Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  The setting is a small race track in big dry mountains that rise up to eleven and twelve thousand feet. Ruidoso is a linear town, stretched out along miles of highway in creases of the mountains, its wide streets lined with flaky plastic. Curio bins. Drive-in burgers. The same versatile hand that painted Las Vegas into the desert may have painted Ruidoso into the mountains. One has only to get on a horse and go sidewise, though, up into a canyon or onto a mesa, to see what beautiful country Ruidoso was built in and why the town is the retreat and playground of, primarily, Texans. Ruidoso is where Texans cool off. It is in the nearest mountain region to the plains of West Texas, and Texans have been going to Ruidoso in big numbers for many decades. Long before there was a track, the Texans on holiday were betting on horses. They brought their quarter horses with them, their “cow ponies.” (The quarter horse is the horse of the cowboy—the roping horse, the cattle cutter unparalleled.) Conversations would develop roughly like the ones about Windmill.

  “I’d run you four hundred and forty yards for twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t run my horse for twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “Well, then, how about twenty-five thousand?”

  Match races were held in the shadow of Gavilan Ridge, on the only stretch of ground that approximated level, the place where the grandstand and barns of Ruidoso Downs were eventually built. They were gamblers at base, these vacationing Texans. If they had not had horses to bet on, they would have bet on frogs. The All-American Futurity, Ruidoso’s big race, exploits that particular kind of horse owner right in the soul. When their horses are very small and not even far off the teat, owners start writing checks to Ruidoso Downs, each owner obviously picturing not the little stilt in the pasture but a champion quarter horse exploding out of the gate. They put in fifty dollars at first. (“My dad’s idea was not to scare him.”)

  The first fifty dollars toward the All-American Futurity of 1973 was due on January 15, 1972, and money flooded into Ruidoso in the name of one thousand and seventy-two colts and fillies. The owners, for the most part, were Texans and Oklahomans. Cattle ranchers. Wheatland ranchers. Some oil people. Here and there a road contractor, a doctor, a film star, a lawyer. The almost common denominator of the owners was that they, like the owners of racing Thoroughbreds, were very rich. It was not completely unimaginable—but somewhere near it—that an unrich man sitting around having his coffee in a drugstore in a small town in Arkansas, as Bill Smith did every morning, might see himself as an owner equipped to enter the All-American, might hear once too often that his old stallion was producing not so many horses as dogs, and that if his horse and its get were really as good as he said they were then why didn’t he enter those two new colts of his in that race in New Mexico? Smith said he figured those two colts had the bloodlines to do it, but he didn’t want to be away from fishing that long. “Do it, Bill,” said his friend Wayne Laughlin, a feed salesman. “You should put those two colts in the All-American.”

  “All right,” Bill said. “I believe I will.” And a hundred dollars went from Pea Ridge, Arkansas, to Ruidoso Downs.

  On March 15, 1972, when a hundred additional dollars per horse was due, eighty-seven horses dropped out. But nearly a thousand stayed in, and that second payment added about a hundred thousand dollars to the pot. A third payment was due in June—a hundred and fifty dollars this time—and more than a hundred horses quit. The pot, though, moved up to over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. October 1st, December 15th, March 15th, payments due went up in small, coaxing increments of fifty and then a hundred dollars, while the number of paid-up owners gradually grew smaller. Anyone who owned a two-year-old registered quarter horse that had not been entered in the All-American could buy eligibility for the horse with a penalty payment—on or before June 1, 1973—of six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars. Eight such penalties were paid. On June 15th, when the next incremental payment (five hundred dollars) was due, some three hundred and fifty horses stayed in. After rubber checks were deducted (there had by now been seventeen of them), the total pot accrued to date was one million thirty-one thousand four hundred and twenty-five dollars.

  In order to determine the ten horses that would take part in the climactic race, to be run on Labor Day, all eligibles would race in trial heats a week before. In hundredths of a second, every horse would be timed, and the ten fastest, notwithstanding where they may have placed in their trial heats, would be the ten horses of the All-American. Their purse would draw seven hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars out of the pot. The horses that ran from eleventh to fortieth in the trials would run in other races and partake—in lesser substance—of the mother lode.

  Twenty-five hundred dollars was the aggregate required for a horse that had been paid in from the beginning, but there was one more chance for a late horse to get into the field. Just chip in fifteen thousand dollars on or before August 15th, and join the group. Owners of twelve horses came forth with such money—a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. When everything was added up, including more than thirty thousand dollars in interest payments from the Ruidoso State Bank, the total pot collected for the 1973 All-American was, in round figures, a million five hundred thousand dollars. The track management, though, had decided to hold on to the excess over a million, and to apply it to still another race—for these same horses a year hence, when they were three-year-olds. All they would have to do to stay eligible would be to make a few additional, incremental payments.

  There have been smaller pyramids. The man who, some twenty years ago, developed and first promoted this hippie chain letter frenetically travelled the Southwest—the quarter-horse states—seeking out owners, selling his race, signing them up. He was, at the time, the owner of the track. Eventually, he had to watch the big race on television, if at all, because he was confined to a federal penitentiary for tax evasion.

  One of Bill H. Smith’s colts, Joy’s Cutter, pulled up lame during his first workout at Ruidoso and was finished for the season, fit only to move slowly in circles on the exercise walker and to eat his daily hay, at up to seven dollars a bale—many times what it would cost at home. The other colt, Calcutta Deck, was a gentle bay with a small star on his forehead. He had the gluteal muscles of an eight-ton jackrabbit. His grandfather Top Deck had sired a great line of quarter horses. And his great-great-grandfather was Wilson’s Yellow Cat, “the Iron Horse of Arkansas.” The iron horse had once won two match races in a single day. All this—as quarter horses go—did not add up to aristocracy; but neither, on paper, was Smith a fool. He had not come a thousand miles with nothing. The breeding of the horse was not expensive, but it was not common, either. In the vernacular of the business, the horse had the license to win.

  Bill called him simply Deck. “This horse right here,” he would say, shoving the horse aside so he could muck out his stall, “this horse right here, you could take him off this track and in a month have him working cattle if you wanted to.” Something similar might have been said of Smith himself. One look at him suggested a rolled smoke, a shivery morning, coffee in an iron pot, inseparability from the horse. He was a small, spare man, trim. He walked in a natural riding position. When he stood still, he bent forward as one would when brushing one’s teeth. More often than not, he had a toothpick in his mouth, or a cigarette. When he spoke, he leaned right at you. This helped make his words emphatic. He had seven small diamonds in a ring on his right hand. The skin across his face was tight, and he had sharp brown eyes that moved quickly but without suspicion. He wore a long-sleeved shirt, Levi’s, a big silver buckle from Ozark Downs. “Leading Trainer.” Ozark Downs had folded five years before. “Race interest kind of left out down there.” On his head was a Bulldogger hat—four-inch curling brim—and it came off virtually never. When it did, it revealed hair as black as shoe polish, beginning halfway back.

  Smith was registered at the Horseshoe Court motel, hard by the main road of town, and when he was not down at the barns he was up a
t the motel sitting under a shade tree, a big cottonwood, playing dominoes and talking about his horse. He ate breakfast soon after five, lunch at ten-thirty, dinner at four. He moved his patronage a lot, the food in town was so bad. He washed his clothes in a coin laundry, and he missed his home, his wife, his boat, the fishing. As Labor Day drew near, he slept less and less. He weighed a hundred and fifty-five when he arrived in Ruidoso. In the course of the summer he lost fifteen pounds. He had companions. Jimmy Grimes, his assistant, his exercise boy, had made the trip with him. Wayne Laughlin, the feed salesman, who had retired, joined them there. Jimmy walked slowly as a result of polio. If Calcutta Deck hit it big, it was Smith’s intention to use part of the winnings to pay for an operation for Jimmy. Money would go also to a crippled-children’s hospital in Little Rock. All summer long, Smith never left Ruidoso, was never more than five or ten minutes away from his horse, with one exception, a short tour of the reservation of the Mescalero Apache.

  The horse had a radio down in the barn and liked listening to it. He liked hard rock and country-and-Western. He liked the six-o’clock news. He was a neat horse. His droppings always landed in the same place in the stall, making it easy for Bill and his pitchfork. Bill walked Deck by hand, in a small oval outside the stall, or had Jimmy lead him with the pony; he never put the horse on a walker. Walkers were invented to reduce the high cost of grooms. A walker is a mechanized device that has four cantilevered steel arms, lead ropes attached, leading four horses in a circle. Many dozens of them were spaced among the barns. Horses have on rare occasions been electrocuted by walkers, which are powered by electric motors that gently coax the horses to move. Horses have tried to bolt away from walkers and have broken their necks.

  Bill rubbed some of his own formula leg brace over the metacarpals of Deck. “The skill is with the feet and the legs,” Wayne said. Wayne was a heavyset man with wavy gray hair. He, like Bill, was about as talkative as Jimmy Grimes was silent. “I don’t think there’s a man in the world who understands horses and horses’ legs better than Bill does,” Wayne went on. “He could have been one of the great trainers. But he just took his own horses. He don’t like to be away from home.”

  “We’re not rich people,” Bill confessed. “These millionaires has tried to win the All-American years and years. Fellow out of Kansas City had ten entered once. The Old Boy upstairs has to help you. Somebody has to.”

  Larry Wilson, Deck’s jockey, turned up shivering at the barn one morning at five-thirty. The temperature was fifty. Deck was going to go out on the track for a blow. Smith said, “It’s colder than a well digger’s butt. Look at Larry, there—hair standing up on his arms like the bristles on a hog.” Larry was unusually tall for a jockey, blond, slender, fine-featured. He was thirty-one and was from Kansas, and had been riding quarter-horse races since he was sixteen. In the early-morning light, Wayne and Bill watched Deck gallop, Larry clinging for—if nothing else—warmth.

  The track was a small oval, five-eighths of a mile around, the inside plowed by circling Thoroughbreds. Tangent to the oval was a straightaway as broad as a turnpike, where ten quarter horses could race abreast. The straightaway reached far back into the barn area. Quarter horses of various ages and classes dash three hundred, three hundred and fifty, four hundred, four hundred and forty, and sometimes five hundred and fifty yards. In the infield were two flagpoles, and a tote board about the size of a one-room cabin, and the graves of two quarter horses, and two small ponds, one in the shape of an R, the other in the shape of a D, with an R- and a D-shaped island in their respective centers. What was painted had been painted blue—grandstand, rail, filming towers, starting gate. Hanging limp from the flagpoles were the flags of New Mexico and the United States. They were wind indicators to the horsemen, who watched them closely. When the flags straightened out and whipped toward the east, as they often did, racing quarter horses had to dig through a direct head wind all the way.

  By the standards of quarter racing, such a track had grandeur, for the old brush tracks of the type Windmill had run on were still in use as well. In Louisiana, for example, horses still run in clearings in woods, between rail fences set up as lanes—no starting gate, just ready-set-go. Riders race for cigars, for eggs. The practice has been called “folk racing.” Within ten miles of Evangeline Downs—a quarter-racing track in Lafayette, Louisiana—are ten brush tracks. There are more than a hundred actual quarter-horse race tracks in the United States, and of these many do not have pari-mutuel systems—not Blue Ribbon Downs, in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, where Bill Smith first raced Deck, or Blue Stern Downs, in Emporia, Kansas, or Life Downs, in Laredo. Narrow Gauge Downs is in Durango, Colorado, Uranium Downs in Grand Junction. There are two tracks in Michigan, five in Ohio, and two in Florida, but most are in the West, and the preeminent ones are Bay Meadows and Los Alamitos, in California, and, in New Mexico, Sunland Park and Ruidoso Downs.

  “The horse is a gentleman this morning,” Wayne said.

  Bill explained, “He’s on the track. He’s a race horse. He knows what he’s there for.”

  “He’s broke just like an old horse, as if he had run a hundred times,” Larry Wilson said when he brought Deck in from his gallop. “I think they’re going to have to catch him here if they want to beat him.”

  Before travelling to Ruidoso, Bill tried Deck in four races, in Oklahoma and Kansas, and Deck won three of them. On two occasions, he ended the day with the fastest time of any horse on the program. (“We knew we had something good then.”) Some years ago, Wilson had broken an arm in the starting gate, a dangerous place for sitting on a quarter horse. “You’re glad to get out and away,” he said. “You sure enough are. But this colt doesn’t make any mistakes at all. You can relax on him and get ready to go. He puts his head right up there in the front and doesn’t move.”

  When Deck came in from any kind of exercise, Smith washed off his legs and feet with a hose—no telling what he might have got into out there. Finished rinsing, he let Deck take hold of the hose and drink. When Bill forgot to do this, Deck bit him. Bill frequently sprayed the walls of the stall with disinfectant. “A horse can be well one day and a sick peckerwood the next,” he would say. “There are so many viruses around the barn. I’ve got to take care of him. All of northwest Arkansas—that’s their horse now.”

  Bill’s farm in Pea Ridge is small. Or, as a Ruidoso Texan might say, “thirty-five acres would kill it dead.” Smith has eight brood mares, and runs some cattle, and raises horses for rodeos as well as for racing. Bill himself rode broncos for ten years in rodeos, breaking ribs, fingers, tearing cartilage in his knees. He rode a bull once that got a horn inside his pants, tore them completely off, and stood there in triumph with the shredded Levi’s hanging from the horn. Bill has raced his own horses for twenty-two years, mainly in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, and, before the track closed down, in Arkansas. He says he can tell early, even when a horse is still a “little old shaggy colt,” if it is going to be good as a runner. “You can watch a colt in the pasture. See his action. You can tell if he’s got speed or not. Say the mares are way up in the pasture. The colts are way down by the pond. The colts have a horse race getting back to the mares. The little cusses all race together, all coming for their mammy.” Deck was a quick one getting back to his mammy.

  The colt needed race experience at Ruidoso, and toward the end of July—although he had been there almost two months—he had still not been given a chance to run. There were racing programs four times a week, but races for two-year-old quarter horses were insufficient to include all the horses that had collected to prepare for the All-American. It was imperative that Deck run at least once. Bill felt he needed it badly. So he entered Deck in the one race he could get—of all things, a claiming race. For ten thousand dollars, in this instance, anyone who wanted to buy a horse running in the race had only to present a certified check at the track office beforehand. Then, after the race, the new owner would approach the old one and take the horse. Smith, as it happ
ened, had offered to sell Deck for a thousand dollars when he was a yearling, but he obviously figured him for a great deal more than ten times that now. The claiming device is a method of making a horse race, of finding a level for a field. Owners and trainers, in effect, classify their own horses. A horse will “buy no feed” when it is entered in a claiming race above its level. Theoretically, it will run last. So it must run at the level of its worth, and an owner should be content with the price if the horse should be claimed. There is an old simple saying about owners who bemoan the loss of horses in claiming races: “They can read and write.” That is, they knew it was a claiming race; they knew the conditions; they entered the race. Bill Smith, for his part, knew exactly what he was risking, but he reasoned, “Deck never had run in this country. Nobody knew a thing about him. He was an unknown horse.”

  Deck drew the 1 hole, the inside position in the starting gate—the worst position as well. The quarter-horse straightaway joined what might be called the Thoroughbred oval about halfway through the race, and quarter horses coming out of the 1 hole had to run in the plowed furrows of the Thoroughbreds. The track was heavy from recent rain. Deck was good in mud, but the situation lacked promise. Yet he won, in the fastest quarter-horse time of that day.