Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  As William drove home, he apprehended from his short experience of Justa Bob in distress the same thing about the animal that all of his owners had discovered, that he was patient, well disposed, and sensible, that he knew some things and could be taught more, that, though he wasn’t pretty or hugely athletic, he was worthy. William sighed the way he always did. The money would come from somewhere, the way it always did. By the time he dropped the horse trailer and the truck at the track, and checked one last time on the other horses in his string, it was nearly eleven o’clock and he was tired. He drove his girlfriend’s car to her house, and when he let himself in with the key, he saw that the lights were out and she had gone to bed. He slipped off his shoes and went softly into the bedroom. Her musical voice murmured, half sleepy, “Hi, babe. I missed you. Everything okay?”

  So he took off his clothes and slipped in beside her, and she turned and put her arms around him, and he said, “Yeah, things are okay. Weather’s a bitch.”

  “Thanks for coming back. I thought maybe you’d—” and then she was asleep.

  At the clinic, saving Justa Bob was fairly routine. They made a six-inch incision through the fascia of the midline. The gas-filled large intestine seemed to bubble out of the incision, and they cut that open. A miasma from the sour, fermenting feed rose around them, not the sweet, healthy smell of manure, but a darker, more threatening odor. Then they cleaned the colon and washed it gently, always touching it as little as possible, knowing that, everywhere they touched it, it could be damaged and later adhere to the walls of the abdominal cavity. When it was clean, they sewed it up and allowed it to fall back into the spacious cavity that it had so recently filled up. Then they stitched the two sides of the abdominal wall firmly together, overlapped them just a bit. If the horse was ever to run again, intestinal-wall fortitude was the key. Then they stapled the shaved skin back together. It was a simple procedure, really, though neither easy nor quick. While they were at it, since the horse was totally relaxed, they cleaned his dangling penis, which Hakon had never bothered to do. Justa Bob was then moved again, swung over to a stall, where he was laid upon his side and where his eyes began to flick back and forth again, showing that he was waking up. As soon as he was mostly awake, the instinct to stand at all costs took over, and up he got, full of painkillers and soon attached by the neck to bags of fluids. His legs were treated and wrapped where he had abraded them. He was petted and made much of.

  41 / FAIRY GODGELDING

  WHEN HE GOT BACK to the West Coast from Saratoga, it was late, after eight, and after nine by the time Farley stopped by the shedrow at Santa Anita just to make sure all the horses were alive and standing. And they were. One two three four five, all the way up to forty-two. It was reassuring, all those haunches in the air. It was thus, perhaps, all the more unexpected when he went into the office and opened the refrigerator for a bottle of water and saw the pig’s head in there, black and white, much bigger in the context of the refrigerator than it had been in the context of the filly’s stall. And even though Farley did recognize the pig’s face, he found himself, a moment later, running down the shedrow to the filly’s stall, just to make sure, and indeed, the filly was eating her hay all by herself, no pig. By now it was nine-thirty, and Farley was going to find Julio, the night man, or call Oliver, but he knew they were sleeping, and anyway, what would they tell him that he couldn’t surmise? The pig was big now. Farley had been half wondering what to do with it. The Guatemalan grooms, probably, had done the obvious thing. No doubt there were a couple hundred pounds of succulent pork scattered around the backside, in this refrigerator or that one. It was reasonable. It was rational. It was the only thing to do.

  As soon as Oliver saw him in his office the next morning, he walked in, saying, “We are in deep shit about that pig.”

  “I’m sure—”

  “I tried to call you, but you’d already left the hotel, and then I tried your cellular.” Accusingly, “I left you a voice mail.”

  Farley didn’t confess that he had decided to spend one day without checking his voice mail. He said, “As soon as I opened the refrigerator, I figured—”

  “They chased it. That thing was running all around the shedrow and they were chasing it with knives.”

  “Who?”

  “Mario and Heberto and two of Logan’s grooms, too. He fired his. Horses were going nuts with the squealing.” Farley stifled a smile, but not quickly enough. Oliver said, sharply, “The track officials are up in arms. You went too far with that pig. You let that pig go on too long.”

  “I did,” said Farley. “Did anyone get hurt?”

  Oliver shook his head. Then he said, “Well, except the pig.” Right then there was the whoosh of air brakes, and Oliver leaned back and looked out the window of the office. “And by the way,” he said, “Tompkins is sending down another horse.”

  “How old?”

  “Not a racehorse. You’ll see. He called while you were gone and asked about that filly of his and I told him she couldn’t settle. He’s got a theory about her.” And then he got up and exited. Farley wondered if he planned to quit.

  Farley went out and saw the big Tompkins van. The driver had gotten out and was letting down the ramp. Then a woman he recognized at once got out of the cab and came toward him, smiling. That smiling face.

  No doubt about it, Joy Gorham was a pretty girl. A little on the diminutive side, a little unkempt, a little androgynous in that horsey way. Her hands were surprisingly big and strong-looking, and Farley knew from watching her that she was built of muscle, the sort of muscle a ninety-pounder needed to get cooperation out of a twelve-hundred-pound horse. But even while Farley noticed all these things, he set them aside. The important thing was that he had seen that face only once before, and yet he remembered it perfectly. That had been a good day, a relaxed day, a day without fear or anxiety. Looking at Joy’s face made the feeling of that day flow back into him, in spite of the pig. Oh, lucky me, he thought.

  Here he is, thought Joy, the man with the kindest eyes she had ever seen. Oh, lucky me, she thought. She handed him an e-mail Mr. Tompkins had sent her, watched her read, then had her print out. Mr. T. paused at the top of the ramp, alert. Joy went over and received the leadrope from the driver. Mr. T. descended. He looked about, first at the barns, then at the few horses walking by. She led him down the ramp. Farley went over and gave him a pat on the neck. Then he nudged Farley in the chest with his nose. Of course Mr. T., once dark gray with a diamond-shaped star and a white sock, now white with no distinguishing marks, remembered every human he had ever known. That’s what a horse was obliged to do as a relic of his ancestors’ lives as prey animals. Some humans, like Bucky Lord, were painful to think about, but Farley, his old trainer, was a pleasure to remember. He concurred with Joy’s view that kindness radiated off the man, heat or light, or simply promise and reassurance. Did now, always had.

  Farley read, “ ‘Jack Perkins said the filly trained pretty well with this guy, so I sent him down. Try him out.’ ” Farley’s hand moved to the horse’s neck, up his neck to his ear, and Mr. T. dropped his head to enjoy the caress. Joy said, “He’s an old stakes horse that ended up back at the ranch. I ride him, and the filly did well with him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Mr. T.”

  But she didn’t mention his registered name, which Farley would have recognized; the last time she read through his race record, she hadn’t noticed the names of the trainers.

  Mr. T., a horse of excellent manners and great reserve, didn’t press his attentions upon Farley. Feats of memory didn’t surprise or impress him, anyway, nor did coincidences. He was a horse. He had no expectations about what was normal. His whole life was a demonstration that anything at all could happen at any time. You could go anywhere, do anything, have anything be asked of you, from running and jumping in paradise at one end to starving in Texas at the other. He sighed a large horse sigh, though. Some of Jim Logan’s horses walked by, follow
ed by Logan himself. He shouted, “Hey, baby!” And then he snorted like a pig. Farley saw that it was going to be like that all day.

  He said to Joy, “What are you doing for breakfast?”

  Joy said, “Waiting for you to ask.”

  “We can go to the cafeteria, but there’s going to be a lot of pig noises. I became a legend yesterday.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Orlando rode Mr. T. out to the training track, and Arturo, her regular rider, rode Froney’s Sis. The two horses greeted each other subtly, or perhaps they did not greet each other at all, but the large steady presence of the old gelding did seem to relax the filly and make her less susceptible to the influence of the other horses on the track. She jogged nicely in his shadow, straight and smooth. Farley and Joy leaned companionably on the white plastic railing. They had eaten breakfast. They had eaten lunch. They had gone to the races. They had eaten dinner. They had heard the story of the pig from every possible point of view, and in every form, tragedy, comedy, satire, lament, outrage, joke. She had stood with him beside the remains of the pool where the pig was bled out. She had looked at the head in the refrigerator. He had driven her to her hotel at night and picked her up in the morning. Now they were talking the easiest talk—horse talk.

  He said, “He’s a nice mover.”

  “He won some stakes in Europe.”

  “How many starts did he have?”

  “Fifty-two.”

  “Huh. Where did he run?”

  “Around here. Lots of places.”

  “I wonder who trained him?”

  “I don’t remember. I can ask Hortense when I get home.”

  “When do you have to go back?”

  “Oh, tomorrow, I guess. Do you think I could—”

  “What?”

  “Do you think I could ride him around the backside tomorrow one last time? I’ve been riding him every day all year.” She didn’t say what she was thinking, that there wasn’t much for her at the ranch with Mr. T. gone.

  She was looking down, then looking intently at the two horses. How many times had Farley seen that look over the years, the gaze of someone looking at a beloved equine, a mixture of softness and rue, wonder and reserve and pleasure? Love animated her features, a love that he perfectly understood himself. What was it, fourteen hours they had spent together? Plenty of time when you thought about it. Farley said, “Say. Joy. Why don’t you not go back? I’ve got work you can do. It’s August. I’ve got horses here and at Del Mar, and it’s been a little bit of a stretch this year. And your broodmares don’t start showing up till December, really. You could—”

  “It’s a critical time for the weanlings, though.…” Joy thought of herself trudging alone from hot, dusty pasture to hot, dusty pasture. She looked at him. She already didn’t know what he looked like anymore. She turned her gaze and looked at Mr. T. and Froney’s Sis, at all the other horses and riders. At the trainers leaning on the rail, at the grandstand and the liveliness and the lush landscape. How much did it take to trade in the Central Valley for Pasadena and Del Mar, at least for a while? She licked her lips. Yes, she thought. “Yes” was a hard word for her to say. “No” was much easier. She was a “no” sort of girl all the way—no roommates, no friends besides Elizabeth, no boyfriend, no parties, nothing unusual supposed to happen at any time. She didn’t think she could get herself all the way up to a yes, so she said, “Okay.”

  He grinned, which reminded her of what a good sport he had been all day the day before about the pig.

  She said, “Are they ever going to let you live down that pig?”

  “And sacrifice a story like that? Nope, I’m eternally attached to that pig now. I’ll be lucky if they don’t start calling me Piggy.” But he smiled.

  A moment later, he said, “Ever ridden a racehorse?”

  “Only Mr. T.”

  “Well, you’re built for it.”

  In the years since his divorce, he had dated plenty, and had, in spite of the story he’d told Oliver that time, eventually gotten laid, too. During these years, he was interested to note, he had grown increasingly indifferent to what a woman looked like or could do. Every woman these days looked great and could do something. Women in their thirties and forties and fifties at the end of the millennium were doers without peer. They lawyered, they mothered, they doctored, they cooked, they show-jumped, they organized their closets, they developed real estate, they openly discussed sex, politics, money, gender roles, and his own idiosyncrasies. Going among women these days was a succession of splendors, Farley sometimes thought, and he counted himself lucky to be having this opportunity after so many years of marriage. Even Marlise had become a butterfly of doing—her real talent, she told him, lay in target-shooting with some sort of special pistol. It turned out she could shoot in time to the beating of her heart. She went to competitions all over the state where she ran up hills and threw herself behind barriers and shot into targets shaped like the silhouettes of men and antlered prey.

  In the admittedly few hours they had spent together in the last day, Joy had talked about horses and Mr. Tompkins and this woman Elizabeth and sometimes about what she had done at a university in the Midwest before taking the job at the ranch. She was kind and competent with animals. But unlike most of the women he knew, she didn’t seem to aspire to anything, or to have an agenda of wants or needs; she didn’t ask him about horses who might be leaving the track or talk about horses she wished to have. She rode this old gelding. In their fourteen hours together, she hadn’t talked about owning anything.

  He remembered, as a very little boy, maybe three or four, lying on a blanket in his backyard where he had been told to take his nap, watching his mother hang sheets on the line. His mother would have been about twenty-seven then, blonde and graceful. The sun, as he remembered, was behind her, and would cast her dark outline on each white sheet as she pinned it up—her upraised arms and elbows, her hips and waist. Below the sheet, she would rise on her toes each time she attached a clothespin. It was like watching a shadow play. As he lay there sleepily watching, he saw her pass along the line of sheets, setting poles between the sheets to prop up the lines, sometimes as a shadow, sometimes as his mother, and the brevity of the moments between the sheets, when she was there, glancing at him, her real self, made them startling and filled him with love. There she was, and then, a few seconds later, there she was, and then there she was again. Something about that moment reminded him of Joy—something in her was momentarily visible from time to time that was not looks or doing or wanting or intending or even having done anything. It was something else that was perhaps visible only to him, and perhaps not even there. He couldn’t tell yet, but that’s why he was suddenly so interested, he thought.

  He turned after a moment and watched the two horses again. The filly really did seem quite relaxed. The gelding, though, was tossing his head and pulling. Farley shouted to Orlando, “Send him in a little gallop!” He nodded, and then they were off—about three strides of canter before the old horse took hold, changed leads, and shot away from the filly. “Uh-oh,” said Farley. “That was a mistake.”

  Orlando was a strong rider, and immediately steadied his bridged reins on the old horse’s neck. A horse not under human control was presumed to be out of control altogether, but it was clear to Joy as she watched the white gelding lengthen his stride that he was under his own control. He was resisting Orlando, but actually he wasn’t paying much attention to him. He was watching the other horses. His ears were pricked. He was neither upset nor frightened. He was simply going very fast.

  “Beautiful big stride,” said Farley.

  “I’ve felt that,” replied Joy, “but I’ve never seen it.”

  “Look how open his shoulder joint is. His forelegs are long, and he can really stretch them. And even though he must be ouchy somewhere at his age, he’s very even and efficient. There we go.” The horse came back to the trot. Farley said, “Well, I don’t think there’s going to be a problem working the two togeth
er, unless she can’t keep up with him. Boy, I would really like to know who trained him. How old did you say he is?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Huh.”

  Froney’s Sis had bucked once and tossed her head when the gelding galloped away from her, but now she trotted calmly up to him, and the two riders brought their horses down to a walk and moved way to the outside of the track.

  Only then did Joy realize what she had agreed to do. Staying here? Leaving her little cocoon? Finding a new place to live? Moving or discarding all that stuff? Changing her routine? She glanced at Farley, who was saying to another trainer, “Yeah, the head is in my refrigerator, but Heberto swears he’s got some recipe for it.” The scariest thing was all her stuff. Her little house was stacked and jammed with piles of horse equipment, clothing, books. She herself could barely function there—when she ate she had to clear a space on the table, when she slept she had to clear a place on the bed, only the bathtub was empty—the stuff would never come out of there—

  The other trainer left and Farley turned to her again. He said, “You know, here’s an idea. Stay through the Oak Tree meet. Maybe the filly will learn enough in three months so that Mr. T. can go home at the end of the meet, and by that time you can decide if you like this life. One thing’s for sure, there’s nothing like it. My office manager can help you find a room—” And so he went on, a kindly lullaby. Joy nodded and nodded, and by the time they had followed the horses back to the barn, she knew what her duties would be and what her pay would be and what she would learn. She managed another “Okay.”

  “Did I ask you Mr. T.’s registered name?” That she had said “okay” delighted Farley more than he dared show, if not to her, then to himself, so he pursued this neutral topic.