Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  The Pisser was glad to get to the track, where everything was familiar business. For sheer activity, you couldn’t beat the backside of a racetrack at seven in the morning. Horses looked over the doors of their stalls. Other horses cooled out on their walkers. Others were being mounted and ridden out to the track. Still others, steaming in the sunlight, were being sponged and scraped. No horse was ugly on the backside. All lifted their heads, turned their bodies, swished their tails, pricked their ears, tossed their manes in an endless series of graceful gestures. The Pisser had seen lots of horses in his day, of all breeds and ages. Horses in general, he felt, were good. But Thoroughbreds in general, he felt, were more than good. Beauty flowed through their bodies like a steady ocean breeze, sometimes seeming, if he was in the mood, to pass from one to another in an exchange of energy that netted them all together, and all their humans with them, their genetic tie become nearly visible to the naked eye as the body electric, a single body electric repeated everywhere you turned your head. Those were good days. But driving with his mother had filled him with longing, made him think how little he could do for her. If she wanted something, he would surely give it to her, but it didn’t do a bit of good to ask. There was never anything she wanted. He had come along too late to give her anything, and it made him, just now, feel useless. He drove the trailer carefully to Barn C, where his trainer was already mounted to go out with his third set. That was okay, though. The Pisser knew what to do, and the stall was bedded deep in yellow straw. The horse’s hay net was hanging by the door.

  The horses left for their exercise, and the Pisser got out of his truck. He closed the door carefully and went around to the trailer. He opened the side doors and untied the gelding, then went around to the back and let down the ramp. The Iron Plum stood calmly until the Pisser said, “Okay, fella.” Then the Iron Plum stepped carefully backward, his hooves feeling for the ramp. The Pisser reached for the leadshank, but there was his mother, before him, her hand scooping it delicately from his. The horse looked around.

  HERE HE WAS AGAIN, Justa Bob, justa racehorse. Justa Bob flared his nostrils and snorted in the familiar smells, yes. Pivoted his ears like satellite dishes, yes. Turned his head this way and that to focus his big eyes on the scene he was born to see, yes. His skin shivered over his muscles as if flies were landing on him, but it wasn’t only the excitement. He hadn’t seen another horse in a long time, and now he was among them, signals flying everywhere. He whinnied a single loud greeting, and other whinnies answered him immediately, Hello, hello, hello, I’m here, I’m here, too, hello, a ripple of whinnies spreading from Barn C out over the backside, until, far away, they had nothing to do with Justa Bob at all, only to do with Hello, I am here, where are you, I’m here, too.

  WHILE HIS MOTHER held the horse, the Pisser squatted beneath him and unwrapped his legs, throwing the wraps off to the side. Then he ran his hands down where the wraps had been. Cool and tight. The quarter crack had grown out nicely, ready for a patch, and the coronary band was smooth and whole. He was a stable system, this Justa Bob horse. Not the fastest thing in the world, or the prettiest, but his architecture was damn good. The foundation sat square under the rest of him, and the rest of him moved squarely upon the foundation. He was indeed a plum, and he was indeed made of iron. The Pisser said, “Okay, Ma. Let’s walk him around a little, then put him in his stall.”

  He did not take the horse away from her, as he was tempted to do. It wasn’t so easy to walk around here on the backside of Golden Gate. Conditions were crowded, and the footing was uneven. All he needed at this point was to see his child-mother stumble and fall underneath the horse, even for the horse to step on her. As little as she looked at home, she looked even littler here, smaller than the smallest jockey. And the horse was clearly excited to be back, arching his neck, picking up his feet. So the Pisser turned away and busied himself with cleaning out and closing up the trailer so as not to interfere, so as not to let her see that he had tears in his eyes. His mother was passing through his life. The speed of her passage was accelerating. He had nothing to give her, no going-away present. All he could do was watch her for a moment, watch her with that horse, who, for all the distractions around him, still followed the Round Pebble attentively, his nose inches behind her neck, his ears pricked, his steps careful. Oddest thing he ever saw.

  THE ROUND PEBBLE led the Iron Plum into his stall and turned him around so that he was facing outward. She reached up and undid the buckle of his halter and slipped it off his head. Meanwhile, the Pisser adjusted the animal’s blanket. The groom would come around about noon and wrap the horse’s legs for the night. Light training would begin tomorrow. If they were lucky, the horse would run again in six or eight weeks. Whatever, thought the Pisser. His mother preceded him out of the stall, and after he did the latch, he paused to give the horse a piece of carrot that he had in his pocket. His mother did not look back. It was impossible to tell if she felt affection for the horse. She headed down the shedrow. The horse looked after her, his ears as far forward as a horse’s ears could be. And then he started in again, whinnying and whinnying. He beat his knees against the stall door, turned and plunged and whinnied and turned and plunged. The Round Pebble did not look back. The horse’s distress grew. The Round Pebble opened the door of the truck and got in, then shut the door. The Iron Plum watched, whinnied again. The Pisser had never seen anything like it. He shook his head, then he closed the top half of Justa Bob’s stall door and latched it, then he himself walked to the truck. Sometimes you just had to leave a horse in the dark in his stall to figure it out and get over it.

  JUNE

  31 / A BAD FILLY

  FARLEY WAS STANDING in the grandstand, staring out at the training track, watching Arturo attempt to pony Froney’s Sis. The plan had been to trot twice around the six-furlong track, then gallop once, then bring her back and cool her out. She had ponied the day before and the day before that and the day before that. Before that, one of the hot walkers had walked her all over the backside, the way he liked to do with all of them when they first came in. She had seemed ready to be ponied, but she had gotten less ready as she went along. Now she didn’t seem able to learn anything, and every day was worse. She bucked and reared and kicked out, no matter how tightly Arturo held her to the pony. Every horse that came near her frightened her. When she got back to the barn, she would be pouring with sweat and quivering.

  Arturo was getting annoyed.

  The pony was getting annoyed.

  Farley was getting interested. One of Neil Drysdale’s two-year-olds came up on the filly’s right, not close at all, and the filly twisted her head around to see him, then reared up and pulled away, like a kid at the movies who insists on looking at the monster and then screams bloody murder. Arturo urged the pony, hoping to pull the filly forward, out of her panic and into the idea of running, but the filly dug in her back heels and threw her head up.

  Oh, she was a bad filly.

  Farley called out, “Just walk her, Arturo. She’s panicking.” He saw Arturo nod, and they came down to the walk and moved over way to the outside.

  She was a bad filly and a filly of obscure breeding, a common glass bead on the Tompkins string of pearls. At best she would run in allowance company and make Mr. Tompkins a few tens of thousands of dollars that would go directly to the IRS. More likely, if she even made it to the races, she would make it as a claimer.

  Given her mental problems, she would be time-consuming and costly to train.

  Her dam had died, so even the motive of improving her dam’s produce record was out. There was no percentage in wasting his time on this one.

  But she was interesting.

  Arturo and the pony and the filly left the track and headed back to the barn.

  Farley regarded them, stroking his beard, as he followed them. “Hey,” he said to Ron Ellis. “Hey,” he said to Mel Stute. “Hey, hey,” he said to Neil Drysdale. “Hey, man,” he said to Bobby Frankel. But he didn’t see any of
them, winners all. He was warming to something he always found it interesting to warm to, which was a lost cause, a futile attempt, a Zen koan—how do you train a useless animal to perform a useless function?

  He was smiling.

  When he got back to the barn, Arturo said, “I don want to pony this filly anymore. She making me mad, boss. I don like to be mad aroun the horses.”

  “We’ll think of something else, Arturo.”

  AT 6:00 A.M., Joy drove her old Ford Ranger into the foaling complex to see if anything had happened in the night. It was the beginning of June; 176 foals had been born and only a few were still circling the farm, as it were, waiting to come in for a landing.

  She walked down the barn aisle. It was bright day now, time to let out the mares whose foals were old enough and strong enough to frisk about in a space larger than a stall.

  Jose helped her lead out the mares; Jorge walked along with the foals, one arm around their rumps underneath their tiny twitching tails, the other arm around their chests.

  When they were done with that, she saw a van in the courtyard bringing a mare to be foaled out and then bred to a Tompkins stallion. Zora, one of the broodmare handlers, was at the top of the ramp. She said, “You better come look.”

  The mare in the van was standing with her legs spread apart and her head down. She was covered with sweat and hugely in foal. She was groaning. Zora waved her papers in the air. She said, “She’s due in a week. She seems exhausted. I can’t believe they shipped her this late, and in this weather.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  The driver said, “I picked her up in Temecula.” Then he said, “I had to stop to sleep, you know.”

  “When did she get on the van?”

  “About three yesterday afternoon.”

  “Did you check on her at all on the way here?”

  “Well, the other drivers out sick?”

  “We’ve got to get her off the van,” said Zora, “and into a foaling stall. I called the vet.”

  Joy went to the mare’s head and pinched a fold of skin at the base of her neck, where it met the shoulder. The fold stayed pinched. Joy said, “She’s very dehydrated.” She lifted the mare’s upper lip and pressed her finger against the mare’s gum. It seemed to take forever for the blood to come back into the white circle her finger left. Joy said, “And she might be shocking.”

  The driver said, “I guess I slept a little too long. I had this long trip the other night, from—”

  “Well,” said Joy, as she led the mare off the van, “the owner shouldn’t have waited this long to ship her, and you shouldn’t have fallen asleep, and it just all came together, so let’s get her walking here and give her some fluids.”

  Zora went into the barn and came out with a light fly sheet, and Joy led the mare to a bucket of water. The mare took only a sip. Joy said, “Oh, Mommy. I am so sorry.” Inside that van, alone for fifteen hours, the mare might have wanted to pace, and had become distressed because she was tied. She might have wanted to roll, sensing perhaps that the foal was malpositioned. Joy handed the leadrope to Zora and took the papers. The mare was by Hoist the Flag, a great broodmare sire, and was in foal to Avenue of Flags, an expensive California sire. There was no reason for the owner to have been careless, but he had been.

  NOW IT WAS almost noon. Everyone had left. The grooms had gone to eat. Dunya, Farley’s bookkeeper, had gone out for her daily run. All phones were silent. All the owners were busy elsewhere in the world making money hand over fist. Farley had noted down the results of the day’s training and put his paperwork in his briefcase. Only FitzGerald, the acupuncturist, was around—down at the end of the aisle, working on the High Brite colt. All up and down the aisles, horses were eating, dozing, sleeping. Even the pig, in the last stall at the end of the shedrow, was sleeping. Farley closed his office door and walked down to Froney’s Sis. She was facing the back corner of the stall. He said, “Hey, girl. Turn around and look at me.” She ignored him. He lowered his voice and clucked to her. She cocked one ear backward. He said, “Come on, girlie. Things aren’t so bad out here. You’ll like it if you try it.” He shook her hay net and she turned her head. But she turned it away again. He pulled a carrot out of his pocket and snapped it in two. At the sound, the filly turned around, stepped over to him, took a piece of the carrot between her lips. Then she did the hoped-for thing. She looked for another, ears up, neck arched. He put another piece between her lips and stroked her cheek, then her chin. When she had finished the carrot, he took the halter with its attached shank off the hook beside the stall and slipped it over her head, then he folded back the stall guard and led the filly out. “Come on, sweetie,” he said, “let’s just go for a walk.”

  THE DISTRESSED MARE was now standing in a stall. She had gotten banamine to relieve her pain and lower her temperature (which had been about 103), and mineral oil down her nostril into her belly to prevent any possible colic. Now she was getting intravenous fluids. At this very moment, Joy was watching her urinate, a good sign, though the urine was still a little dark. Most important, she looked more comfortable and relaxed. Joy had groomed her a bit, so she was clean and dry, no longer caked with sweat. Maybe, Joy sometimes thought, that was the most important thing, just the attention, just the conversation and the stroking. You always underestimated, didn’t you, how it hurt a horse to feel lonely and isolated.

  The foal, the vet said, was fine—strong heartbeat and big, it looked like.

  A horse didn’t like to be by herself year after year, with only her stuff around, thinking her isolated thoughts. A horse didn’t like to have only one friend. A horse didn’t like never to be touched—nibbled over the withers and nipped on the cheek. A horse didn’t like to go for months without entwining her neck around the neck of a friend. A horse didn’t like to graze alone day after day, with no one to switch the flies off her chest for her. A horse didn’t like to stand off in the corner of the pasture by herself, looking at the others and wishing to be with them but afraid of it. That sort of behavior made a horse think too much, ponder every decision too carefully.

  Now Joy was sweating. The sun was well up over the Central Valley and her eyes were beginning to hurt. Probably it was going to be so hot today that it would be inhumane to ride Mr. T., her greatest joy. She went into the office to find her sunglasses.

  The flyer in Joy’s box read, “Tompkins Equine Employees! Sign up now! Last trip of the spring! Mr. Tompkins will take ten equine employees to Hollywood Park on June 7 for a day at the Races! First Come First Served! Several Tompkins Worldwide Racing horses are entered to run!”

  Joy looked across the office at Hortense, Mr. Tompkins’ personal secretary, then out the window to see if there was any evidence of the man himself. Nowhere in sight. She said, “Hortense. Do we have to wear the white jackets?”

  “He said chambray shirts. It’s a little too hot for the white jackets. That’s what I told him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You going?”

  “Well, I never have.”

  “Oh, it’s fun, honey. That DC-3 is something else. Right out of the Second World War. I love to go. Let me sign you up. You look like you could use a break, sweetie.”

  “I think I could, Hortense. How many have signed up?”

  “Only two, plus you. And it’s day after tomorrow. He’s going to be disappointed. But I tell him nobody likes to be trooped around like a bunch of school kids. He doesn’t listen.”

  “Do you think I could take a friend?”

  “I don’t see why not. He always likes a crowd.”

  MAYBE, THOUGHT FARLEY, if he started every day with a nap in the parking lot, every day would turn out like this one. What happened was, he stopped at a deli on Century Boulevard about five and got himself a bagel with lox cream cheese and a cup of coffee. Then he set them on the dashboard of his Yukon and drove into the trainers’ parking lot. It was still cool out, and not very bright, and just after he parked his car, he was ov
ertaken by the most soothing knowledge that, instead of opening the door of the truck and getting out, he was going to put the seat back and fall asleep, and then he did. When he woke up, maybe ten or fifteen minutes later, the sunshine had come through the windshield and warmed his bagel and his coffee was cool enough to drink, and so he sat there, biting and chewing and sipping, and he knew he was going to have a good day.

  He had two in—one in this race, and one in the ninth. This race was his very own race—he had persuaded the racing secretary to write this race for his French filly, and even though the racing secretary had written it for horses of both sexes, this filly was strong and fit. Farley thought, in the barn, that she could take on any turf horse at the track, and when he got her out there and saw the others, he knew it. She had a pleasant manner, but she was self-possessed and self-confident. She was also big and built in that French way—legs like posts, lean body, low-set neck, big ears. Her owners had made their money, together, in cable TV, selling home food-dryers and herbal supplements. The filly had a whole agenda of herbal supplements that she was given every day, along with regular chiropractic, massage, and acupuncture. “We would never treat our animals less well than we treat ourselves,” said the wife, Alise. Farley had been given to understand that, though Alise and Vincent had only one racehorse, they also had five cats, four dogs, a goat, two ferrets, a chicken, three guinea hens, and a donkey. Should he be reincarnated yet again, Farley thought, he would like to come back as any animal belonging to Alise and Vincent.