and said, “Hiya, Cliff,” but Sandy only nodded as they went by. We had nothing going that afternoon, so Sandy had chosen today to make his announcement. “An early dinner, boys, on me, in a real restaurant,” he said, I thought a bit smugly. Whatever had happened at lunch, he looked pleased about it. And so, just after feeding and hot showers, we all piled into three cars and drove to a restaurant called Tigris, specializing in foods of the Middle East. Barbara had raved about it and hoped we’d like it, though I suspected none of the racetrackers had ever had anything like what they were about to eat. Barbara had them seat us in a small private room, where we were set up at an oblong table. The food began coming: excellent, I thought, wishing Erin could be here. The boys ate cautiously at first, then with greater appetite, and Barbara watched us eat with growing satisfaction. But there was an air of unease at the table, a feeling of something too long in the wind finally coming to pass.
Dessert. Coffee. Uneasy laughter.
I paid the first compliment to them both, toasting them with a glass of white wine. “This is really superb, Barbara. Just great, Sandy.”
The others quickly said you bet, right you are, hear-hear, wowie.
At last Sandy got to the point. He stood at the head of the table and said, “This won’t come as a surprise to any of you, but I’m going to train some horses for Barbara down south this winter. Obie will be in charge of my own stable, and I know you-all will work as diligently for him as you have for me.”
Barbara smiled broadly and said nothing.
“Bob and Cliff will go with us.” Sandy looked at me rather than Bob and said, “I’d like you to go down ahead of us and check us in; bed down a dozen stalls and get us ready. We’ll be along shortly.” I asked when he’d want us to leave and he said, “Tomorrow morning.”
This was annoying but I’d have to work with it. A strange evening, I thought as we left the restaurant, a strange situation, but that, I was learning, was life on the racetrack. If the man said to be ready at dawn, you got ready. It was assumed you were free when you signed on, and many lived out their lives that way. Some of them saw the outside world only when they had to move between race meets.
One last bit of business at Golden Gate: That night I hunted Rick down and gave him his money back. He was upset at the news. “I thought we’d be together for a while,” he said. He looked hurt, betrayed if I had to put a name to it. “You’re never coming back,” he said, and there was something heartbreaking in his face and in his voice. “I promise, Rick. You just keep your chin up and stick with Cappy, I’ll get back here as soon as I can and we’ll decide what to do next.” I clutched his hand and told it all to him again, but suddenly I knew that I was just another in a long line of his personal disasters, and finally there was nothing to do but to walk away. I took that picture of him with me as I looked back down the dark shedrow and waved.
I called Erin from the phone booth, a short call. I told her to turn in her rental car and be ready to leave at daybreak. But I had a hard time sleeping that night: The vision of Rick stayed with me.
22
Bob and I were out at five o’clock, just before dawn. He put our two folding Army cots in my trunk, along with our bags and some blankets, and I drove us down the freeway into town. I told him we had a passenger and Erin was waiting for us in the hotel lobby. She stashed her bag in the trunk, crawled into the backseat, and we were off.
“Erin, Bob: Bob, Erin,” I said, and they shook hands across the seat.
“So where did Janeway find you?” Bob said.
“Won me in a poker game in Reno. I do laundry and other occasional jobs.”
They got on famously from the first few minutes.
We were taking the fast inland route, east to Interstate 5, south across the great plain, over the Grapevine to Los Angeles, then east again through Glendale and Pasadena to Arcadia. “Old-time ginneys say this trip used t
o take all day,” Bob told us. Now we would do it in less than five hours, plenty of time for gregarious strangers to become chummy. An hour out of Golden Gate, Erin and Bob were old friends. They joshed each other and there was an air of easy camaraderie that we all found contagious. But there was also a cautious threshold still uncrossed. We were somewhere in the middle of the state when I stepped gingerly over it.
“So how long’ve you been with Sandy, Bob?”
“Four years next month.”
“He seems to be a good guy to work for.”
“Yeah, you can learn a lot from him…if that’s what you mean.”
“So how’d you guys meet?”
“I was passing through, had no idea of doing anything with horses, and a guy I met knew a guy, you know how that goes. Next day there I was, muckin’ out stalls at Golden Gate.”
“And found it such fascinating work you’ve never looked back.”
“Something like that. Of course there’s more to it than just mucking and shoveling, as you know. I’m looking to buy my own horses, somewhere down the road.”
“That’s what I heard. Got one picked out yet?”
“Only about a dozen times is all. The trick is to get the right horse for the right money.”
“And then have a lot of luck.”
“Yeah, there’s that. But I’m still young and patient. That’s the other thing you’ve got to have. Patience.” He smiled and took his own stab in the dark. “Why do you ask, kemo sabe?”
“I was just wondering if there’d be any honest work here for Erin.”
“Now there’s an idea.” Erin leaned over Bob’s shoulder. “Cliff wants to get me off the streets and out of hotel rooms, and that would probably do it.”
Tentatively, he asked, “What do you do besides follow Cliff around the country?”
“That’s about it. He runs a white slavery racket.”
Bob laughed politely and said, “There’s almost always room for somebody when you move into a new race meet. We’ll have to ask Sandy.”
“I would be a very raw somebody,” Erin said. “I don’t even know which end of a horse the hay goes in and which end you muck up after.”
