Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “But I—There’s wine in the liquor cabinet.”

  “Throw it out. I’ve got to go. The assholes are accumulating.”

  Mr. Maybrick laughed. Harold W. laughed, too. Harold W. wasn’t a saint, by any means. He had been in AA for thirty-two years, at a meeting almost every day. Mr. Maybrick didn’t know whether to respect that or have contempt for it, but he knew for a fact that Harold W. was a force to be reckoned with, and he thanked him politely, ragelessly, and hung up the phone.

  Now Eileen trotted into the room. It was clear to Mr. Maybrick that the dog was intentionally ignoring him. She clicked over to her bowl and checked it, took a drink from the water dish, circumnavigated the cooking island, and then, casually, leapt onto the granite counter and trotted toward the sink. “Get down, Eileen,” said Mr. Maybrick. It was as if he hadn’t spoken. Eileen cocked her little tan head and peered into the garbage disposal, noting that the stopper was in place. Her little stump of a tail flicked a couple of times, and she seemed to squat down. She stretched her paw toward the stopper, but her legs were too short; she couldn’t reach it. She surveyed the situation for a moment, then went behind the sink, picked up a pinecone that had been hidden there, and jumped down. Only now did she look at Mr. Maybrick. She dropped the pinecone at his slippered feet and backed up three steps, her snapping black gaze boring into his. “I don’t want to do that, Eileen,” he said. Her strategy was to take little steps backward and forward and then spin in a tight circle, gesturing at the pinecone with her nose. But she never made a sound.

  “You’re not a retriever, Eileen, you’re a terrier. Go outside and kill something.”

  Indeed, Eileen was a terrier, and with terrier determination, she resolved that Mr. Maybrick would ultimately throw the pinecone. She continued dancing, every few seconds picking up the pinecone and dropping it again. She was getting cuter and cuter. That was her weapon. Mr. Maybrick considered her a very manipulative animal. He looked away from her and took another sip of his (third) cup of coffee. Now she barked once, and when he looked at her, she went up on her hind legs. She had thighs like a wrestler—she seemed to float. Mr. Maybrick had often thought that a horse as athletic as this worthless dog would get into the Kentucky Derby, then the Breeders’ Cup, win him ten million dollars on the track, and earn him five million a year in the breeding shed for, say, twenty years. That was $110 million; it had happened to others. He had been racing and breeding horses for eleven years, and it had never happened to him. This was just the sort of thing that made you a little resentful, and rightfully so, whatever Harold W. had to say about gratitude. He closed his eyes when he felt himself sliding that way, beginning to count up the millions he had spent running horses and thinking about deserving. With his eyes closed, Al could hear her drop the pinecone rhythmically on the tile, chock chock chock chock, the bass, her little toenails clicking a tune around it. Didn’t he deserve a really big horse? Didn’t he? And then, while his eyes were still closed, dog and pinecone arrived suddenly in his lap, a hard, dense little weight but live, electric. With the shock, he nearly dropped his coffee cup, and as it was, spilled on the counter. “God damn it!” he shouted. Eileen jumped down and trotted away. “Hey! Come here, Eileen,” he said. “Eileen!” Eileen sheared off into the living room, and he realized that he had forgotten to let her out. Mr. Maybrick put his arms up on the counter and laid his head upon them.

  2 / ROUGH STRIFE

  THOUGH IT WASN’T customary for Farley Jones to find himself out with the first set of horses at 5:00 a.m. or so, he didn’t mind it today, for he hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and it was better to be up and about than lying in bed wondering what was going on with everyone who was up and about. Oliver, his assistant trainer, was home with the flu. They were working under lights, and the horses, the best group in Farley’s barn, were all galloping today rather than working. And he was alone in the grandstand at Santa Anita, and it was pleasantly quiet now that the hurly-burly of the Breeders’ Cup was over. The weather was good, too, for all the talk about the imminent arrival of El Niño.

  It wasn’t until his horses were finished and trotting out, a good twenty minutes of blessed solitude, that anyone joined him, and that was Buddy Crawford, another trainer, with his assistant. They came abreast, like a sandstorm, bringing turbulence in with them, and Farley felt his body gear up to flee, then felt his mind resist that impulse. On the one hand, he wasn’t done looking at his horses, and on the other, there was something he had to say to Buddy Crawford that he hadn’t been looking forward to saying. He had sworn he wouldn’t seek an opportunity to say it or say it in front of any other trainers, and that condition now applied, and he was stuck. He put his hand on the railing to hold himself in Buddy’s presence. And then the horse he had been intending to discuss with Buddy trotted by below, grinding his bit and pulling, his ears pinned and his back end bouncing. When he got a hundred yards away, he reared up, but the exercise boy was ready for him and kicked him forward. Buddy leaned out and shouted, “Work five is all!” Then he turned to his assistant, handed him a slip of paper, and said, “Take this to the clockers’ shed.” The kid walked away. Farley’s sense of turbulence increased rather than diminished. “Hey, Buddy,” he said.

  “Hey, Farley. How’s it going, old man?”

  “Not bad.”

  “I hate working in the fucking dark. My old man worked the night shift, did you know that? He hated working in the dark, too, and sleeping in the day. But what the fuck, I don’t sleep a wink anyway.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping very well lately, either.”

  “This is a fucking lifelong thing with me. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I can’t sleep because I worry all the time, or if I worry all the time because I can’t sleep. I can’t stand to be in the fucking bedroom, with the windows shut and with the carpeting and all. The cars going by on the street make me think of horses galloping, and then I got to get up and see what they’re doing. It’s a fucking mess.”

  “You know, I knew a guy who went to a sleep-disorder—”

  “It’s not a fucking sleep disorder. It’s a horse disorder. It’s a too-many-horses-in-the-barn disorder!” He laughed, but not mirthfully. Then he leaned over the railing and shouted to the riders of two horses who were trotting along together, “You two need to break from the gate. Don’t let your filly pass the other one, Gaspar.” Then, to Farley, “Fucking Gaspar. He rides like a fucking girl. If he lets that filly take hold and pass the other one, he’ll have a runaway on his hands. Teach him a fucking lesson.”

  Now Buddy, who was wiry and little, was pacing, and Farley was glancing down the track, hoping and not hoping someone else would come along. He saw the last of his set exit the track down where the path came in.

  Farley could see the horse in question heading toward them. He was a big bay horse with a distinctive white stripe on his face that ran between his eyes for a few inches, then veered off to the right and ended at the horse’s nostril. He said, “How you doing with that colt?”

  Buddy glanced at the animal.

  “He’s training pretty good. Inconsistent. He’s got some speed. Dam’s a Rahy mare. She had some speed, too.”

  “Wedding Ring.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “She was steady as they come.”

  “Yeah, steady hot, Henry says. He had her in his barn before she went back to New York. This one, though, he’s up, he’s down. But he’s got to learn his job and bull through it. That’s the name of the game. Hasn’t raced in three weeks. Vacation’s over.”

  Once Farley had watched his former wife suggest to her sister that she wasn’t giving her one-year-old daughter enough attention. The sister had been looking out the window, and, hearing this rather mildly stated reproach, had turned her head to look at Marlise, whose own two-year-old (with Farley) was babbling at her feet. What really happened was that the sister’s head swung around in surprise with a definite wrecking-ball look to it, and after screaming at
one another for ten minutes, causing both the children to cry, and startling both the husbands out of two years of prospective longevity, the sisters didn’t speak until their children were six and five. And they lived in the same town, and saw each other at nearly every family dinner. It was with this in mind that Farley never offered any suggestions to other trainers about their horses. But now he said, “Buddy, you should have that horse’s stifles X-rayed. I had a filly who moved like that in the hind end, and she—”

  “He moves fine. He had an abscess. That’s why he’s been off. But the gravel erupted two weeks ago.”

  “Maybe, but—”

  “Watch this work.”

  The horse shot past them. You could see the exercise boy gritting his teeth, the horse was pulling so hard. Buddy said, “That horse loves to run, and I’m not going to stand in his way. In fact, I’m going to provide him with an opportunity to do what he loves to do.”

  “Buddy—” But in the end, he couldn’t bring himself to say what he was thinking, which was that the horse was going to break down.

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “These horses are here to race and win. Their owners pay me seventy bucks a day and all they fucking care about is racing and winning. But that’s not even it. The owners don’t care as much about racing and winning as I do. If the fucking horse falls over two steps after the finish line, he’s done his job that he was born into this world to do.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “What? A Thoroughbred is not a natural phenomenon. His mommy and daddy didn’t fall in love, get married, and decide to have a baby. None of these horses would be here if they weren’t meant to race and win. The breeder is their God and the racetrack is their destiny and running is their work, and any other way of looking at it is getting things mixed up, if you ask me. The last thing I want to do is get things mixed up, because, as fucked as I am now, I’d be really fucked then, because I wouldn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Buddy—”

  “Farley, we’ve been training together around this track for twenty-five years or so, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, here’s what I’ve noticed about you. You’re smart. They all say that about you, Farley’s smart. Sometimes he’s too smart, but he’s always smart. I ain’t smart, if you’ll pardon my English. If I’m going to get winners, it isn’t going to be by being smart, it’s going to be by sticking to what I know. That’s how smart I am, exactly. I’m smart enough to know how to get by without being smart.”

  “Anyone can learn—”

  “Can they? You had that colt Rough Strife, remember him? You had him around here for a year and a half. He was dumb as a post, wasn’t he? He’s a legend. He fell down at the quarter pole in his first race, and every start after that, he shied at the quarter pole. He couldn’t learn not to. Lots of them can, but he couldn’t.”

  “Just get his stifles—”

  “I don’t want to know about it. He’s ready to run. As long as he tells me he wants to run, I’m going to run him.” Buddy leaned over the railing and shouted, “Gaspar, you were okay this time, so I’m going to put you on another crazy one. I think you’re learning something!” And he turned and marched out of the grandstand. In the ensuing lull, Farley realized that his own second set were discreetly milling about, awaiting instructions. He sighed.

  BY WEDNESDAY, Farley was back to normal, sleepwise, and Oliver was back to normal, flu-wise, so Farley didn’t get to the grandstand until dawn was breaking over Pasadena. There were two or three trainers standing about, and Farley joined in the joking. Henry, who was over seventy but under eighty-five, said, “You know, there were these two veterinary surgeons who shall remain nameless, but you know them, golfing up there at Pebble Beach, before the Japs bought the place. They were on the third hole, there, in the woods, and the guy from around here says to the guy from Kentucky, ‘See that tree down there with that knothole about four feet from the ground?’

  “ ‘Yeah,’ says the other one.

  “ ‘This is the kind of surgeon I am. There’s an owl in that tree, and I’m going to take these surgical instruments I got in my golf bag, and I’m going to remove that owl’s tonsils without waking him up.’

  “ ‘Nah,’ says the other surgeon.

  “But the guy goes down there, leans into the knothole, and comes back ten minutes later. He’s got these two tiny little pink things in his hand, and sure enough, they look like tonsils.

  “So they each take another shot, and the surgeon from Kentucky says, ‘Gimme those instruments. I’m such a good surgeon that I’m gonna go down there and remove that owl’s balls without him waking up.’ So he heads down to the tree, leans in, comes back ten minutes later. He’s got two tiny red things in his hand, and he says, ‘Sleeping like a baby.’ So the California guy says, ‘You win,’ and they finish their round.

  “Well, around dusk the owl wakes up, and he goes out flying around for a while, and he comes over to a friend’s tree, and lands, and they’re sitting there talking, and he says, ‘You know, there’s something funny going on over there on the third hole. Stay away from there is my advice. I woke up tonight, and I can’t hoot worth a fuck or fuck worth a hoot.’ ”

  Everyone laughed and, after a while, headed back to the barns, except Farley and Henry. Henry looked up at Farley. He said, “So—Buddy Crawford says you broke that horse of his down.”

  “I did hear that colt of his broke down Saturday, but all I did was—”

  “Shouldn’ta done even that.”

  “Even what?”

  “Even make a suggestion, or a comment, or whatever.”

  “The horse was moving just like a filly I had. I knew for sure—”

  “Shoulda kept your mouth shut. Buddy says you jinxed it for him.”

  “Henry, that’s ridi—”

  “You may think so, Farley, and I may think so. I may. I’m not saying I do. But this is a racetrack, Farley. Jinxes, curses, luck, superstitions, evil eyes—this is where they live.”

  “Breakdowns have causes, like stress fractures and toegrabs and bad conditioning.”

  “They do. But you tangled yourself in this one.”

  “I was right, is all.”

  “That’s an even worse mistake, to be right about another man’s horse.” Henry shook his head, then he said, “I know something’s up with you, boy. You haven’t had such a good year this year. Those come and go.”

  “I know that. That’s not—”

  “Listen to me, I’ll tell you something. I’ve worked all over California, here and up north and at the fairs. You know I saw Phar Lap? Down at Agua Caliente. Right there is what I’m getting at. The things I’ve seen men do to horses made me believe in sin, original and every other kind. And when I die, and that isn’t so far away now, I expect to be punished for the sins I looked upon but didn’t stop. But what I’m telling you is, that’s the wages of a life at the track. You don’t say everything you know.”

  Farley knew that this was true. Henry shook his head, then turned and walked away.

  3 / IF WISHES WERE HORSES

  THE REASON Tiffany Morse left her purse on the bench in front of the clothes dryer in the Spankee Yankee Laundromat in Lowell, Massachusetts, was that she had to run out the door into the dank November cold to catch her niece Iona, and in the panic of that, she forgot where her purse was. Then she had to make Iona look at her and understand that she was not to ever ever ever go outside without Tiffany ever again, but of course, Iona was too young to understand that—she was only three. Fast, though. Anyway, when she came back to dryer number four (“John Adams”—all the dryers were named after famous Massachusetts politicians, right down to “Michael Dukakis,” number sixteen), her purse was open and her money was gone. The Laundromat was empty, too. The worst thing was that she hadn’t fed any quarters into the dryer yet, and her wet clothes were sitting inside in a lump with the door open. It actually would have been easier i
f the thief had stolen the clothes as well as the money, since now she had to cart all those wet things back to her apartment and try to corral Iona, too, but he hadn’t. Tiffany could not say that she was having a good day. She certainly could not say that.

  But Tiffany didn’t really require good days anymore. She was always willing to settle for a good morning, or even a good hour. And she and Iona had had a good hour just that evening, before coming out to the Laundromat. What happened was, Tiffany picked Iona up at her mother’s on her way home from work because she had agreed to take Iona for the night while her mother went to choir practice and then out with some of the other choir members, and her mother had been making pork stew, and when she got there, tired and hungry, her mother had been in a good mood, and had sat her down at the table and given her a big plateful. Iona had been a good girl, so there had been no ill-tempered references to Iona’s father, Tiffany’s brother, Roland, who was up to no good in Ohio somewhere, or maybe Texas. The stew had lots of potatoes and carrots in it, and nice chunks of pork. In the larger war that was Tiffany’s relationship with her mother, they had made a truce. The next thing that happened was that, when Tiffany got home, she saw that the Christmas cactus in her window was starting to bloom. Between them, the stew and the flowers made her feel good enough to endure the Spankee Yankee, but now, in retrospect, she saw that they had been bad, or at least false omens, because if she hadn’t had that good hour she would have stayed home watching TV, and would not have lost her money and had to hang all her wet clothes around the apartment. By the time she did that, and got Iona to bed on the couch (never an easy task), she was exhausted and even more blue than she’d been when she first discovered the money missing.

  It was more than the money, it was what the theft meant—that you couldn’t afford to be happy, because being happy made you do things that then ended in greater unhappiness than you had been feeling before you got happy. Everyone knew that that’s the way it was with love and sex and men—the happier you were when you fell in love, the more crushed you would be when it didn’t work out—but what was even more depressing was that that was the way it was with simple things like pork stew and flowers. The whole depressing idea made your life pretty impossible, especially since all the time you were telling your mom that (1) things were fine and (2) everything was going to be all right. Tiffany had always told herself and her mother that she wasn’t going to end up where her mother had—always saying things like “Don’t count on that,” and “There’s many a slip ’tween the cup and the lip” (an assertion that everyday experience showed to be patently untrue) and “If wishes were horses,” a phrase of her mother’s that made no sense at all.