Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Roberto said, “That was so much fun! Does he always make the decisions?”

  “Always does. He does it his way or he doesn’t do it at all.”

  “I can’t believe he doesn’t win every race. He seems to know how.”

  The groom shrugged, and now gave Roberto the best lesson of his life as a jockey. He said, “Some jocks can listen and some can’t.”

  Now the trainer, Farley Jones, came over and said, “Good ride, son. Send your agent around. I can put you on something else tomorrow; the regular jock has the flu.”

  “I don’t have an agent.”

  “Get one, then. Your brother Julio. He can be your agent for now. How did the horse feel?”

  “Like the boss. I’d like to ride him again.”

  Farley laughed. “I don’t see why not.”

  Pretty soon, Justa Bob’s number went up on the board right next to the “I” and they stepped into the winner’s circle. It didn’t look like the owners were there, but that didn’t matter; everyone else made a big deal of Justa Bob, and he knew it. Roberto dismounted and took his tack over to the scales.

  And then, as they came out of the winner’s circle and turned to go under the grandstand, the guy came out and hung that red tag on Justa Bob’s bridle that showed he had been claimed by another trainer. “Huh,” said Farley Jones. That was all he said, but Roberto could tell that he was upset. The assistant trainer was angry. He said, “I know it was Buddy. It has to be Buddy. Fucking Buddy Crawford. He’s claimed every horse we’ve put out there. He doesn’t care, you know he drove Ernie Jenkins out of business by taking all his horses, and Boris—”

  “He did,” said Farley.

  Roberto saw the groom’s face fall. There was something about it, thought Roberto. Most races were claiming races, and horses were claimed at the racetrack every day: they entered the starting gate belonging to one owner and left it belonging to whoever put down the required amount of cash in the racing secretary’s office. It was absolutely routine, and everyone played the game—daring another trainer to take a horse that might be on its last legs, or hoping you could get away with a win without losing the animal. You could put a horse in a claiming race a dozen times and never have him claimed, or you could risk it once and bid the horse farewell. You never knew. Everyone was used to it, but somehow they all four of them slowed their gait and drooped as they went under the grandstand, in spite of the win.

  “He was never going to stay an allowance horse forever. He’ll be six,” said Farley. Allowance races, Roberto knew, were like the middle class—a realm of hardworking stability that stakes horses rose out of on their way to wealth and greatness and claimers fell out of on their way to oblivion. Farley went on, “You’ve got to run them in races they might win or you’ve got to retire them. But I hate to see him go. He could end up anywhere. You know, horses start out in France and end up in North Dakota or Hong Kong. That’s always given me a funny feeling, to tell the truth.” The trainer sounded calm, but Roberto thought he looked depressed. Roberto sighed with him, even though for him the only challenge was getting Buddy Crawford to let him ride the animal.

  The assistant said, “Better to end up in North Dakota than Hong Kong.”

  “Why?” said Roberto, whose idea of North Dakota was very similar to his idea of the moon.

  “Because horses can’t be re-exported from Hong Kong after they’ve been exposed to some disease there, so when they’re finished racing they’re put down,” said the assistant trainer. He still sounded angry.

  “I doubt,” said Farley, “that Justa Bob will end up in Hong Kong.”

  “Buddy Crawford is bad enough,” said the assistant, and Roberto didn’t get the feeling that Farley Jones disagreed with him.

  It wasn’t until he was almost to the jocks’ room that Roberto realized how dirty he was. And he realized something else, too. The way time passed in a race was not like anything else in the world. That was why the jocks kept riding, year after year, accident after accident. They kept wanting to feel that again, the rhythm of it measured in your body by the horse’s stride and the simultaneous chaos of it in front of your eyes, ready to eat you up. Surely there was nothing else like it on earth.

  They were waiting for him at the door, and about six guys, it seemed like, jumped him, then poured ice water on him, then slapped him on the back and put some ice down his neck, and everyone was laughing and screaming, Roberto, too, because he had won his first race, and on his first mount, and that was something special. And then, he thought, that was over, too. So he went over to the wash bucket and picked up the sponge to wash his face. Even now he could still seem to feel the horse’s mouth in his hands like a gentle heat, and so he wasn’t surprised when he dipped his hands and the sponge into the bucket and they came up orange. He didn’t realize this was more than a manifestation of his state of mind until the guys behind him started laughing again. Then he snapped into the present and realized that someone had poured Betadine into the water, and that, furthermore, he had also thoughtlessly splashed it all over his face. But he was an unusual Acevedo in this, that under the influence of Justa Bob he produced Justa Smile.

  8 / THE TIBETAN BOOK OF

  THOROUGHBRED TRAINING

  ONE THING Oliver Haskins, assistant trainer, liked about working for Farley Jones, trainer, was the cooking. Farley’s exercise riders, male and female, were always trying out this and that. For example, today Jorge brought in a pot of chicken soup. The way he got just the right tang in the broth was to simmer the chickens with a couple of chili peppers, and then discard them. The way he took away the sting was to use barley instead of rice. The soup was delicious, and all the riders, grooms, and assorted hangers-on kept after it until the pot was empty.

  Oliver was on his second six months with Farley, and part of the reason it was a good job was that Farley not only took a day off himself every week, he gave Oliver one, gave the grooms one, gave the riders one, gave the hot walkers and everyone else one day off per week. This was a revelation to Oliver, whose last boss, Buddy Crawford, neither took nor gave days off. Farley, in fact, never looked at a horse on his day off. When he took vacations, he went to places horses did not frequent, like music festivals and art museums and plays. On the bumper of his truck, Farley had an Amnesty International sticker. Oliver had had to ask Farley what Amnesty International was, and Farley had been able to tell him, so Oliver knew for sure that the sticker had not come with the truck. The other weird thing about Farley was that when he walked through the barn he looked like a visiting physics professor—he was tall and slender, with glasses, a trimmed white beard, and short, graying hair. He wore khaki Dockers and button-down shirts and his cellular phone hung at his waist like a slide rule. Of course, he didn’t talk like a physics professor—he talked about icing and hosing and inflammation and walking and working and one-on-one and a fifth and galloping out a half and allowances and handicaps and big horses and fillies and the condition book and turf and dirt and breezes and one turn and two turns and lanes and stretches and the garden spot and good movers and bad movers just like everyone else, but he talked the language as if he had learned it as an adult rather than as a child.

  And then there was “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,” which was a laminated sheet of paper tacked to Farley’s office door. It read,

  1. Do not pay attention or investigate; leave your mind in its own sphere

  2. Do not see any fault anywhere

  3. Do not take anything to heart

  4. Do not hanker after signs of progress

  5. Although this may be called inattention, do not fall prey to laziness

  6. Be in a state of constant inspection

  Although these instructions were never spoken of, and Oliver was only conscious of having read them three or four times, well, you looked at them every time you went into the office, so he had begun, bit by bit, to take them rather literally. For example, it was his job to make sure that the stalls and the shedr
ows were clean and raked, and he did find himself in a state of constant inspection. Or, when one of the grooms got drunk and missed work, he found himself not finding fault with that. The grooms, after all, didn’t make much money, didn’t speak much English, and lived in a perennial state of culture shock. After six months or so of exposure to “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,” Oliver didn’t have the heart to find fault with them for giving in.

  Sometimes Oliver had one instruction running through his mind and sometimes another. If a horse stepped on himself in a race and was out for several months, there would be non-hankering after signs of progress. If a horse got into a temper and bit or kicked, there would be not taking anything to heart. If a race was coming up, and a jockey chose another mount, there would be not paying attention or investigating—soon enough another jockey’s agent would show up, and the horse would have a rider. It was soothing. Oliver knew, too, that it was soothing to everyone. He often saw owners or strangers who were waiting for Farley to get off the phone gazing at or reading “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,” and he often heard the exercise riders say things that indicated they were aware of being attentive, or non-reactive, or whatever, but the topics around the barn, apart from food, were the same as around every other barn—who was winning, who was losing, who was riding, who was doing something crazy, who was doing something illegal, who was doing something funny.

  Another favorable thing about Farley was that he had a good sense of humor. He always referred to his ex-wife and the mother of his four grown children as “the foundation mare.” Then he always smiled. His smile was big and merry, and made Oliver smile in return.

  The trouble with working for Farley these days was he wasn’t winning a damn thing. Oliver was trying to bring a state of non-hankering after signs of progress to this problem, but he wasn’t having much luck. Oliver’s parents were Southern Baptists and great hymn-singers. They were opposed to gambling, but generally in favor of animals, so they hadn’t minded too much when he had taken up horse-training as a way of life—reprobates and backsliders had cropped up in every generation of their family pedigree, and in his generation, he was considered a rather benign example of the pattern, since he had to go to bed at eight-thirty every night, and did not drink, smoke, or do drugs. As the scion of great hymn-singers, though, Oliver had a tune for every occasion, and lately he found himself humming one he didn’t like. The words went:

  When death has come and

  taken our loved ones

  It leaves a home so

  lonely and drear

  Then do we wonder

  why others prosper

  Livin’ so wicked

  year after year.

  The chorus was meant to be reassuring:

  Farther along, we’ll

  know all about it

  Farther along, we’ll

  understand why

  Cheer up, my brother,

  live in the sunshine

  We’ll understand it

  all by and by.

  Maybe, thought Oliver.

  “Wicked” was a good word for Buddy Crawford, better than “maniac,” “butcher,” “madman,” “jerk,” or “shit,” the words most frequently used to describe him by other trainers, grooms who could speak English, jockeys, and jockey agents. The list of things Oliver had hated doing for the man during the four months he worked for him started with docking the already meager pay of the grooms for infractions like not getting the shedrows raked by 6:00 a.m. and ran right though firing riders, telling the vet to pin-fire some poor animal’s ankles, keeping toegrabs on all of the horses even after that study about toe-grabs’ increasing the chances of breakdown got all over the track, galloping horses who were sore, running early two-year-olds. Sometimes Oliver tried to distinguish what he himself had suffered at Buddy’s hands (screaming abuse if he didn’t fax the man at home about how things were at the barn before 5:30 a.m., screaming abuse if he didn’t manage to fire a rider before the rider quit, screaming abuse if an owner made any sort of complaint at all) from what others suffered, but it was all tangled together in Buddy’s wickedness. And Buddy had a philosophy of wickedness, too. It was about culling the herd. He would say, “You don’t get a Cigar by babying every horse and coddling every jockey. You get a Cigar by getting rid of whoever doesn’t want to win, horse or man, jockey or owner.”

  And yet Oliver had worked for Buddy for four whole months, and conscience hadn’t made him quit, either. What had made him quit was that he had gotten so tired from his work schedule that he started sleeping with his hand on the alarm clock, to be sure he’d wake up by 2:00 a.m., in order to be at the track by 3:15. Then he’d started dreaming about not being able to get up, and waking up every hour to check the clock. He had been making good money, maybe the best money of any assistant trainer at the track, since his earnings depended in part on the winnings of Buddy’s horses. Even so, in sheer exhaustion, he had faxed Buddy his notice, and Buddy had called him instantly to scream at him that he’d intended to fire him that day, and how dare he quit before he got fired. He’d been sure after he quit that no amount of money was worth that, and he still held to this opinion.

  But every horse Buddy had was winning, and good races, too, so lately he’d had his picture in the Daily Racing Form three times, with little squibs about his training philosophy, his toughness, his daring vision. “Finally,” he said, “everybody in my barn has got to perform and they know it. Second place is losing. The betting fans know that, and I know it.”

  Oliver didn’t know how, but the horses seemed to know it, too.

  A claiming race was a kind of bet. Not every horse in a race got claimed, even—or especially—when you wanted it to. You entered your horse and took your chances, but every horse Farley ran in a claiming race, Buddy was claiming and, it looked like to Oliver, running to death. As his girlfriend had pointed out to Oliver, should he quit horse-training, and she would quite like it if he did, he would know a lot about hostile takeovers from claiming horses and having them claimed. Once you put your horse in a claiming race, it was very much like taking your small family-owned company public and having it bought out from under you. Sometimes, of course, your small family-owned company was a dud, and seeing it go was a pleasure. But other times the hostile takeover was painful. All trainers and many owners played this game, and Oliver expected to, also, but lately it hadn’t been fun at all.

  The owner of a nice filly Buddy had claimed the day before was sitting in Farley’s office with Farley, asking, Oliver figured, about when they could claim the filly back. Through the window, Oliver could see Farley kind of shaking his head—not emphatically, not “no,” but sadly, just “I don’t think its a good idea.” The owner had bred the horse and was attached to her. The owner had been reluctant to put the horse in a claiming race. The owner was calling Farley’s judgment into question. That was something Oliver hated to see, because he knew that that was just the sort of thing that could build up around the track, especially up in the Turf Club, where the owners sat together and lamented their fates and told each other that, given how much money they were spending on the game, more of them, a majority of them, deserved to win. One of the distinctions between owners as a class and, say, grooms as a class was that, whereas grooms sometimes knew what they wanted and took it, owners always knew what they deserved. Assistant trainers, in Oliver’s experience, were generally unsure on both counts.

  Farley, as you could tell by “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,” didn’t know a thing about deserving, and so he and the owner were probably not even talking the same language. Oliver tried not to appear to be spying, but he watched as the owner stood up and turned toward the door. He was a good-looking guy, but he didn’t look happy. As he pulled the door open, he said, “I’m losing confidence in you, Farley, I’ve got to say—” But then he saw Oliver and fell silent, only adding, “Well, I’ll call you.”