Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “Not exactly. I’ve never voted.”

  George came over and sat down. “No doubt she’s been going on about the horror of it all.”

  “I want to do it,” said Deirdre. “My horses have won ninety-four thousand dollars since April.”

  “Where are they?” said George.

  “They’re stabled at Belmont. They run there and at Aqueduct and Saratoga.”

  “If you brought them to Maryland, you could step them up in class—” suggested George.

  Deirdre put her heel on George’s toes and ground it in hard, until in spite of himself he yelped, then she said, “If your horses are making money on that circuit, you don’t want to be moving them to Maryland, believe me.”

  George made a noise in his throat, very Irish, a combination of disgust and resignation. Deirdre tossed her head and continued to Tiffany, “Keep your horses in New York, dear. That’s where the money is, and the good footing, too.” There, she had done it again, sent away the very thing that she most wanted for herself. She glanced at George, who was looking annoyed again. “But if you come to me, I’ll teach you some things. We’ll see how far we get.” Then she turned to George. “You go away, George, you can take me to task later.” He heaved himself out of the depth of the sofa and went off, but not without cuffing her on the head. She knew that cuff. It was more affectionate than angry by now. She smiled to herself. It was not at all pleasant to be on the outs with George. Meanwhile, here was Tiffany. She said, “Now. You tell me whether your friend Norman is going to break up this fine establishment, because the best part of my livelihood depends upon Mary Lynn and Skippy, and I can’t do without either one of them, and if she moves to Seattle, well, they call it racing out there, but—”

  “She’s already told him no.”

  “But her eyes were rolling back in her head.”

  “That’s why she told him no.”

  “Marriage kills passion?”

  “Lots of people think so.”

  “They do, don’t they?”

  “It’s almost a rule.”

  Deirdre nodded, having never been married, and having never, she supposed, felt passion. Tiffany turned her head away, and looked across the room, so that Deirdre could see her profile. What she saw was that moment you saw rarely enough in a child, not often in an adult, the inner warmth of true happiness infusing the features quietly, one by one. Then Tiffany turned to her—the girl couldn’t have been more than twenty or so, half Deirdre’s age—and said, “Thank you, Deirdre, I’ll be there in a week,” and kissed her on the cheek. Later, when she was driving home with George, she said about meeting Tiffany, “That was fucking well almost worth venturing into Washington society and having to listen to them talk about Clinton all afternoon,” but she actually didn’t feel nearly so ironic about it as that. What she felt was simple, and certainly ephemeral, certainly fleeting, certainly momentary, and certainly fickle joy, groundless and feeble-minded and gormless. All George said was, “Ah, Cousin, you take everything to heart.” She saw that he was no longer angry at all, but resigned. That was perhaps not the best of omens, but it was all the more convenient for pursuing her contrary way.

  40 / EASTWARD HO

  JUSTA BOB LEFT Golden Gate Fields in a shipment of horses headed for Arapaho Park, in Colorado. He was claimed away from the Pisser by Lily Dodd (aged twenty-three), whose father and grandfather were trainers before her; she had a second and a third with him out of three starts. He was then claimed away from Lily by Hakon Borgulfsson, an Icelander, the only trainer in America of Icelandic parentage, who had a six-horse trailer and liked to combine racing claimers with supporting his daughter Thora’s career singing opera. She was rehearsing Judith and Holofernes in Denver, which Hakon considered a difficult and depressing piece of work, but not nearly as bad as Wozzeck, which she had been in last year, in male costume, in Houston, while Hakon ran some horses at Sam Houston. He tried to get her out to the track as often as possible just to give her some relief. Justa Bob had several infirmities. He had a tiny chip in his left knee, and both his ankles were beginning to get a touch of arthritis. He had a stress fracture in his pelvis. The dry weather in Colorado could do him a world of good.

  Colorado was an education, especially for a Cal-bred, like Justa Bob. You couldn’t say, and Justa Bob didn’t say, that Hakon wasn’t a horseman, but, for all his good intentions, Hakon wasn’t a horseman. Hakon was a reader, an esthete, a charitable human being who never failed to give something to a homeless person. Hakon could whip up a nutritious meal in a half-hour over a Coleman stove, something he often had to do when he was trying to save money for books by living at the track, and he always had some to share. Hakon had kept that Dodge truck of his going for fifteen years and three hundred thousand miles, but horses were a divine mystery to him, and no amount of reading, discussing, consulting, observing, and receiving tips from well-meaning friends could shed any light upon that mystery. He gave Justa Bob so much bute over the course of their time together that the horse’s stomach was beginning to know it. He fed only a little alfalfa hay, because he couldn’t afford anything more, so Justa Bob hadn’t had much to do all day. He fed bran mashes that were too hot, water that tasted poor, soy oil rather than corn oil. He wrapped all his own horses, because he couldn’t afford a groom, and he wrapped them unevenly, so that too much pressure on one part of the leg alternated with too little on another. He almost never called the vet, because he had his own theories about how horses got better and because he usually didn’t quite understand what the vet was telling him. Living with Hakon, for his horses, was an exercise in gratuitous survival, and other horsemen Hakon knew always cited, in his regard, the old racetrack adage “Lucky is better than good.” Hakon was lucky. He almost never worked a horse fast enough for its accumulated minor damage to result in a breakdown, but when his horses got claimed and went off to other trainers, who were not so lucky, the more normal sort of work sometimes did break them down. Hakon considered himself a natural-born genius, his very unconventionality a testament to his talents.

  After an eventful month, in which Justa Bob loafed around the track during training hours and then loafed to a win and a third in two starts, Hakon Borgulfsson, Justa Bob, and Thora parted company—Hakon back to the Bay Area, driving his empty six-horse trailer, with some money in his pocket to claim a couple more horses, and maybe take them to Arizona for the winter; Thora on a plane to St. Louis, where she was to sing all the parts of all the female leads in a compressed version of the Ring cycle; and Justa Bob to Chicago, where his new owner, William Vance, had a stable at Sportsman’s Park.

  William had twenty-seven horses in training, all of them jointly owned with an assortment of friends and relatives. When Justa Bob arrived at the track on Cicero Avenue in the midst of a heat wave, he had already gotten fairly dehydrated. Nor was William there to greet him, since William’s son Alphonse was being honored for work he had done in a state-sponsored summer program at the local high school. When the groom put Justa Bob in his stall, deeply bedded but with an unusual-smelling straw, and well provided with hay but timothy rather than alfalfa, Justa Bob turned away from all of these unfamiliar sensory experiences and manured in his water bucket as a gesture of despair. He was tired from the long van ride. He was thirsty, but now that he had manured in his water bucket, he no longer cared to drink from it. He looked around. Everything was unfamiliar. He closed his eyes.

  The groom checked the horses one last time and then decided to leave early. William didn’t like for the horses to be left alone, but he was due to arrive himself in less than an hour, so the groom thought it was all right to leave. Justa Bob wasn’t the only horse who seemed lethargic. A few were sweating in their stalls, even though they had fans blowing right on them. The groom, unfamiliar with Justa Bob, of course, didn’t realize that he was a horse who rarely failed to take an interest in his surroundings.

  And then, leaving his son’s high school, William Vance’s car blew a rod, and was
rendered undrivable. William thought everything would be fine, though. He had no one running that afternoon, as if anyone would be running with this heat index; his groom, Homer, was on the job; probably those new horses hadn’t arrived yet; and, all in all, he wasn’t worried about a thing, and he was very proud of his son, who had a scholarship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and a nice girlfriend who was going to Connecticut College for Women, and he decided to go home and take a nap and get to the track later in his own girlfriend’s car, but she was at work until four. He took the bus to her apartment to wait for her, which was why, when his buddy Romero saw that Justa Bob was groaning and looking at his flanks, indicating colic, he couldn’t reach William at home.

  And then the power browned out, and Romero got busy with other things.

  Inside Justa Bob, his large intestine was beginning to increase the frequency of its peristaltic contractions, which gave him a little pain. He began to pace around his stall, stopping every few minutes to paw through his straw. Sometimes he stretched out his head and neck and opened his mouth. The pain increased. He took a look at his flanks, but there was nothing visible on the outside that gave any evidence of what was going on on the inside. He pawed some more, then lay down. For a while he curled his legs and hooves under him, trying to relax. But he found that he had to look with increasing fixed intensity at the bland expanse of his side. It was such a mystery, this pain. Finally, about an hour and a half into his ordeal, he stretched out on his side, and then rolled over, a time-honored way of expressing and sometimes relieving belly pain—what you did was roll back and forth, back and forth. However, Justa Bob was unfamiliar with the dimensions of his new stall, and after he had rolled over, he discovered that he was cast against the wall and couldn’t get back onto his other side. He had been cast before. His natural inclination, which had saved him innumerable times in his life, was to wait. There are horses who wait and there are horses who can’t wait. Those who can’t wait get into more trouble. Justa Bob was a waiter, but when he rolled over and got cast, something else happened, which was that his large intestine flipped over 180 degrees. A bit of the hay from the van that he was still digesting stopped moving and began to compact. It hurt very much more even than before, but Justa Bob kept trying to wait.

  “Almost dead” is a relative judgment. Justa Bob’s heart was still fine and his brain was functioning, but purely in terms of time, Justa Bob was much closer to death by five in the afternoon than he had been at noon. At noon he had been in one country, the country of good health, and death had been in another country, and the two countries had shared nothing, but in the course of the afternoon, colic had made a bridge between them. Justa Bob was beginning to go into shock. His eyes were half closed. He was groaning. Once in a while, purely involuntarily, he hit his feet against the concrete blocks of the stall, and scraped his own legs with his own hooves. Horses stalled nearby watched him and whinnied from time to time. They all noticed when William Vance finally showed up about five. William would have noticed their higher level of anxiety—it wasn’t all that subtle—but he was still groggy from his nap and lethargic from the ordeal of driving through the streets of Chicago in a car without air conditioning in this heat.

  He made his way toward what he thought was still an empty stall in a leisurely manner.

  William Vance was a middle-aged black man from central Missouri. His first memory was of a mule his father owned named Hyacinth, and his subsequent memories were all of the saddlebred horses his father trained, or retrained, at his little place near Sedalia. His father had begun as a farrier, then added working with sour or broken-down animals and getting them back into the show ring. William had seen his first Thoroughbred when he was nineteen, when he and some friends of his father’s had gone down to Kentucky to a big saddlebred show and sale. One Thoroughbred was enough for William. He’d found a farm to work at as a groom in Kentucky right that day, and stayed behind when his father and the other men had taken their horses home. His father had told him he would never make a living as a black racehorse-trainer, because white men wouldn’t bring their horses to him, so he had made a living as a black trainer for black owners. He had an interest in most of the horses he trained, so when they won he made some purse money. He paid his bills, he did not live at the track, his son didn’t have to work during high school, except when he didn’t get A’s on his homework, in which case he had to clean stalls, something he preferred studying to. William’s win percentage hovered at around 15 percent. He enjoyed himself.

  He neared Justa Bob’s stall and heard a groan. The moment he saw that the horse was cast and only semi-conscious was one of the worst moments of his life.

  Choosing whether to spend five thousand dollars on colic surgery for a horse was a decision you had to make beforehand. You had to weigh the animal’s value, both commercial and sentimental, and the potential effects upon his performance. You had to decide whether the animal was a pet, an agricultural asset, or an athlete. You had to know your regular income and expenditures. You had to understand the worth of your nest egg and know your priorities with regard to drawing upon it. William Vance had duly made a distinction among the horses in his barn, which were worth the surgery and which weren’t, but he had no way of deciding into which category to place Justa Bob. He didn’t know the horse personally, and had very little idea of how he ran or what his potential was. He had never done more than run his hands down the animal’s legs and feel his feet, right after the race in which he claimed him. He didn’t even know if he was a good-tempered or bad-tempered animal, though he knew that as a gelding he had no future in the breeding shed. And so, for a short moment that seemed very long, he felt every single impulse as a temptation to sin.

  There was the temptation to sin against his bank account, and just call the vet and do what was necessary, even though that very day he had been wondering where the extra money that his son’s life in Middletown, Connecticut, would require might come from.

  There was the temptation to sin against manhood, just to turn away and pretend this wasn’t happening. As he was recognizing this temptation, the power browned out again, which reinforced this impulse; he could go right home and turn on the air conditioning and take off his trousers and—

  There was the temptation to sin against compassion, to know what was happening, to recognize it, to be present for it, and to watch it happen. As he was recognizing this temptation, the power went on again.

  But, in fact, his body was more decisive than his head. Even as he was considering his options, he was calling out for help. Romero came running down the aisle, and they went into the stall and grabbed the horse’s tail and pulled his haunches away from the wall. While Justa Bob was getting himself up after that, William was calling the vet on Romero’s cellular, and the vet was only one barn over, and was answering him, and was on his way. And so the decision had been made, because, once a vet and a trainer got together and started relieving pain and distress, it got to be very hard to stop yourself from going on with it, until the animal was standing and the vet bill was more than you could afford.

  It was after Justa Bob had gotten to his feet, though unsteadily, that William realized he was going to carry this out to the end, and that the money would come from somewhere. Why this should come as a surprise to him was what should have come as a surprise to him. He always said, “Well, the money will come from somewhere, I guess.” He stroked the horse on his sweaty neck and head. The horse’s body seemed to creak—that’s what the groans sounded like.

  And so that was how Justa Bob happened to get on a trailer to make the nightmare trek through the snarled traffic to Naperville. At one time there had been a surgery at the track, but no more. It was Naperville or bust, literally, in terms of Justa Bob’s colon. William Vance had the sensation all the way out there that all the cars in Chicago had moved aside to make straight the highway for our Bob. Perhaps that was a sign that the compassionate choice was the right one, but all the
time he was driving, William had more misgivings than he could shake a stick at. The surgery was only the beginning. If the horse died, it would be the end, too, but still five thousand dollars, and that might be the better outcome, because the aftercare would cost plenty, and then the horse would be out at the farm, burning hay and oats for three months at least until he could come back to the track and go back into training, as a six-year-old, don’t forget, and sometimes they never come back from colic surgery able to perform. But the only times in his life that William had ever hoped for a horse to die were when the horse was so injured that such an outcome was inevitable and better sooner than later. Right here was the difference between Hakon Borgulfsson and William Vance, even though Hakon was educated, benign, and kindly, and William was irascible and sometimes hard to get along with—Hakon thought that horse injuries and death came to you out of nowhere, the workings of blind fate, and William knew that usually death, and often injuries, too, were choices you made for the animal. Death had been a choice he could never make, even as a wish.

  At the clinic, the choice was taken from him as soon as the horse came off the trailer into the possession of the vets, the anesthesiologist, and the assistant. “Come on, fella,” they said. “Easy, now. Keep walking. Here we go.” They took him into the ultrasound room and ultrasounded his belly. William watched this, not knowing what to hope for. The vet knew, however, and there it was, the simple twist in the large intestine, nothing as ugly and life-threatening as it would be in the more delicate small intestine. Then they walked him into the operating room, gave him Rompen and ketamine to collapse him, and eased him down. Then the straps on the rails came over, and they padded and strapped his cannon bones, and the straps tightened as he was winched up and swung over to the table. Then they lowered him onto his back, put rails and cushions around him, and a large tube down his windpipe. William left, and so he didn’t see Justa Bob lying there, his open unseeing eyes flicking left and right as he drifted deeper and deeper into unconsciousness, his legs in the air as if he were a dog sleeping on its back, flexed, his long black tail draping softly to the ground.