Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS was something that Justa Bob’s new owner, R. T. Favor, né Robert Biddle, would have taken a genuine interest in, but he was not a reading man, or a subscribing man, and though he thought of himself as a horse-trainer, and claimed a horse from time to time when he had some money, he was not at the moment associated with any particular track. He had the horse at a run-down stable outside of Houston, and the best that could be said for him was that he was not actively abusing the horse right at this time. He was feeding him, watering him, housing him, and cleaning his stall whenever he remembered to do so. R. T. Favor was a man of many aliases (for example, he had claimed the horse under his Louisiana owner’s-license name, Ronald de Montriere), and a rap sheet as long as a short novel, but under every one of them he had displayed a hot temper and a penchant for drink. He was, therefore, not of an investigative turn of mind, and Justa Bob’s lameness, which was a slab fracture of the right knee, did not present itself to him as an occasion for veterinary attention—for example, X-rays, which, like all investigations, tended to reveal more than R.T. cared to know. So from time to time he buted the horse, but most of all he espoused the efficacy of stall rest, which was just as well, since the stable where Justa Bob lived had no turnout. Justa Bob’s lameness was just typical, R.T. often said, of what was always happening to him—bad luck with horses, wives, girlfriends, parents, bosses, partners in crime, even though he himself always did the best he could. And how could he train the horse, anyway, when he had these deals he was trying to put together?

  Justa Bob himself was not displeased with his circumstances. The stall was confining and the provisions were suspect (he ate what seemed wholesome and left the rest) but every broken slat and missing board allowed him to impove his acquaintance with R.T.’s other horse, Doc’s Big Juan, a five-year-old quarter-horse gelding, a burly chestnut with a bald face, a blue eye, and considerable joint deterioration in his ankles and knees (Wouldn’t you know it? remarked R.T, philosophically). The two horses often stood nose to nose or nose to withers, nibbling each other here and there, avoiding the nailheads, wire ends, and broken boards all around them. They dozed. They kept an eye on the goings-on, such as they were, around the barn, they avoided, as much as possible, the unquiet presence of R. T Favor (“God-damned horses don’t even like me,” observed R.T, without taking it personally). Would Justa Bob happily give up Doc’s Big Juan in order to return to better circumstances in Chicago? Hard to say. The depth of attachment between horses is hard to gauge, as is its worth in relation to other forms of equine well-being. But it could not be said that Justa Bob felt unhappy. He was only a horse, after all, but he could understand a trade-off just as well as the next guy.

  ALL OF R. T. FAVOR’S deals fell through. He couldn’t believe it. Some stuff he was getting from a guy turned out to be completely the wrong thing, and he had to eat it. Then a guy who had some money of his and said he was going to pay him back didn’t show up, and when R.T. went to the motel where he was, the guy had checked out. Then his girlfriend said she was going back with her old boyfriend, and she was keeping his mattress and box spring, a perfectly good set from Sears, until he gave her back some stuff of hers that he had sold to a friend of his without telling her two months before. It was time, R.T. thought, to get back to training horses. He appeared at the stable early one morning—suspiciously early, as far as Justa Bob was concerned—and he had tack in his arms. He looked over the stall door, said, “Hey, you guys, time to earn a living,” and threw the tack down on the ground and went looking for a cup of coffee.

  He came back two hours later. It was now broad daylight, and R.T. was a little irritated because he had gotten into this thing with a waitress. That sometimes happened when you were just looking for a cup of coffee and minding your own business. You got to flirting with the waitress, and she was kind of a bitch, and that egged you on, and you tried teasing her a little bit, just harmless, and then it turned out that you couldn’t get out of there until you got a smile out of the bitch, and sometimes that took a while.

  So it was hot. R.T. kicked the tack to one side and haltered the red horse and pulled him out of the stall. He was fat. R.T. couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had gotten the horse. Wasn’t that sometime in January, when he had that money from that deal? Well, nothing like two, three months of stall rest. The horse moved away from R.T.’s unquiet presence and R.T. gave the horse a jerk. Justa Bob was watching them. R.T. tied up the red horse and brushed him down, then he picked out his feet and tacked him up. Then he went over to the other side of the barn and found this guy named Lex, who was an exercise rider, horse behavioral consultant, and experienced cowboy, as it said on some cards he’d had printed up, and he brought Lex over. There was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t team up, thought R.T. It was meant to be.

  As Lex trotted Doc’s Big Juan out to the arena they had at this place (when he got some money, he would move the horses to a regular training center), Justa Bob whinnied after him. R.T., who wasn’t especially annoyed with Justa Bob in particular, picked up a brush, threw it at the stall door, and snarled, “Pipe down!”

  The abuse had begun.

  MAY

  63 / IT’S ALWAYS SOMETHING

  SAM PULLED on a long vinyl sleeve, moved the mare’s tail out of the way, and buried his arm almost to the shoulder in the mare’s anus. She took a little step to the side, but was otherwise patient. Krista couldn’t help looking away.

  “Nice follicle,” said Sam. “My guess is she’s ready.”

  “Okay, then,” said Krista.

  Now Pete came out with Himself on a shank. Maia, thank goodness, was with Krista’s mother at the grocery store. Krista’s mother had agreed to help them by babysitting during all the breedings, and sometimes she also helped them by buying a few groceries.

  What a nice mare, Himself seemed to be thinking. His ears were up, his tail was up, his neck was arched. He seemed to spring off the ground in elastic little steps. The mare was winking like crazy, flopping her tail over to the side, dropping her haunches, and so, when he bumped her with his nose, she seemed to say, Oh, yes, indeed. Ready ready ready.

  Still perfectly gracious and well mannered, Himself stretched his nose and wrinkled his upper lip. “I saw a giraffe do that once,” said Sam. “At the St. Louis Zoo.” The mare lowered her haunches another centimeter, and Himself began to quiver all over. Krista thought he looked splendidly beautiful. “This fellow does give new meaning to the word ‘stud,’ ” Sam muttered, and then the stallion leapt, needing no handlers or penis man, doing it all himself. The mare stood receptively, but Krista couldn’t help looking at her back pasterns. She jerked and held with the thrusting. In Kentucky, she knew, three or four guys would be pushing up against her chest, helping her stabilize herself. Krista counted three and then four thrusts and stepped toward the mare’s head, expecting Himself to dismount, but the thrusting continued, five, six, seven. Pete and Sam shared a glance. Eight, nine. Pete said, “I’ve never—”

  Sam went up behind Himself and put his hand between the horse’s back legs. Ten, eleven. Twelve. Twelve thrusts was a lot. The stallion’s thighs were shaking now, not an eager quiver, but with fatigue. What if he fell? Krista checked Himself’s eyes to see if they were rolling back in his head, but he was looking straight forward, staring, as if to encourage himself. He was grunting and thrusting, grunting and thrusting.

  “No thrill,” said Sam.

  “I would say not,” said Pete.

  “That’s a technical term. No ejaculatory thrill. Here.” And he put Pete’s hand between the horse’s legs. “It’s a pulsing of the urethra.”

  No kidding, thought Krista. On Himself’s back, the skin corrugated into a pattern, and she couldn’t help thinking of large structures, like bridges and roads, fatiguing, breaking apart. She closed her eyes.

  But the horse simply dismounted, though awkwardly, his erection shooting forward from his back legs to his front, pale and smooth. He looke
d disturbed and confused. The mare groaned with relief and Krista stroked her neck.

  “Walk her around,” said Sam, thoughtfully, “she’ll be okay.”

  But it still seemed like another thing to Krista. Did every strange thing in the world have to happen to them?

  Himself looked more surprised than anything else, that and tired. He shook his head impatiently.

  Sam said, “Ejaculatory incompetence.”

  “Is that a disease?”

  “No, just an event. Okay. Okay. I’ll do what I once saw your grandfather do.” He went over to his truck while Krista and Pete kept the animals moving.

  Sam brought back his stainless-steel bucket, the twitch, a coil of rubber hose, the mouth pump, the funnel, and a pint bottle of a clear liquid. In a moment he had twitched Himself, and had Pete holding the twitch. Himself stood there with his head forward, his eyes half shut, that look on his face of a twitched horse, half pained, half pleasured, all lost in space. He might be being treated for colic. Only his erection showed that there was something else going on. Sam fed the tubing down the stallion’s nostril coil by coil. Himself did not object. Then the vet put the mouthpiece in his own mouth and cleared the hose. Finally, he poured the clear liquid slowly down the funnel into the hose and into the horse’s stomach. It was so quiet Krista could hear the birds singing and the maple leaves sighing. Krista sighed herself. In a moment, Sam was finished, and he eased out the tube. Pete untwisted the twitch. Himself came to, and bent his head down to rub his lip on his knee.

  “What was that?” said Krista.

  “Gin,” said Sam. “He was just a little overexcited. We’ll wait a few minutes for the medicine to take effect.”

  “A pint?” said Pete.

  “Basically a shot and a half, at his weight. We’ll see.”

  And they did see. And it was pretty good, Krista thought; if not that, then at least a relief. The mare was cooperative, the ejaculation was thrilling. Later, when Krista came out from putting the mare away, giving her a bag of carrots and a nice big flake of grass hay, Pete and Sam were drinking shots of their own, but of bourbon, not gin.

  Krista came up to them. “Why gin?” she said.

  “Well,” said Sam, “your grandfather used to say racing is an English sport of long tradition. Gin would be the traditional remedy. I think of it as a kind of veterinary heredity, just like, and parallel to, all these horses descending from Eclipse.” He regarded his glass for a moment, one of the ones Krista and Pete had gotten for their wedding. Then he said, “Let’s make this a courtesy call. I always wanted to try that gin cure. Bottoms up.”

  64 / PEACE AND QUIET

  FARLEY THOUGHT it was always rather peaceful in California during the Triple Crown. Hollywood Park was open and the horses were running, but it was sleepy—only a few stakes races, and the best of those for turf horses. What it was, was that the press was elsewhere, and so were the Industry Leaders. The Industry Leaders had made it their personal mission to bring horse racing to the attention of the general public, with the NFL as their model and television as their medium of choice, which was fine with Farley, though his own view was that horse racing out at the track, newspaper reading, still photography, placing bets in person, and writing thank-you notes by hand were all related activities, and football, ESPN, video, on-line betting, and not writing thank-you notes at all were another set of related activities. In short, with everyone who was young, up-to-date, well dressed, and ambitious away in the East, the dedicated horse-players had the track to themselves. And the dedicated horse-players, in their quiet way, liked Limitless quite a bit.

  After a cold winter, the weather in Pasadena was everything that those who had paid to live there expected—balmy, bright, hopeful. Farley was hopeful, too. He and Joy got up every morning after sunrise and went to the barn. His forty-six horses were wide awake and ready to work, and they were working well enough. Every day or two, he shipped a couple over to Hollywood and ran them. After the races he shipped them home. Or not. Claimers were always coming and going. He was starting to like that game again, too. Joy devoted herself to Limitless. He came back from the ranch just as fit as when he left. Farley did not put him on a regular work schedule, but let Joy decide, when she got him out to the track, whether he felt like running or not. At first this was scarier than Farley had thought it would be—here he had always considered himself sensitive to the needs of individual horses—but when Joy said that the horse was ready to run two days in a row, and then again on the third day, Farley balked. The horse was young and foolish. He didn’t know how he was stressing himself. For his own good—

  “The thing is,” said Joy, “he is having a really good time. I don’t like to say no to him. I really think—”

  “When Rosalind said to let him do what he wanted, I didn’t think he was going to want to do so much.”

  “You’re the one who’s always saying racing is in their minds.”

  “And I’m the one who keeps thinking soundness is in his bones. What if he—”

  “ ‘What if’ is my line, not yours. That’s when they start you on Prozac, you know, when you say ‘what if’ all the time.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Farley loved a joke from Joy. “Let him go, then. We’ll pretend no what ifs.”

  She took him to the seven-eighths pole and let him run. He blistered the track for half a mile, then trotted around with his ears pricked as if waiting for a round of applause. In the afternoon, she took him out and walked him. Sometimes they were gone for a couple of hours. He let himself say, as if his fear that she would slip away from him was just generalized cautiousness, “I don’t like you wandering away. What if—”

  She smiled.

  He shut up. On the one hand, there was the truism that if you visualized a bad outcome your own expectation would cause it. On the other hand, there was the truism “Be prepared.” Surely by this time in his life he should have drawn some sort of conclusion about the relative merits of these truisms, but they seemed equally possible, along with “Speak of the devil and the devil doth appear,” “Least said, soonest mended,” and “Leave no stone unturned.”

  Three weeks after the horse’s first race, Farley put him in another one; the purse this time was forty-eight thousand dollars. Still allowance company. Roberto brought him in cruising, three lengths in front. Farley said, “Okay, you’ve ridden him twice. Tell me how he likes to run.”

  “You can see, boss—”

  “I can see, but you tell me.”

  “Well, he’s a closer. He likes those easy early fractions. You know, most of the time when we’re back there in the last group, I don’t get the feeling he’s thinking about things at all. It’s like he’s just enjoying himself. Scoping out the others, you know. He doesn’t put in a lick of work the way you think of work.”

  “He’s got quite a stride. You should see him as well as ride him someday.”

  “It’s easy, boss. Just slippery. Then, about the three-eighths pole, he kind of wakes up, looks for a hole, and goes for it. I don’t get the feeling that he’s looking at the other horses as horses at all. Like, you know, most of them, they get their eye on a horse coming up on the outside, and they just hook onto that, and that makes them want to put themselves out there. I’ve seen that so many times when I’m coming up on a horse. His eye rolls and you see the white, and he’s looking at your horse and saying, ‘No way, buddy.’ But this guy, he doesn’t even think of them as horses or something.”

  “Maybe he’s looking for a better class of company.”

  “I think so, boss. But the one thing is, besides his mouth, he doesn’t like to go fast early. I wouldn’t like to push him if you had horses that were going to eat him up in the early fractions.”

  So he sent him to the farm for a week, then moved him up ten days later to sixty thousand dollars, but still in allowance company. For this race, Rosalind showed up. Al was in Uzbekistan again, but Rosalind expected him home sometime soon. The morning line on Limitless fo
r the race was three to one. By post time he was the favorite, two to three. Joy sat next to Rosalind and glanced at her from time to time. What she admired about her was the subtle smile that burnished and lit her up as she gazed toward the starting gate. On the other side of Rosalind, Farley said, “The trouble is, he’s running out of conditions. If he wins this race, I’m going to have to put him in a stakes race.”

  “That sounds good to me,” said Rosalind. “Don’t you think he can do it? He’s posting great works.”

  “And a lot of them,” put in Joy.

  Farley stared out at the track, stroking his beard with his hand. Joy continued, “But it’s like having a present to open. Sometimes you just want to put it off a little longer. At least, that’s what I say.” She reached around behind Rosalind’s chair and found Farley’s hand. He grasped her fingers. He said, “That’s not what I say.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Bit by bit over the last few weeks with this horse, I’ve dropped all these big chunks of what I knew about horse-training.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that you shouldn’t work too often, that long slow gallops are better for the horse than frequent works, that the jockey rides the horse, and asks for this here and that there, you know.” He smiled. “That a horse lives in a stall at the track twenty-two hours a day.” He grinned. “That I know what is going on with this horse.”

  “Not even Elizabeth and Mr. T. know what’s going on with this horse,” said Joy.

  “Who’re they?” said Rosalind.