by John Dunning
He opened the door and walked away; then he turned to give me one last look. I thought he was about to say something, but when he did it was only a racetracker’s tip. “My horse is ready to run today, in case you’ve got a little change burning a hole in your pocket.” Then he was gone. I went out into the shedrow and watched him leave. For a moment the barn felt absolutely still, but slowly the sounds of a living world returned to us. I heard a horse nicker and the rain rattling on the roof. I could hear the noises of men and boys talking and working in the next barn. One of them came limping past the gap and in that second before I saw him, I knew it was Cameron. He stopped and turned my way and we stared at each other briefly across the thirty-odd feet of the rainswept tow ring. I looked away first. When I glanced up again he was gone.
9
I was settled in the corner tack room before noon. By twelve-thirty I had been photographed and fingerprinted, I had a ginney’s license issued in my name and I was official; I could now get into the stable area any time day or night without a guide; I could talk to anybody about anything. I was standing just outside the paddock, watching the horses being readied for the second race. The steady rain had made the track a sloppy lake. Sandy came into the paddock and stood in the dry stall, waiting for his horse. He saw me lounging near the rail, but he didn’t nod and neither did I. He wore a coat and tie despite the weather and his pants had been pressed to a razor-sharp crease. The horses arrived: Obie led Pompeii Ruler around until Sandy told him that was enough; then they turned into the stall. The riders came out: There was barely any conversation between Sandy and his jockey—this boy, I later learned, had ridden this horse in ten races, had won five and knew him well. He would go off in blinkers, which Sandy was putting on him now. The race was a mile and seventy yards, a bit of a stretch for this animal, who liked to run on the lead and was good at any distance under a mile. That’s why the odds were so generous—the tote board had just taken another bump, knocking him back to third choice at 12–1. The Form on him looked solid in sprints, but he had raced only once at more than a mile since early last year and had finished sixth, fading fast in a ten-horse field. He was getting no confidence at this distance—the Form doesn’t cut racehorses any slack for headaches or mood swings, menopause, or the occasional bad-mane day. I remembered an old saying on the racetrack from years of following the races in Denver: Play the trainer, not the horse. I dropped $100 on his nose and swore I wouldn’t bet again until I had some kind of break on this case.
Thirty minutes later, I cashed my win ticket and came away with $1,350.
I walked back to the stable area with Obie and the horse. The rain was relentless and we were all grubby now: I could see the dirt caked between the horse’s legs and I felt it on my face and neck. We arrived just as Sandy got there with his guests. She was a handsome woman in her sixties; the guy I pegged as her husband. They might have been a couple of millionaires celebrating a Derby win from the look of them: there was lots of happy talk between Sandy and the lady: lots of camaraderie, lots of laughs. He called her Barbara. I heard her refer to her guy as Charlie. She wore dressy clothes and a colorful hat and carried an umbrella. Sandy passed through his circle of boys and handed out twenty-dollar bills and the lady looked on with kind amusement. “Did you play this horse, Janeway?” Sandy said, and I told him I had indeed and I thanked him for the tip. He gave me the twenty anyway and I damn well took it: I didn’t want to stand out from the others in any way, and soon enough they would all know why I was there.
Sandy got out some folding canvas chairs and he and the lady sat in the feed bin, out of the rain but near enough to see what was going on. Her husband had drifted away down the shedrow and around the corner, to see what he could see. “Sandy always stays to watch his horse cool out,” Obie said. I held the lead shank while Obie sloshed hot water on his horse with a sponge. The steam almost obliterated us, and Obie’s voice was like some disembodied entity wafting up from the other side, as if the horse, not his ginney, was suddenly doing the talking. “Man, I love this horse. You can see the intelligence in his face, the pleasure he gets from a hot bath.” He washed the animal’s private parts and scraped the water off his back, threw on a heavy wool cooler, and I started him around the shedrow.
Here he was then, my first walk, and it was a cold one under the barn’s overhang. I didn’t have to learn anything, just walk. I snuggled down inside my jacket and still it was cold. Around and around we went: I lost track of the time and forgot about the cold as I walked. This was indeed a nice horse, so gentle and well-mannered, such good company on a bad day, impossible not to like. I stopped him occasionally to look in his eyes and fondle his head and say a few words. At thirty minutes Sandy took off the wool cooler to run a hand over his flank and cover him with a sheet. He was slow to cool and all this took most of an hour. During that time someone from the stewards’ office arrived and stood at the stall while I held a small jar on the end of a stick and waited for the urine sample. “Whistle to him,” Obie said, and I did: just a monotonous series of high-pitched one-note birdcalls. After three minutes of this he was ready to pee, and from this flood we collected the tiny urine sample. The man sealed and labeled the bottle and left.
Sandy was off to an early dinner with his guests. I thought he might say something more, since we had barely made eye contact during the whole time he was in the barn. He’s spooked now, I thought: all this talk about the bookwoman had given him too much to think about. This might mean something or maybe nothing at all: anyone’s guess was as good as mine. I could hear the horses being called for the seventh race when Sandy said good night to us all and he and Barbara went around the barn to find her elusive husband.
I put Pompeii Ruler in his stall. Obie felt his legs and picked the gunk out of his feet, then filled his bucket with water. The horses ran past in the seventh. I could hear their hoofbeats briefly and I heard the call wafting over the stable area in a muffled monotone. But the crowd had left early and now there was no spectator noise. The horses for the last race were called to the paddock as an early dusk fell over the bay. I heard thunder as Cameron limped quickly past the open gap and disappeared into the tack room opposite mine.
I stood in the open door and looked down our shedrow. There were seven of us in Sandy’s barn: twenty-three horses, six ginneys, and me. I was the only full-time hot walker. Sandy no longer carried a jockey on his payroll: he preferred to pick his boy or girl from the pool of available riders as a race drew near. “We used to have a full-time bug boy but the old man’s partial to girl jocks in sprints,” Obie said as he showed me around. “He says they’re smarter and less prone to use cowboy tactics. But in longer races, he still wants a man.” Obie was the unofficial stable foreman. He was young but he’d be the one they’d all look up to, his word would be final if something came up and Sandy couldn’t be reached. In the room next to mine was a Mexican kid named Milo and a pint-sized Texan who played the harmonica and guitar simultaneously and sang country songs about jilted men and the women who broke their hearts. Halfway down the barn was a fellow named Bob from Boston, a serious student of the game who was saving his money to buy a horse. Bob was a drummer; he carried his drumsticks in a bag with his clothes, admired the Gene Krupa legacy, and could beat out a mean rhythm on the flat part of a chair. He had a notebook where he had written down everything he could remember that Sandy did and said. “Sandy’s the best trainer in the state,” Bob said.
I met them all that first day. The day waned quickly under its deep black cloud cover.
I raked up the shedrow and did some other chores. All along the row the ginneys were at work with their pitchforks. Filling their baskets with muck. Getting ready for the night. At loose ends in the murky day.
The wind picked up and an early night fell over the bay. All of them had apparently accepted me as just another racetrack drifter; only Sandy knew the truth. Obie might suspect something—once I saw him looking oddly in my direction—but it was one of those
hypnotic stares that sees nothing. The days of Candice Geiger were long past and I wondered if any of them had ever heard her name. At last he looked away and beyond me. He might have been staring over my shoulder at a crack in the wall, reliving the race in a dream.
Thunder rumbled across the sky. The rain fell steadily, relentlessly.
The crew felt the weight of the stake Sandy had dropped on us. The extra money seemed to burn holes in every pocket. It called for a night out, but no one wanted to brave the storm even for a run to the kitchen. All during the dinner hour the rain came down in sheets.
By seven o’clock we had decided to stay home and eat our simple racetrack fare: fried egg sandwiches on plain white bread with mayonnaise, and beans in a can. Hobo food, which at the moment sounded elegant as hell. The sizzle and smell of twenty eggs frying on hotplates filled the shedrow and we sat in the canvas chairs and ate, feeling like rich horse owners.
We talked and cracked jokes. I felt insulated, far from the real world, with only a hazy light to tell us that life might exist on the next planet, in the shedrow just across the way.
Tex played his harmonica and Bob kept rhythm with his sticks. They all sang songs of cheatin’ women and old-timey horse races, and nobody asked about me. As far as they were concerned I had no life before this one. I felt a growing sense of unity with these guys. Amazing how quickly I had blended in with them. None of them cared where I had been or what I had done, none of them asked, and this was good. I didn’t have to lie and then remember the next day what my story was. The good cheer was spontaneous. There was no need to reveal more of myself than I already had, and soon the songs of fickle love and heartbreak gave way to musical tales of ginneys with legendary peckers, of cocks that stood up and yelled heee-haw, said mamma, and saluted the flag. We laughed at everything and nothing. For the moment we were happy in this bawdy male universe, sealed in by the rain and the good feeling of money unspent from today’s winner.
We had no past. The future was unknown, not to be probed or pondered.
Obie walked along the shedrow and checked on his horses. Cleared his throat and said he was going to bed. Four o’clock comes early. But a few of us sat up talking, reluctant to give up the day.
“Tell you what, boys, I’ve had enough of this weather,” Tex said. “Maybe I’ll get to be the lucky one goin’ south.”
Everyone but me seemed to know what he was talking about, so eventually I asked.
“Sandy’s going to Santa Anita after this meet’s over. He’s only takin’ one ginney with him.”
“He’s gonna train Barbara Patterson’s horses,” Bob said.
I looked perplexed, which wasn’t difficult at the moment.
“That’s the lady you just met,” he said.
“Where the hell you been all your life, Janeway?” Texas said. “Maybe Sandy’s time has come. I don’t think Ms. P. is running short of cash, and cash money speaks out loud to just about everybody anywhere. Anyways, you can bet me.”
“Ms. P.’s got a stable full of really nice horses,” Bob said helpfully. “Got a nice ranch about a forty-minute drive from here.”
“Got a dynamite undefeated two-year-old geared up for next spring’s Santa Anita Derby,” Tex said. “If he runs good there, it’s almost a sure thing she’ll ship east for the Triple Crown races.”
“So why’d she get rid of her old trainer?”
“Real question is why she ever hired that moron in the first place. He’s screwed up more good horses than most of us’ll ever see.”
“This is all on the q.t. for now,” Bob said. “Word to the wise.”
“We let Sandy make his own announcement in his own time,” Tex said. “Gives him a feeling he’s running things around here.”
They laughed.
“You all seem to know a lot about what’s really going on,” I said.
Bob held his finger to his lips. “Backstretch scuttlebutt.”
I looked for a way to mention Cameron but nothing opened up. I looked for some door that might open innocently into the topic of Candice and her books, but it didn’t happen. Someone suggested a card game but he had no takers. “Damn, boys,” said his voice, somewhere in the ethereal night. “I can’t give this money away.”
A light flickered. The tack room across the way went dark and closed down for the night.
The rain picked up again.
I let go my part of it and went to bed.
Deep in the night I heard the muffled sounds of people talking. I opened my eyes. The little clock radio said the time was one-thirty. I got up and cracked my door: looked out at the new day, which at the moment looked much too much like the old day. The sky was still black and would be for another five hours. The rain had slowed to a steady downpour and I got the sense, though I couldn’t see it, that the tow ring was unwalkable, filled with lakes of mud.
The talking persisted as a faint mumble. I pulled on my pants and cracked open the door. Suddenly the voices were louder. A shadow-man stood just inside the shedrow in the barn across the tow ring. He was huddled in conversation with another guy I couldn’t see at all, and their voices carried amazingly well over the rain. The shadow said, “If Bax asks, you don’t know where I am. Do not mention the farm. The last thing I need is him busting in on me.” They both came out and went past me in the drippy morning. I watched from there until they disappeared around the corner, then I eased across the tow ring on the other side, water over my shoes, up to my ankles in it, and struck out in the general direction I thought they had gone, out toward the stable gate and the parking lot across the street.
At the edge of a barn I saw their tiny light bobbing on the road forty yards ahead. A truck came in through the gate and its headlights illuminated the two silhouettes. One of them limped distinctively in the glare from the truck. I moved over into the darkest place on the road—couldn’t see the gate from there, but I pushed ahead anyway, slowly, and eased around the corner. There they were, chatting and laughing with the night man inside the stable gate.
In a while Cameron went outside and crossed the road to the parking lot. When he came back he had a small bag, which he passed through the window to his pal. The night man asked to look at it and seemed to be satisfied. I guessed it was the other guy’s clothes, meaning what?…that Cameron was going away for at least a day? Cameron had a few more words to say and they all laughed; then he went across to the lot again, got in his car, and drove away. The muscle man stayed another fifteen minutes, talking to the guard. When he did come out he hurried back through the stable area in the rain. I followed him at a distance and lost him briefly, but when I came into my shedrow I saw him about twenty yards away, in his own barn across the tow ring. The night was almost completely black and I saw him only because he was standing directly across the way, having himself a smoke. I waited in the dark until he apparently called it a night. The light went on briefly in Cameron’s tack room and went off almost in the same breath.
Inside my own room, I stripped off my wet clothes in the dark, hung them across my chair, and lay down shivering under my blankets. I was asleep almost at once.
I dreamed of wicked things.
Monsters who looked like men.
Killers I couldn’t catch, couldn’t see, who wore masks of smiling friendship.
I opened my eyes and saw light trickling in from somewhere. I got up, pulled on my pants, and looked over at the clock radio. Four forty-two.
I cracked the door, just enough to see Cameron’s pal across the way. He was mucking a stall about thirty yards straight across the tow ring…the same stall Cameron had done last night. In our shedrow I saw Bob and Obie already hard at work.
I opened the door wide and walked down the row. “Anybody got horses to walk?”
They all did. Obie looked at the chart Sandy had made and said I could start with Pompeii Ruler. I hitched a shank to his halter and away we went. As I came around the first time I heard an angry voice across in the next barn.
&nbs
p; “Whaddaya mean he had to go somewhere? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I told you, an emergency came up.”
“Emergency, my ass. Goddammit, does he want this job or not?”
“Sure he does. Didn’t he leave me to cover for him?”
“If I wanted you to rub eight, I’da hired you for eight. One man can’t do a decent job with five head, let alone eight.”
I made another trip around the barn and the guy across the way was still steamed. His voice carried clearly over the tow ring “He’s got a problem? He’s got a problem? Don’t tell me about Cameron and his problem, Rudy, I don’t wanna hear it. This is what I get for hiring that guy, I shoulda known better, everybody said I’d live to regret it. Who the hell just disappears his first day on a job? I could hire a skid row bum and get more out of him than this.”
By then Sandy had arrived. He paid no attention to the ruckus in the next shedrow: he went about his own business and pushed on into the morning. “Let’s walk ’em today,” he was saying. “All but Erica’s Eyes. She needs the work even if it is miserable out there. I’ll start ’em, see if we can get this done at a decent time.”
I moved on down the row. On my next trip around, Sandy fell in behind me. He had been standing with his horse in an empty stall, waiting for me to pass. He still didn’t say anything and neither did I: we just did our half-hour walk and started two more horses, but I was aware of his presence the whole time. Now the shedrow across the way was quiet. Once I saw Cameron’s pal Rudy drag out a muck sack and dump it into the bin between the barns, but he didn’t look up and we never made eye contact. At some point I was aware that Sandy had dropped off. I went around one more time and he was standing in the shedrow, waiting. He didn’t say anything: just cut his eyes back toward my tack room. I nodded and turned the horse into his stall. Obie took him and ran a rag over his gleaming coat.