Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  As Deck was led back toward the saddling paddock, Bill, moving to meet him, was addressed by a man—a rancher—who was leaning against a post, looking down, potato-chip hat over his eyes. Never looking up, the man said, “Would you take ten thousand dollars for this horse?”

  Relieved immeasurably, Bill said, “I don’t believe so today.”

  Rich and John came in by air on the Sunday before the trials. Those were their nicknames—what everyone close around them called them, particularly their trainer, Jerry Fisher. Rich and John were California quarter horses bred, born, and raised, and they were accustomed to an elevation far lower than Pea Ridge, let alone the mountains of New Mexico. So Fisher started them at once on twice-daily rations of bottled oxygen. Their home was the Vessels Stallion Farm, near Anaheim, nearer sea level, and their owner, Frank Vessels, Jr., was a grandee of quarter racing, as his father had been. The Vessels family had a four-hundred-and-fifty-acre compound, which included their breeding farm, a golf course, five private homes (their own and Fisher’s among them), and Los Alamitos, their prodigiously successful quarter-horse race track. Since the inception of the All-American, in 1959, the Vessels family had been trying to win it.

  Sometimes at Los Alamitos, to delight the crowd before the beginning of a night’s racing program, Vessels stages milk runs. Brood mares stand by the finish line. Their foals, from a hundred and fifty yards away, bedazzled by floodlight, run to their mothers like condensed giraffes. John, in his time, was the star of the milk runs. He liked milk. He also liked Hershey Bars, Nestle’s Crunch, Mars Bars, and chocolate doughnuts. His favorite drink was Pepsi-Cola. He grew up on such stuff, living around a race track like that, and so did Rich. As John matured, he became a lazy horse, and began what would apparently be a life-long habit of spending much of his day lying down in his stall. When it came time for him to race, he would stop to rest on the way from the barn to the paddock. Still, he could outrun a bullet. Rich, for his part, had always been alert. Always looking around, always biting something. If anything moved near his stall, Rich would stick his head out to see what was happening—while John, next door, slept on. John’s father was Father John. John, of course, needed a name of his own, and in the quarter-horse registry he was Go Fartherfaster. Rich’s father was Aforethought and his mother was Chronometer, so they called him Timeto Thinkrich.

  An overland drive was thought to be too punishing for these two; hence they were flown to Roswell, seventy miles east of Ruidoso. Fisher brought with him a bag full of candy bars and chocolate doughnuts. He bought local Pepsi-Cola. The candy, the doughnuts, the Pepsi, and the oxygen might see them through. On the day of the trials, he put muzzles on them. “When you muzzle them, they know they’re going to run,” he said. “These two colts are pretty good eaters. With the muzzle, they’re not filling up. You want these quarter horses fresh. You want them high. With Thoroughbreds, they blow those horses out the day before. A lot of Thoroughbreds gallop the day they run. They don’t want Thoroughbreds to be too fresh. These colts are nice colts. They’re hard-knocking colts. Rich is always walking around, playing around. John, though, he don’t get high. He rests a lot. He’s down in his stall. When he is on the walker, he stands still. If he so much as shakes his head, he’s feeling good. He acts like a saddle horse. He’s just kind of a big old pet.”

  Fisher, as a trainer, was under his fourth millionaire. He had worked for several of the prominent farms in the business. Five times, horses he trained had run in the All-American, and the most successful of them had placed third. He had been a jockey—a brush-track rider from the age of ten, a professional from seventeen. He came from Meade, Kansas. Toward the end of the nineteen-fifties, he had found it “too hard to do the weight” and had become a trainer. Thirty-seven now, slim, shy, recently married, he looked ten years younger.

  Frank Vessels, a ship captain of a man with rampant sideburns and a tan head, had paid thirty thousand dollars to give Rich and John a chance at the All-American. Vessels’ approach was to ignore all the peanut payments, look over his crop of two-year-olds, decide which might win, pay the maximum penalty at the ultimate moment, and send the horses to Ruidoso. No horse from California had won the All-American in ten years. California quarter-horse people wanted badly to change that. A third California horse had also paid fifteen thousand to come in, and riding it would be the foremost jockey in quarter racing. The word among the Texans was that the Californians had come to Ruidoso “loaded for bear.”

  When the trials came, Rich drew the 7 hole in the fourteenth race. Deck unluckily drew the 1 hole, in the twelfth. Three horses were scratched only hours before, reducing the total number from the eleven hundred-odd that in one way or another were represented in the pot to two hundred and seven. To put them through trial heats, twenty-one races would be required, all in a single program, beginning in the morning and ending in gathered dusk. John drew the 8 hole in the twenty-first race, and could sleep through the morning and the afternoon.

  Starting a quarter-horse race is extraordinarily difficulty, for so much can be gained or lost in the first part of the first second. Human sprinters—diggers or floaters or whatever they may be in their various styles on the straightaway—are losers if they do not, at the beginning, find the rhythm of the gun. With Thoroughbred horses, the start of a race is important, to be sure, but Thoroughbreds have a lot of ground to cover, and they are in some ways like human distance runners, who, seeming to loiter in groups as they wait for the gun, do not even bother to bend over. Thoroughbreds, for all the difficulties they can cause in the gate, are mild in there compared with quarter horses. The least dispensable talent in Ruidoso belonged to Dean Turpitt, the starter.

  Turpitt was an independent, freelance contractor, offering his crew and himself as a package to the management of the track. Far removed from grandstand and barn, his starting gate was his own principality, where his decisions were absolute, and he controlled there something that was like the isthmus of an hourglass, a point of transfer between disparate milieus—the grandstand on the one hand, the barns on the other. The grandstand—with its Jockey Club, its All-American Turf Club—was full of millionaires who looked like vaudeville cowboys in tailored jeans, their abdomens sparkling with platters of silver. Turpitt called them “Texas-buckled sons of bitches.” He wore a plain business suit and a Knox panama. Behind him were the barns—long, quiet corridors, people around who looked like farmers, rare the owner who, like the trainers, was welded to the creatures in the stalls. There were fourteen hundred stalls. Loudspeakers there said, “Take your horses to the paddock for the twelfth race. Take your horses to the paddock for the twelfth race.” And Calcutta Deck walked half a mile, through the complex of barns, around the beginning of the straightaway, and down a long path to the paddock, in the shadow of the stand. When the horses approached the gate, Turpitt was standing in a small tower, outside the rail, with an electric cord in his hand. His voice was soft and low, somewhat husky, but it carried successfully into the gate, where seven men in baseball hats did what he suggested.

  “If the 8 horse gets a little bouncy, who’s got him?”

  “I do, Dean.”

  “O.K., Cotton. Just pick up his tail a little bit if he gives you trouble.”

  The horses were led, pulled, or crammed, one by one, into the gate—in this case, in numerical order.

  “Kent, get that 3 horse’s feet under him.”

  Some horses cause so much trouble in the gate that Turpitt has them kept out until the last minute and then stuffed in. Some other horses will freeze if they stand in the gate too long, or, conversely, relax so completely that when the gates open they just stand there and don’t move. So they, too, are kept out until the last minute.

  On a program in Turpitt’s pocket were hieroglyphs beside the names of the horses in this race, reminders to himself of their inconvenient idiosyncrasies. When a horse might require some wrestling into line, there was beside his name an “H,” for “handle.” Where the program
said “Bill H. Smith, Pea Ridge, Arkansas, owner, CALCUTTA DECK,” Turpitt had written nothing. That horse in the 1 hole was all right. Turpitt had seen him before.

  “That 10 horse is going to need tail, Gene.”

  They were all in the gate now—forty hooves, ten heads, ten jocks in their racing silks, seven crewmen.

  At the back of the starting gate, on the ground, was a heavy steel bar that backed up all ten holes. It served the same purpose that starting blocks serve for a human sprinter. It was called the braking block. The quarter horses in the gate worked their hind feet back against it—the better to spring away.

  “Johnny, hold the horse’s nose down a little.”

  “I can’t get hold of him, Dean.”

  “Well, get a hold. This bus is leaving.”

  “Hold it, Dean.”

  “Hold it.”

  “Hold it.”

  “Back him up, Cotton.”

  “Dean.”

  “Dean.”

  “No, Dean.”

  The entire gate, a steel structure ten feet high and more than twenty feet wide, vibrated from the activity within it—heads whipping, forced straight, bodies pushing against the steel walls. Heads should be straight, all four feet on the ground solid. Turpitt watched the feet, the heads, and waited for a moment of appropriate stillness. It came. He pressed a button.

  Dirt flew thirty feet into the air. In no time, the horses were massed on the immediate horizon, their distant motion like a heat wave. Dean looked after them with real interest, absorbed in the outcome. “That was a good one, a good line break,” he said. “It looks like the No. 1 horse from here. Of course, I’m not right very often. After all, I’m looking at their rear ends.” Inside the gate, in the ground by the braking bar, were deep divots.

  Deck’s winning time was twenty-two and two-hundredths seconds—half a second slower than the track record. A fast first quarter turned in by a Thoroughbred might have read within a second of that, but Thoroughbreds are not timed, as quarter horses are, from a standing start. They are already doing thirty or thirty-five miles an hour when they trip an electric eye. The clock on these quarter horses was started by the button that opened the gate. The precise timing for each horse behind the leader was accomplished by photography.

  On non-racing days, Turpitt spent a fair part of his time schooling young horses in the gate. “Quarter horses in the gate are more excited than Thoroughbreds. Excitable, anyway. Maybe a little more tense would be the word.” So he walks them into the gate a few times, slowly—a mistake to do it too fast. “If you can keep colts where they’re not scared and nervous in the gate, they got a lot better chance. Walk them in four or five times. Stop them. Open the gate by hand. Walk them out. Sometimes they’ll just set up a little bit to see if those gates are open, but after that they just go. They learn fast. Thoroughbreds are slower out of the gate. These quarter horses are just like shooting a bullet out of there.”

  Certain bloodlines are rough in the gate, others calm, he says. Ask him which are which, and he won’t say. “The owners would be all over me.” Whether he has schooled it or not, he remembers any horse he has ever started. “I remember them. The good ones I don’t remember in detail. You remember them better if they screw up a little. But once I’ve started them I’d remember them if I saw them on a street in Hong Kong, China.” With a kind of reverence, he speaks of certain people in his field—Bill Mills, of Santa Anita; George Cassidy, of Belmont. “They are the great ones. I’ve met Mr. Cassidy.”

  Between races, Turpitt goes back to the paddock, and sometimes sits in the shade on the porch of the jocks’ room. Fifty at dawn, the temperature will rise toward ninety by midafternoon. He kids with the jockeys. They tease him. He tells them, at the call, “Get out there and shut up.” A time when he is almost sure to be there with the jockeys is after a bad start. Taking it all on himself, he seems to feel that he has let them down, and he seems to want to be among them, to absorb anything that may be said, to respond, if necessary. He was a jockey once himself. He grew up on a farm near Hemingford, Nebraska, and he started out riding in county fairs, long before the advent of the electric starting gate, when races were begun with a flag. There were gates as well at some places, but they consisted only of slots open in front. “You sat there and sawed on them reins and got that horse in there, and broke with him, too.” So much for the pampered modern jockey, led into the gate, sprung out. “Get out there and shut up.”

  In the fourteenth race of the All-American trials, Rich lost, running second to Azure Teen. John, at the end of the day, walked slowly from the barn, rested on the way to the paddock, stood quietly through the saddling while the other horses snorted and pranced. His time, as winner of his heat, was twenty-two seconds flat, the third-best time of the day—third among two hundred and seven. Six colts and four fillies would be the ten finalists—four from Texas, two from Oklahoma, three from California, and one from Arkansas. Coca’s Kid, the other California horse that paid fifteen thousand to get in, had the best trial time of all. Calcutta Deck’s time was so good that two other horses in his heat got into the final as well. Rich, close enough behind Azure Teen, made it, too. Separating first from last, the difference in time among the ten horses who emerged as the qualified finalists for the All-American Futurity was one-sixth of a second.

  Before 1973, the All-American Futurity was run at four hundred yards. After changing the conditions of the race (a change that was announced, perforce, in 1971, long before any money at all had been paid in), the track management explained that its motive was merely to tidy up—to extend the distance to the classic measure for which the quarter horse was named. Seems reasonable—but the news touched off a smoky dispute. The classic distance, some owners said, should be saved for older horses; these horses were too young. The forty extra yards—ten per cent—might well increase proportionately the number of injuries and breakdowns suffered by two-year-old horses, for the longer the sprint the more punishing it will be, and the bone structure of a two-year-old, being incompletely formed, is particularly vulnerable. In the main, though, what brought so much concerned attention to those forty extra yards was the fact that somewhere not much farther than a quarter mile comes the point where the Thoroughbred catches the quarter horse. Thoroughbreds, of course, do not run in quarter-mile races. Their offspring do.

  By the rules of quarter racing, only one parent has to be a registered quarter horse. The other can be a Thoroughbred. Of the ten horses set for the All-American final, five had Thoroughbred sires. John’s father, Father John, was a Thoroughbred. All three California horses had Thoroughbred sires. All quarter horses, without exception, have Thoroughbred blood in them. It is not unusual for a quarter horse to be mostly Thoroughbred, and with the lengthening of the big race it would now become increasingly customary for a quarter horse to be seven-eighths or fifteen-sixteenths, or even thirty-one thirty-seconds, Thoroughbred—a dismaying trend, in the view of some people, and one that seems to make less clear the definition of the quarter horse as a type.

  Thoroughbreds are Thoroughbreds, pure and uncomplicated, dam and sire, and to get onto a track they have to have pedigrees that go all the way back to one or another of the three foundation studs from which the breed descends—the Godolphin Arabian (foaled in 1724), the Darley Arabian (1700), and the Byerly Turk (1685). Quarter horses go back, in a generic sense, a great deal farther than 1685. Quarter racing in England is traceable at least to the late Middle Ages, and horses were bred to the purpose even then. All horse racing in early America was quarter racing, and the fastest runners, as it happened, were descendants of horses brought to America by the Spaniards—Arabian in history, heavily muscled not only in the rear but also across the chest, fast off the start, uncatchable for four or five hundred yards but tending to fade quickly after that. When the cowboy came along, he made these horses forever famous. He chose them because they could stop on a dollar, turn on a dime, sprint faster than anything else, and cut out a heifer fro
m a herd with an athletic knack that was known as cow sense. When the United States Cavalry went West to help protect (among other things) the expanding cattle industry from disgruntled aborigines, many a government horse became host to an arrow. To replace the dead and gone, a cavalry station would have a Thoroughbred remount stallion standing at stud. The remount stallions were bred, often, to local mares, cow ponies, producing the modern quarter horse: part Thoroughbred, part Spanish-Arabian, part streak of light. The horse had a definite conformation, a long list of physical characteristics that contributed to its talents and made it a recognizable type—notably the heavy musculature in the rear and the chest, a height of about five feet, a weight around twelve hundred pounds, small ears, wide-set eyes, a short muzzle. In 1940, a quarter-horse studbook was opened, as a result of a movement among ranchers to make a formal breed of the animal that had become the horse of the Southwest, the region where the greatest concentration of quarter horses could be found—where the cows and the cowboys were, and where so many remount stallions had been. Speed and appropriate conformation were the criteria for inclusion in the book. Standards were high, and many thousands of applicants were turned down. The book closed in 1962. So far so simple: any quarter horse born thereafter would have to be traceable on both sides to a horse listed in the studbook. In racing, though, the studbook seems to act only as a kind of fixed foot around which something else can swing. The rule that one parent need not be a quarter horse seems to defy logic, if not to defeat altogether the purpose of the studbook. The quarter horse is by definition a mongrel. Walt Wiggins, the editor of Quarter Racing World, has observed, “The question has been ‘Is it a registry or is it a breed?’ The years have proved that it is a registry.”