Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  Out of the gate like a bullet of red,

  Dropping behind as the rest speed ahead,

  Loping along as the clubhouse fans cheer,

  Leisurely stalking the field in first gear.

  Down the backstretch forty lengths far behind,

  Unconcerned—strictly the following kind;

  Muscles in motion, nostrils aflare,

  Holding the pace with a casual air.

  The poem continued for a few more stanzas, then galloped toward a finish as heart-tugging as any of Silky’s.

  And now he’s at rest, where all champions go;

  We’ll miss the parade of his “Derby Day” show.

  As he pranced and kicked up his heels for the crowd,

  He was loved—he was big, he was gentle and proud.

  About eleven-thirty fans began arriving in steady streams, and as I watched them come in I had the sense of a jointly imagined form evolving, something entirely apart from horses and jockeys. Each person seemed to carry a narrative element in his head, and these elements were being woven gradually into the prevailing fiction. It was modeled on notions of symmetry and coherence. The electronic devices around the track reinforced the fiction in the warm-up patterns they flashed: the infield toteboard showed four rows of zeros balanced one on top of another, the smaller totes inside offered odds of five to five at every slot, and the closed-circuit TVs featured tiny dots boxed at perfect intervals within a neatly squared grid. The gift shop lady displayed her horsehead bookends in a horseshoe-shaped arc, and the popcorn lady, her striped smock in harmony with the trim of her booth, checked to see that the empty cardboard boxes she would later fill were distributed in evenly matched stacks. The fiction was carefully, if unconsciously, projected and didn’t begin to dissipate until the National Anthem had been played and the horses came sauntering up from the barns in single file. Then order gave way to chaos.

  VIII

  The moment when horses enter the paddock before a race can be a bad one. Statistics that had earlier seemed so definitive are translated peremptorily into flesh, and flesh is heir to miseries, bandaged legs, a limp, a nervous froth bubbling on a filly’s inner thighs. Many times I’ve heard people groan when they saw what their figures had led them to, some scarred creature with downcast eyes. I was fortunate on the opening day of Tanforan. The horse I’d chosen at the Terrace, Southern Gospel, looked good. He was a rangy chestnut gelding with a polish to his coat. He was breaking from the preferential four hole, too, which should have set my mind at ease, but I was feeling anxious. I’d been away from the track for some time and my responses to its stimuli were heightened, exaggerated. Every flickering movement made an impression on me, and I tried to take them all into account. Suddenly other horses began looking good. Folklore’s Lite, who’d earned a high Beyer speed rating, was up on his toes. When I opened the Form to compare him with Southern Gospel, I saw instead something I’d missed before, excellent workouts for Top Pass. Was Top Pass ready to make his bid? Davidowitz might think so. The more I read, the more confused I became. The Form kept bursting open, punctured by discoveries, ruining my cartographic efforts.

  Next I felt the concentrative energy of the bettors around me. They were staring at the paddock just as piercingly as I was, working hard to affect the outcome of the race. It was as though many versions of reality were competing for a chance to obtain. The man next to me was steaming. He wore the blissful expression of a monk in his tenth hour of zazen; smoke was about to issue from his ears. I stood there paralyzed, unable to make a choice. I was afraid that if I lost my first bet, a downward trend would be irreversibly established. With three minutes to go I ran to the windows and bet a horse I hadn’t even considered before, Spicy Gift, because I’d noticed that he’d had some bad luck last time out, which indicated, absolutely, that he was bound, perhaps even compelled, to win. When I walked away I realized I’d just put ten bucks on a twenty-to-one shot. Handicapping overkill, the brain weaving useless webs. Spicy Gift finished somewhere in the middle of the field, beaten by Bargain Hostess, a filly and first-time starter who broke from the outermost post. These factors had eliminated her from contention in my mind; now I saw them for what they were, markers of talent.

  But it was too late, I was locked into a loser’s mind-set and couldn’t shake free of it. All day long I compounded my mistakes, playing the most improbable nags on the card, hoping to get even, to start over, the slate wiped clean, Hong Kong Flew, Skinny Dink, throwing what little expertise I had out the window, Hey Mister M.A., a toad at fifty-seven to one, giving it away, then Queequeg in the eighth race because of Melville and what they’d found taped under his desk after he’d died, a scrap of paper on which he’d written, Be true to the dreams of your youth; but Queequeg drowned too, leaving me adrift, not even a coffin for support, and in the ninth, a broken man, I latched on to the favorite, Crazy Wallet, and watched in disgust as he hobbled home fifth. Down I went, spiraling, down and down, done in but good, sixty dollars fed irretrievably into the belly of the beast and still the breeze did blow.

  IX

  The whiskey at the Home Stretch bar was soothing, lucid, un-statistical, and I sipped it and stared at the photos on the back bar wall, pictures of horses and people and one large oil painting of Emmett Kelly, the clown, his bum hat wreathed in losing tickets. About seven o’clock a skinny man in a new denim leisure suit came in, accompanied by a short silent Mexican who looked as though he’d just eaten a shoe.

  “Glad you’re alive,” the bartender said to the Mexican, grinning sarcastically. “You want more Cutty and Seven or’d you get enough last night?”

  “Give him a beer,” the other man said. “He doesn’t need any Cutty. He was sick all over the barn this morning. Somebody else had to rub his horses. Isn’t that right?”

  The Mexican smiled happily and drank his beer.

  A slim blond girl, barely out of her teens, was dancing with a man even smaller than the Mexican. He was jockey-size and had the powerful shoulders and arms that jockeys often develop. The blonde drank a beer as she danced, tipping back the bottle and closing her eyes. When the music ended she came over to the man in the leisure suit, pushed out her chest, and asked to borrow twenty dollars.

  “I have three tickets I can cash in tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve been holding on to them. As soon as I cash in, I’ll pay you back.”

  “Honey,” the man said, not unkindly, “that story has a beard.”

  She shrugged, looking unruffled, as though she made this pitch on a daily basis and expected a certain percentage of turndowns, and went back to the jockey-size man and asked him for five dollars. When he delivered, she used part of the money to buy a six-pack, then fed the jukebox and started dancing with yet another man, also very small, and when the music stopped this time she left with him, wiggling her compact hips.

  “You ever see anybody who needs money forget to cash in?” the man asked. “No way. Does not happen. That girl loves jockeys. I think she might be a groupie.”

  The Home Stretch was often like this, friendly, wistful, and a little ragged at the edges. Grooms, trainers, winners, losers, mailmen, any and all of them were likely to wander in and sit down and order a drink and then tell you their life story, or at least the most immediate part of it, how they’d dropped a sawbuck on a Sure Thing only to see the horse go wide on the turn and wind up in the parking lot. The day bartender, Benny, a cigar-chomping five-by-fiver out of a Joe Palooka comic strip, ran the place with an iron hand and brooked no displays of unnecessary roughness. He yelled as loudly at friends as at enemies. “Whaddaya want? A Bud? Speak up. Can’t hear you!” Once I heard somebody say to him, “Benny, like you to meet a friend of mine, he’s a nice guy.” Benny frowned. “We’re all nice guys in here,” he said. On the wall there was a photo of him and Rocky Marciano. Benny had his head on the Rock’s shoulder and he was smiling like a baby. After dark, when the regulars disappeared, the Home Stretch underwent a subtle transformation. Drunken grooms beg
an talking to themselves, and pale outsiders with unauthorized business to effect somewhere in the night sat alone and sipped iced gin, their eyes on the clock.

  The man in the denim leisure suit, whose name was Sam Edwards, told me about his life. He worked for a trainer who worked in turn for a wealthy Indian, an India Indian, handling a string of forty horses. Sam supervised the trainer’s grooms, most of them Mexicans, and was responsible for shipping the stock from track to track, Santa Anita to Golden Gate, then back again. He liked his job, but not the trainer—his methods were too “European”—and he looked forward to summertime, when the horses would again move east. He loved Saratoga for the partying and Belmont for the education he’d gotten there. Sometimes the vets had allowed him to descend along with them into a subterranean room where they performed autopsies on horses who’d died on the grounds. They did this for insurance purposes, to pinpoint the cause of death. There was a big difference, at least in the eyes of adjusters, between a mare who’d died of a heart attack and a mare who’d died of a heart attack while stoked on cocaine. One day a doctor showed Sam a torn stifle muscle on a dead horse’s inner thigh and let him feel the separated flesh, and that same afternoon Sam diagnosed a similar complaint in a lame animal at his barn. The trainer he worked for then didn’t believe him, of course, but that was how things went around the track. Sam left this trainer not much later, when the man refused to lend him money during a poker game.

  “And I’d been with him for a couple of years,” Sam said wearily. “I’ll tell you, someday I’m going to retire. I got these two broodmares back on my grandmother’s farm, they’re both in foal right now. Maybe I’ll get lucky this time. You never know for sure. Look at Seattle Slew. That horse wasn’t bred to be a champion. I might win the Derby yet.”

  He ordered another round and drew faces in the frost of his beer glass. He’d told me earlier that he liked art. Whenever he visited a track he hadn’t been to before, he saved a pari-mutuel ticket—every track issued different ones, with different colors and symbols—and when he retired he planned to paste them all together in a collage and hang it over his fireplace in the house he planned to buy.

  “I love horses, you know. I think they must have eight senses instead of five. Like ESP. I know they have ESP. I had this one filly, she always washed out, got real nervous and sweaty before a thunderstorm. You could almost predict the weather by how washy she was.”

  “You think we have extra senses, too?”

  “Could be,” said Sam. “Could possibly be. Sometimes when I walk into a room I know I’ve been there before. I believe in reincarnation. I know I’ve had more than one life. When they made the planet, you know, there was only so much water created. It rains, the rain evaporates and goes back up in the clouds for next time. Same thing with people. Only so much people stuff to go around.”

  I asked him how he’d come to work with horses, and he said it went way back, to a particular grade school afternoon when the class bully had popped him one and raised a welt on his lip. Walking home he’d passed the neighborhood junkman (this was maybe forty years ago), and the junkman said, “Why you crying, son?” and led him into an alley where an old rundown junk-cart horse was tethered to a signpost. The horse was lathered and looked immense. “How’d you like to take a ride?” the junkman asked, and without waiting for an answer lifted Sam onto the horse’s back and sent him sailing out into the full bright panorama of the street. Sam felt his troubles leaving, and the power of the horse rising up. This was the beginning, said Sam, “and I never did recover.”

  X

  It was past midnight when I left the bar but I still wasn’t ready to sleep. Back at the Terrace the TV sets would be tuned to Johnny Carson, and I wanted to avoid those emanations at all cost. Watching Carson robbed you of your essence, I thought. He occupied strange latitudes, flat plastic zones of the interior, and if you watched him long enough you could feel yourself oozing into the tubes and being sucked onto the set, where you became a part of Burbank, perhaps forever. It was even possible you might start wearing vinyl trousers and telling jokes about your mother-in-law. So instead of returning I drove across the railroad tracks to see what Golden Gate Fields looked like by night. Down by the rocks at the edge of the Bay somebody was fishing. He wore a black knit cap pulled low on his forehead, and he was whistling softly. A package of salted anchovies rested at his feet and moonlight caught in the crystals and blinked like charges of phosphorus at the tideline. I asked him what he was after.

  “Striped bass,” he said.

  “Doing any good?”

  “Nothing, man. I need some grass shrimp or something, some pileworms.”

  He worked as a groom and it wasn’t bad work, he said, but the climate didn’t agree with him and the fishing was strictly for amateurs. In the town where he’d grown up, near Mazatlán, even kids caught big snook, and he himself had nailed a black marlin in the Sea of Cortez when he was just fourteen. I told him about fishing for steelhead on the river at home and how they had the same lustrous quality as stripers, an opalescence shimmering on their scales. They were an anadromous species and lived most of their lives in salt water but returned unerringly to the fresh waters of their birth at spawning time. We knew where they chose to spawn, in creeks and estuaries, but I wondered if there was an equally distinct point deep in ocean waters that marked the other half of the egg.

  I told the groom about the dam and how it would eventually kill off the steelhead. He wanted to know why the dam was being built, and I said I didn’t know, but of course I did. The dam would impound water to form an artificial lake, and the land around the lake would appreciate in value, and the realtors and developers would build the usual tacky resort facilities, and the people who made their fortunes by destroying things would be a little richer but not any safer from death. The dam was also a product of the zones Johnny Carson occupied, and of the current bias against historical modes of perception and the relevance of the past. But these matters were too disheartening to talk about after midnight on a losing day, so I gave the groom the last beer from my six-pack, wished him good luck, and drove away.

  XI

  In the Costonoan creation myth, all the world was water, and from this water two peaks rose, Mount Diablo and Reed’s Peak. There were no humans, only Coyote, and Coyote was alone. Then one day from his place on the peak, Coyote saw a feather floating on the water. He watched the feather, and as he watched, it turned suddenly into a eagle, and Eagle flew up and joined Coyote on the peak. Coyote liked his new companion so much that they played together for a long time before even giving a thought to making any humans. Then they decided to make the Costonoans.

  Chapter Three

  In the morning I felt better. Morning is the best, the most optimistic, time at any racetrack; everything seems possible again. Some mornings when I left the Terrace early, just after six, to watch the horses working out, the dawn light filtering through the fog on the Bay echoed the gold I’d seen in painted halos all over Florence. I thought I could feel its healing properties. Out on the freeway the first commuters were tangling, but from where I stood along the rail I was aware only of the animals. Around me there rose the smells of manure, tobacco, coffee, and new-mown grass, and I found myself agreeing implicitly with Slaughterhouse Red, the gateman who supervised the comings and goings of riders, when he raised his abused face to the sun and said, “Anybody don’t like this life is daffy!” Red was a former cowboy who’d grown up in the old Butchertown section of San Francisco and earned his keep as a boy by herding cattle from stockyard trains to the slaughterhouses lining the streets. He worked at the track until noon and then, if the weather was good, left for Martinez, where his fishing boat was docked. If the weather was only fair, or if an old buddy was in town, or even if he just had the itch, he stayed around for the afternoon’s races. If the itch was bad, he’d been known to drive directly from Golden Gate to Bay Meadows so he could catch the quarterhorse races held there at night.

&nbs
p; Horses came up from the barns in constant process, differing appreciably in their approach. Some looked half-awake, some looked sore, and some looked lazy. Some kicked up their heels because they were feeling good, while others, the rogues in need of stricter handling, bucked and snorted and let it be understood they were performing under duress. The true racehorses were always ready. They took to the track prancing, and when they returned from a gallop they were slick with sweat and their veins protruded in marmoreal splendor. A few of them wanted to keep right on running, and their riders were forced to hold them tight, pulling in on the reins, which put a crook into the horses’ necks and gave them the look of knights on a chessboard. They were beautiful. Ponies and humans were interspersed among them, but they provided the movement, the exhilaration. Back at the barns they were bathed and brushed, then hooked to hotwalkers and set to circling. Everywhere I looked I saw horses, chestnuts, bays, browns, and blacks, and sometimes Gray Dandy or White Sprite, singularly elegant animals, and I felt locked within the clashing perspective of a battle scene painted by Paolo Uccello.

  Right from the start horses move fast. A mare gives birth in fifteen to thirty minutes and after parturition her foal, born with eyes open, begins to pull away, tugging its legs out of the vagina and breaking the umbilical cord. In less than an hour, the foal is standing and looking around and in two hours can suckle, walk, vocalize, and show affection for its mother. Before the first day is out, the foal can trot, gallop, protect itself from insects by nipping, kicking, and shaking its tail, play, and even forage. Mares secrete mother’s milk, colostrum, and it gives the foal antibodies and serves as a purgative. Even the digestive system of horses is geared to acceleration. They process food almost twice as fast as cows and can live on poor quality graze because their stomachs rapidly transform any available protein into amino acids. But they have to eat twice as much, twice as fast, and their teeth are sometimes worn down to the jawbone by the high silica content of grass. In the wild, toothless horses starve to death. Racehorses are fed hay and oats with an occasional taste of mash, a healthy balanced diet, but their relatives in other parts of the world exist on oddments like grapevines, lawn clippings, compost, bamboo leaves, and dried fish. Whatever they eat passes quickly through them. They defecate five to twelve times a day and urinate seven to eleven times. They have a normal body temperature of 100.3° Fahrenheit, which they maintain by shivering and sweating. The panniculus muscle beneath their skin allows them to shake off excess moisture, along with pesky flies, and acts as a thermostatic control.