Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  Then they were off, in a shotgun burst of color, and I felt another forward surge, nerves set suddenly on edge. Track Reward went to the front, but Affirmed was right next to him and took over the lead coming out of the turn. He was running easily and Cauthen was sitting chilly. Jorge Velásquez held Alydar tight at the back of the pack, and the colt moved along step for step in a shadow dance to the pace Affirmed was making. That Alydar had power and would take his shot was never in doubt, but the when, the precise instant of release, kept us in suspense. Indigo Star was fifth at the half, and I looked over at June, whose hand rested in Arnold’s back pocket, and saw her face powdered with hope, impossible hope. The horses rounded into the stretch and then Alydar was there, a length behind and coming, and then he was up and there and almost hooking Affirmed head to head. They moved in tandem toward the wire and Cauthen leaned forward and asked his colt, Go baby, mooching sweet nothings in his ear, and Affirmed responded and began to pull away. Velásquez set Alydar down, but the colt couldn’t quite make it. Cauthen had done an expert job of rating, and Affirmed had a little more left at the end, a dollop more in the cup, just enough to stretch out and cross the wire in front. The tension began to subside, and as it passed I could feel people coming down, as they might from sex or drugs. It was odd to see flushed cheeks and satisfied smiles beaming through the familiar stale cloud of smoke.

  After the race I listened to Cauthen and heard in his voice the melodious innocence of all young jockeys, an accent full of southern syrup but characteristic even in the west. I went outside to sit by the Bay. My racing high had not yet dissipated and I was able to sit still on the rocks without worrying about what would happen next. But this was solved for me anyway when I saw a big rat slink from a crevice and drag its slithery tail over moss and potato chip bags, destroying in the process the brief ascendance into the legendary I had so enjoyed.

  Chapter Eight

  Ruling Don was the first horse I ever saw die. He broke down in May, on a beautiful morning with the sun shining and all the touts and trainers along the rail talking of summer, of county fairs and smaller tracks like the one up the coast in Ferndale, where the breeze blew lightly in off the ocean and kept things cool. I was standing among them when I heard the sharp sudden gunlike sound of bone breaking and looked up and saw a horse begin to falter. This was Ruling Don. He’d been working five furlongs fast, inside on the rail, running well, but then his right front leg had broken abruptly in half and he’d gone out of control. His shin and hoof flopped about in the dirt, held in place by a hinge of skin, and he pitched forward as though he’d been pushed down a flight of stairs, with the same panicky flailing. When he stumbled past the main gate, I saw that he was running now on three legs and a stub of bone, hop-stepping toward oblivion. He couldn’t quite stop himself. His limbs worked of their own accord and carried him forward along the curve of energy expended, downward in compliance with gravity.

  Art Lobato was riding him. He was pulling up hard on the reins, but Ruling Don kept stumbling forward, threatening to fall. Lobato knew if the horse fell he’d likely be crushed, so he slipped his feet from the stirrups and bailed out. He hit the track with a thud, then gathered himself into a fetal ball, arms crossed over his knees, and looked back to see if he’d be trampled by other horses still coming. He was lucky, though, the horses had been taken in hand or steered wide or yanked to a halt, and he was able to scuttle crabwise under the rail to the safety of the infield grass. He was wearing a strapped red T-shirt and for a moment I thought the dark stains on his chest were blood. But he was just sweating. His face had no color in it. He looked pale and old.

  About twenty yards down the track Ruling Don tripped to a stop without losing his balance. He was breathing hard and looking around in a bewildered way, tottering on his unbalanced legs. Every now and then he tried to take a step forward but managed only to lurch a few inches and shift his weight. Somebody ran over and took his reins and rubbed his forehead, while Slaughterhouse Red called the Corporation Yard and told the maintenance boys to send over a van in a hurry. An exercise rider walked past me, wiping viciously at his eyes. “It always gets to me when that happens,” he said. “Don’t matter how often I see it, it always gets to me.” A few trainers nodded in agreement and bitched among themselves about the condition of the strip, but they did this every morning. It’s a crime for horses to have to run over shit like this, they said, and picked up pebbles and smoothed over cockles and hoofmarks as though such hasty minuscule improvements would make things better.

  “There’s just too goddam many sore horses running these days,” one man said.

  The man next to him spat. “So what else is new,” he said.

  Bob Hess, who’d once trained Ruling Don, stood with his back to the track and said that he’d thought the horse might have had some problems, but nothing serious, nothing bad enough to break him down.

  Five minutes later the van drove onto the strip, and two men got out and unlatched the back door. They lowered a ramp for Ruling Don and coaxed him along, but after three tentative steps he quit. The pain was too great. Blood trickled down from his knee, and he twisted his head around. His bewilderment seemed to increase, spiraling into fear. The men got behind him and locked their hands over his tail, forming a sling with their arms, and they were joined by Lobato and Gerry Danbrook, the horse’s trainer, and Mike McRae, a veterinarian. Together they pushed, and Ruling Don proceeded reluctantly up the ramp, dragging the exposed bone over ridges of corrugated metal. It made a scraping noise and had the effect on some bystanders of chalk squeaking on a blackboard. When the horse was inside at last the men latched the doors behind him and drove over to the Corporation Yard.

  Danbrook phoned the horse’s owner, John Schipani, who’d claimed Ruling Don from Hess for twelve thousand five hundred dollars. Danbrook was apprehensive because Schipani had suggested the claim, and it was clear now that he had purchased damaged goods. He gave Schipani a brief medical report. Ruling Don had fractured a cannon bone and exploded a fetlock joint, but his leg could be repaired in a fairly common operation. The surgery would have to be done elsewhere, though, because the emergency facilities at Golden Gate were minimal at best. In all probability, Danbrook said, Ruling Don would never race again and would have to be destroyed. There was really no reason to keep him alive. He couldn’t race, he was a gelding and hence useless at stud, and besides, Schipani had no insurance to cover the costs of surgery. Insurance was never a guarantee that a horse would be saved, anyway. Often enough owners had marginally injured stock put down just to collect a premium. Most cheap horses were worth more dead than alive.

  So Danbrook passed along his decision to McRae, who set about preparing his “euthanasia solution.” Its primary component was phenobarbital. The drug acted directly on the central nervous system, shutting down all sensory input. Sometimes McRae administered curare before the phenobarb to deaden a horse’s muscles and prevent any radical reactions, the organism’s involuntary kicking and rearing, but Ruling Don was in shock and behaving calmly. McRae slipped in the needle, and the horse overdosed almost immediately. His muscles quivered, his eyes glazed over, and he dropped to the ground. The appropriate forms were signed. A representative of the track had already telephoned Clarence Pementel of Mission San Jose. Pementel had an arrangement with Golden Gate that entitled him to all unwanted carcasses, the offal of a season’s racing.

  Back by the main gate some heavy-handed joking was going on. Lobato told Bob Hack that Richie Galarsa was supposed to have worked the horse for Danbrook, and that he, Lobato, had only been doing Richie a favor. Hack grimaced. Then a dour little groom with sunken eyes strolled by and seeing Lobato said, “Hey, Artie, I got this good horse for you to ride. This Ruling Don.”

  Lobato forced a smile—his lips trembled at the corners—and said, “I’m not riding any Ruling Don, man. Nobody’s riding that horse any more. Ruling Don, he’s dead.”

  II

  Ruling Don’s history was brie
f and melancholy and barely long enough to fill a dossier:

  Chestnut gelding, three years old. Ancestry undistinguished, Windsor Ruler out of Señorita Cevole. Raced a total of eleven times. One first, two seconds, a third. Earned about four thousand dollars. Debut at Agua Caliente, Tijuana, Mexico, August 28, 1977. Finished eighth. Ran four more times at Caliente before breaking his maiden on October 16, going a mile in 1:37.3. Showed evidence of a good stretch kick. Potential talent. Shipped to Bay Meadows in November, ran a promising fourth in a claiming race. Ran again at Bay Meadows on November 25 and was claimed by Bob Hess for sixteen thousand. Raced first time for Hess, in owner Pergakis’s colors, on December 17, stepping up to allowance company with Tony Diaz riding. Apparently serious bid, but finished dismal seventh on muddy track, sixteen lengths behind. Indication of leg problems, causing perceptual transference. No longer a stakes-caliber horse, no longer quite so valuable. Reduced to commodity status. Rested three months before racing again, then ran at Golden Gate on March 16, 1978. Seventh by five and a half lengths. Ran next a month later for a fourteen-thousand-dollar price tag. Appeared to have the race in hand, but jockey, Raul Caballero, was forced very wide on the turn and gave up too much ground. Finished fifth, returned to the barn tired. Entered again on April 22. Price tag dropped this time to twelve thousand. Good start, tired in the stretch, finished third. Claimed by Gerry Danbrook. Never raced again.

  III

  Gerry Danbrook was just returning from a gallop when I caught up with him at his barn. He swept down from the saddle and walked briskly toward the shedrow, strutting like an adjutant. A Snoopy-the-Red-Baron decal was glued to his riding helmet. “I call this Bad News Week,” he said. First he’d lost two nice horses, saw them claimed away, then Ruling Don had gone out and busted a leg. Danbrook’s stable had been reduced to a rudimentary three head, but he was playing it tough. Toughness was a quality he admired, a manly quality, and when he ordered his teen-age groom to wash down his mount, he did so with authority.

  This wasn’t the first time Danbrook had suffered through a spate of bad news. Back in 1976 a trainer down south was about to ship up a string of horses for him to handle, but Golden Gates’ janitors had gone on strike and closed the track, which soured the deal. So Danbrook, with nothing to do, had taken a vacation in Toronto, his hometown. The trip was a bust, though, when his wife phoned from California to say she was leaving him. Bad news was part of the game, part of life, and Danbrook refused to buckle under to it. He’d been around racetracks since he was fifteen. He was thirty-one now, a compact curly-haired man with a fashionable mustache and a chest pushed forward by ambition. He wanted desperately to be known as a winner, so he was less than anxious to discuss Ruling Don.

  “Come into my office, we’ll have a cup of coffee,” he said, leading me into a tack room equipped with a coffeemaker and several cans of Yuban. On the wall, a poster showing hand-holding lovers skipping out of a misty landscape advised us that whenever we thought things were done, there was always something more to do. Apparently this was another aspect of Danbrook’s present credo. Twice before he’d left racing, once to take a trip to Asia and once to go back to college—he wanted to be a pilot—and this time around he was determined to stick it out.

  I asked him to tell me about Ruling Don.

  “Ah, you know,” he said, looking at the floor, “the horse had problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “He was sore. His legs weren’t in such good shape.”

  “Was he running on phenylbutazone?”

  Danbrook frowned. “Most of the horses here run on bute.”

  He poured out some coffee.

  “What did Schipani say when you told him?” I asked.

  “John Schipani’s a class guy. He understands these things. I already learned a lot from him.”

  For a while we sipped our coffee and talked more generally about racing, and then Danbrook got fidgety.

  “Listen,” he said, “I don’t bullshit my owners. That horse wasn’t very sound, but that’s the chance you take in claiming. You’re bound to get some bad ones. I’m not going to cry about it. Before, I used to listen to too many people. People are always trying to screw you up. The other day, Art Hirsch, he told me if I ran my horse Pobjoy for eighty-five hundred instead of twelve-five he’d claim him. Used to be that would get to me. I’d be up all night thinking. Not any more. I ran Pobjoy for eighty-five, he won, nobody claimed him.”

  “What would’ve happened with Ruling Don?”

  “He would’ve been a useful horse. Nothing special. I would’ve kept him till he wasn’t useful, then tried to get rid of him. That’s how it goes.”

  We stood outside and watched the groom working. Mike McCrae passed by and Danbrook kidded him about all the business he’d been sending McCrae’s way. McCrae was in a hurry and didn’t stay long. His practice, private but licensed and supervised by the state, was a floating one, and he went from barn to barn, working to keep the walking wounded from falling apart, squeezing a last race or two out of nags bound for greener pastures.

  “You know,” Danbrook said reflectively, “I used to think there were secrets to the game. But there aren’t any, really. To win you need good horses. You’ve got to take good care of them and run them in the right spots. But secrets? No way.”

  He told the groom to saddle Low Lie, and when the boy brought out the horse he mounted up. I felt uncomfortable talking to him while he was on horseback. Low Lie seemed to give him a swelling sense of pomp, and I understood why soldiers loved to pose for equestrian portraits, sitting grand and tall with a thousand pounds of speed between their legs. We shook hands and Danbrook set off, marking a slow course between the shed-rows. Then he stopped suddenly and turned around in the saddle, posed just like a statue, a John Hawkwood of the backstretch.

  “You know what it really is?” he shouted. “It’s balls! That’s all. Balls! If you don’t have ’em the guys who do’ll step all over you. Balls, that’s what it takes.”

  He touched his boots to Low Lie’s ribs and rode off.

  IV

  In the late nineteenth century, aminopyrine, a derivative of pyrazolon, was introduced into medicine as an antipyretic, or fever-reducing agent, and soon found additional favor both as an analgesic and anti-inflammatory. Researchers later discovered that aminopyrine had potentially fatal bone-marrow toxicity, and the drug has since disappeared from the therapeutic scene in the United States, replaced in part by its congener (of the same genus, having similar properties) phenylbutazone, a compound first used to make aminopyrine soluble. Phenylbutazone, trade-name Butazolidin, has anti-inflammatory properties akin to but stronger than those of aspirin, although as an analgesic and antipyretic it is of limited value. Among horses the compound is used in the treatment of rheumatism, arthritis, and musculo-skeletal disorders. It works primarily by inhibiting the biosyn-thesis of prostaglandins, those diverse and bewildering hormones that, in some instances, are the cause of inflammation.

  On the backstretch, phenylbutazone is nicknamed “bute,” a word pronounced with the same crisp technological fervor as disco or module. Bute is modern, efficient, an equine penicillin capable of transforming sore horses into competitors; seventy-five percent of the stock at Golden Gate took it regularly, either orally or by injection.* The drug whose use it was supplanting, cortisone, a steroid, had awesome side effects including pituitary upset, hormonal imbalance, fluid retention, retardation of the natural healing processes, and, maybe, tumors. Despite these drawbacks about thirty percent of the stock still raced on cortisone (often in tandem with bute), and if you looked closely you could identify them in the paddock by the needle marks around their knees and hoofs. Sometimes cortisone collected in the body, bulging out here and there in lumpy pockets, and needed to be drained. It was a frightening compound and any alternative to it had to be deemed a pharmacological breakthrough, as well as an advance in humane treatment.

  But phenylbutazone also had problems. T
hey were less visible, more insidious, falling into familiar patterns of abuse. Bute worked so well to alleviate soreness, banishing aches as easily as Valium unraveled tensions, that it was given almost randomly at the first sign of stiffness, even to lightly raced two-year-olds who might in the past have been rested until they were fit. Once the pattern started it was difficult to stop. Vets had little control over the specific application of the drug because they were dependent on trainers for their livelihood. They had to be accommodating. If Trainer X demanded bute for a sore filly, then Vét Y usually prescribed it, even if he considered it unnecessary or counterindicated, on the assumption that if he didn’t, another vet would. The California Horse Racing Board’s veterinary representative, Dr. Jay Hoop, supervised drug use on the grounds at Golden Gate, but since the Board believed bute to be relatively harmless when given in accordance with certain guidelines, Hoop had little actual say unless these guidelines were transgressed. Even bute’s efficiency had negative attributes, especially for those marginal horses who were always sore and couldn’t move very well without drugs. When they ran on bute, they moved freely, but they couldn’t feel the pain associated with inflammation. They were running uninformed, with their warning systems shut down, and they tended to exert undue and dangerous pressure on sensitive joints and muscles. They ran, in effect, on chemicals when they should’ve been resting or put out to pasture, and it seemed to me that more horses than ever before were breaking down in the doped and struggling manner of poor Ruling Don.