The Ghost Horse

by Joe Layden

  “I just went down and rolled, must have slid about twenty feet,” Tim recalled. “I burned a hole right through my boot. And the horse … Jesus … the horse went up over the snowbank and caught a foot, catapulted into a Dumpster, and broke his neck. If I hadn’t got off him at the last second, I’d have been right there with him.”

  When things settled down and the horse’s carcass was hauled away, a man in a suit approached Tim, asked if he was okay—he wasn’t; a cracked vertebra would leave him limping for months—and then handed him a business card.

  “He wanted to know if I’d be interested in doing some stunt work,” Tim said. “I just laughed. ‘Mister, I couldn’t do that twice if I wanted to. But thanks, anyway.’”

  The stories spilled from him effortlessly and endlessly, shaping a portrait of a racetrack Kerouak, a man always on the move, always searching for something; worried, perhaps, that if he sat still long enough, he might just die. There were stories of girlfriends who put themselves through pharmacy school by producing and trafficking synthetic cocaine; or who cooked the books for employers and wound up behind bars; of children he fathered but barely knew, or did not know at all.

  “At first I wasn’t sure whether to believe him,” Carol said. “But then he kept telling the same stories, over and over, and always with the same details. Then I’d meet other people who knew him, and they’d say they’d heard the same stories, word for word. And then I met his sister … I guess some people really do live like that.”

  True or not—and while some of it can be verified, much of it cannot—it was enough to make your head spin. Carol wanted her daughter to be happy, though, and for whatever reason Timmy made her smile. So it wasn’t long before Carol began treating him like a member of the family. Fathers, though, can be a tougher sell, and Frank withheld approval for quite some time. Whether Tim was a bullshit artist or a man who had truly lived the life he claimed to have led was of little importance to Frank. Either way, he was a man best kept at arm’s length.

  “My husband was harder,” Carol said. “He liked Lisa’s first husband; they got along well, did a lot of things together. They were friends, so it was hard for my husband when the marriage ended. And Timmy could not have been more different. My husband likes anybody, but for Lisa … I don’t know. I just think he was cautious.”

  If there was one thing that Tim had in common with Lisa’s first husband, according to those who knew them both well, it was a capacity for alcohol. John Tebbutt remembers bonding with Tim the way people do when they share surroundings and circumstances and hobbies. They came to know each other in the early 1980s, at Finger Lakes, when both men were eking out a living on the backstretch. It wasn’t unusual, Tebbutt said, for them to rise before dawn, put in a full workday, and be at the bar by lunchtime, “drinking and smoking pot all afternoon.”

  The next day they’d do it all over again.

  Sometimes, Tim said, they’d start drinking while they were at the track, a practice that was risky for a trainer or hotwalker, and downright suicidal if you were an exercise rider, as well, which happened to be the case for Tim.

  “I used to drink every day,” he said. “Galloping horses in the morning, I could drink five whiskeys, no problem, and then close down the bar afterward. I mean every goddamn day, the whole meet. But I quit all that when I met Lisa. Well, a little earlier, actually, because I got a DWI six months before I met Lisa, so I’d kind of made a decision on my own—or had it forced on me, I guess you’d say.”

  He quit cold turkey. No rehab, no twelve-step meetings, no meds to help with withdrawal symptoms. Just white-knuckled it alone on the bathroom floor, sweating out all the toxins, throwing up so hard he thought his ribs would break.

  And then it was over.

  A few weeks later he nearly ran down a pretty girl on the shedrow, and for a while everything changed.

  “I never really went back to that life,” Tim said. “Lisa wouldn’t have stood for it. I got drunk on occasion, flicked ashes into a shoe, thinking it was an ashtray, but that’s not really a relapse. Not compared to the way I was. It’s a bad habit, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a big difference between going out and having a few drinks to celebrate when your horse wins, eating lobster tails like they’re shrimp and washing them down with a good bottle of wine … that ain’t the same thing as putting away a pint of whiskey while galloping horses. When Lisa came along I had started to clean up my act; and then all of a sudden I had someone to take care of. And she took care of me, too.”

  She’d always been a rescuer, drawn instinctively to people and animals that needed help; she couldn’t stop herself. So while Tim might have been the older and more experienced person in their relationship, he was not necessarily the one in charge. They had a complicated union, one born of mutual need, each of them having been damaged in some way. If they were an unlikely couple and their courtship not exactly the stuff of fairy tales, it worked nonetheless.

  “Their relationship was all about horses,” said Cheryl Hall, Tim’s sister. “That’s how it began, and that’s how it ended. But I know my brother, and he was madly in love with the sweetness and purity of Lisa. It’s such an ugly world sometimes, and Timmy had seen his share of ugly things. He’d been through a lot, and he could be his own worst enemy. But then Lisa came along, and she was so wonderful; such a simple, beautiful girl. But a regular girl, you know? She’d had this head injury, and she’d had cancer … and none of it seemed to slow her down. She was the best thing that ever happened to Tim.”

  They quickly became inseparable, a development that amused and baffled Tim’s friends.

  “At one point Timmy put on a lot of weight,” John Tebbutt recalled. “He got so fat he could barely get out of his car. I’d go sit in the barn with Lisa—and I always gave her a big hug and kiss when I saw her—and I’d say, ‘What the hell are you still doing with him? He’s a pain in the ass.’ Then I’d turn to Timmy and say, ‘Why don’t you go clean out the stalls or something? Stop making your girl do all the work!’ He’d just laugh, tell me to fuck off, and then Lisa would laugh at the two of us.

  “In some ways they had a dysfunctional relationship,” Tebbutt went on. “Lisa was very motherly to Tim and let a lot roll off her shoulders; too much, probably. But she loved him dearly, and he adored her. She was a very kind, compassionate person. She saw through Timmy’s bullshit, and she didn’t really even care. Timmy’s the kind of guy who probably shouldn’t be married; he’s too much of a handful. But we all look for love, don’t we? We all look for someone to love us and take care of us. And that’s as close as Timmy ever got or probably ever will get.”

  * * *

  By the winter of 1994–95, Tim and Lisa had become partners in every sense of the word. Carol and Frank Calley had graciously welcomed Tim into their lives, primarily because he seemed to have a positive influence on their daughter’s mood, and because they figured eventually the relationship would run its course. Hopefully, Lisa, having gotten some of the wildness out of her system, would settle back into a more normal life, preferably with someone closer to her own age and not quite so … different. Instead, the pair went off to Ocala to gallop horses for John Candlin, a New York trainer and owner who raced horses on the New York Racing Association circuit, as well as at Finger Lakes.

  In March, as the winter season drew to a close, Tim and Lisa decided to drive west to St. Petersburg for vacation. They figured they’d spend a few weeks relaxing on the beach before heading home to Central New York, where winter would not relent for another couple months. One morning, completely out of the blue, Lisa held Timmy’s hand and asked him a question:

  “Can we get married?”

  Although impulsive by nature, Tim was not prone to romantic gestures; nor had he ever demonstrated a propensity for commitment. He was, in short, the kind of man you might expect to hyperventilate at the very prospect of marriage. In this case, though, the response came to him easily and without the slightest bit of doubt or dre
ad:

  “Hell, yeah, I’ll marry you!”

  He paused; then, in what can only be termed an act of chivalry, he offered Lisa a chance to reconsider.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  She nodded. They embraced. A few hours later, on the afternoon of March 13, 1995, Tim Snyder and Lisa Calley were married at a courthouse in St. Petersburg, Florida. Two weeks later they returned to New York and moved in with Lisa’s parents. A month passed before they told anyone that they had gotten married.

  “And then Carol and Frank kicked us out of the house,” Tim would say years later, laughing as he recounted the story.

  “No, we didn’t,” Carol retorted. “We were happy for them.”

  She stopped, collected her thoughts, looked at Tim for a moment, and then continued. “He won me over because my daughter loved him and he was a horsey person. That was all it took.”

  Their venture became a family affair, with Carol eventually earning a groom’s license and working alongside her daughter and son-in-law. If Tim could be irascible and impetuous, not unlike a horse or a small child, well, that wasn’t such a terrible thing. No one was perfect, and whatever life Tim had led previously, he now seemed committed to Lisa, and to helping her find stability and happiness.

  “She was a special girl, very warm and adventurous,” Tim said. “She loved to travel, she loved the beach, and she loved to ride horses. What can I say? Lisa was my girlfriend, my wife, my partner—she covered all the bases. We were friends first, and then we fell for each other. I’d never felt like that about anyone before. She was a great person, very pure. The only thing she didn’t have going for her was her health. I didn’t know that much about her problems at first, but even when I found out, I didn’t care. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference to me.”

  Wanting a place of their own, but lacking the resources (or even the inclination) to buy a home, the couple moved together into a tack room at Finger Lakes. Essentially little more than a concrete bunker designed for transient and often penniless backstretch workers, it was the sort of accommodation that would make most newlyweds blanch; but it had exactly the opposite effect on Tim and Lisa. Far from being saddened or depressed by their humble surroundings, they were energized. What better way for a pair of horsemen to live? It cut down on the commute, anyway. Get up in the morning, walk out the door, go to work for the next sixteen hours, then grab some sleep and do it all over again the next day.

  Slowly, patiently, and with meager resources, they built a business together over the next several years, working for other trainers and owners while simultaneously acquiring and selling inexpensive horses (“churning,” as it’s known in the parlance of the business), sometimes racing their stock, sometimes not.

  Their first project, foaled in January 1992 and purchased by Tim and Lisa two years later, was a bay filly they dubbed Lisa’s Calley. She wasn’t much of a horse, or didn’t seem to be anyway, on October 16, 1994, when she made her debut at Finger Lakes in a maiden special weights race for juvenile fillies. The competition was light; nevertheless, Lisa’s Calley was completely overmatched. Starting in the third post position, in roughly the middle of a seven-horse field, with jockey David Rivera aboard, she broke badly and wound up dead last after only a few strides. By the time Rivera eased her through the stretch, she was fifty-nine lengths behind, a rather spectacular defeat in a race that spanned only five and a half furlongs and was completed in slightly more than one minute’s time.

  No matter. She was their horse—their only horse—and they would not quit on her. She was named after Lisa, after all, and hadn’t the owner been an impressively resilient young woman? Maybe the filly would, in time, display similar resolve. That’s what made the game interesting—the possibility that a slow horse, given time and training and the right guidance, might become suddenly fast. Breeding, the purists would say, trumped everything in the end, but pragmatism got you only so far when you toiled at the lower levels of the sport. You had to have ambition and faith.

  You had to have hope.

  They took the filly to Florida when the racing scene shifted south for the winter, gave her about ten weeks off to rest and recuperate, and to grow into her body. In that sense, they knew, horses were like people—some of them were perpetual adolescents, taking months if not years to reach maturity and perhaps blossom into functioning adults. Others, sadly, never matured at all, and instead floundered in perpetuity. This was the crux of the racing business: knowing when to give up on a horse and when to stick with her. A rich owner could indulge in sentiment; on the county fair circuit and at second-tier tracks, where Tim and Lisa toiled, it was a luxury few owners or trainers could afford. You had to be smart and efficient; you had to be a shrewd businessman. Every so often, though, you found a horse that made your heart beat faster, and for those you were willing to bend the rules.

  Lisa’s Calley grew stronger with rest. She began working in a pool, and after a few months returned to the track. Almost immediately her handlers noticed that she appeared to be a different horse. More muscular, more confident. Lisa used to gallop the filly on a regular basis, until she became so rambunctious and energetic that she couldn’t be relied upon to do as she was told. She wanted to run, and sometimes she wouldn’t stop running. That was fine when you put her in the starting gate and asked her to race, but not such a good thing when the person riding her had a history of cancer and seizures. Lisa loved the horse, but eventually Tim convinced her to give up the saddle, except for leisurely strolls along the shedrow.

  “I worried about her constantly,” Tim said. “Lisa knew how to ride, and she loved galloping horses, but she wasn’t always careful. There were certain things I did not allow her to do because they were just too dangerous for someone in her condition.”

  For example, one of the more challenging aspects of training a budding racehorse is acclimating the animal to a starting gate. Thoroughbreds are prickly, high-strung creatures by nature, and when you put them in an enclosed space and shut the door fore and aft, they tend to get agitated. Especially if they are new to the process.

  It is a popular misconception that most racetrack injuries occur on the track, when horses collide or break down. Those are simply the most spectacular and catastrophic accidents, provoking as they often do injuries that can cripple or maim or even result in fatalities. Less shocking—in part because they occur mostly out of sight—but far more common are accidents that occur before the race even begins, as anxious animals are carefully steered into the starting gate.

  Indeed, there are few moments in sports more intense than those that occur in the brief span between the final stall door closing and the bell that signals the start of a race. Ask just about any veteran jockey and they’ll tell you this is the time when they worry the most about getting hurt, for all it takes is a slight buck for the rider to be pinned against the steel walls of the starting gate. If a horse loses his shit, so to speak, in that setting, it quickly becomes contagious, with one horse after another snorting and kicking and arching its back, trying to unseat his rider and fight his way to freedom. For this reason jockeys reserve a special disdain for the starter who is slow on the trigger, allowing horses to linger in the gate.

  “Everyone who works around a racetrack knows the starting gate is the most dangerous place to work,” said Tim Snyder. “You’ve got a thousand-pound horse, a hundred-pound jockey, and you’re putting them both in a steel cage. Out on the track you can get thrown, but the ground is forgiving and even if you get trampled, you’ll probably be okay. In the gate you can get absolutely crushed.”

  So Lisa stayed away from the starting gate, at least while Tim was in her orbit. Since they also worked for other trainers and owners, though, there were times when Lisa would be assigned tasks that Tim might not have permitted, and if he wasn’t around to police the situation, well …

  “She’d do it,” Tim said. “She was that kind of girl. Not afraid of anything. But if I found out…”


  On more than one occasion, Tim said, he lost jobs after confronting employers who had allowed Lisa to work their horses in the starting gate, or gallop a particularly boisterous animal. It didn’t matter whether they knew of her condition, or even if she had volunteered for the assignment. Not to Tim. People took all sorts of silly risks at the racetrack—hell, he’d taken enough of them himself—but this was different. This was his wife, and no job, no paycheck, was worth her life.

  * * *

  The seizures came without warning and presented symptomatically in a variety of ways: a blank stare in response to a question might simply mean that Lisa wasn’t listening closely or was otherwise distracted; then again, it might also mean that she was in the midst of a neurological episode of undetermined severity. In that sense, at least, the milder seizures were more difficult to comprehend than those that prompted physical contortions or loss of consciousness. Frank and Carol Calley had long ago learned to deal with the unpredictability of their daughter’s medical condition, and while the more intense episodes still filled them with anguish, they no longer feared for her life.

  Tim was another story.

  It took time for him to adjust to Lisa’s ongoing struggle, and to resist the urge to panic each time she suffered an episode. For a few years he was befuddled by the mysterious nature of her ailment, the way she could disappear into herself, falling into an almost peaceful trance. There was the afternoon, for instance, when Tim and Carol were sitting in the kitchen of the Calley home, talking casually at the end of a workday.

  “All of a sudden you could hear something banging outside,” Tim recalled. “Like footsteps. Big footsteps.”

  With a mother’s intuition, Carol jumped to her feet and began walking to the back door. As she approached, she could see the head of a horse bobbing slowly up and down, in time with its stride. Carol opened the back door to find Lisa standing there, reins in hand, a distant look in her eye.