Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  All this transpired in less than fifteen seconds, and when the horses disappeared behind the toteboard Pichi was running ninth, far back of Minnie B., who’d taken the lead. The next quarter mile was invisible to us, and the things around me took on a dreamlike quality. It was like being in a movie theater when the sound track suddenly cuts off. I became aware of my own breathing and the person breathing next to me, of life outside the frame. The platform seemed to wobble beneath my feet and I was hyperconscious of the fans in the grandstand behind me. I turned to look and saw them as molecules in a pattern, their bright shirts and blouses chromosomal beads. Mrs. Sandomir brought me back by touching my arm. She was very animated, disturbed by what she couldn’t see, and she walked back and forth twisting a handkerchief between her fingers and asking the same question over and over again, “Where the hell is Pichi?” I think she wanted to be assured of a just outcome, but I had no such assurances to give. When the horses came into the stretch, I couldn’t even find Pichi. But Alan could. He took Mrs. Sandomir by the shoulders and pointed her in the right direction.

  “Here she comes,” he said. “She’s on the outside.”

  Pichi made the most inelegant stretch run I’d ever seen. She went far too wide on the turn, awkwardly changing leads, but Colaneri spoke to her and she picked up the pace, passing horses at the back of the pack. She passed Breeze Ahead and Dancing Senorita and Pilfered Purse, all nags of little talent. For a minute it looked as if she would challenge the leaders, but when Colaneri hit her she lugged in. Colaneri was amazed. He was whipping her left-handed, just as Headley had told him to do, but instead of keeping her off the rail, the stroking seemed to be driving her toward it. Either she was rebelling against being hit or her inside bias was simply too strong to correct. The lugging was costing her dearly, she was losing ground. I folded my program in half and looked away, and then damned if she didn’t start moving again, jump after jump, passing My Masai and drawing close to Minnie B. She gained another stride, and with fifty yards left pushed forward a little more and hooked Minnie B. head to head. Colaneri hit her and she jumped, and he hit her again at the wire, and she jumped again and seemed to pass through the photoelectric beam a split second ahead.

  Immediately the PHOTO sign went up on the toteboard.

  “Did she win?” asked Mrs. Sandomir.

  “I think so,” I said. “It looked like she got up on the last jump.”

  Alan thought she’d got up, too, and so did his girl friend, but none of us could be sure. It was a commonplace around the track that the camera saw things from a special angle, some point outside history, and the evidence captured on the photographic plate often diverged considerably from what you thought you’d observed. Horses materialized out of ectoplasm, and when you looked you saw their noses or heads touching the line, making a shambles of reality. So we waited silently for the verdict. Colaneri brought Pichi back, shook his whip at the stewards to let them know he had no complaints, and dismounted. Bo unstrapped the saddle and gave it to him, and he stepped onto the scales. I was watching Bo. A cigarette burned between his lips, and he led Pichi around in circles, cooling her out. If she won, his work would acquire a momentary significance. The care he’d lavished on her sore legs and sorry disposition would seem important, not just part of his job. You could tell him the care mattered even if she didn’t win, but I don’t think he would’ve believed it. He’d been on the backstretch too long and its singular sense of payoff was inculcated in him by now. But the matter was soon resolved, anyway. The photo tube came whistling down from the grandstand to the placing judges in the paddock, and the photo inside it showed clearly that Pichi had won. She had won by a neck and paid $18.80, and everybody on the platform went wild. Alan hugged his girl and said Gregory Sandomir would freak out when he heard the news, and the little girl Sandy ran from rail to rail participating in a joy she didn’t quite understand. Tears rolled out from under Mary Sandomir’s big sunglasses and down her cheeks, and she squeezed my arm tightly and wouldn’t let go.

  IV

  After the race I went back to the barn to see how Pichi was reacting to her changed condition. She looked the same to me. She was on the hotwalker, going round, apparently indifferent, and Bo stood off to the side muttering to himself. He had his work clothes on again and was using a hose to water down the dust.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Well, she did it.” A smile almost got him, but he ducked it just in time.

  “She sure did.”

  “Yeah, she sure did do it.”

  “She looked terrific in the stretch.”

  “I thought she might do it but I wasn’t sure. Colaneri, he give her a good ride.”

  “You know,” I said, “that’s the first time I didn’t bet on her.”

  Bo shut off the water. “I didn’t bet on her, either.”

  “I was going to bet her. Hell, I was going to bet her across the board.”

  “I was going to bet her, too,” Bo said, “but some son-of-a-bitch followed me to the window. They do that, some bastards, wait for you to come out of the paddock and see if you’re going to bet. Everybody around here wants something for nothing.”

  I watched Pichi circling. Tesio said that horses left to their own devices will always walk a perfect circle, never an oval, because of the centers of balance in their ears.

  “Well,” Bo said, “I got all these stalls to clean.” He moved inside and pulled the barn door closed behind him.

  V

  Much later that night I was sitting in the Home Stretch, high on Pichi’s victory, staring at the mingled images of animals and humans on the back bar wall. Men and women with horses, horses with men and women. It had never struck me before how accurately the pictures reflected the composition of the backstretch. The proportions were almost exactly right, with the humans just slightly dominant. I remembered the recalcitrant mares of Windsor and I would’ve bet anybody in the joint that studs had some equally devious means of withholding their blessing, a technique for thinning out their sperm. Thoroughbreds were tricky, that much I had learned. They liked secrets, and even when boxed in and broken they retained a little wildness deep inside. Or maybe this was only their sixth sense, a few frames of E. caballus galloping across Mongolia spliced inextricably into the genetic film. They wouldn’t run to form, no matter how you coaxed them, and in a world increasingly controlled and uniform this was exciting. When you picked a winner, especially at a price, you were buying back a little of your own wildness, cutting a wound into the smothering fabric of domesticity. We were starved, I thought, for contact with an animal other and experienced the lack as a form of sensory deprivation, a diminishment. The corporate fiction into which we’d fallen denied us our passions, and we were hurting because of it.

  I had another bourbon and thought how thoroughbreds took us away. In their moment of running they had wings. When I was in touch with them, I felt the same way I felt on the river when I hooked a steelhead and it seemed to fire every neuron in my body, transforming me into one long synapse, bits of energy blowing apart. Why did fish so often strike your bait or fly when you were thinking about something else, lips, a bird, the moon, when you weren’t “concentrating”? After the strike there was always a shock of recognition, learning again that water was a world, and of electricity, intercepting a charge in the flow. Whenever I beached a steelhead I looked at my line in wonder. It looked flimsy, and the knot attaching it to my hook was tiny and not very strong. All connections ever tenuous. I knew what was happening then. I was letting go of the sadness, letting go of my mother. Living and dying, winning and losing: I sat on the stool and drank my whiskey, suddenly permeated by all the emotions I’d been blocking out. Nothing abides; no cause for alarm.

  Again I looked at the photos and thought how thoroughbreds resisted. In holding back that ounce of wildness they kept their dignity, and more than any quality of the flesh this made them beautiful. But I didn’t know how long they could survive, not when fac
ed with so many obstacles. In some sense our own survival was dependent on a continued mingling of the images, caring for what was sensate but inarticulate, or articulate only in ways we chose not to consider as speech. This was no way to end it, though, not after Pichi had made everything possible again, so I bought another bourbon and joined a groom down the bar who was talking to his crème de menthe, and together we discussed the horses and how great it was when one of them suddenly came alive and surprised everybody by winning a race.

  VI

  Pichi’s win closed down my accounts. Of my initial five hundred dollars I had three hundred sixty-four dollars left. The seventh week was my undoing. Maybe the tactical changes I made (fewer bets but of greater magnitude, distributed among topflight trainers and stock) might have paid off over a longer period, but in the short run they proved devastating. I just couldn’t accept the discipline imposed by such a limited scope. For five or six races, I’d sit tight, waiting for an opportunity to play, but if it didn’t come I’d revert to the craziness of the first week and bet a large sum on an ill-considered filly and soon thereafter mark down a loss. I cashed a few tickets when I stayed within my self-imposed boundaries, but the truth was, win or lose, I didn’t care any more. I was tired of the goddam Form and bored stiff with statistics. On the sixth of June I bought a newspaper and read the front page first. This was a signal event, the end of a flirtation.

  Sometimes as I sat watching I wondered about the immemorial question of the track: Could the races be beaten? The answer was tough to swallow: Yes, they could be, but never by me. I lacked the qualities necessary for success—dedication to the profit motive, a high tolerance for the drudgery of daily handicapping and record-keeping, a cold, emotionless eye, a tightly controlled system, an accountant’s approach to cash flow, and the cutthroat managerial attitude of a Harvard Business School grad. The few winners I knew weren’t casual racegoers. More accurately, they worked for the track. Golden Gate Fields was their place of business and they reported every day because they couldn’t get the edge they needed by hanging around a booking joint. They had to look over the horses personally, incorporate late scratches and jockey changes into their calculations, and keep tabs on the changing toteboard odds. Handicapping was their job, along with attending the races, and most of the time they enjoyed it no more than the average worker enjoyed his nine-to-fiver. And they were under considerable pressure, too; they earned no salary if they performed their job badly. Perhaps there were winners around for whom the excitement never died, but I’m sure they were in the minority. Besides, you could find blithe souls in any line of work, happy garbagemen, whistling dentists.

  As for me, I was a loser, certainly not pleased with the label but not dismayed by it, either. The most important wager I’d made had paid off; the final cash outcome was not as significant. What I’d gotten from the track was pretty much what I’d deserved, conditioned in part by a desire to indulge in the precarious notion (a form of innocence? of losing?) that there was more to life than met the eye.

  VII

  That should be the end of my handicapping chronicle, but it isn’t. Losers walking around with money in their pockets are always dangerous, not to be trusted. Some horse always reaches out and grabs them. In my case it was Plumb Dumb Bandit, sixth race, June 8, five furlongs on the turf. There was something about the way she looked, the feeling I got as she crossed over the main track and planted her hoofs confidently on the turf course. Confidently? How could I be falling into that trap again? On the other hand, how could the mare be going off at thirteen to one? She had three thirds in four starts, was five years old and Kentucky-bred; I was captured by the heartwarming suspicion that if her entire racing history were spread out before me, instead of just the most recent portion given in the Form, I’d discover in her past a victory or two on the grass. Yes, I was convinced she was a turf horse (anyone could see it), and I made my bet and watched her move confidently from seventh to first to take the race, winning by an indisputable length and returning $26.80. I won’t say how much I collected, but it brought me close to even again, or maybe a little better, which meant, of course, that I had to make further bets to break the stalemate. The process is endless, I thought happily, endless.

  VIII

  On June 10, the last day of the meet, I left Golden Gate after the third race, drove directly to Spenger’s, and took a seat in front of the wall-size TV to watch the Belmont Stakes. It seemed improbable that the race would be as good as the ones that had come before it, but it was, every bit as good, with Affirmed and Alydar hooked again, head to head all down the stretch, their movements, too, a kind of process, the margin between them so slim that the question of “winning” could not be resolved in any final sense. The day was Affirmed’s once again, but ten minutes earlier or later it might have been Alydar’s. The scale on which they had to be viewed invalidated the concept of competition; Michelangelo was not “better” than Leonardo.

  After the race I couldn’t pull myself away. I sat at the bar and watched the dinner crowd begin to fill the room, mostly Berkeley students who’d brought along parents or relatives in town for commencement. Everybody was on their best behavior, but little bouts of embarrassment surfaced here and there, a student wondered how his father had gotten so small or when his mother had become so foolish, and parents caught up in speculations about their children’s sexuality and drug preferences.

  About seven o’clock Jake Battles and some friends wandered in. They’d been celebrating the end of Tanforan somewhere else and they were extremely happy. As they settled in around a big circular table to wait for a table in the dining room, I cataloged the company in my notebook: Battles in his familiar red cardigan, his groom in a sport coat and cowboy hat, a ponygirl whose skin was chafed pink from six months of all-weather riding, a large puzzled woman in a heavy camel’s hair coat, a young man dressed like a lumberjack, two pretty young women in thrift-shop glad rags, their cheeks rouged and flowery barrettes in their hair, and last, a stocky rubicund man who kept running back and forth to the oyster bar and depositing plates of oysters and clams on the table. His offerings were ignored. The oysters just sat there being luminescent. In a while “Battles, party of eight,” came over the loudspeaker, but nobody at the table responded, nor did they move when the call was repeated five minutes later. The third time I heard it, I finished my bourbon and went out the door.

  IX

  The summer was hot and dry, as it always is where I live, and the winter rains came late. The fishing was terrible. Old-timers said it was the worst season they could remember. I caught only two steelhead and one of them, a little male, was spent and bright red. When people asked me why the fishing was so bad, I told them the steelhead could feel the dam being built, and with it the message of extinction, although there were more realistic factors involved, including high muddy water and some voracious sea lions at the river mouth.

  Golden Gate opened in late January, and I followed the action from a distance. Management had renovated the racing strip, banking it in accordance with the 1947 blueprints and blending in top sand, redwood sawdust, and mushroom compost to give it bounce, but it wasn’t holding up well under the rains. Two of the finest horses on the grounds, Captain Don and Boy Tike, broke down, and one morning eleven two-year-olds working in company slipped and fell in the mud. Halfway through the meet there was a stupendous accident right in the middle of the strip, with horses sprawled flat and two riders thrown and almost killed. The footage was so graphic that Bay Area TV stations showed it on both evening and late news programs. When horsemen refused to race the next day, the Pacific Association closed down for twenty-four hours to make the necessary repairs.

  The Tanforan Association fared no better. Though the rains had stopped by April, pari-mutuel clerks went on strike when automatic ticket-selling equipment was introduced into the parimutuels department, costing the union some jobs. Management hired scabs to replace them, but fans were reluctant to cross the picket lines and
instead took in the quarter-horse races at Bay Meadows. Attendance dropped radically, down by almost fifty percent. When the clerks signed a new contract and returned to work in mid-May, the association tried to recoup some of its losses by cutting back on the size of purses being awarded, lopping three thousand dollars from an allowance race, twenty thousand for a handicap. Everybody felt the pinch, and during the last third of the meet, thousand-dollar exactas were as common as pollen in the breeze.

  X

  But in accordance with Tesio’s law, I was feeling better, restored if not renewed. I borrowed a device from the shield Lorenzo had carried in his betrothal ceremony, that of a bay tree half dead, half green, pictured above the motto, The spring returns. It was a good spring, too, rich with promise. In my mind the dying and the cancer had become separated, almost discrete, the one a natural process of organic decay, the other a cultural hastening of that process. Resistance was the key, holding on to the model, the waves of the brain reaching out like the legs of a Devonian creature scrambling up from the sea and onto the land. Slow determined extensions toward prosperity in the human heart; what was any renaissance but a sudden bias in favor of hope?

  Souvenirs of Golden Gate were scattered around the trailer, wads of losing tickets, cardboard boxes full of Forms, a few photos of horses and jockeys. Ted’s globe rested on a table, intransigently circumscribed. I thought what a paltry representation it made of what we knew. Walter Pater once said of Pico’s world that it was “bounded by actual crystal walls, and a material firmament; it was like a painted toy,” and I could hear if I tried the sound of the walls being shattered, by Columbus first, then Copernicus. But the walls were always being shattered, breaking open here and there, the globe mapped and remapped. More often than ever I was happy just to ford the river and climb the hills of the sheep ranch. Someday the model would obtain, the dam would silt up, the cardboard houses would be blown away, and the steelhead would return to the river in great numbers, or to another river of equal importance. Whether or not I saw them return no longer concerned me. They would return. Just this then, to make every world the New World, to approach it with an explorer’s sense of wonder.