by Jane Smiley
“I am?”
“Sure. It doesn’t matter what happens, you always go back for more. Most of the time you don’t even seem to notice what’s happened. You don’t seem to take anything to heart.”
“I don’t?”
“You’re very reliable.”
“I am?”
“Sure. The motor never stops running, never seems to need a repair or a tune-up. Don’t you realize how unusual that is?”
“No.”
“Well, Buddy, I know you’re not very introspective. That’s why being saved is so hard for you. But I think you’re doing a good job.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I do.” She kissed him on the forehead, the way his mother might have. It was a little disconcerting. You married someone and then ignored her for thirty-some years and then it turned out she had all these opinions about you, and she kissed you like your mother did, and that was okay, in fact it was fine. He sighed. But he still felt disconcerted, so he said, “You think I can get this filly to the Breeders’ Cup?”
“Why not?” she said.
“There are two or three of them. That horse Epic Steam, too. This could be my best year. I could be like Baffert or Lukas,” said Buddy.
“Ah, honey—” she said, but he interrupted her, as always. He said, “Why would I, though? That’s what I don’t understand.”
AS FOR RESIDUAL, early the next morning, attached by a tie to the eye-bolt in her stall, being groomed and tacked up, she was one of those beings in whom all good things combine. The front end of her pedigree was good but not fashionably great. However, back past the five generations provided through the Equine Line by Bloodstock Services, and purely coincidentally, she was inbred many times to St. Simon, many times to Stockwell, many times to the great nineteenth-century mare Pocahontas. Added to that, Baba Yaya had been a lovely broodmare—attentive and experienced, kindly and firm, high up in the hierarchy of the mare herd. And everything all of Residual’s connections thought about her was true. Her owner spent money freely—on supplements, vitamins, massage, all the good things. Leon, whom Buddy tended to call “the idiot assistant trainer,” paid special attention to her, making sure her legs were stone cold every day, watching every step she took, checking her in her stall many times, giving her carrots and apples. She got to like him—whatever his program, her program was to make him her very own human, and she did. So shining red and silky, so kind and large of eye, who could resist her? She was made for love, the way she laid her chin upon his shoulder and looked into his eye. And she did mesh perfectly with her exercise rider, Deedee, with the woman’s easygoing femininity, her light weight, and her soft voice. She gave herself to her exercise rider, and was a pleasure to ride. The jockey enjoyed her, too. What the filly had learned from racing was a simple thing—every time she had drawn upon herself for the extra something that it took to flow through an opening and get in the clear, St. Simon, Stockwell, and Pocahontas had supplied what she needed; anatomically, it was a higher volume of oxygenated blood passing from her large heart into the rest of her body, preventing the buildup of lactic acid in her muscles—but she felt this ease as a larger ease, as the kindness and interest that she sent out returning to her from every direction. Everyone saw it. What they said to each other was that she was easy on herself, but what they meant was that she was easy on everyone. And so, when her groom led her out of her stall, everyone around her stepped forward with a smile.
Which did not mean that she had any plans whatsoever to go to the Breeders’ Cup.
30 / JUSTA QUARTER CRACK
IN REVIEWING HIS LIFE after he developed a painful quarter crack in his right front hoof wall, Justa Bob could find no precedents for either the place he now found himself or the people he found himself with. There was indeed a fence, though it was low and mostly made of vertical slats. The space it ran around was small and contained no grass. Rather, there was a house that people of all sizes went into and out of, there was another small house, containing chickens, and there were several unusual objects that the smaller denizens of the house ran to every day and climbed about on. Justa Bob’s corner of this compound contained his buckets of water and feed and his mound of hay. It was divided from the rest by only some slender boards. He remained inside it more out of courtesy than anything else. Every day, though, a very small old human who appeared to be female came to him four times, fed and watered him. Twice a day, she snapped a shank onto his halter and led him carefully around the compound, scattering the children and chickens if she had to. All of this was quite different from the racetrack and from the studfarm where he was born and the training center where he received his education. Other than this woman, there were two men who attended to his foot. They touched it, looked at it, nodded at it, smiled at it, talked to it, put something into it that was rather soothing for a moment. Justa Bob did not have the sense that they recognized him except insofar as he was attached to his foot.
As odd as it was, Justa Bob had no complaints about this place. The feed was sweet and wholesome, the hay was rich, the water was quite nice, no off tastes, and the old woman always treated him kindly and tactfully. She adhered to a strict schedule, and in gratitude for that, he held off manuring in his water bucket. When the children ran under his feet, as they sometimes did, he stood still, though occasionally he aimed a stray kick at one of those damned chickens.
Lin Jay “the Pisser” Hwang was eager to get the gelding Justa Bob back to Golden Gate, but there was no reason to pay a fifty-dollar-a-day fee to his trainer just to have the horse stand in the stall. You never knew with a quarter crack. It could grow down and disappear, it could linger for as long as the horse lived. There were various techniques, old and new, for treating it, but it was slow, rather like growing out a damaged fingernail or a bad haircut. Even so, you had a chance. The Pisser, who had an affinity for making odds, since he had started out as a math-genius Red Guard handicapper just off the boat from China back in 1983, often tried to specify the odds on a quarter crack or a bowed tendon or a condylar fracture or an ankle chip, but too many horses had defied the odds one way or another. The odds, he finally realized, had to be reserved for a reasonably sized statistical population, say the eight or ten horses in one race. One horse could not help defying the odds.
This horse, Justa Bob, or, as his mother called the animal in Chinese, “The Iron Plum,” had “odds-defier” written all over him. He didn’t look like much, just a brown horse, but after forty-two starts, eight wins, six seconds, four thirds, and a handful of fourths, he seemed unchanged by his experiences—that is, unchangeable by experience. “Good horse” was what his mother said, in her usual oracular fashion. The Pisser was himself fifty-five, so that made his mother near eighty. She knew a good horse when she saw one, and since she herself was unchangeable by experience, she recognized a kinship with the animal. She hadn’t liked one of the Pisser’s claimers this well in years. That was why she took care of the Iron Plum herself. The Pisser was reasonably sure that she was slipping some herbs into his feed. That was okay, too. In fact, everything his mother did was okay with the Pisser.
The Pisser was much changed by experience, even though he had always, since his school days in a small city in Hupei Province, been known as the Pisser. At first he had gained this name because in schoolboy pissing contests he had been able to go twice as long as the other boys. After that, it was just a name. When he got to America, he found out that a “pisser” seemed to be something especially strong or interesting or unpleasant. That was what he aspired to be, and so he translated his name and kept it. Americans were shocked and put off by it, just a little. That was fine with the Pisser. The way he had gotten to the racetrack, Golden Gate Fields and Bay Meadows, was that, when he couldn’t find a job in his field, which was teaching algebra, and, as a result of his experiences in the Cultural Revolution, when he had spent several years planting paddy in Guangzhou Province, he had chosen not to repeat his experiences with menial work, but to tr
y gambling. As a mathematician, he preferred variables to pure chance, and so he had ended up at the racetrack rather than playing the numbers or visiting poker rooms. He probably hadn’t actually lifted his eyes from the Form to look at a horse for the first year or more, but when he did, he liked what he saw. Another thing that he saw was that if you owned and claimed horses you could play both ends, sort of like raising crops and playing the commodities market at the same time, so he always had a couple of horses with a couple of trainers. He was always out in the a.m., watching works, and he went to just about every race. His wife was resigned to all of this, even though she would have preferred to live among other Chinese people in the middle of San Francisco rather than out in Pleasanton with the whites, where they could keep a horse who happened to be on the DL. She herself had a job she liked, selling designer dresses at Saks. Her customers, whom she called “clients,” often spent more for a dress than the Pisser spent for a horse.
The Pisser’s mother had lived a life that the Pisser had witnessed much of but still could not imagine. Waves of history and death had passed over her as rhythmically as surf. The thing about her that the Pisser found the most intriguing was that she had named herself, because her own parents, peasant farmers in Fukien Province, had not valued their seventh daughter enough to do so. His mother’s name, in English, meant Round Pebble, a name unlike that of any Chinese female he had ever heard of. It was possible that she had never seen a horse before the Pisser brought home his first project. Certainly on that occasion she had walked and walked around the animal, a nice filly named Ladidah who won three races for him before being claimed away. Anyway, maybe his mother was four feet six, maybe not. Maybe she liked him, maybe not, maybe she liked his wife, maybe not, maybe she liked his children and grandchildren who came around, maybe not. His mother seemed to have no desires, no wishes, no hopes, no fears, no illnesses, no complaints; in fact, she seemed to be just what she called herself, a round pebble.
———
THE THING the Iron Plum found most intriguing about the Round Pebble was her fragrance. He often put his nose up to her face and snuffled her in. She let him. After her face, he would sometimes work his way down her shoulder, or over her back, or down her chest, or into her hair. She let him. Her hand never came up to touch him or pet him, she never looked at him or spoke to him, but she was available for investigation, and the Iron Plum investigated. She was endlessly fascinating to him. If he wanted to lick the front of her dress, as he did a couple of times, or lick her hands, or even nip her on the cheek, she made no reaction, not even a contained startled reaction of the sort any observant horse could sense. The Iron Plum recognized that the Round Pebble was absolute stillness, a space there in the clutter of the house and the chicken house and the garden and the tools and equipment and vehicles and trailers and noise and chatter and wishes and frustrations and dreams and dissatisfactions. Such a space was unique in his experience, so he snuffled and nosed and probed and pushed her gently with his head and dropped his manure in one spot in the corner of the pen, where it was easy for her to pick it up. Track grooms, perhaps, did not think this sort of choice could be a part of a horse’s repertoire, but, then, there was no track groom like the Round Pebble. When she led him around on his scheduled program, he watched her and smelled her. It was a complete change of pace.
It was the Pisser’s mother who held in check the natural sense of superiority that a dialectical education had given him. He often caught himself looking around at the Americans he knew and saw and marveling at their foolishness, loudness, carelessness. Even their largeness seemed, sometimes, to be somehow their own fault, as if they didn’t know the proper moment to stop doing anything, including to stop growing. And his fellow workers, the bettors at the chosen scene of his operations, seemed even less controlled, if possible, than most. They were always whooping, shouting, lamenting. If they hit a long shot, they thought it was meaningful in terms of their personal glory. If they lost a big race, they screamed as if the jockey, or even the horse, had designed the loss just for them. Even his best American friends, the ones who had shock-proof systems, who never looked once at a horse, who took into account all sorts of extraneous factors, like where the turf rail was placed, and the direction and speed of the wind, even these Americans were tempted regularly by the notion of personal salvation—that the numbers were going to look right at them and take mercy upon them. At such times, the Pisser felt himself fill, molecule by molecule, with contempt, and then he drove home, and looked at his family and his house and his life, and he felt the contempt he had for others surge back over himself a thousandfold. It was then that he looked at his mother, creeping along in front of the horse, the horse staring at her, his ears pricked, his nose just inches from her neck, and he was so mystified by this sight that he decided that he knew nothing after all, and he decamped from the high ground of his contempt, and went in the house and had a glass of water, and felt better.
ON THE DAY when the Iron Plum was to go back to Golden Gate Fields and resume training, the Pisser got up earlier even than usual, way before dawn. The Iron Plum was still asleep in his pen, flat out on his side, his ankles relaxed, his toes almost pointed, his ribs rising in single heaves, his ears flopped. The Pisser had already hitched the trailer to his old truck and set out the horse’s wraps by the time the animal sighed and rolled up onto his breastbone, then put a lazy foot out and levered himself to his feet. The Pisser performed his tasks in orderly quiet, and soon enough the horse was on the trailer, his nose in his hay net, and the trailer ramp was latched up. One last check of the hitch and the lights and the Pisser was ready to go. He picked his cup of coffee up off the railing of the Iron Plum’s pen, and went around and got in the truck. When he opened the door, the overhead light revealed the small figure of his mother in the passenger’s seat. The Pisser contained his astonishment—the Round Pebble had never gone to the track with him before—let out the parking brake, and drove out into the street. He could feel all of his expectations for the day, and they had been utterly routine, slip away. He smiled.
The fact was, when you had your mother settled in one spot, and she did the same things all day, day after day, you didn’t have to think about her much, but when you got her out on the road, driving through the neighborhood and then onto the highway, and you could see that she was looking out the window, everything, from the truck cab itself to the highway on-ramp to the passing semi-trucks, looked big, fast, and amazing. Sometimes the Pisser himself was reminded, especially by his dreams, that he had passed through several universes to get to this moment. It was intimidating in retrospect, especially if one dream held objects or persons from different universes. The Pisser sometimes thought of the old topology problem, the four-color problem, which stated that only four shapes in a two-dimensional space could actually touch each other, and that therefore a mapmaker needed only five colors to make his map. Only in a nightmare, then, could teachers from his childhood, his father’s death during the Great Leap Forward, a beating he got just after leaving his university and going into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, the first man he had ever met who had gone to America and come back (a math colleague at the school where he taught), and his wife in a black suit and high heels, standing in front of a row of dresses, seem to squirm together like snakes, all touching in an impossible way. He had to wake himself up and remember all the steps he had taken in between, every step working out the manageable and credible distance between individual universes. And there was time, too. In dreams, time and distance collapsed, but in life, time and distance were one and the same; walking and waiting, having to make your slow and deliberate way, prevented the special terror of having to be in two or three universes at once.
How much stranger things must be for his mother, sitting there, a cipher, a curl against the door (he checked to be sure it was locked), her hand on the dashboard, her eyes on the road, her feet barely touching the floor under the seat. She wore loose, khaki-gree
n-colored pants, a white shirt with buttons, and a pair of child’s sneakers; her hair, gray, coarse, and thick, made a ball at the nape of her neck. She could not read. She had never been taught to read Chinese, of course, and reading English had been out of the question at her age. He wasn’t really sure how many children she had borne. He and his wife had figured out seven, but there could have been more. Formerly, the Round Pebble had had a fair amount to say, mostly instructions and admonitions, not much about herself or her life, though. But now for years she had said very little. There was an American expression that no American children seemed to abide by, that children should be seen and not heard. That was his mother, in her second childhood—doing this, doing that, busy all day long, always in evidence, but never more than a word or two, and those always in English.
FOR HER PART, the Round Pebble knew perfectly well that Hwang Lin, her son, continued to think of her as his mother, even though she herself had grown out of motherhood years ago. It was like all those other things about her that she had once thought were her, but had left behind—her parents’ daughter, her brothers’ sister, a wife to the man her parents had sold her to, a wife to the man she had chosen on her own after the first one was killed in Hunan Province by some thieves, it was said. A mother a mother a mother a mother, over and over, a woman who swept, a woman who cooked, a woman who carried nightsoil, a woman who minded other women’s children, a woman who changed beds in a hospital and washed the bloody sheets by hand, a woman who planted gardens and killed chickens and bled hogs out and carried water and waited to be told what else she was to do, a woman. All of these things she had shed like husks, one after another. Now she called herself nothing but the Round Pebble. Work found itself done after she had passed through it, but she no longer felt herself work any more than she felt herself breathe. Soon enough, she would shed the final husk. Sometimes she wondered what she might find out then, but wondering was something she also did little of anymore, since it made no difference of any kind what you wondered about, what you wished for, or even what you got. At this point, what the Round Pebble knew was that just about everything there was was larger than she was. Even her great-grandchildren were larger than she was, for the most part. But it wasn’t as if this hadn’t always been true. Her mother, her father, her brothers and sisters, her husbands, her sons and their wives, wars, revolutions, famines, epidemics, the sum of money her parents had sold her for, the work she was put to, the orders she was given, now these horses. You name it. But her feelings about that had changed, too. Largeness had once been frightening to her; now it was not. Now that she wondered nothing, wished for nothing, and cared nothing about what she got, the largeness of everything outside of her carried her along smoothly, the steady deep current of a broad river passing through a spacious valley under a generous sky. She was only a small pebble after all; she required no violent force of nature to lift her to her destination. She sighed as she looked around. The sun rose before her in the windshield of the truck, and she shaded her eyes. When they came to a stoplight, the Iron Plum stamped a bit, and she could feel the truck beneath her shiver with the vibrations. Hwang Lin looked around, but the Round Pebble knew it was only the horse making his music.
