Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  Creed was expert at many aspects of calling, but his greatest strength was in playing the crowd. An announcer has to work on fans, to build the pace of a race with his voice, wheedling and modulating and creating effects, and then at the finish punch it to them in a vibrant hoof-echoing staccato. Creed could do this splendidly. He loved to joke, and he’d take a rider’s name and stretch it out like taffy, Raul Caballero, taking the syllables in Raul apart, then reassembling them as a wolflike howl, Raoooool, his voice keening, going after those frail high notes just off the scale, and then he’d follow it up with a rumpitythump letter-perfect Spanish rendition of Caballero, the aptest surname on the backstretch. The jockeys liked Creed for buffing their stars and also for his concern over their safety. If a horse broke down during a race, Creed alerted the riders, and if the situation was really bad, portending an accident, he’d take it upon himself to stop the race entirely, shouting, “Pull up, jockeys, pull up, this race is over.” Management didn’t approve of such usurpations, but Creed wouldn’t be swayed. In the booth he was Caesar. You can do strange things with a microphone, he liked to say. The most difficult part of calling a race, he said, wasn’t sorting out the horses after the break but picking them up when they came out of the first turn. The image you saw flipflopped then, going from side-view to head-view, and the worst mistakes were made.

  But everybody missed one occasionally. Creed told me once about the time he was calling a night race at Cahokia Downs in St. Louis with a dense tule fog obscuring the track and the yellow arc lights giving the proceedings an infernal glow. Two jockeys in the race were wearing blue silks. One rode an even-money favorite, the other a fifty-to-one shot. In the fog Creed mixed them up and had the fifty-to-one shot winning, when in fact the favorite had crossed the wire first. A minute later he corrected himself, but the damage was already done. Angry fans who held tickets on the long shot were demanding Creed’s head on a pole—he’d nearly doled out several coronaries—and one of them, a giant, materialized at the door of the booth, apparently to rip Creed to pieces. But the giant’s anger fizzled when he saw Creed’s dark-tinted glasses. Instead of hitting Creed, he groaned and slapped his forehead.

  “I knew they must’ve had a blind man in here,” he said.

  Gibson had avoided any physical confrontations so far. As a rule he left Golden Gate right after the ninth race and drove nearly a hundred miles to his home in a Sacramento River delta town, close to his birthplace, where he could relax and do a little striped bass fishing. He used threadfin shad for bait and had a special method for rigging them, running a wire from mouth to tail to keep them on the hook longer. There was nothing quite so tasty as fresh striped bass, Gibson said, fried or cooked on a grill, and then he tugged on the brim of his porkpie hat and stepped onto the viewing platform for the next race. He reviewed the horses running, pronouncing the names over and over again. “Tiercel,” he said, consulting Charlie and Ernie, “are we making that Ter-cel or Tear-cel?” He memorized post positions and silks colors, and at Ernie’s suggestion performed a little of the old Spike Jones racetrack routine, “It’s Cabbage by a head, Carrot by a nose,” and so on, until the horses left the paddock. “Just five minutes until post time, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. It was odd to stand next to him and hear the familiar sentence and not feel prodded into the usual last-minute scurrying. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Gibson said, “if you want to be an announcer you better start when you’re about fifteen or you won’t get anywhere.” He picked up his binoculars and focused them. “I’m not kidding you,” he said.

  VI

  So Gibson fished for stripers, as did Slaughterhouse Red and the grooms and some of the jockeys, and Creed fished for trout, up in the Sierras, and Bob Hack fished whenever he got a chance. Optimism, pursuit of slippery creatures, the desire to connect with forces beyond your control. Driving back to the Terrace one evening I passed a backwater slough growing spiky reeds and long fingers of grass, perfect habitat for catfish, and thought, I bet there’s horses in there.

  VII

  All week long I kept winning. It had nothing to do with systems, I was just in touch. When I walked through the grandstand I projected the winner’s aura, blue and enticing. Women smiled openly as I passed. I drank good whiskey and ate well. One night I went to a Japanese restaurant and sat at a table opposite Country Joe Macdonald, the singer who’d been a fixture at rallies in the sixties. Joe had a new wife with him, and a new baby who refused to sit still and instead bawled and threw an order of sushi around the room. A chunk of tuna flew past my ear. Even this seemed revelatory, the domestic roundness of a star’s life, his interrupted meal, carrying the baby crying into the night, and I knew that someday soon Tuna or Seaweed or Rice-ball would appear on the menu at Golden Gate and I’d play the horse and win. Things fleshed themselves out before my eyes. In a liquor store I bought two bottles of Sapporo Black and went to sit on the Terrace steps and listen to my upstairs neighbor’s piano exercises, the dusky fastnesses of ivory. This tune, I thought, will never end.

  VIII

  One morning as I stood by the rail I saw Debbie Thomas galloping Bushel Ruler. He looked good coming through the fog, the edges of his body softened by mist, the contours hidden in smoke, Leonardo’s sfumato. Debbie was standing in the stirrups, holding him. Her hair billowed out from under her pink and red cap, and she seemed as she rode to be centered in him, her balance absolute. I was waiting for her back at the barn. She took off her cap and asked me to hold Bushel’s reins. He didn’t like it. He started moving toward me, shaking his head and rolling back his lips to exhibit his awful teeth. They were stained various shades of brown from hay, oat husks, bran, and mash and reminded me of the eroded, unbrushed nubbins dentists showed you when they were trying to coerce you to floss. Debbie yanked on the reins. “He’s just feeling good,” she said. Grooms always said this when their horses were acting rowdy and appeared ready to kick. I remained on guard. Horses always got you when you weren’t looking. The other day, Debbie said, she’d been walking down the shedrow, minding her own business, when clunk, this new colt of Dick Leavitt’s stuck his head out of his stall and wrapped his mouth around her arm. She showed me the purple bruise.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Went and got a rake and hit him with it.”

  She squirted liquid soap into a bucket and filled it with water. The solution smelled minty. I led Bushel to a spot near the hotwalker and Debbie started bathing him, working a sponge over his withers. He didn’t like this either, not in the chilly fog, and he snorted a few times and backed away. Again Debbie yanked on the reins. “You cut that out,” she said, bringing her face close to his, “or I’ll go get the shank,” a piece of leather rope used for teaching manners. She gave me the sponge and I washed Bushel’s right side. It was like washing a car, involving similar motions, sponge to bucket, and sloppy suds, but horse felt better under my hand than chrome had ever done. There was something sensual in the washing, feeling Bushel’s bunched muscles and his coat slick with water, and experiencing at the same time the reticulated nature of the backstretch, my eye drawn to other grooms washing other horses all down the shedrow. They seemed to recede into space like the figures reflected in the background bulbs and mirrors of Flemish paintings. Debbie passed me an aluminum sweat scraper, a thin curved blade about a foot long, and I used it to scrape off the excess soap. Then she took Bushel and hooked him to the hotwalker. He felt the pull and began to circle. Midway through the second go-round he let out a whinny, flexed his quarters, and shot both rear legs into the air.

  “Still feeling good,” Debbie said.

  I stepped back a few steps, thinking of skulls busted like pumpkins, coils of brains.

  Debbie could still remember the day she fell in love with horses. It happened in Virginia when she was a little girl. Her father took her to a horse show and she pressed her nose to the auditorium rail and looked down at the floor of the arena where Morgans and high-stepping Tennessee Walkers were on pa
rade. The pageantry of the event stuck in her mind, and when she was nine she got a pony of her own and won titles all over the state. After graduating a year early from high school, she was offered several jobs but turned them down (the scene was too “political,” she says) and instead went to work for a famous trainer of show horses in Massachusetts. She wasn’t happy there. The trainer was tough, a stickler for detail. Debbie’s day began at six and ended at dusk; she earned next to nothing. In the barn there was a large clock overhead, and every task the grooms had to perform was apportioned by it. Each horse received exactly forty minutes’ grooming, then forty minutes’ brushing with a currycomb. When the grooms finished, they had to sweep the barn, muck out the stalls, and arrange the dirty straw in a precise checkerboard pattern outside. Debbie lasted about three months. She left after the first frost, slipping away with a friend and boarding a plane for the friend’s house in San Rafael, California.

  Once she’d settled in Debbie went looking for a job at Bay Meadows. She got some work galloping horses and slowly built up her clientele, handling twelve to thirteen head every morning at three or four dollars a ride. Eventually she left California to work for a man who ran his horses at tracks in the East and Midwest, and made the Grooms’ Grand Tour of Major Racing Installations in the United States. Every groom seemed to have made the tour at least once and they returned from it with copious mental notes on the various facilities available—backstretch accommodations, the quality of cafeteria food, the night life nearby. In Delaware Debbie got her trainer’s license. The oral exam was difficult, she said, and to illustrate she told me about a man who tried to take it without bothering to study. “What does ‘stifle’ mean?” the examiners asked him. The man shrugged. “Means I don’t get no trainer’s license,” he said. Debbie was glad she’d made the tour. “Now I know the grass isn’t greener,” she liked to say. She liked working for Glen Nolan. He paid her well and had recently advanced her twenty-five hundred dollars so she could claim an ancient router named Benson, a hard-hitting vet if ever there was one. Benson was stabled at Nolan’s farm, burning hay, and rode in by van on days when he was scheduled to race. He was the fourth horse Debbie had owned and she’d made money on all of them. She was shrewd in money matters. Her own wagers, carefully placed, supplemented her income and allowed her to rent a small apartment in El Sobrante. She thought of herself as a homebody who spent quiet evenings among her cats, dogs, books, and friends. Perhaps she needed to make this distinction between her racetrack persona, brisk and efficient, and the more feminine self she was forced to keep hidden. Even though she discouraged them, backstretch Lotharios pursued her avidly. On Saturdays, she worked in pari-mutuels and from its pool of eligible bachelors she drew her suitors. When a young pari-mutuel clerk came by the barn one morning to say hello, dressed to the macho nines in patterned body shirt and aviator glasses, I saw Debbie flustered for the first time, trying to balance herself as she’d done so successfully on Bushel Ruler.

  IX

  Everybody had a theory about why so many young women came to the track looking for work, but I discarded them in favor of a very simple equation best put by little Liz Taylor in National Velvet. “I can’t help it, father,” Lizzie whined, “I’d rather have that horse happy than go to heaven!” What I saw in the shedrows was an ongoing love affair. For the most part, it revolved around service, and also the aesthetic pleasure to be derived from handling horses, but there was a randy underside to it as well, which could be seen in the smiles of certain ponygirls as they rode off the track after a good gallop, and in the dreamy-eyed look some grooms got as they stroked the flank of a colt. Most women hadn’t read D. H. Lawrence, but a few of them raved to me about the books of Walter Farley, which they’d read in adolescence. Farley had written a series of juveniles starring the Black Stallion, who is described as follows when he makes his first appearance on a ships’ landing in a small Arabian port:

  White lather ran from the horse’s body; his mouth was open, his teeth bared. He was a giant of a horse, glistening black—too big to be pure Arabian. His mane was like a crest, mounting, then falling low. His neck was long and slender, and arched to the small, savagely beautiful head. The head was that of the wildest of all wild creatures—a stallion born wild—and it was beautiful, savage, splendid. A stallion with a wonderful physical perfection that matched his savage, ruthless spirit.

  Once a young woman got a job, she was assigned tacitly to one of two prevailing social roles, princess or tramp. Princesses came to work at six in the morning, often with makeup on, lipstick, blusher, even eyeshadow. They were friendly but aloof, smiled but seldom laughed, worked hard, accepted no invitations, and remained untouchable except within the confines of a monogamous relationship. Tramps, it was understood, were fair game. They chewed gum, went braless, liked to party, and screwed around. If a woman slept with a man once, and only once, in healthy abandon, without any thought of the future, she ran the risk of being consigned forever to trampdom and hit upon by every lackluster dooley in manure-stained jeans. “That girl who works for so-and-so,” said one clucking male groom to another, “I hear she does the trick.” Because women were permitted to do “men’s work,” the backstretch was supposed to be a liberated place, but I saw little evidence of this. More often I felt as if I were back in high school, observing the same tedious sexual constraints.

  A few women at Golden Gate seemed suspended momentarily between roles. I saw the slim blonde from the Home Stretch every now and then, wandering around as though shopping for permanence. She’d picked up a friend along the way, a tall girl with pale blue eyes and ice-blond Nordic hair, and together they cruised the backstretch and grandstand waiting for something to happen. There was another woman around whom I thought of as a fallen princess not quite ready to become a tramp. I’d heard that she’d worked once for a trainer, but now she was unemployed. One morning I saw her alone on the infield grass, dressed in a flowing Hawaiian shirt and trousers. While jockeys bundled in rubber suits jogged around her, sweating off pounds, she did handstands and cartwheels, bouncing barefooted off the trunks of palms. Another morning, cold and foggy, she stood next to me during workouts. She wore a watch cap and a navy-blue greatcoat that touched the top of her shoes. Across the shoulders of the coat, thrown there like a fur piece, was a white cat. Every time the cat moved, the fallen princess caught it and returned it to her shoulders. When the sun came out she took off her cap, and long brown hair fell in tangles to her waist.

  X

  When Pico fell in love he did so with abandon. He became enamored of a grocer’s wife in Arezzo who was married to a relative of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s. Presumably Pico could have carried on an affair, as did so many of his contemporaries, but he wanted all or nothing. So he mounted a night raid, taking along his secretary and twenty other men on horseback, then snatched his mistress from her donjon of commerce and spirited her away to a town nearby, barely escaping with his life. Fifteen men were killed in the skirmish following the kidnap. The siege came to an unhappy conclusion when Pico was arrested. Only Lorenzo’s intervention saved him from the gallows. It was impossible for the wife of someone related to the Medici to be unfaithful, he said, and the kidnapped woman was returned to her husband a little the worse for wear. As for Pico, he wasn’t capable of concocting such a plan. Certainly his secretary had misled him, said Lorenzo, turning the poor secretary over to the constables.

  XI

  Bo Twinn was waiting outside the barn when Bill Stallings, the jockey, dismounted and returned Urashima Taro after his morning workout.

  “How’s the little bastard feeling?” Bo asked.

  Stallings handed over the reins. “Real good,” he said. He had a Munchkin’s voice, sunglasses, puffed cheeks. “Feeling real good.”

  “Then how come he was pawing in his stall all night keeping me awake?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Every time you look,” said Bo, addressing nobody in particular, “you find s
omething else wrong. They generally doing something they ain’t supposed to when you don’t want ’em to be doing it.”

  “Played Softball last night,” Stallings announced. “Hurt my damn leg, too.”

  Bo was unsympathetic. “Go see Headley,” he told Stallings. “He’ll medicate you.”

  Pichi was due to run that afternoon and I went in to check on her. She looked anxious. When she saw me coming she backed away, toward the protective recesses of her stall.

  “She’s so radical,” Bo said. He was cleaning Urashima’s hoofs with a pick, chipping mud and pebbles from under the shoes. “All fillies is finicky this time of year but she’s worse. She’s a bad doer. If she don’t eat, how’s she going to run?” He tried to get at Urashima’s right front foot but Urashima wouldn’t help. Bo slapped him gently below the knee. “C’mon, c’mon, you little bastard, lift it up. You ain’t going to no Derby. Did you see this little bastard run?”

  Headley’s dream horse had finished next to last his first time out. “I saw him.”

  “Then you know why he ain’t going. Headley’s riding a new boy on Pichi today, that Jimmy Colaneri. He might rate her more kindly. I hope he rates her more kindly.”

  “How’d you come to work at the track, Bo?”

  He gave me an exasperated look, arching his eyebrows. “I was left an orphan is how,” he said. “In a town outside Houston. My father, he rode jumping horses and us kids knew all about racing. When he died and left me an orphan all I knew to do was to go to a racetrack. Tell me where else a ten-year-old is likely to get a job.”

  “Which track did you go to?”

  “Epsom Downs.”

  Bo stopped talking abruptly when a man in a pale green shirt materialized in the shedrow doorway and stood there backlit and grinning in a shifty sort of way, as though he’d oiled his lips on getting out of bed.