Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  II

  I met Bobby Martin at his office, a musty tack room furnished with dilapidated armchairs and a vinyl-covered couch that belonged in a bus station. The office felt like Kansas, some inner sanctum on the plains with gas pumps out front and day-old newspapers for sale at the cash register. Martin sat behind a wooden desk and studied a large cardboard chart that listed all thirty-four of his horses and indicated by symbol whether they were scheduled to work (run hard over a specific distance, six furlongs, a mile, usually in preparation for a race), gallop, walk, or rest that morning. I had the impression that the chart wasn’t really necessary, that Martin had long since memorized the data but wanted to give it an outward form and make it official. The chart was businesslike, professional, and so was the black phone on the desk, one of the few private lines I ever saw on the backstretch. These accoutrements suited Martin. He was a quietly confident man. He wore a rust-colored ski jacket and blue jeans with a dry cleaner’s crease in them. His blondish hair was combed and he didn’t look beaten down the way many trainers do when they hit forty.

  Mike Haversack, a bugboy, sat opposite Martin and stirred the dust with his whip. He had the right face for pumping gas, thin, pale, with that curious racetrack hardness creeping in around the mouth. He galloped horses for Martin and sometimes got to ride a maiden. He lived in Pleasanton, as did the boss, and this seemed to work in his favor. “Hell,” Martin said, “must be half the track lives out there.” A groom led a big chestnut to the office door and Haversack stepped out of the office and into the stirrups. The transfer had a surreal quality, especially so early in the morning, but then again horses were always showing up in odd places. They filled the available space quite suddenly and I sometimes had the feeling of being pushed out of frame, like an actor snipped from a key scene. Another rider replaced Haversack on the couch, waiting in turn for his mount, and was soon replaced by yet another rider. The men were all dressed just like Martin, in ski jackets and jeans.

  Ivan Puhich, Bill Mahorney’s agent, stopped in to check on affairs. He was a big overwrought man, also wearing a ski jacket, who took himself and his job very seriously. One morning I’d tried to talk to him while he made his rounds, but he kept walking faster and faster, increasing the length of his stride—he stands six feet six—until I could no longer keep up with him. “If you can’t keep up, we can’t talk,” Puhich said. “There’s Bob Hack. Go talk to him, he walks slower.” Martin also seemed to find Ivan a trifle overbearing, but he listened politely as Puhich told a convoluted story extolling his own virtues as an agent. He was representing Haversack and claimed to have saved the bugboy from a nefarious trainer’s clutches. Apparently this trainer had asked Haversack to exercise one of his horses but hadn’t stipulated a price to be paid for the job. “That bastard,” Ivan said, “he tries to screw everybody. I told Mike, ‘Don’t you get on a horse unless I say so.’ So the trainer says to him, ‘You want a ride, Mike?’ Mike says, ‘I don’t know. Talk to my agent.’ So the trainer, he turns to me and says, ‘Is it okay, Ivan?’ ‘Sure,’ I tell him. ‘Get on the horse, Mike.’” Ivan reached out a long arm and patted Haversack, who’d just returned, on the shoulder. “Mike, I want to commend you. You did the right thing.” Poor Haversack, his cheeks red, sank embarrassedly into his boots. Martin slipped past Puhich, who was blocking the office door, and watched a filly on the hotwalker. She wasn’t moving well. Her gait seemed awkwardly constricted. Martin stood watching her for a long time, his arms crossed over his chest.

  Martin bought his first horse, Domingo Kid, when he was nineteen. He paid only seven hundred and fifty dollars because the horse, who’d once run in allowance races, was so brokedown and rank that nobody else wanted to deal with him. But Martin was young and ambitious and gradually conditioned the Kid and won eleven races with him that first year and twenty-six overall before he lost him to another trainer. Martin’s name first appeared in the standings at Golden Gate in 1966, when he saddled ten winners in forty-three tries, and he has dominated them ever since. In 1978 he was pursuing his fifth consecutive championship and held a slim lead over Bill Mastrangelo, with whom he’d dueled before, most notably in 1975, when he’d won the title by only two victories. Though he tried to act nonchalant, Martin’s eyes fired up whenever the championship was mentioned.

  “It’s not like golf or tennis,” he said, “where you just go out and take somebody on head to head. Horses’ll only do so much for you. You can’t control ’em. Lot of people around here’d like to see me get beat. That’s how it is when you’re on the top.”

  Martin was exaggerating. No doubt a few malcontents wanted to see him collapse, but most people revered him. Young trainers wanted to be like him when they grew up, and old grooms said Bobby hadn’t changed since he was a kid. He was honest and polite and never bullshitted you, or only a little. He treated his horses well and his grooms even better, paying them top dollar and refusing to inflict the usual psychic punishments. Even Tumwater Tom, who started early on his daily quota of Olympia and knew more about horses than most trainers, had stuck with Bobby. There was something of the classic Western hero in Martin’s demeanor, the shy commanding presence of an Alan Ladd. He represented that most estimable racetrack quality, class, but his soft jawline and slightly lumpy nose would’ve kept him from ever playing opposite Maureen O’Hara.

  There were two main reasons, beyond intelligence and hard work, for Martin’s success: his expertise as a conditioner and his mastery of the claiming game. Conditioning a horse properly, getting him into shape and then keeping him fit, on form, was a craft little practiced at cheaper racetracks. Because of financial exigencies and near-terminal shortsightedness—some called it stupidity—trainers often pushed their horses much too hard in morning workouts, cranking them up for a single race, the clichéd Big Effort, and then afterward, when the horses returned to the barn feeling tired and sore, had to rest them for a month or two before running them again. This tactic made no sense but trainers pursued it zestfully, with oblivious devotion. The real key to conditioning was conservation. Energy expended in a race or workout had to be restored. So Martin kept close tabs on all his horses, checking their energy levels as he might the water in batteries, and designed for each of them an exercise program—the chart—that took into account individual strengths and weaknesses. He took the time to know his stock and so he got an optimal performance every race instead of one stellar showing followed by months of eights and nines.

  Claiming was a more intricate and cerebral activity—it was known as the poker of the backstretch—but again success was dependent on knowing your stock. Any horse entered in such a race could be claimed, or purchased, for a predetermined price set by the Racing Secretary in the Condition Book. The idea was to create fields of roughly equivalent talent and value. In theory, trainers wouldn’t enter a horse worth twenty grand in a race where the horse could be claimed by a rival for sixty-five hundred. But of course this happened all the time, because trainers, like their constituency, were gamblers. They were always looking for an edge.

  Take, for instance, the hypothetical trainer Profit and his horse Lament, a four-year-old gelding who in the past month has finished fourth and second in two twelve-thousand-five-hundred-dollar claiming races. After such good performances, Profit might be expected to enter Lament at a higher level, say fourteen thousand, to protect him (Lament is clearly worth twelve-five), but Profit, a sharper, drops the horse in class and enters him in a race for a price tag of eighty-five hundred. This means one of three things: Lament is in bad shape, and Profit wants to get rid of him at a slight loss before Lament’s true condition is known; Lament is not in bad shape but Profit wants others to think he is and thereby win a race against inferior opponents; Lament is just beginning to be in bad shape, getting old, with a kink in his step, and Profit is trying to make him look attractive, a bargain, while in fact he wants the horse to be claimed, having figured that the winner’s share of the purse—four thousand—plus the claiming pr
ice—eighty-five hundred—will more than compensate him for the loss. The third tactic is the most difficult to master, predicated as it is on keen judgment, and Martin makes better use of it than anybody else at Golden Gate. Of the twenty-three head he’d “lost” since January, only three were worth feeding. Sometimes he got stung, this was inevitable, but more often than not his experiences echoed the early one with Domingo Kid. “I do a lot of speculating,” Martin said. “You can’t get too attached to the horses.”

  Martin was the only Golden Gate-based trainer whose horses did well consistently on the tougher southern circuit. Every now and then he liked to assemble a caravan, sneak down to Hollywood Park, steal a few purses, then slip out of town. He smiled when he talked about these raids on Tinsel Town. I wondered why he didn’t just set up shop in Los Angeles, or at least run a string there, but he said he made just as much money up north. This didn’t compute. In 1977 Martin’s horses won seventy-two races and a total of $456,287 in purse money, not much at all by southern standards. Actually, Martin hated L.A. “You ever been down there?” he asked. “It’s like a jungle around those tracks.” Bobby was still a good old boy at heart. On warm evenings he could still go out to his ranch in Pleasanton and do a little roping and riding and general whooping it up without having to worry that some criminal bastard was waiting just around the corner to steal his pinky ring, the one inset with his initials, RM, in diamonds.

  The filly on the hotwalker was still having trouble. Martin went over and walked along next to her as she circled, and as he walked he touched her gently on the withers and said something inaudible. She seemed gradually to quiet, to understand her position in regard to the machine, and soon she was moving more fluidly, shaking her head and rippling her mane in the sun. Martin stayed with her for thirty minutes, linked to her movements, watching. The scene had a special air of transference. When Martin was satisfied with the filly’s progress, he touched her a last time and went away.

  III

  I was about to leave the barn when Olivia Hernandez arrived to check on her baby. She worked for Martin and so did her husband, George, rubbing horses. For years she’d been trying to get pregnant without success, and then last fall, when she’d given up hope, she had missed a period. At first she refused to believe the implication, but the tests were all positive and she was still radiant now, two months after giving birth.

  “You want to see her?” she asked. “Come in here, I’ll show her to you.”

  We went into Martin’s vacant office and Olivia knelt by the wall and removed a metal grate from the gas heater. When I knelt next to her and looked through the mesh, I could see into the tack room on the other side of the wall, where a dark-haired baby girl lay wrapped in bright pink blankets on an iron-frame cot.

  “I could take you in there,” Olivia said, “but I don’t want to wake her. She’s sleeping so soundly.”

  Her eyes were closed. She was surrounded by empty beer cans, bottles of liniment, unclipped rolls of Ace bandages trailing to the floor. Horses moved past the room, looking larger than ever in the low-ceilinged barn, going along the shedrow to their stalls. Olivia replaced the grate and we stood outside for a while, near the mounds of hay and sparrows bathing in puddles. Rogelio Gomez, the jockey whose broad cheekbones and deep-set eyes gave him the look of an Inca, rode by on an onyx-colored mare. He’d given the baby a stroller, but she was still too small to use it.

  “Como esta la niña?” Gomez asked from his saddle.

  “Muy buena, Rogelio,” Olivia said. Then she smiled, exhilarated, and said to me, “She’s my miracle baby, you know.”

  IV

  One morning I found a carved wooden owl hanging by a cord at the north end of the grandstand. The owl had been put there to keep starlings from nesting in the rafters, but above me I could see the birds flying in with bits of stolen hay in their beaks. This made me think of what I’d been reading about later Renaissance artists and the notions of dominance that had crept into their work. “Art is more powerful than nature,” Titian had said. Giorgio Vasari, equally proud, had articulated a sentiment that Henry Ford might have approved. “Art today has been carried to such perfection,” he said, “that, whereas our predecessors produced a picture in six years, we produce six in one year.” Perfection as an aspect of technique; the power of nature arrested. Meanwhile the starlings went about their procreative business, peppering the bleachers with their droppings.

  V

  Glen Nolan had made his money operating a drayage company, but recently he’d diversified into a less predictable enterprise (a hobby for him, really) and now owned Nolan Farms, Inc., a ranch in Pleasanton where he bred horses to race and sell. Around the track he had a decent reputation. He spent necessary cash without groaning and his stock was honest and sometimes fairly good. Smart handicappers gave Nolan’s starters an edge for condition and maybe talent. He employed a trainer, Steve Gardell, at the farm, and during Golden Gate meetings he always requisitioned a few stalls in which to board horses who’d be running regularly. This year he had three stalls and they were presided over by Debbie Thomas, a princess of the backstretch.

  Debbie’s official title was assistant trainer, but she spent most of her time grooming. The work showed in her body. Her shoulders were broad, her arms were hard and thickly muscled, and her hips were very trim. She had the build of a gymnast, somebody whose specialty was the parallel bars. She wore her blond hair at shoulder length and her eyes were blue and cool, except when she stepped outside the racetrack frame and became a young woman of twenty-two, pretty, a little dreamy, flirtatious, and decidedly feminine. She had three horses in her care: Ali Time, a dumb but honest two-year-old; Moonlight Cocktail, a moody filly; and Bushel Ruler, a handsome three-year-old gelding who hadn’t raced yet. Of them all she loved only Bushel. She called him Oli, after his dam, Oligarch, and thought he’d fixated on her as a mother-substitute. When she walked down the shedrow in the morning, he’d stick his head out of the stall and whinny and nicker until she gave him some attention. He had personality and a touch of class, and Debbie wished she could change his name to something more suitable than Bushel Ruler.

  Choosing the right name for a horse wasn’t easy. The Jockey Club rules stated that you were limited to eighteen letters, counting spaces and punctuation, and couldn’t duplicate names already registered or use those of “famous or notorious persons”—no Johnny Rotten, no Richard Nixon—or “trade names or names of commercial significance.” Copyrighted names were permissible five years after their introduction into the culture, and so were “coined” and “made-up” names if they were accompanied by an explanation. There were also mystical injunctions to consider, like the Arabs’ belief that a horse should never be named foolishly or in jest because he’d live up to that name. Language should be exact, as Dante once demonstrated to a Florentine blacksmith whom he caught reciting verses of The Divine Comedy, misquoting fiercely. Dante threw the man’s hammer and tongs into the street, ruining them because the blacksmith had ruined his poetry. Debbie had once worked for a man who’d let her name all his horses, and she said the best names often came to her at night, in dreams. She was most proud of her choice for a colt out of Eskimo: Chill Factor, she’d called him, and it fit perfectly.

  On the afternoon I met her, Debbie and Steve Gardell were preparing Moonlight Cocktail for the third race. Debbie said Moony had always been a problem horse. She’d run so poorly the year before, once falling twenty lengths behind when favored, that everybody had written her off, but Nolan had shipped her to the veterinary school at the University of California, Davis, for a last-chance physical before turning her out. The vets took some X-rays and discovered a painful hoof disease, which they corrected. Now, Moony was on the comeback trail. During the Pacific meet she’d raced twice, but she was only beginning to round into shape. She was no longer crippled, just feisty, and Debbie bore the scars. Moony had kicked her twice, once in the leg and once in the head, breaking her nose and barely missing the cri
tical space between her eyes. Every groom, and almost every trainer, told such tales, of hoofs flying out of nowhere to bunch an ear like cauliflower or scatter teeth like Chiclets, but I still found them harrowing. There was really nothing to protect you from the horses except a sort of grace conferred by the animals themselves.

  Debbie knelt in the hay at the front of the stall and removed packed ice wrapped in towels from Moony’s front legs. The ice kept the legs cool and the muscles tight. When the last ice shavings were brushed away, Gardell began wrapping the legs, applying cotton wads first, then Ace bandages sprinkled with paprika to keep the horse from chewing them loose, then wide swaths of adhesive tape. Taped front legs usually indicate that a horse has problems, but Debbie said in this instance the tape was cosmetic, meant to deceive. Moony was making a slight class drop, from eighty-five hundred to seventy-five hundred, and the bandages were supposed to plant a seed of doubt in any potential claimant’s mind.

  “She’s got a real good chance to win,” Debbie said. “She was real sharp when she galloped yesterday and I’ve been holding her off ever since. She’s ready, if she’s in the mood to run.”

  Later, I stood by the paddock fence and watched the third race entries as they circled. Flowering bushes along the perimeter of the paddock gave off a soapy smell from white waxen blooms, and I had the impression that the horses had all been recently bathed. Moony looked splendid. She had green ribbons laced into her mane, and her dark brown coat had a fine sheen. Her quarters were tight and had a sculptural intensity, a focusing of power, and as she walked she kept her ears pricked. Debbie had also dressed for the occasion, in a Western shirt, a leather belt decorated with blue flowers and a pair of new jeans. Her hair was brushed and she wore sunglasses. She stood very erect, conscious of her posture, and she whispered constantly to Moony as they circled. Their heads seemed confined to a single plane and they moved forward as a unit. Seeing Debbie so brushed up and shiny made me aware of the plight of less presentable grooms. Some of them hated the paddock, its public nature, the way it accentuated their pimples and boils, and though they did their best to clean up and face it squarely they always looked like recalcitrant children sent off to school. They had too much oil in their hair, bloody shaving nicks on their cheeks, and creases in shirts and blouses badly folded and stored too long in musty bottom drawers. That the world valued beauty, and rewarded it disproportionately, was never so apparent as in the paddock.