Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Buddy liked to think that putting Epic Steam on progesterone was an inspiration from Jesus himself, a demonstration, through Buddy, of Jesus’ charitable nature. The horse was a menace, and the groom’s misadventure had been a specific sign that it was time to do something. Unfortunately, the obvious thing, or at least the obvious mode of doing it, cutting the horse, could not be done, precisely because it was too obvious. The horse had a set of testicles like a pair of grapefruits, and Jason Clark Kingston would recognize their absence. The man himself was a sex maniac, Buddy thought, and Epic Steam’s overt sexual characteristics were the other thing besides the money that recommended him to his owner. There couldn’t be much else—the sort of mooing affection that Residual’s owner showed for her, and that the filly seemed to reciprocate, with nickers and nuzzlings and long warm looks, wasn’t in the cards for a horse that you could hardly approach without a weapon in hand. Jason liked those testicles, and the one time Buddy had done the right thing and urged the owner to have them removed, using the usual excuse, that they seemed to be “bothering” the horse, Jason had said, “Well, if they’re bothering him, then he won’t like having them touched after he works. Let’s try that.” And so Buddy had been obliged to walk up to the horse and grab his testicles right in front of Jason, and he had done so; the horse, for once, had stood like a gatepost. No pain, no gain, at least for those who had to deal with the animal moment by moment. Jason’s problem, as far as Buddy was concerned, was that, even though he knew nothing about horses, he was interested and he was smart. He always knew what was two and he always could get from two to four to eight to sixteen with no trouble at all. Jason came out to the track all the time.

  Press-wise, it didn’t help Buddy that Jason courted news coverage, so the news that he was a successful racehorse-owner was a Godsend for everyone in every section of the paper. The owner of Residual, too, frequented the newspapers, though in the society pages rather than the business pages, and as a mover and shaker of humanitarian causes—she could move the earth (get any number of people to a fund-raiser) and shake the money tree (every fund-raiser she put on broke a record of some sort). All of this was seen by the reporters themselves as a dream-come-true for Buddy, who was portrayed as a hardworking middleweight horse-trainer who had never really made it big. Rather than run down the list of the races he had won over all the years while he was mistakenly thinking he was successful and important, he listened to Jesus and kept this mouth shut and his lips stretched into a charming smile.

  A lot of press coverage, though, meant different things to different people, and to Buddy it meant that not only was there the remote chance that someone would get wind of Epic Steam’s implant (was it working? was it not working? Buddy changed his mind every day), there were other remote chances, too.

  There was the remote chance that the fact that the truck owned by Curtis Doheny, D.V.M., was parked outside his barn every single day would be noticed by someone and commented upon. Curtis Doheny was a crooked vet. Many years before, when Buddy was mostly running claimers, Curtis and Buddy had worked closely together on several projects, as Curtis liked to say, and very few of their associates had been on a need-to-know basis with regard to these projects. Certainly not any jockeys, exercise riders, other vets, other trainers, owners, racing officials, or officials of the Jockey Club. Curtis’ course in life had taken him through several detoxification programs, and even his dearest friends, like Buddy, had lost confidence in Curtis’ ability to keep his mouth shut. Curtis’ strategy of late had been to engage in a form of advertising. Whenever a trainer was known to be hot, with several good horses running and winning, he would park his clearly marked truck outside that barn, whether or not he happened to be working on any projects with that trainer at the time. The intent, Buddy thought, was to imply to other trainers, specifically the younger and more ignorant ones, that the hot streak was owing to “the old Curtis magic,” as Curtis had been wont to call it. Curtis’ truck had been parked outside of Buddy’s barn for ten days. All he needed was for one of those reporters who actually knew something—for example, Curtis Doheny’s reputation—to ask him about Curtis. Then to ask Curtis about him. Curtis, like all track characters, had a deep well of stories that he liked to dip into, and no sense about whom they might hurt. For example, he could tell those Marcaine stories, where you would block a joint so the horse would feel no pain. Usually, he would come back alive, but not always. Or there would be the Sublimase stories. Sublimase was a synthetic thing like morphine, kind of. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, though part of the good idea was never to tell the jockey that the drug had been administered, either before or after the breakdown. And how many horses had Curtis nerved for him over the years? You cut the nerve above the knee, and the horse didn’t feel his tendon or his suspensory ligament ever again. Trainers had been doing that for generations, maybe. At any rate, Buddy didn’t think his mentor, Simon Dawkins, who had come from England by way of Australia as a young man early in the century and had known all the tricks, could have run a training stable without nerving 10 percent of the horses he had.

  There was the remote chance that one of these reporters would turn up for the first set of the morning, which Buddy liked to have out there just as the sun was rising over Century Boulevard. Should such a reporter be astute enough and have night vision, he might see that the lovely Residual was not quite the girl she had been at the beginning of the season. It would have to be a very astute reporter, because no one—that is, except Buddy—could quite put his or her finger on how the summer campaign was affecting the filly. She still ran easily, with her ears pricked. Her loss had been quickly and honestly attributable to a virus and a fever spiked for many witnesses, some of them unimpeachable. Yes, his vet said, if the filly were 100 percent, she might not have gotten that virus, but a virus was a virus. The press understood a virus. Baffert’s horses got viruses. Skip Away got a virus. Even Buddy, not known as a man of science, could explain to a reporter that hundreds of horses gathered in one spot during warm weather after a wet winter presented a virus with a field day. But with almost a hundred horses in his barn, Buddy also had several vets. He had always had several vets, even in the old days, when most trainers used one vet for everything. Vets differed in their opinions. For example, one of his vets thought the filly was feeling the pressure of the campaign. She had begun to eat less even though she was training hard. That vet put her on some Tagamet every day just to make sure. After a week she began to clean up again. Another of his vets was more philosophical. Of course she was feeling the pressure—that was just something you helped her deal with. First, you gave her progesterone to remove the added stress of going into season every three weeks, then, you know, steroids often had a wonderful effect on a filly, especially if she began to run with colts. Steroids were in common usage, not illegal, though they often made fillies hard to deal with. In fact, Buddy couldn’t see much of an effect upon Residual. She retained maybe 98 percent of her former personality. Did she run a little harder? Was she a little more competitive? Hard to tell—as a front-runner with speed, she didn’t have to be all that competitive.

  In fact, he had fallen, was falling deeper, into what his dad, always a man who called a spade a spade, called “the insurance trap.” The first step into the insurance trap was thinking that something might go wrong rather than letting something go wrong. The next step was buying something that might or might not prevent the thing that might go wrong from going wrong. Then you began to look for signs that what you had bought was working, and then you lost your sense of what was really happening, so you bought more stuff, and pretty soon, there you were. You didn’t know which end was up, so, in your confusion, or, as his dad would have said, because your head was already up your ass, you pushed it farther in because at least it was a cozy spot. The two horses confused him, because the only thing he really knew about both of them was that they were extreme—he was an extreme son of a bitch and she was an extreme sweetheart.
Now every time each of them acted more like a normal horse—he saw a person pass his stall without lunging at the stall guard, ears pinned and teeth bared, or she switched her tail—Buddy was tempted to think his insurance was working, and therefore to try something more, just to wedge his head higher up into that warm, tight spot. Why this was he wasn’t quite sure. Neither owner needed more money, and they knew that, unlike some owners. Even he, Buddy, didn’t have the old craving for funds that he had felt for so long. Picking the pocket of Jason Clark Kingston had had an air of superfluity about it, not to mention bad conscience. Both horses could end the season right here and have done more than well. There were trainers all over the world for whom five races was enough for any two-year-old.

  But how good were they? In the old days, it was an accepted thing—race ’em race ’em race ’em. Eventually, as with Lexington, Stymie, John Henry, Kelso, Phar Lap, Citation, Count Fleet, you realized what you were seeing was something that you would remember all of your life. But what did Jesus think of that? What did that tempt you to? To the contemplation of greatness? Into the cruelty and exploitation that Buddy had engaged in so routinely in the past, for money and fame and just because that’s all he knew how to do?

  The fact was, he had not known Jesus long enough to know how he thought about these issues. Buddy’s preacher had pointed out to him that Jesus kicked the money changers out of the Temple, but it wasn’t clear to Buddy that that referred even to gambling. The Bible was not a definitive guide on a number of subjects, and so you found yourself getting into that insurance trap there, too, leafing here, trying this passage there, opening in the middle of that chapter over there, and learning that, for example, “many are called but few are chosen.” Well, racing racing racing surely did separate the few that were chosen from the many that were called. Or that the Angel said unto her, I bring you tidings of great joy that shall be to all men. That didn’t seem to apply to horse racing in any way, no matter how you sliced it. And once you were buying insurance, secret insurance, there was no one to ask, because no one besides you knew all the facts.

  It was no relief at all to get to the track. When he pulled into his spot in the parking lot, people were already looking at him. He waved and smiled in the time-honored presidential, I-am-not-a-crook manner and strode with all deliberate speed toward the barn. Even though it was barely light outside, and not light at all inside, his aisles were suspiciously abuzz. The feed man was standing at one end of Epic Steam’s aisle, shaking his head at several men Buddy recognized as journalists. He was shaking his head because Buddy had instructed him that when in doubt he should pretend not to know English. The guy from the San Diego paper was trying Spanish, but the feed man, from Tijuana, was pretending not to know that, either. Buddy walked past the four men, who turned to pounce on him, with another of those practiced waves. “How are you boys this morning,” he said, not as a question. At the far end of the aisle, beyond Epic Steam’s stall, stood Georgette, his office manager. She was pretending she couldn’t speak at all. Everyone else was standing across from the two-year-old colt’s metal door. It was a long walk, as walks made in ignorance always are. Halfway there, Leon, his assistant trainer, came up to him, his manner studied and casual, waved at the reporters, and said in a low voice, “I tried to call you at home, boss, but you’d already left.”

  “How did these reporters know I was working these horses right now?”

  Leon shrugged, then said, sheepishly, “The thing is, Buddy, you always work your hot horses first thing. People know that—”

  “What else is wrong?”

  But there they were. There it was. Oscar, Epic Steam’s groom, held it up for him to look at. It was a stiff gray cat. He said, “Foun it in straw, boss.”

  “He found it in the straw,” said Leon.

  “Horse keel it,” said Oscar.

  “The horse killed the cat,” said Leon.

  “He hit it gainst wall,” said Oscar.

  “He picked it up by the neck and threw it against the wall,” said Leon.

  “Foun it in straw.”

  “Yes,” said Leon. “He found it in the straw when he was picking out this morning.” They both looked at him. They all looked at him.

  Buddy spoke smoothly and carefully: “I don’t think the horse killed the cat.”

  As if in answer, Epic Steam caught his eye, pinned his black ears, and lunged at the stall guard.

  Buddy said, “I think the cat must have picked up some rat poison somewhere, and wandered over here to die.”

  The cat’s neck was broken and his head was turned sharply to one side.

  Buddy said, “No doubt, he curled up in the straw.”

  The cat’s skin was abraded where the horse had pawed the fresh corpse.

  “And the horse, showing typical two-year-old curiosity, pawed him a little bit.”

  Epic Steam snorted and gave forth a mighty challenge.

  “He’s all boy, but it’s mostly playful.”

  “Right, boss,” said Leon.

  “Right, boss,” said Oscar.

  “Oscar,” said Buddy. “You get rid of the fucking cat.”

  Oscar nodded.

  “But, first, tack this guy up and let’s get the first set out there.”

  He walked back to the reporters. He said, “Oh, a cat died in the horse’s stall. Looks like poison. No one wanted to touch it, you know. Superstition. All that. Bad sign.”

  “Think it’s a bad sign for next week?”

  Buddy laughed cheerfully. “Depends on the work.”

  The reporters laughed cheerfully, too. He herded them back toward his office. One of them said, “Horse ever taken down game before?”

  Everyone laughed again. Buddy said nothing in reply.

  Fifteen minutes later, when the first set was lined up to be mounted, they had Epic Steam, as always, right up front, the stud chain firmly set across his gum. As always, they did their little ballet. Buddy stepped up to him; twenty yards away, at the end of the row of stalls, a groom led a filly across the aisle; Epic Steam stopped grinding and jumping just for a moment and stood there, ears pricked; Buddy bent down and felt his legs firmly and quickly; as he stood up, Leon stepped forward and threw the exercise rider on top, and then the horse moved out. No matter what, the exercise rider was instructed to keep him going forward. A horse going forward was less able to rear, buck, crow-hop, bolt, spin, you name it. Less able, not unable. But it worked. His predatory urges possibly assuaged by the death of the cat, Epic Steam moved off almost normally, and the reporters were glad to look at Residual.

  And just as they all had backed away from the colt, they all stepped closer to the filly. Two of them reached out to pet her, possibly not even realizing it. Buddy didn’t stop them. Better that their brains were fogged by sentiment.

  Yes, she seemed to come to your hand, as if affectionateness expanded her. She pricked her ears, arched her neck, flared her nostrils, sniffed the hand of the Form reporter, then turned her head and looked deeply into his eyes. Buddy bent down beside her and felt her legs. Cold today, cold enough for anyone to feel. Last week he had felt just a degree of heat in her left ankle. He had chosen to start her on Legend, not to X-ray. The heat was gone now. She stood squarely but alertly, as if on tiptoes. He threw the rider up and the filly moved out immediately, eager to get to work. As she walked down the aisle, every head, horse and human, chicken and goat, cat and Jack Russell terrier, turned to look at her. Walking behind her with the reporters, Buddy said, “She’s shaped up into a nice filly. But there are nice fillies every year.”

  He glanced at the reporters; they were staring after the filly’s scintillating red haunches, white ankles. This was a view Buddy liked of a horse, the shimmering tail like a waterfall, the sharply defined hocks, and below, the graceful lift of perfect pastern angles shading the hollow, silvery heels. Looking at a horse from behind like this told you all about running, all about how a thousand-pound body could seem airborne. People didn’t think
Buddy was much of an esthete when it came to horses, and it was true that he didn’t swell up at the sight of a pretty head or a graceful neck or a kind eye, but, walking behind a horse like this, he could stare at those miracle ankles for quite a while.

  The instructions were that three of the horses in this set were to do a timed work—three-eighths for the fillies, a half-mile for the colt. The colt was to jog the wrong way around the track out ahead of the fillies to the eighth pole, then turn, gallop to the half-mile pole, and then break off to work a half-mile. Residual and a rabbit filly by Glitterman would backtrack to the wire, then turn and gallop to the three-eighths pole, and get timed from there. They would be done with their work by the time Epic Steam, who always worked alone, was ready to go. The other horses in the set were only galloping. As they walked out to the trainers’ stand, Leon in the front, then Buddy, then the reporters in a semicircle around him, Buddy found himself unable even to hear their questions, or to hear his answers, though he was making some. Jesus, he thought, would have to take care of this. He supposed he would find out what Jesus had said in the next day’s papers.

  Epic Steam disappeared behind the tote board on the far side of the track. The fillies were still on the turn, the rabbit on the rail and Residual on the inside. Already, of course, Epic Steam had quite a reputation, and Buddy didn’t have to see him demonstrate it by whinnying, squealing, rearing, and champing at the bit. Everyone else would keep their distance. They always did.