Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

“Someone knowledgeable in the barn.”

  “I’ve heard that one before. I don’t suppose they simulcast to Murmansk.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, next one, maybe. Breeders’ Cup, maybe.”

  “Good night, Al.”

  Then he got up, though it was two hours until he had to, and went to the track.

  Santa Anita was wide awake, and Buddy Crawford’s first set was already out there, though it was still dark enough for the lights to be on. If Joy went off, Farley thought, I could go back to this, to these earliest, coolest, purest hours, the kind racetrackers kept if they cared about nothing else in the world but racing.

  When he came in after the second set, there was a call from Rosalind, saying that her plane had been delayed on the tarmac by a terrorist bomb threat, and even though it was over now, she couldn’t possibly make the race, and so she was going to go on to Caracas. He gave her the message from Al. Her voice softened. She said, “He said he’d be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s very hard to dial Murmansk on the cellular, so, if he calls to find out the results of the race, tell him I’ll meet him in the hotel lobby at noon Saturday.”

  “Right.”

  Then he had a note from the front office that Mr. Tompkins had lost an engine just outside of Fresno, turned back, and landed safely, but would not make the Swaps Stakes. Put down five dollars to win on the horse Limitless and he would pay him back later. The morning wore on. The morning line on Limitless was five to two. He was the second favorite. It looked like his audience for the race would consist of Farley and eleven thousand strangers. At about three o’clock, Rafael pulled the horse out of his pen and led him over to the receiving barn. Farley lingered and lingered, but the phone didn’t ring and the footsteps did not come. Finally, he went to the saddling paddock alone. Limitless and Rafael were standing there in position five, calmly and alone. It was a good big race, eight colts and two fillies. Baffert had two in, Lukas had one, MacAnally had one. Owners were everywhere. Limitless stood quietly while being saddled, but on his toes, his ears flicking back and forth. Rafael held him while Farley pulled his forelegs out one at a time, then Farley held him while Rafael smoothed his tail and toweled his face again. His odds were down to two-to-one, and he was still the second favorite, after one of the Baffert entries.

  The paddock judge stirred them up, and as Roberto approached, there were plenty of well-wishers and hopeful bettors leaning over the barriers. He threw Roberto onto the horse, and as Roberto picked up the reins, ever so delicately, Farley felt anticipation perk the colt up. He followed him under the stands. Both of the Baffert horses looked terrific. He went to a betting window and bet five dollars for Mr. Tompkins. He saw as he came up the stairs to his box that the horses and their ponies were trotting. Limitless’s pony was hard put, as always, to keep up with his big trot.

  She was sitting in her usual seat, and when he came up to her and sat down, she put her arms around him under his jacket and laid her cheek upon his chest. He put his hand on her head and pressed it into himself, and they sat like that until the horses were in the starting gate. Then, because it was a Grade One race, Limitless’s first, they sat up and watched, but Farley held Joy’s hand tightly in both of his.

  The horses broke evenly and well, and around the first turn, Limitless and General Challenge settled together in the back of the field, which was not good for either one of them, since both preferred to dog it alone while the front horses spent themselves. But now they were pushing each other; and they both had so much speed that they could not help moving up on the main group. Farley glanced over at Baffert, who had his binoculars pressed to his face. Down the backstretch, the two horses simply mowed down the company in front of them, matching stride for stride. Through his own binoculars, Farley could see that McCarron had the big chestnut gelding on a tight hold, while Roberto had Limitless nearly on a loose rein. It was impossible to know what Limitless’s reserve was, but General Challenge seemed to have plenty. Into the second turn, they were just behind the two leaders, who were both on the rail, one about a length in back of the other. Farley saw Limitless pull out to go wide and he said, “I think Roberto’s forgotten who he’s racing against.”

  Joy said, “Limitless doesn’t care.”

  The other horse stuck to him as if tethered and they went around the second horse and took aim on the first. Farley saw Roberto glance at McCarron, and then he saw McCarron ask the big gelding for a little more. They were at the first horse’s shoulder, nose to nose, stride for stride. They hit the eighth pole. Limitless’s reins were flapping, and Roberto had his hands in the horse’s mane. McCarron lifted his left hand with the whip in it. The jockey of the number-one horse had already whipped the animal twice, and he raised his arm again. At that moment, Limitless switched leads, flattened, pinned his ears, and pulled away from the other two. He crossed the finish line a neck in front. Farley ran down to the track, taking no chances and pulling Joy with him.

  There was nothing like a Grade One stakes win to set things right. A little serotonin and a few endorphins always cleared your head and made you see that whatever you were thinking that was dark and fearful, well, that was wrong—enlightening, perhaps, in some way, but a divergence from the truth. Everything about a Grade One stakes win was reassuring, from the look on the horse’s and the jockey’s faces of excited accomplishment to the smiles in the grandstand to the shouts of congratulation as you lined up for the win picture. After the excitement, there was the pleasurable moment in the test barn when the horse stretched his hind legs back, lifted his tail slightly, dropped his penis, and urinated into the jar, and then there was the afterglow of the walk back to the barn, the various ministrations of bathing, walking, wrapping, massaging, through which you demonstrated to the horse what a good job he had done and how grateful you were for him and to him. Farley had a rule—never talk about or listen to any fantasizing about future races—no dreams allowed. This win, whatever it was, was good enough to enjoy right now. And so, thanks to Limitless, Farley found himself sitting up in bed at about two in the morning, wide awake, holding Joy against his chest, feeling her warm and affectionate softness. They had been asleep, and had coasted back up to consciousness. She said, “You know, sometimes I find the State of California personally overwhelming.”

  Farley laughed.

  “I love your voice,” she said.

  “I know you do.”

  “My mother said that I wanted to die, but right now it doesn’t seem like it was as true as that, that it was more like a pretense. Or like I was substituting something fake for something real that I couldn’t remember. I just couldn’t remember.”

  “What?”

  “This. I couldn’t remember this. I couldn’t remember how to feel your presence.”

  “Do you feel it now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too.”

  “That’s enough, then,” she said.

  AUGUST

  68 / SELF-IMPROVEMENT

  THE REASON R. T. Favor never got Justa Bob and Doc’s Big Juan back to the track was that he had this accident with his truck where he went off the road one night on the way home from a bar, and even though it was no big deal, he just ran it into the ditch, it got caught up on a stump or something, and he couldn’t rock it off, so he couldn’t get it out of the ditch, so then he did something that really had him laughing, he got his shotgun off the rack in the back window, and he shot the damn truck in the driver’s-side door, blam blam, the thing was dead, that’s what made him laugh, that the engine was dead and so he shot it, and it was dead in two ways. Just a joke, a pun, harmless, but there was this sheriff’s deputy who lived in a house nearby (wouldn’t you know it?) and he woke up and came out, and even though R.T. knew he hadn’t shot the truck more than a couple of times, the fucker gave him one of those blood tests that you get when you piss some cop off for no reason, and what happened after that was R.T. ended up in jail! R.T. had notic
ed in the past that he never met up with a cop who wasn’t in a bad mood, and then they look at your record and it all starts over again.

  It was August, and so the owner of the stable, whose name was Angel Smith, was keeping an eye on the horses, even though all the boarders did their own work. You couldn’t let them run out of water, that just caused you yourself more problems, so he made sure R.T.’s horses had water, and then, the next day, he gave them some of his own hay, because they had nothing in front of them. The day after that, he did the same thing. Well, the day after that, R.T. finally came out there. He’d been out of jail for a couple of days, but he’d been feeling a little under the weather from the whole experience, and, besides, his truck was impounded for non-payment of parking fines, and it wasn’t easy to get out to the stable. When he got there, no one was around, and he looked and saw that someone was watering the horses and giving them some hay, and then he turned around and walked away. His conscience was clear. If they were being taken care of in his absence, then, well, that was that. R.T. was getting tired of Texas, anyway. It was hot. His truck never would have gotten him anywhere else, but his thumb could. So he walked out to the road and stuck it out, and pretty soon he had himself a ride, and the fact was that he would be somewhere far away by the time of his court date, and that was an old habit that had stood him in good stead over the years.

  After a few more days, Angel noticed that R.T. hadn’t shown up in a week now, so he approached Lex about picking up R.T.’s board bill and taking care of the horses, but Lex respectfully declined, so, while he was deciding what to do with the two animals, whom he called “Amigo” and “Frank,” he put them in a pen together so that he could rent out the stalls. The pen was about twenty by twenty, wire mesh. It was in the lee of the barn, facing the road, and had some shade at noon from the overhang, and in the afternoon from the barn itself. The footing was the same as the driveway—hardpan. There was a shallow depression in the middle of it that filled with water during storms. It was not comfortable to lie down in, but that wasn’t what bothered Justa Bob. It was one thing to have Doc’s Big Juan in the next stall, putting his head through the window. A large grassy pasture would have been even better than that. But in a twenty-by-twenty-foot pen, Justa Bob found that he had no place he could call his own. The old man just threw the hay over the top, so that it landed in one spot. Justa Bob really didn’t care for eating what was already scanty enough in close proximity to another gelding, and so their friendship came under some pressure. There were squeals and bites and kicks. For his part, Doc’s Big Juan felt much the same way, that good fences make good neighbors. And he was a little younger and quicker than Justa Bob, so he managed to avoid injury, while also laying one on the other horse from time to time. Soon Justa Bob had three good bites—one on his haunches, one on his neck, and one on his back. For his part, he had managed to kick Doc’s Big Juan in the knee, which swelled up. The barn owner thought that, compared with some he’d put in the pen, they were doing okay and would get used to one another.

  IT WAS ALSO HOT in Maryland, where Epic Steam, now known as “Sudden Intuition” or “Toots,” continued to hold solitary court in his own two acres of grassy pasture. Ellen took care of him herself, and everyone else had strict instructions to leave him alone. It was an old cowboy trick for taming a bad actor. The first thing you did was isolate the horse from all social contact with horses or people. For a week, she didn’t even get out of her truck to feed him, but threw supplementary hay over the fence as she drove past. When he was lonely enough, he would greet her, and, sure enough, on the seventh day he did—he nickered at her. She immediately got out of the truck and went over to the fence, threw in the hay, and spoke to him kindly, but only briefly, and she didn’t attempt to touch him. The next morning, he was standing at the gate looking for her. She threw most of the hay over the fence, and spoke to him again, but this time she showed him a carrot, and then dropped it onto the hay. When he approached it and ate it, she spoke to him again, in a calm, friendly, but not fawning voice. Then she got in the truck and drove off. For the rest of the day and night, some twenty-three hours and forty minutes, Toots was alone.

  Having achieved his lifelong goal of separating himself from the company of tedious and punishing humans, Epic Steam did not now know quite what to do with himself. He trotted and galloped around the pasture, reared, squealed, bucked, and played. He kicked the fence, sometimes repeatedly, as always enjoying the sound of the impact. Often he stood in one spot or another, alertly listening to the sounds of horses and other creatures that came to him on the breeze. There were storms, an uncomfortable novelty since he had no shelter, so he got wet and windblown. He grazed. The grass was delicious, and there were plenty of other little plants that he sampled by the way, as he did the bark of the trees in the pasture, but not the fencing, since he didn’t care for the sting of the electric wire that ran along the top board. He dozed. He slept, most often in the heat of the afternoon rather than at night. With only himself for entertainment, he got a little dull, and then a little duller. He experienced the ebbing of testosterone as the ebbing of a certain kind of frustration, but that was a slow process, for his testicles had been quite well developed and part of his problem all along had been their efficiency in promoting his masculinity.

  Toward dawn one morning he had what could only be called an idea. He was standing in the corner of the pasture closest to the woods. Though the leafy hickories and oaks and hackberries hid his view of the other horses, they did not interfere too much with either their scent or their sounds—he often heard them whinnying, and often whinnied back to them and they back to him. Now he trotted over to the fence and pressed his chest against the gate. The gate gave a little bit, which was encouraging. He pressed against the gate again, and it gave again, because the chain holding it was loosely snapped. Now he trotted away from the gate and then back to it, butting it with his chest. He liked the play in it. It gave him hope. So he tried it again, this time from a bit greater distance. He was a bully and strong—it came naturally to him to push things down. Part of his problem with people was that they were always yelling at him and poking him when he crowded them. He’d had elbows in the ribs countless times, handles of mucking forks and shovels, the occasional hoofpick, a twitch handle. So, for the third time, he trotted away from the gate, intending to come at it again and hit it a little harder this time. He made a circle.

  But, standing back from it, he saw something else about it—that the space beyond it was just like the space in front of it—grassy and open. The gate itself had a bar running across the bottom, right along the ground, and a well-defined bar along the top, and three bars in between, about a foot apart. You could, he realized, look over it, through it, at it. It was not, he realized, a wall. He trotted toward it, then he turned and trotted back toward the middle of the pasture, then he turned toward it again, picked up a canter, and did the obvious thing—he jumped out of his pasture.

  Later, when everyone realized what had happened, no one was surprised. He was a young athletic horse, his pedigree riddled with Nearco and Nasrullah blood. Damascus, Raja Baba, Blue Larkspur, all the Thoroughbred jumping lines. The gate was only four and a half feet high, and he was a seventeen-hand horse. Nor was Epic Steam surprised. It took him only once to find out that jumping came naturally to him, that once you could jump you could not be confined, that four and a half feet was easy for him, and that once you were in the habit of jumping out of pastures there was no end to the havoc you could wreak.

  The first thing he did after congratulating himself upon his escape was to trot through the trees and investigate the other pastures and paddocks. Of course the other horses were much enlivened by the sight of him—he so obviously was out of bounds. He riveted their attention and distracted them from the daily wait for morning hay and grain. Soon he had them all galloping about. Also, since he was a troublemaker by nature, he visited with all of them over their fences, and issued various challenges having to do
with dominance and masculinity. And all of them were ready to take up these challenges. He was a new horse. Every horse in the herd had some sort of instant opinion of him. And there were so many horses turned out on these summer nights that he had plenty to keep him busy.

  It was by now about seven-thirty, and all would have been fine if it hadn’t been Sunday morning, when Ellen’s feed girl gave herself an extra half-hour in the sack. She was asleep in the apartment above the barn, with the windows closed and the air conditioner on high. Just as she turned over, glanced at the clock, and decided to allow herself another fifteen minutes, Epic Steam was deciding to try that jumping thing again, and within seconds he was just where he had wanted to be for so very long, in a paddock with four mares. Something this exciting for the four mares hadn’t happened in years, so they stood stock-still, ears pricked, tails up, staring at him. He took this as encouragement, and lifted his own tail, arched his neck, and progressed in a beautiful passage around the perimeter of the pasture, picking his feet up as quick and high as if the ground were strewn with hot coals. All the horses in every other pasture looked on and occasionally whinnied encouragement. After displaying himself to his own satisfaction, Epic Steam lowered his head and snaked it toward one of the mares, a little bay. He approached her. She moved away, toward the other mares, and he paused, but then approached again. Manners do not come naturally to a young stallion, and did not come naturally to Epic Steam in any event. Her retreat aroused some of his inherent aggression, and he went after her. He thought he might bite her. Intent upon this thought, he did not pay attention to his position relative to the other mares, and so did not realize until it was already happening that they were kicking the stuffing out of him.

  At this point, the feed girl got up, yawned, went into the bathroom, peed, and brushed her teeth. Then she found her jeans and paddock boots, a T-shirt, and a Diet Coke. She put on her baseball cap that was hanging by the door, and went down the stairs. First she went into the barn, and noticed that the stalled horses seemed a little restless. She fed them, which took about fifteen minutes. Then she loaded up the feed and hay into the bed of the farm pickup, pulled it out of the feed shed, and headed toward the back of the property, past the arenas and the first turnout. She stepped instinctively on the gas when she saw that almost all of the pastured horses were trotting around. Her first thought was that a pack of dogs had gotten into one of the paddocks, which had happened once, and she felt that adrenaline rush of fear. But there was no barking. Only over where those mares were—