Laughing in the Hills

by Bill Barich

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning yourself.”

  There was an extended silence during which all the nonhuman sounds of the backstretch seemed to accelerate, the whining of forklifts, goats braying, water sloshing in gutters.

  “I was wondering about that filly,” the man said. “Appears she’s about ready.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Bo said. “She’s a radical son-of-a-bitch. She might go good or she might not.”

  The man waited awhile longer, whistling to himself, a low mean tune, and at last touched his hat brim. “Well, all right, then,” he said and departed without the information he’d been seeking.

  “Damn ten percenters,” Bo said bitterly, “they’s always looking for something for nothing. That one, he’s a jockey agent. I don’t like him. He don’t work. Why in the hell should I tell him if my horse is fit? If he worked it might be different, ’stead of living off somebody else. Long as a man is working and has a little money, he don’t have to take any outstanding wad of shit from anybody. If I don’t like something, I just move on. I guess that makes me independent.”

  He took a red coffee can, dipped it into a bag broken open on the floor, and filled the feed tubs with sweet feed, a mix of rolled oats, rolled corn, barley, and molasses.

  “I got my trainer’s license, you know. My name’s listed in the program.”

  I’d seen it there, under Headley’s name, Asst. Trainer Elbert A. Twinn. The designation didn’t mean much. Lots of grooms had earned it but few would ever accept the full-time responsibilities inherent in being a trainer.

  “Why do they call you Bo?” I asked.

  “Comes from Elbert. My brothers and sisters used to call me Elbow and then they shortened it to Bo.” He looked around despairingly. “I wonder where the hell Headley is at. He just went home to change clothes but it’s almost eleven. Those people, they’s supposed to come up and watch Pichi run.” He went into his room and made some instant coffee. Two kittens were playing, one hiding under a fringe of blanket and the other, on the bed, pouncing on him. The runt was still around, asleep now on the dresser top near a bottle of after-shave. “I got rid of two so far,” Bo said, “but the others, looks like they might be staying.”

  I respected grooms like Bo, perhaps disproportionately. They lived the most rigorous and honest lives on the backstretch and seemed to have fewer illusions than anybody else. Their lives had an ascetic quality, functioning within a matrix of basic demands, work, food, rest, sex, a little occasional excitement, and peace of mind. Often they were highly principled and uncompromising, which led them to social failure. They were suspicious of owners and trainers alike. On more than one occasion a groom had told me in confidence that he’d left his last employer because he’d been instructed to mistreat the stock. Instead of participating in such malice, imagined or not, grooms moved on, going from trainer to trainer, track to track, state to state, leaving in their wake beer cans and whiskey bottles, broken marriages and promises broken on principle. Sometimes they left for no reason at all, or because the booze or dope had finally fried their circuits. But through it all they remained faithful to some inner model of goodness, an eccentric and singular moral code, and always to the horses.

  Bo stomped out his cigarette and kicked the butt under a stall ledge, hiding it. “Those fire inspectors from Berkeley, they come around all the time now. If they’d just fix things up in here nobody’d have to worry.” The barns were old and the wood was old and rotting. “I saw a bad fire at Exhibition Park,” Bo said. “Some crazy guy, he was mad at somebody, he lit the straw on fire with gasoline. The horses went crazy. I could hear them a long way off. My boss saw them burning up and he had a heart attack on the spot. Just dropped dead. I left eight days later.”

  It was getting warm in the barn and I thought of summer. “You going to work the county fairs, Bo?”

  “I don’t work no fairs.”

  “What’ll you do?”

  “Either go down to Hollywood Park or take a vacation.”

  “What do you do on vacation?”

  He smirked. “Little as possible.”

  He went to his room and shaved and changed clothes, and when he came back he looked ready for a night on the town in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was going to kid him about it, but he was getting more and more anxious. Headley was still missing and if he didn’t show up soon Bo would have to deal with the Sandomirs.

  “Probably I’ll go south,” he said, sitting down in a lawn chair. “I got a three-quarter-ton pickup out back I just finished rebuilding. I can go anywhere I want. I might even go to Texas.”

  “Texas?”

  “Hell, yes, Texas. They got racing there. I know people around. There’s lots of guys that know me. I still got family down there, too. I’d like to see them.”

  “You ever try any other kind of work?”

  “I thought about it once,” he said, “when I got out of the service back east, but I ended up at Narragansett. The track froze solid, that’s how cold it was that winter. I don’t know,” he said, collecting Pichi’s tack, the bridle and bit, “I guess this is really all I know to do.”

  Headley arrived at last, and he met the Sandomirs and escorted them to the paddock. They stood together on the elevated rectangle fenced in wrought iron and called the Owners’ Pavilion, watching the horses stride onto the track, where each in turn was claimed by an outrider on a pony, the movement as sinuous as the stitchery on the brocade of a Sienese madonna. Pichi was even calmer this time and went off at twenty-three to one. Colaneri handled her well against a cheaper field and she finished a good if somewhat unbelievable third. The race went in 1:12 flat, about average for a maiden sprint, and it became possible to entertain the idea that Pichi might someday win. Headley was gloating. “Did you see those people?” he asked. “They acted like the horse won the Kentucky Derby.” The Sandomirs were very pleased. Mary was hugging anybody she could get her hands on, and would’ve hugged Bo, too, but he was out on the track helping Colaneri down from the saddle and retrieving Pichi.

  XII

  When I watched Bo working I thought of the young men who were apprenticed to Florentine painters and sculptors during the Renaissance. They too kept manic schedules, working from five in the morning until eight at night, sweeping clean the studio floors, tossing garbage into the street, fetching bread and cheese, grinding colors and mixing pigments, priming wood panels with an undercoat of ashes made from chicken bones, a charcoal base for permeable gesso, doing a hundred such menial tasks so that Pollaiuolo or Verrocchio or some other master could step up, brush in hand, and apply the final strokes unencumbered, just as Headley, on arriving at the barn, found waiting for him a horse as blemish-free and fine-tuned as possible. Like Bo, most apprentices never went beyond the rank of assistant trainer. They lived out their lives transferring the master’s cartoons to chapel walls and filling in background areas, blue skies too simple for the master to bother with, but there was still something noble about their service. In the case of grooms, this nobility came from husbanding the stock. The job was pure in its way, untainted, and its dimensions had never been expressed so beautifully as in a groom’s handbook published in the nineteenth century, A Treatise on the Care, Treatment and Training of the English Racehorse, by Richard Darvill, late of the Seventh Hussars. Darvill was a perfectionist and carried his devotion to extremes. Horses should be given only water from rivers, he said, or rainwater, and stable boys, those lowly groom-aspirants, should harvest the green feed (tares, vetches, lucerne, and clover) from the pasture on the hour so it stayed cool and fresh. The plants “should be cut before they begin to blossom, when they are young,” wrote Darvill, “and full of juice.”

  XIII

  From my grandstand seat I looked down at the paddock and there was Debbie Thomas leading Bushel Ruler around, both of them groomed and promising, her blond hair setting off the dark rippling of his coat. This was Bushel’s debut. He looked strong and full of purpose, and D
ebbie had told me he was ready to win. At any moment I expected to feel the sensation that always accompanied the magic. I experienced it most vividly in my body, where I felt a sudden slackening of tensions, and then a lightness all over, as though I’d just lost twenty pounds. When I was in this state I never doubted that my horse would win. Sometimes the race itself seemed anticlimactic. Nothing was happening, though, nothing at all. I tried to remember how it had felt to wash Bushel, the water and soap, the feel of his muscles, but the details remained fixed in their arc, useless to me now. In spite of my doubts I bet the horse as heavily as I’d ever bet any horse, knowing even as I laid my money down that I was in violation of some important principle.

  I had ten long minutes to wait, and the couple sitting in front of me were making things worse with their constant chatter. They were from Cleveland, visiting an Albany relative, a bald old coot with a flame-red crown, and they kept talking about the Boy Mayor. “Kucinich’s honest as all get out,” the Cleveland man would say, “he just won’t do what the crooks tell him to do.” The Cleveland lady would respond by rolling up the sleeves of her dress a little higher and pitching in her two cents. “It’s not just because he’s Polish we like him,” she’d say, “he means to do right by everybody, even the coloreds.” I was perversely fascinated by the conversation, which went on and on, disrupting handicappers left and right, but at the same time I wished I had a manual of racetrack etiquette to present to these visitors from Ohio, one with as much bite as Giovanni della Casa’s. “When you have blown your nose,” della Casa advised his ill-mannered Florentine compatriots, “you should not open your handkerchief and inspect it, as if pearls or rubies had dropped out of your skull.”

  “Who do you like in this race, Ralph?” the coot asked his guest.

  Before he could answer his wife extracted two dollars from her purse and waved them around.

  “I don’t care who he likes,” she said, “you go bet that pretty number-two horse for me. That Bushel Whatzisname.”

  This cut me to the quick. I hated to be in line at a window and hear the person in front of me play the horse I intended to play. Such occurrences hurt my chances, stuffing too many expectations under a single saddle, and the Cleveland woman’s commitment would be even worse, weightier, more fraught with neurosis. She was gross, she was stupid, she loved the Boy Mayor, and I knew I was sunk. Before my eyes the city of Adocentyn rose in reprimand. Dogs barked, lions roared, bulls lowered their heads and rammed into the walls, and from the eastern gate eagles took flight, their talons festooned with losing tickets. The magic could not be forced. It was instead a matter of being receptive, of sitting still, of recognizing the moment and then seizing it as Pico had seized his inamorata.

  I had a few seconds’ worth of elation when Bushel broke well and moved into second place, and I got another jolt when he was still second on the turn, and my heart was beating but good when he was still second going into the stretch, but then he began to fade, shortening his stride and sinking back into the commonplace, his ears drooping, his tail sagging, his body unable to sustain the effort just as I’d been unable to sustain the illusion. Together we watched as the other horses disappeared into the distance, dust in our eyes, space stretching out before us, and Sunday’s Best, neat as a new suit, spitclean as a barbered head, receding from sight, galloping through the pin-hole of victory.

  I stopped at Nolan’s barn to see Debbie, but she was talking to Gardell, the trainer, and neither of them looked ready for company. Debbie’s cheeks were flushed and she was collecting tack with a fury. Bushel was already on the hotwalker. Some people say that horses know when they’ve lost, but I didn’t notice any change in him. Maybe it would show next race, when he had less pride on which to draw. For now he was just circling. The next morning I learned why Debbie had seemed so angry. Bushel had been claimed by Mel Eisen, who trained for Dallas Black. Apparently Eisen had been tipped off to Bushel’s potential when he saw him in a training race, running well against much more expensive stock. Debbie was disconsolate. She told me she’d cried for two straight hours after the race. Later that night, though she wasn’t supposed to, she’d snuck over to Eisen’s barn to check on Oli. When he saw her coming, he stuck his head out of his stall and whinnied and nickered, just as he’d always done in the past.

  XIV

  I watched the Kentucky Derby in the press box. The race was a pure and emotional thing, and it brought us back to the essence of the sport and bleached our bones of caring. I came away from it feeling refreshed, and I thought how nice it would be actually to go to Kentucky someday and watch the race from that crackerjack grandstand and drink overpriced mint juleps and smell the ripe perfume of southern girls. This was the start of something, hope.

  That night I went on a minor-league celebration with Arnold Walker, who’d finished the day ahead and couldn’t tolerate all that extra cash in his pockets. We had a big dinner at Spenger’s and Arnold spilled some cabernet on his good gray vest. Next he dragged me into the room where they have the oyster bar and wall-size TV. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “Here, have a seat. I think you’ll like it.” He forced me to drink another bottle of wine and watch a beauty pageant. The semifinalists walked onstage through an arch formed by the crossed sabers of some cadets from the Citadel while the Citadel choir sang “You Light Up My Life.” “I love it,” Arnold said. “I absolutely love it.” The Question Period followed the parade. Leroy Neiman, the Famous Artist, was a judge and he tried to trick one of the girls into revealing something out of the ordinary. “If you could pick one woman,” Leroy said, winding up, ready to toss a spitball, “other than your mother, as your model, who would it be and why?” Miss Massachusetts thought it over. “My grandmother,” she said. Miss Florida told what a bad driver she was, having accidents all the time and once driving right onto a porch where some old lady was eating breakfast. “I’ll bet she takes drugs,” said Arnold. “What’ll you give me?” I wouldn’t give him anything. We watched the coronation and the tears and then I went back to the Terrace and fell asleep in my clothes. When I woke in the morning the first thing I saw was the globe Ted had given me. I spun it around, looking for Italy.

  Chapter Six

  In a notebook I had written “Firenze: Florence, flowers, efflorescence,” but this was far too romantic, only part of the truth.

  II

  In 1963 I kept several secret notebooks, recording observations, deep thoughts, ideas for poems and novels never to be written. I was nineteen and was supposed to be planning my future, but with the war in Vietnam escalating it seemed to me that I had no future, not of the sort my background and education proposed. College had also been a disappointment. In my first two years I’d learned the meaning of J. Press, how to look as though I’d gone to Exeter, how to make fish-house punch, the quickest route to Skidmore, and a little about art and literature. This was not what I had expected. An abiding disillusionment set in and I flunked American Ideals and Institutions, a required course, and drove my Chevrolet Impala across the frozen lawns of neighboring fraternities, destroying snow sculptures in the process. When the snow melted I went with friends to a boathouse by a lake and drank beer all night long. At dawn somebody almost shot me through the head with his .22. You could say I was confused. I accepted strange invitations, found myself in taverns in towns with one stoplight, existed on pickled eggs and whatever else pitying ladies happened to feed me, and once woke up on a couch in a minister’s study somewhere near the Canadian border. Not good, I thought, not good at all. A friend came to the rescue by telling me about a study program offered by another university, a semester abroad in Florence. “It’s cheap and they’ll take almost anybody,” he said. Certainly I fit the bill.

  III

  We left on a cruise ship, American Export Lines. Somebody brought around champagne on a tray and several passengers operating under the influence of B-movies smashed their glasses on the deck, much to the stewards’ consternation. The man next to me wept softly into
his handkerchief and kept waving long after the New York skyline had dropped from view. I felt no sadness myself, only exhilaration. It never occurred to me that the people back at the dock might not be there when I returned. They had a fixity of purpose in my mind, a rooted quality that in part I was escaping. For a long time there was nothing to see except birds and water. The water changed colors constantly and sometimes rolled forward in a spume-dappled band of aquamarine, but after a week or so I got tired of looking at it and went into the bar. The bartender had a funny little goatee and thought I was a rogue, young and wild and flirting with danger. Apparently the sea infected everybody with romantic notions, even hard-bitten guys from the Bronx. I sat by a window and watched the old couples taking constitutionals and the children chasing after quoits and Ping-Pong balls. It seemed odd that they were determined to perpetuate the most mundane aspects of existence when there were porpoises on the horizon and the liberating dreams of Ishmael to be dreamed.

  Tangier was our first port of call. On shore, bells were ringing and traders gathered in the dust to hawk knives, hassocks, opium, fake Swiss watches, girls, boys, kif, fezzes, parrots, and tours of the Arab quarter. I ate some obligatory couscous in a dank and therefore authentic restaurant and spent hours standing on the huge granite blocks along the Mediterranean littoral, watching gulls, ships, and fishermen. I think I wrote some verses about the sea. It was difficult to accept the validity of a foreign country when you knew that at a predestined hour you had to leave it, probably forever. Tangier might cease to exist or perhaps shuffle its elements into a more sophisticated diorama for the next bunch of tourists.

  In Lisbon we had a little more time. I saw the famous mustachioed ladies with baskets on their heads and took a taxi to Estoril, reputed playground of the world’s leading deposed monarchs. The monarchs sat beneath striped beach umbrellas, wearing sunglasses and knit bathing suits with the waistbands pulled up almost to their pectorals. They were fat and jolly and loved to splash in the sea, accompanied by thin bronzed women in bikinis. They made exile look attractive. I remember drinking a gin and tonic on the terrace of some café and feeling very cosmopolitan, as though the collar of my shirt didn’t really button down.