by Bill Barich
Finally the elements were starting to cohere. A fragment of dialogue, notes scribbled on the back of a program, something I’d observed on the backstretch a month ago—they were all coming together for the first time. It was mid-morning and I should have been doing my handicapping, but I decided not to go to the races that afternoon. Instead I’d follow Tesio’s lead and visit a breeding farm. Somebody had told me earlier in the meet about Windsor Thoroughbreds, a modest operation about sixty miles north of Albany, and I bought a six-pack and headed for Sonoma County. I wasn’t sure what I’d find there, but the act of going felt right; it had the exactitude of one of those magical bets.
Windsor was a country town, small and poor, with a dusty main drag, two blocks of sidewalk, and a slow steady corona of heat rising from the ground. The heat was constant, even in May, and people on the street, farmers, ranchers, migrant workers, withdrew into pockets of shade and stood there in silence, unwilling to move. The men wore straw hats and jeans or overalls, and the women had chubby arms and combed their hair back into tight unflattering buns, which made their faces look as round and crusty as pie fresh from the oven. But outside town the country illusion was punctured by the spindly wooden frames of houses going up in a subdivision. Somewhere paint was already being mixed into the familiar subdivision hues, brown, dark brown, brown-green, and olive drab.
I saw a sign outside a church (TOO LATE! IS WRITTEN ON THE GATES OF HELL) and then the sign for Windsor Thoroughbreds. Country-and-western music played through the screen door of a ramshackle farmhouse, and I had to knock for a long time before John Ryan appeared. Ryan looked as if he’d just gotten up from a nap. He was a tall thin unshaven man in a western shirt and maroon-colored jeans. A safety pin was hooked through a vent hole of his Red Wing baseball cap. Ryan was a rancher and breeder from way back. His grandfather had once owned the largest herd of Black Angus in the nation, three thousand head run on twelve thousand acres near Sioux City, Iowa. Ryan had started with cattle himself but switched over to thoroughbreds about fifteen years ago. He and his wife, Laverne, had been in Windsor for three years. They were managers and part-owners of the ranch, forty gently rounded acres with picturesque fences, barns, and pastures. The place looked ideal for raising horses. Business was good, Ryan said, so good that he had an eye toward acquiring sixty acres across the road if he could convince his neighbor to part with them. He liked dealing with his present clients, the carriage trade. When they came to look over the ranch, they usually went away impressed and never asked how much anything cost.
“If they have to ask what it costs to board a horse,” said Ryan, applying a layer of Chap Stick to his lips, then lighting up a Lucky, “you know they can’t afford it.”
Breeding season was just drawing to a close. It had begun in early February and would end promptly on the first of June. In season Ryan employed a crew of four to help him. He had three good stallions in residence, working studs who were booked up or nearly so. Each of them would cover about thirty-six mares before summer, sometimes two a day, one in the morning and one in the evening, and they were beginning to tire, as they did toward the end of every season, growing thin and edgy and mildly cantankerous. Ryan’s ace stud was Fiddle Isle, who’d once stood at prestigious Claiborne Farm in Kentucky. Fiddle held the turf course record at a mile and a half at both Santa Anita and Hollywood Park and commanded a stud fee of twenty-five hundred dollars, insignificant by Kentucky standards but top-of-the-line in northern California. When he’d been turned out in 1970, his owners had syndicated him for a hundred thousand dollars. This meant the public could buy shares in his stud career just as they might back a comedy bound for Broadway. So far Fiddle hadn’t paid much in dividends. It was possible he might close in Philadelphia. At thirteen he had more than a few crops behind him and he’d yet to sire a big winner. He didn’t look very grand in his paddock. He’d lost about a hundred and fifty pounds since his racing days and his ribs were showing. He got along poorly with the other studs, and Ryan had had to put him in the barn, but he hated barns, too, and his ankles were scarred from kicking the walls. Now he had this paddock, a special enclosure in the shade of a live-oak tree. Ryan was annoyed about Fiddle’s reputation as a sire. He felt the horse was being wrongly criticized. While it was true that Fiddle hadn’t produced a star, his offspring tended to be strong and healthy and good on the turf. They were money-winners, Ryan said, which was more than you could say for the get of several studs whose reputations had been inflated by siring a single champion among many duds.
We stopped by a fenced pasture. Ten or twelve yearling colts were playing together, running from fence post to fence post in packs, nipping at each other and whinnying. They made an elegant sight with the blue sky and puffy cumulus clouds rolling out behind them. They ran and stopped, turning abruptly, and their legs, so delicate in relation to their upper bodies, seemed too frail to support them. The margin of error was slim. A chuck-hole caught at the wrong angle could easily shatter a pastern, but the colts had to run. They were high-spirited and still a little wild. A score of pigeons and redwinged blackbirds flew around them, framing their beauty. “Have to get a shotgun pretty soon,” Ryan said, eyeing the birds. I asked him if he ever became attached to the foals, and he said no, not really, this was a business.
“You just can’t afford to do it. Some of these people, they say, ‘Well, you can screw my wife and beat my kids, but don’t you ever touch my horse.’ That doesn’t make any sense to me. Horses are dumb. They can kill you easy. Anything you get off a horse you’re stealing.”
“Can you tell much about these colts yet?”
Ryan nodded. “Usually with a yearling we can tell if he’s going to be a runner. You can’t say if he’ll run in stakes, but you can be pretty sure he’ll earn his keep. The good ones like to eat, they don’t miss a meal, and they’re aggressive.”
Ryan didn’t think much of Tesio. He’d read Breeding the Racehorse but it had given him no special insights. “You can read it in a couple hours,” he said. “It’s just a skinny little book.” He had more respect for Rex Ellsworth, who worked with cheap stock but bred good horses, like Swaps. Most people didn’t know what they were doing, Ryan said. They proceeded like hobbyists, without any practical experience in ranching or farming. They’d never spent any time around animals, so they romanticized horses and made mistakes. Trainers were not much help to the breeding industry either, not in Ryan’s opinion. Often they owned studs, sometimes inferior ones, and they used their persuasive powers to attract business from the track, unsuspecting owners with mares in need of servicing. Trainers had too much sway, they were only in it for the money. The money wouldn’t do them any good when they were dead, Ryan said. Besides, horses were difficult to breed, more difficult than cattle. It took five years to get through a generation of thoroughbreds, to see what you had, but with cattle it took only two. No matter what you were breeding, though, you were in for a heavy dose of the unpredictable. If you crossed a horse with a pony, you ought to end up with an animal this tall—Ryan marked a spot in the air midway between horse and pony size—but you didn’t. And if you hit on something successful, a winning combination, you couldn’t duplicate your result exactly, even if you covered the same mare with the same stallion in the same place at the same time of day in the same month with the moon in the same phase. Nothing was ever “the same”; it was hit or miss for sure.
“This isn’t a particularly exciting business,” Ryan said, “and it isn’t particularly demanding. A friend of mine, a pilot, he used to say that flying consisted of long periods of boredom broken by moments of panic. Like when the red light goes on. That’s what it’s like around here.”
I asked to see where the breeding was done, and he led me to an old barn, cool and dark and a little damp, with spider webbing in the rafters and baled hay piled high against the walls. I was surprised. The place I’d imagined was sterile and metallic, hi-tech, with aluminum surfaces and clamps and rods and the eerie lighting you see in
hospitals and above the meat counter in supermarkets.
Ryan stood about ten yards inside the door, touching a spot on the floor with his boot. “This is it,” he said. He could tell I was puzzled. “Nothing special. Just like any other barn.” Even the mating itself sounded simple. A vet from Windsor examined the mares every two days, and when one of them went into estrus she was brought to the barn, washed down, and teased. The stud was usually ready to go. He sniffed around a bit and then mounted his partner, and then the mare was returned to her stall. The entire process, from wash-down to insemination, took about fifteen minutes. Ryan offered a live-foal guarantee, as did most breeders, and sometimes he had to cover a mare two or three times before she conceived. Maidens were the most troublesome; with them he succeeded only sixty to seventy percent of the time. His biggest problem was recalcitrant mares who wouldn’t stand still for the stud their owner had booked. They didn’t understand the business aspects of their predicament, the effort that had gone into correlating bloodlines, and so they kicked and fought and resisted as best they could. Ryan always managed to subdue them long enough for the studs to perform, but the semen was spent in service of a lost cause. The mares were resisting more deeply, all the way through, and only a few foals, said Ryan, were ever born of such unions.
Chapter Ten
The last week of Tanforan was marked for me by the creation of Emery’s Angels. One day Bob Ferris disappeared, off to Longacres in his Exactamobile, and to replace him Emery hired the little blonde from the Home Stretch and her icy blond friend. They worked as grooms and confidantes, and Emery dressed them in crocus-yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the name of a new two-year-old filly of his, Fornofun. The Angels seemed happy around the barn and happier still in the paddock, especially the icy blonde, who was beautiful and seemed as she walked to draw a protective satisfaction from the horse she was leading. I was glad the Angels’ wandering had ended at last. They would be cut loose soon, but in the meantime their position was secure, inviolable, and they moved around the backstretch with a newfound sense of authority. They were comfortable in the flux, drifting with the rest of us toward summer.
II
Bo Twinn’s kittens were bigger now and still unclaimed, and as they crawled around over his lap they seemed an aspect of his condition rather than something he was likely to get rid of any time soon. He brushed them off distractedly, like a horse brushing away flies, and smoked a slow cigarette while sitting at the spool table reading his Form. His face was bathed in greenish light.
“Think she’ll do it today, Bo?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said curtly. “I never know what she’s going to do.”
Pichi was entered in the sixth race. She was going up in class to sixteen thousand but dropping back to her preferred distance, six furlongs. Jimmy Colaneri’s toothache was long gone and he’d be in the irons again, which meant she’d carry a hundred and nine pounds instead of the hundred and thirteen she’d carried under Mel Lewis. She had a chance, I thought, and nothing more.
“You come back here in an hour,” Bo said, shooing me away. “Headley’ll be here then with those people from Los Angeles.”
“The Sandomirs?”
He made a disgusted face. “What other people is there who’d fly up from down south to watch this filly run?”
When I saw Headley go into the paddock after the fifth race I went down and joined him. He seemed nervous again, but he was more businesslike than usual and introduced me to Mary Sandomir, a small woman in blue. She was the sort of person who makes you feel good right away, putting you at your ease. Her hand was warm, and she smiled warmly and walked around the saddling stall with what might be called a purposeful dizziness, jumping from one thought or action to the next without much transition. She said her husband hadn’t been able to make the trip, but she’d brought along her granddaughter Sandy and also two young friends of the family, Alan and his girl friend, both of whom wore Rolling-brand jeans. Mrs. Sandomir showed me her camera, then told Sandy, who was about seven, to stay close by because the men were bringing in the horses. When Bo led Pichi over, Mrs. Sandomir went right up to him. Her hair, rinsed with henna, almost matched Pichi’s coat. Bo had done a bad job of shaving and his cheeks were spotted with blood, but this didn’t prevent Mrs. Sandomir from giving him a little kiss and hugging him in a motherly way. I thought he’d sink into the bowels of the earth.
“How are you?” she asked. “You’re looking good.”
Bo looked at the dirt and muttered something unintelligible.
Mrs. Sandomir went closer to Pichi and rubbed her nose and the white blaze between her eyes, then stepped back and took her picture. She kissed the filly on the nose.
“Hello, baby,” she said.
Bo led Pichi away. He seemed glad to be going.
“That horse,” Mrs. Sandomir said, plucking at my shirt-sleeve, “she’s so sweet. But she scares me. Oooh, she has such a temper!”
Jimmy Colaneri entered the paddock, tapping his boot with his whip. He was tall for a jockey, with long-lashed dark eyes and a polite manner that bespoke the ten years he’d put in waiting for a break. This was his first full season riding thoroughbreds—before he’d handled quarter horses—and so far it had been splendid. When he talked about his good fortune, he bubbled over and was capable of saying things like, “It just tickles me to death.”
Mrs. Sandomir greeted him solicitously. “How you feel?” she asked.
“Aw, I’m fine,” Colaneri said, blushing a little.
Mrs. Sandomir clucked through her teeth. “Last time his jaw was out to here,” she said, holding her hand about ten inches from her jawbone to illustrate the extent of Colaneri’s past misery.
Headley interrupted to give the jockey his instructions. He told Colaneri the strip was slow and reminded him to watch the early speed on either side of him in the gate.
“If you have to hit her, make sure you do it left-handed,” he said. “I don’t want her lugging in again.”
Charlie Palmer, the paddock judge, called “Riders up,” and Bo helped Colaneri into the saddle. Colaneri’s red silks complemented Pichi’s high chestnut color, and the filly moved forward with precision through the windswept air, her coat gleaming in iconographic tribute to the efforts of trainer and groom. For some reason the words from an old Grateful Dead song began churning in my brain:
Sometimes the light’s all shining on me,
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been.
When I turned around, Headley was leaving for the grandstand. I wanted to go with him, but Mrs. Sandomir wanted to watch the race from the Owners’ Pavilion, that tattered platform at the center of the paddock. This was a terrible vantage point. We could see the gate, but the entire backstretch was obscured by the toteboard and the horses wouldn’t come back into our line of vision until they reached the stretch. Mrs. Sandomir was unconcerned. She scolded Alan for betting on the favorite, Andadora, then opened her purse and took out some photos. They were ordinary snapshots, the kind that feature children posed against a tree or jungle gym, but these were of horses, Pichi’s relatives, a foal and another filly. The Sandomirs owned them both.
“We have a whole family,” she said, “the two sisters and a baby.”
The filly resembled Pichi, and I wondered if she could run. The odds were against it for sure. I had to admire the Sandomirs for intransigently following their hearts. Mrs. Sandomir waved the photos under my nose again, and I had the feeling she was about to tell me a great deal about the horses, foundation mares of a Sandomir dynasty, but then the gate opened and we were hooked by the flare-up of silks in the green metal mesh.
III
Later, Colaneri would remember a single moment from the race, when he’d opened his mouth to scream but nothing had come out. “I thought I was dead,” he said. His troubles started in the gate when Pichi failed to respond to his urging. She broke poorly, tr
ailing the field, and Colaneri was forced to rethink his strategy. He’d wanted to take her outside and run her there away from traffic and then make his move in the stretch, but now he was blocked ahead by a wall of flesh and couldn’t maneuver in any direction. All he could do was sit tight and hope for a break. Seconds later he got one when a hole opened in the pack, a flash of daylight between horses. He touched Pichi with his whip and she came right on, making up ground. When she was almost to the hole, Mark Couto, the rider on Minnie B., turned around in his saddle and hit his mount hard. Colaneri recognized this as a habit of Couto’s, something he did whenever his horse began to quit. Minnie B. slowed down a little anyway and drifted toward the center of the track, toward Jane Driggers on Silver Symmetry, and the hole began to close. Colaneri couldn’t pull up on the reins, not without throwing Pichi dangerously off stride, and he couldn’t move left or right, so he held on and kept driving and got caught in a pinch between horses.
Pichi was suspended between Minnie B. and Silver Symmetry. She ran as though she were in a vacuum, with just one foot touching the ground and the other three fanning the air. Neither Couto nor Driggers knew what was happening. They could feel the press of flesh, but because Colaneri hadn’t screamed, they didn’t know he was struggling for balance. Colaneri was thinking about his inevitable demise. When Pichi was released from the pinch, she’d land full force on one leg and the leg would break and down they’d go, horse and rider delivered to dust. Colaneri braced himself when Minnie B. pulled away, shutting his eyes against the impact. Then Pichi was free, a thousand pounds thrust down on a spindle of bone, but somehow her leg held together instead of exploding, and she planted another one after it, and another, righting herself without so much as a false step. Then she recovered her stride and continued, wholly redeemed, with nothing to lose. Colaneri couldn’t believe it. He touched her again and took her outside, to see if she had anything left to give.