Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  When he was a young rider, what impressed him most about quarter-horse dashes was that they seemed to be over before they started. There seemed to be no time for strategy, or even fleeting thought. He had ridden a thousand races a year for many years now, and his perspective had greatly altered. A race now came in parts, spaced along distinctly in his consciousness. There seemed to be plenty of time, with much going on. “I feel now, during a race, that I have time for coffee and a doughnut. You get your horse out of the gate—standing ride, feet under him, clean break. You maintain as straight a course as you can. You don’t lug him in. It costs you ground, which you can’t afford to lose in a quarter-horse race. You don’t override him. If you hit him right-handed, he might duck to the left. If you’re running second and you hit the horse, he might resent it and drop to fourth. If left alone, he might do it on his own. I won’t whip this filly. She likes to do it on her own. I’ll holler in her ear to keep her from being put off by the roar from the grandstand. I used to think I’d retire if I ever won the All-American, but I’m not an old man. I’ll be thirty next month. I figure I’ll be good for another ten years. If I win, they’ll have to beat me again. I love the quarter horse. I like the looks of the horse and what you can do with him. A race rider is a race rider, quarter horse or Thoroughbred. We don’t make anything like Shoemaker or Pincay—but why do that when here I’m king?”

  The All-American was the twelfth race of the day and the last of the summer, run in the late afternoon. At five in the morning, while Bill Smith was having his breakfast biscuits, he said, “I went to bed at ten-thirty last night, and I slept awful good until one-thirty. I was up at fifteen to two.” He had not slept beyond three-thirty for more than a week. Now, this morning, he had been patient for an hour and then had awakened everyone else at two-forty-five-his wife and daughter, who had joined him for the finish, his friend Wayne, a few others from Arkansas. He went down to the barn before dawn and fed Deck his usual grain, but only about two pounds. Water would stop at noon—a sip or two, no more, after that. The night before, worried about sabotage, he had written the horse’s name in huge letters on the stall-front wall over an arrow that pointed to another horse.

  As the day brightened and warmed, not a cloud appeared. “I’ve been doing a rain dance, and nothing has happened,” Smith said. “This horse runs that mud.”

  Another horseman, looking on, said, “The clouds may build up, Bill. And in the afternoon you’ll get an overcast, and a little wind will come up, and you’ll have a little mountain storm.”

  “That would do just fine.”

  Long rows of stalls were empty now. Horsemen packing to leave would stop by for a word, a wistful look at a finalist. They helped chip away at the minutes—five hundred minutes until post time.

  “When he drew the 1 hole in the trials, they said he couldn’t win,” Smith said. “They said you’d have to have a horse that could outrun the others by two or three lengths. Well, I guess I’ve got that horse.”

  “That’s for sure. You’ve got that horse.”

  “As we say at home, I guess an old Arkansas hog has found his acorn.”

  He took Deck out of his stall, put an old and partly shredded cooling blanket over him, and led him out into the sunshine. Deck stood quietly, tranquilly, almost asleep on his feet. He dropped his head. He let his lip go down. He just didn’t look too good. “Hell wake up soon enough,” Smith said. “The horse is ready. I gave him a good bath last night. He bucked and kicked.” Smith had “put a light breeze in him” five days before—a short gallop on the track. Since then, the horse had walked a little, but that was all. Smith gave the halter to Nancy Roller, his daughter—a young woman as trim and alert as her father, and, at home, his colleague in the training of the horses. He took his pitchfork and went into the stall to muck it out.

  “How many millionaires are mucking out their horse’s stalls right now?”

  “Not too many of them.”

  “They’re getting over those cocktails they drank last night.”

  “What did you drink last night, Bill?”

  “Milk.”

  Wayne Laughlin was suddenly full of stories about things that could happen to a horse in the days and hours before the race. “People with a jackknife could poke a blade into his front leg muscles,” he said. “They could shoot the horse with a needle. They could beat on his cannon bones with an iron pipe. If they would do that for fifty dollars—as people will—or for fifty thousand dollars, how about for a purse like this?”

  “Anything can happen,”

  “He can break down in the race.”

  “This is a breakdown track—the surface is hard under the dirt. The other day, two horses broke down in one race.”

  “I remember three in one day.”

  “All destroyed.”

  “That’s just part of it-part of racing.”

  “This track is like Russian roulette.”

  “Bill, they called home. The whole town’s up. They’re waitin’ and hopin’, they say. They just know Deck’s going to win. Everybody’s a-talkin’ it”

  “You need race luck,” Bill said. “The horses are all winners. You need race luck.”

  In the afternoon, Smith put on a clean shirt, which was as close as he would come to knuckling under to television. He had bought striped breeches, too, for the occasion, but he vetoed them now and stayed in the blue ones he had been wearing all summer.

  “You’ll look good, Bill, in the winner’s circle, with that camera pointing at you.”

  “That camera looks like a cannon to me.”

  By four, Deck was thirsty and on edge. Smith gave him a sip of water. The horse licked his lips, to miss nothing. A blacksmith came and tightened his shoes. Jim Grimes cleaned each foot with a steel brush, then covered the foot with Absorbine Hooflex hoof grease. The radio was turned up high—many banjos and guitars. The horse stood still. Jim and Bill brushed his forehead, combed his mane, and gently rubbed his whole body, like two men in a driveway on a Sunday polishing a car. Four-thirty—another sip of water.

  The horse’s legs had been wrapped overnight in an iodine mixture of Smith’s formulation. Now he rinsed the cannons with cold water. “Do you see any pebbles on him?” he said.

  “I never seen better legs,” said Tom Warren, whose horses had been stabled next to Smith’s. “I want to see that trophy right over here, Bill.”

  “O.K. We’ll put it here and you can look at it.”

  Slowly, Smith wiped Deck’s whole face with a cool wet cloth. The call came from the loudspeakers: “Attention in the barn area. Take your horses to the paddock for the twelfth race. Attention in the barn area. Take your horses to the paddock for the twelfth race.”

  “You could try for a hundred years and you could never bring one horse here and qualify for the All-American,” Smith said. “Now that we’re here we don’t want to be hoggish. We just want the top end of it.”

  Dean Turpitt looked at his program and reviewed the horses in the twelfth race. The only one that might present a problem was Vernon Pool’s horse, Gotta Go Too. “All right, let’s pay attention here,” he said as he approached his crew, ten of them today, milling behind the gate. “Who’s got the one on the outside?”

  “I do.”

  “She’ll rare up pretty high. Make sure we stay with her. She needs handling. If she gets to bouncing too high, pin her down.” In each man’s hip pocket was a pair of ear tongs.

  Timeto Thinkrich, he remembered, had been fine in the gate, a horse that seemed to know why he was there. The other Frank Vessels horse, Go Fartherfaster, was hardly a problem to anyone but himself. He had a tendency to sit down on the tailgate. Coca’s Kid, the favorite—the one Bobby Adair was riding—would require two men with locked arms to lift her into the gate. Otherwise, she would not go in. She would bounce a lot when she was in there, too. “Don’t jam up the 3 horse,” Turpitt said. “Just go to pettin’ on her a little there.” And he moved off toward his tower. The hors
es were on the track and were parading before the grandstand. With the exceptions he had noted, there should be no problems. They were, for one thing, two-year-olds, and, for another, they had class. “If a two-year-old is good and sound and he isn’t hurting, he may be greener than older horses but he won’t get mean in the gate. Least of all this group. Some people may think I’m a liar about it. They think a horse is a horse. But in my estimation higher-class horses seem to have more sense—to be more sensible. They’re calmer and sharper, maybe. I don’t know, by the time you get to bragging on them sons of bitches they throw a fit.” A television camera would no doubt examine Turpitt in his tower, and he was, beyond argument, elegant today, in a tailored tan suit that was lined with silk, a subdued gold panama banded in pastels. That he happened to be bone-tired did not show through his face or clothes, yet he had barely slept at all. Worry or excitement was not what had kept him sleepless, though. As he was about to go to bed, “some son of a bitch” had run over a huge skunk on Route 70, just outside his mobile home.

  The horses were approaching the starting gate. A few small clouds had appeared from the southwest, but the day was clear and warm, the track was fast, and chances of rain had long since gone to nil. The sun was low, and broad shadows reached out from the grandstand, which, from the starting gate, looked like an ocean liner about to sail from a pier, with fifteen thousand people—half in big Western hats—leaning out and waving goodbye, their necks, limbs, fingers, and belts shining with enough turquoise and silver to refinance Texas. The sound of the crowd crescendoed as post time came closer—information scattering like neutrons, out of one hat, into another. Those California horses were not here for nothing, and that bay colt was even faster than he was lazy. Frank Vessels owned two of the great quarter-horse studs in racing—Tiny Charger and Duplicate Copy—but to get these colts he had gone off his own breeding farm and bred his mares to Thoroughbred sires. Of all the colts he had at his place, only these two had made it. Azure Teen was the product of a frank program to infuse Thoroughbred blood and win races. Her father, Azure Te, was a Thoroughbred with extraordinary early speed, and a syndicate had bought him for the purpose of putting quarter-horse mares under him. The 7 horse, Go Benny Go, was the aristocrat of the group. He went to old King Ranch Thoroughbreds on both sides. His mother, Ruby Charge, was by Depth Charge by Bold Venture. His father was Go Man Go. That was as royal as you could get. For quality breeding—known performance on both sides—he was the best horse. Flaming Jet might just be the last Jet Deck colt that would ever run in an All-American. His owner, Joe Kirk Fulton, knee-deep in horses ever since he was a kid, had been handed a million dollars by his father when he was twenty-one years old. His daddy made it, and his daddy handed it to him. How did a horse from Arkansas get in here? He had won only three thousand dollars in his life, so he had never been far out of Arkansas. His presence was good for the business, showed it was not a closed door. For that matter, how did Dancer’s Queen get into this race? Her father earned forty-three hundred dollars, lifetime total, on chipped knees. Mr. Hay Bug? This pot didn’t get to be a million dollars on one class of people.

  The horses were at the gate. Near the top of the grandstand was a light that Turpitt watched while the horses slowly moved in a circle. The light went out. “All right, bring ’em,” Turpitt said, from his tower. One by one, in post-position order, they were brought into the gate. First Azure Teen, then Bobby Adair on Coca’s Kid, then Rich.

  “Make sure each horse has his feet in front of the braking bar,” Turpitt said. “Larry, bear down there.”

  The flags of New Mexico and the United States hung straight down.

  “Jimbo. Don’t jam up that mare.”

  Dancer’s Queen was dragged in, resisting. So was Flaming Jet.

  “You want a tail on him, Cotton. Step down and tail him.”

  Mr. Hay Bug moved into the gate.

  John, 7, ambled in and sat down.

  The crew rubbed the heads of the horses, lightly, gently; they stood calm. Go Benny Go. Calcutta Deck. Gotta Go Too. The gate was full. Heads started whipping.

  “All right. Quiet down in there.”

  The sound from the grandstand increased, and became a concentrated scream.

  “Pin him down, Ugh.”

  Ugh was a Cree.

  “Bear down, Gene. Watch your horse, Kent.”

  “No, Dean.”

  “No. Dean. No.”

  “No, boss.”

  “Hold it, Dean.”

  “Hold it, boss.”

  Suddenly there came a moment when the gate was still. Heads were straight. Feet were solid.

  As soon as the horses were gone, Turpitt jumped down from his tower and looked at the divots of Go Benny Go. The aristocrat had stumbled a little. Otherwise, it had been a clean break. The horses, already over the finish line, were invisible in dust.

  In twenty-one and fifty-eight hundredths seconds, Rich won by half a length. John was fourth. Rich and John together earned three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in the race. Flaming Jet, the Jet Deck colt, was second. Bobby Adair ran third on Coca’s Kid. Vernon Pool’s horse ran ninth. Bill Smith, who watched the race from a point about halfway down, was so hemmed in that he had only a glimpse of the horses flying by. He thought he saw Deck in the lead.

  When Smith read the four numbers that came up on the tote board, he got into his pickup and went back to the barns. He filled a bucket with water. His friends began to collect. He moved around a lot, trying to grin. He asked, “Did you find out where he run?”

  “He ran eighth.”

  “Oh, mercy,” he said.

  Smith picked up a sponge and the bucket and started for the test barn, where Jimmy had taken the horse. Beside the test barn was a corral, where Smith could get away from other people, and he seemed to welcome being in it, with the horse and no one at all. Carefully, he bathed Deck’s shining skin, and cooled him down, and the horse moved close to him for more, and eventually Smith covered him with the same cooler he had worn in the morning. Tests over, they walked back to Deck’s own barn, where the Arkansas people waited.

  “Money talks,” Wayne Laughlin was saying. “This old boy told me yesterday that if he gets a dry track this Timeto Thinkrich could outrun anything, but if you had a half inch of mud he couldn’t do nothing. Money talks. They gambled fifteen thousand dollars on a dry day.”

  “They said that No. I hole was hard as a dirt floor today.”

  “Money talks.”

  “The inside of the track, you can’t dig your heel into it, it’s that hard.”

  “I tell you, it would have taken a hell of a horse to outrun that horse out there today.”

  Smith was not listening. “In the trials, we outrun the horse that won,” he said. He filled a hay bag with a great deal of hay and carried it into Deck’s stall. He stirred some mash. He tried to joke. He struggled for control. “I wish now I’d had my 1 hole back,” he said. “In the trials, we outrun the horse that won.”

  “Did he pull up sound?”

  “He pulled up sound.”

  Wayne said, “This old boy told me yesterday that if he gets a dry track this Timeto Thinkrich could outrun anything, but if you had a half inch of mud …”

  “I wish I’d had my 1 hole back,” Smith said.

  He began assembling and packing his tack. Under some bottles and cans he found a pair of trousers. “There’s my fishing britches,” he said. “I’d better not lose them.”

  His daughter said to him, quietly, “Mama sold your boat.”

  He put an arm around his daughter.

  She said to him, “I didn’t think we’d win, but I didn’t expect so many to outrun us.”

  In this richest of all races, every horse had shared in the purse, and Deck’s share was thirty-one thousand dollars.

  “I was wanting it to come a rain,” he said. “I wish I’d had my 1 hole back. I was wanting it to come a rain.”

  BY JOHN MCPHEE

  Uncommo
n Carriers

  The Founding Fish

  Annals of the Former World

  Irons in the Fire

  The Ransom of Russian Art

  Assembling California

  Looking for a Ship

  The Control of Nature

  Rising from the Plains

  Table of Contents

  La Place de la Concorde Suisse

  In Suspect Terrain

  Basin and Range

  Giving Good Weight

  Coming into the Country

  The Survival of the Bark Canoe

  Pieces of the Frame

  The Curve of Binding Energy

  The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

  Encounters with the Archdruid

  The Crofter and the Laird

  Levels of the Game

  A Roomful of Hovings

  The Pine Barrens

  Oranges

  The Headmaster

  A Sense of Where You Are

  The John McPhee Reader

  The Second John McPhee Reader

  Copyright © 1963, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972,

  1973, 1974, 1975 by John McPhee

  All rights reserved

  Published in 1975 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  www.fsgbooks.com

  Designed by Marion Hess

  eISBN 9780374708603

  First eBook Edition : June 2011