by Maggie Estep
“The car service is coming in twenty minutes,” Attila calls out from the living room.
“Okay,” I say, but nothing is okay right now. At first, the idea of going to a motel seemed adventurous in spite of the fact that we’re doing it to safeguard Attila from harm. Then, when Attila mentioned the motel in Sheepshead Bay that happens to be the place where Ed and I first slept together, it rattled me. I tried to get over it. I’m not, after all, doing anything wrong. I just don’t need or want reasons to think about Ed.
I start throwing clothes in a weekend bag, then trap the cats in the bedroom as I go into the hallway closet to get the carriers out. Cats are not travel enthusiasts and the sight of their carriers usually sends them darting under the furniture.
“You okay?” Attila asks. He’s sitting on the couch, looking at me.
“Yeah. Cats hate travel.” I try attributing what must be my obvious low mood to worry over the cats.
Attila’s not really buying it. “You don’t have to do this, Ruby. You can leave town and forget you ever met me,” he tells me, opening his vivid eyes wide.
“I doubt that very much,” I say, putting the carriers down and walking over to him. He reaches up, takes my left hand, and softly kisses it. “Good,” he says.
We look at each other for a long moment and I feel him reaching a place in me, a savage place filled with crippling lust and tenderness.
“I’ve got to finish organizing stuff,” I say after a few moments of thick silence.
Attila nods.
I move into the kitchen where I pack up cans of Pet Guard and two catnip mice. I also bring my tiny portable coffeemaker. It’s dangerous for me to leave home without it.
A few minutes later, I’ve loaded the reluctant cats into their carriers and Attila hoists Stinky while I take Lulu and my overnight bag.
THE WOODLAND MOTEL falls about twenty stars short of five. In fact, it’s barely a half step up from a hooker hotel. It’s a long tan vinyl-sided building gazing out over an ill-paved parking lot that butts up against the edge of bustling Linden Boulevard. Some of the room numbers are peeling off the doors and the two cars in the parking lot have seen better decades. East New York isn’t known for its swank accommodations but the one thing this dump has to recommend it is that it’s about halfway between Coney Island and the racetrack.
Attila pays the driver, then unloads the cats as I walk into the office to check in. There’s a large woman sitting behind a bulletproof window. She’s avidly reading TV Guide and doesn’t bother to look up when I walk in.
“Hi,” I say loudly, wondering if she can hear me behind the partition.
She frowns, knotting a pair of highly unnatural-looking black eyebrows before finally looking up. Her eyes are tiny and dark.
She lifts her multiple chins at me which I take to mean “what do you want?”
“I called earlier, Ruby Murphy?”
She sneers slightly, asks for payment and, after I’ve given her my forty-nine bucks, hands me a key.
“Thank you.” I smile at her. She frowns again and goes back to the TV Guide.
Attila is waiting outside, obviously lost in thought. He’s staring down at his ungloved hands, picking at one of his cuticles. He doesn’t seem to register that I’m here until I’m two inches in front of him.
“Where do we go?” he asks, looking up abruptly.
“Room eight,” I tell him, taking Lulu’s carrier.
Room eight is decorated in a disturbing brown. The pressed-wood dresser is brown. The thin bedspread is brown and the dirty wall-to-wall carpeting may have once been tan but is now brown.
As Attila comments on what a very brown room this is, my entire life suddenly flashes in front of my eyes. I begin wondering exactly how all my highs and lows and in betweens have brought me here. I can’t say I ever had a vast plan. I never sat down and mapped out where I wanted it all to go. If I’ve ever had any calling in life it was probably to run away with a small traveling circus. But by the time I was old enough to do such a thing, circuses were few and far between. So I drifted. Then settled at Coney Island and took up piano. I get a lot out of both my home and my instrument, but sometimes I wish I’d made a plan. Problem is, I don’t have an obsession the way Attila does. I want a horse pretty badly and sometimes I think I should go work at the track and get my fill of horses, but I don’t know enough to be anything more than a hotwalker and that, I know from experience, is a pretty difficult and incredibly low-paying job. So here I am. In a brown room with an intensely appealing but disturbed jockey with a price tag on his head.
“Are you feeling low? Is this too depressing?” Attila is looking at me intently.
“It’s fine,” I lie. “Let me just get the cats settled.”
I reach down and open Stinky’s and Lulu’s carriers. Their eyes are huge as they emerge. Lulu immediately darts under the bed while Stinky glances around, looks disgusted, and lets out a demanding meow. I get a dish from my bag and fill it with water from the bathroom sink. All the while, Attila sits on the bed, staring ahead.
I go over and put my hands on his shoulders. He looks impossibly sad. I can’t say I feel particularly cheerful myself. “I think I need a nap,” I tell him.
“It’s not that late.”
“I know. I’m tired though.”
He frowns slightly. The truth is I just need to shut the world out and I suppose Attila knows this. I grab my toothbrush and face cream from my bag and go into the bathroom. At least the bathroom isn’t brown. I stay in there awhile. I brush my teeth even though I haven’t eaten anything in a long time and I’m starting to feel starved. When I was growing up, both my mother and father were obsessed with fat. They never carried an extra ounce of fat and lived in fear of doing so. Unlike Attila, they didn’t have professions that demanded fatless bodies. They just didn’t like fat. As a result, both my sister, Chloe, and I had phases of veering toward anorexia. We’d freak out if we saw anything resembling fat on ourselves. We were always hungry and avoided bread, sweets, and pasta like the plague. Then one day I realized I just wasn’t fat and I ate again. I have some meat on my ass but it belongs there. Chloe remains underweight.
I stand at the sink staring at myself. My face looks a little hollow and my eyes seem huge. I look frightened and hungry. I suppose I am both.
I come back out of the bathroom and find Attila lying on the bed reading The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet. He picked it off my shelf one day and immediately became engrossed. The guy can read. In my time, I’ve associated with some distinct nonreaders but Attila’s not one of them. He rips through books about three times as quickly as I do. I lie down next to him.
“I’m going to nap now,” I inform him.
He looks up from his book and leans over to kiss me lightly. I kiss him back, then curl onto my side and close my eyes. I’m so weary I feel like I’m encased in cement. Stinky jumps up on the bed and comes to lie near my chest. I bury my nose in the fur of his neck and start counting horses, hoping to lull myself to sleep.
SAM RIVERMAN/ED BURKE
12.
Savage in the Heart
I was in Clove’s stall, squatting down near the mare’s hind end, feeling for heat in her legs. She’d worked her five furlongs in a thudding minute and six seconds and had galloped out lethargically. This wasn’t normal. Even for an old claiming mare like her. I ran my hands down her cannon bone, then cupped her fetlock, expecting to feel a little filling or at least some heat. Nothing. I went over each leg. They were all fine.
Throughout my little inspection, Clove kept craning her neck to look at me. She seemed politely bewildered, happy for the attention but not sure why it was being lavished upon her.
“Why’d you work so dull, huh?” I asked the mare as I stood up and patted her neck.
Her ears shot forward and her eyes tried to tell me something but I couldn’t for the life of me guess what. I started scratching her cheek. Her eyes drooped shut.
“What’s the mat
ter with Clove?” I heard a voice say. I turned around to find Lucinda, the exercise rider I’d hired to work my three horses for the duration of the Gulfstream meet, or until I finished up this particular investigation for the Bureau—whichever came first. As far as Lucinda knew, I was just some horse-loving guy who’d had an early midlife crisis and gotten a notion to train racehorses—and wasn’t really up to snuff just yet—which made Lucinda and me a good match. She’d been an A list exercise rider on the New York circuit but a serious accident had taken her nerve. She’d stopped riding and had gone home to North Carolina. But, like any true horse person, Lucinda had gotten to missing the brutal hours, excruciating physical regime, and low pay of racetrack life. She’d come down to Gulfstream and some of the lesser trainers gave her a few horses to work each morning. She rode well. Had nice, quiet hands. Everyone said she wasn’t the same rider she’d been a year earlier, but I hadn’t known her then and she seemed to ride my horses just fine. I wasn’t blaming her for Clove’s dull work this morning.
“Oh, hi,” I said, smiling at the girl. “I can’t find anything wrong with her. Guess she was just feeling lazy. What did she feel like to you?”
“Hard to say,” Lucinda shrugged. “She wasn’t rank or anything. Seemed like she was into working. Just didn’t have much in the tank. You really gonna race her?” Lucinda tilted her head and squinted at me.
“Yeah, I’ve got to,” I said simply.
“You broke?” she asked.
“Just about,” I said. I was running my operation with money the Bureau had shelled out but it was a point of honor: I wanted to make money, not lose it.
“Then drop her down to ten thousand,” Lucinda said. “Either she’ll get claimed or at least maybe earn a little purse money.”
“Nah, I like her. I have hopes for her.”
Lucinda rolled her eyes at me but smiled a little, which was nice. She was a tense girl. Intelligent, even pretty, but tense, as if endlessly on the verge of snapping. I’d almost never seen her smile, so I was pleased to have provided amusement—even if it was at the expense of my mare.
“You have hope based on what?” Lucinda said. “The fact that she can outrun some goats?”
I’d told Lucinda how I’d found Clove: living in a tiny paddock on a goat farm outside Wellington, Florida. At that point I had just arrived in Florida, had claimed one horse, Karma Police, out of a race at Calder Racecourse and was hunting around for two more. On the afternoon in question, I’d been heading to Riggs Farm, a small breeding and layup operation where there were a few older racehorses for sale. I was hoping to pick out two. I was driving to the farm slowly, taking back roads. I hadn’t been down here long and was surprised at how rural and lush the area was. It was one of those days when the world, and particularly this little patch of Florida, looked lovely. The sky was cloudless, the temperature hovering just above seventy. I passed a wide flat pasture filled with goats. I’d never seen so many goats in one place and I slowed the car down even more. Which is how I noticed the sign. A handwritten sign duct taped to a railroad tie at the end of the goat farm’s driveway: “Racehorse for Sale.” Generally, you didn’t go looking for racehorses at goat farms but what the hell. I pulled into the farm’s driveway. There was a series of sheds and, off to the side, a small yellow ranch-style house.
I parked the car and got out. No one came to greet me so I walked toward one of the sheds. Suddenly, a woman with a pitchfork materialized from I’m not sure where.
“You Sonny Boy?” she asked. She was holding the pitchfork like a weapon.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “My name’s Sam Riverman. I noticed your sign about that horse for sale.”
“Huh?” She dug her fingers into the pitchfork as if it were my flesh.
“You have a sign saying you’ve got a racehorse for sale.”
“Racehorse?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, motioning to the road where the sign was.
“Oh that. That’s Katrina’s sign.”
I waited for an explanation but none seemed forthcoming. Thankfully, a young woman emerged from the house and walked toward us. She was a sturdy, no-nonsense kind of woman walking quickly on short powerful legs.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I was inquiring about the horse for sale,” I said.
“What about her?” The woman frowned at me. She wasn’t a great beauty to start with and the frown didn’t help. Her thick eyebrows pulled together making her face look like thunder. I was starting to regret having come here at all, but I had a feeling if I tried to back out now the first woman would get inventive with the pitchfork.
“I’m looking to buy some horses. Saw your sign.”
“Well, Clove is a bay mare. Eight years old. Fifty-two starts, five wins, and I can’t remember how many seconds and thirds.”
It didn’t sound like I’d stumbled onto Seabiscuit, but it did seem like the mare might be in my price range. I asked to have a look at her and was somewhat begrudgingly led behind the sheds where I saw a heartbreaking sight.
The mare was standing in a paddock so small she barely had room to turn around. There were flies all over her and she was underweight. She didn’t look up when we approached.
“That’s her,” the younger woman said. “My uncle Jimmy was running her at Tampa Bay Downs. He died and left her to me. I don’t have any purpose for a racehorse,” the woman said.
She opened the gate to the paddock and motioned for me to walk in. The mare finally looked up and that’s all it took. She had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. I knew that even if she was dead lame I had to buy her and get her out of there. I negotiated a price with Katrina as the first woman stood by, still clutching that pitchfork. Goats roamed, occasionally stopping to stare and bleat a little. I made arrangements to pick Clove up once I’d borrowed a horse trailer. I promised myself I would do this by the next day, so as not to leave that poor horse living in those conditions.
Clove definitely wasn’t the best investment in the world, but she proved to be a lot more horse than I’d expected. She was completely out of shape and malnourished but she was sound. I took her to a cheap conditioning farm and left her there for a few weeks to get her ready to start seriously working. I went to visit her every day and was gratified to see her coming to life. After just a few visits she started recognizing me and would nicker when I approached her stall. Her eyes livened up as she put on weight and her coat started shining. When I finally brought her over to Gulfstream, she actually looked like a racehorse, had some muscle on her and had electricity in her body. I liked my other two horses just fine, but Clove was my favorite. And now, Lucinda was laughing at my mare—or at my blind faith in her. I suppose I couldn’t really blame the girl.
“That was a slow time for her?” Lucinda asked, referring to Clove’s dull workout, even though she knew damn well those fractions were terrible.
“A minute six would be slow for a carriage horse, no?”
Lucinda laughed, showing her small teeth. She was an attractive girl and she seemed to like me, maybe even be interested in me. I was stuck on someone else though. Ruby. I’d been a little stupid and, when the Bureau had sent me from New York down here to Florida, I hadn’t initiated an official “relationship talk” with Ruby. We’d been seeing each other for a few months but I was deathly afraid of trying to pin her down. She’d always struck me as being savage in the heart. Untamable. I knew she liked me, probably even loved me, but I hadn’t wanted to force her into any pronouncements she wasn’t ready to make. And now, I could hear in our increasingly strained phone calls that there was another guy. And I was stuck down here under endless blue skies. And so was Lucinda. We chatted on about Clove and about my other two horses. We discussed the fancy French turf horse Bobby Frankel was running in a Grade 1 stakes later that day and I could tell from the dreamy look Lucinda got that she wished she’d get to work a horse like that. Or maybe she was getting dreamy over Frankel. Women loved that guy. He w
asn’t young or flashy but he was smart and funny and seemed to be the only wildly successful trainer who wasn’t a soulless conservative creep. And what’s more, he was good to his horses. Even though I was mistrustful of most trainers, I’d always had a good feeling about Frankel and evidently Lucinda had too.
I was enjoying my chat with her but I needed to get some Bureau work done. I didn’t want to be abrupt with Lucinda though.
“Well,” I said, leaving it at that.
She had her hands tucked into the front pockets of her jeans and she brought them out now. She started picking at one of her cuticles, frowning as she stared down at it.
After an awkward few seconds she looked up at me.
“What are you doing later?” she asked.
There it was.
“Well,” I said carefully, “I think I have to do some work at home.”
She looked embarrassed.
“Okay,” she shrugged, then abruptly turned and walked away.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning? You’re gonna ride Karma?”
“Yeah,” she called out, without turning back.
I watched her walk away. She was narrow but muscular and moved with a slight stiffness that I guessed was a result of her accident. I noticed a groom from the next shedrow staring after her.
I felt badly for putting her off, but the truth was I did actually have work to do. The Bureau had sent me here to look into a sponging epidemic. Sponging was a particularly evil trick involving slipping tiny sponges up racehorses’ nostrils before races. Basically impossible to detect unless you had the veterinarian dig up there. It’s not like it had a fatal impact on the horses, just impeded their breathing enough to make them run lackluster. Could demoralize the hell out of a poor horse. And, of course, cause some pretty big upsets in the outcome of a race. It pissed me off—as did anything involving people doing shitty things to horses. I wanted to get to the bottom of it for the sake of the horses and the fairness of the game. The Bureau itself was wearing thin on me though. The horse-related assignments were great, but the rest of the Bureau business I could live without. For the most part, it was just boring as hell. And now it had pulled me away from a girl I’d wanted to try going the distance with. I’d had to pack up, put on a new identity as one Sam Riverman, former Xerox salesman, and come down here, to Florida.