Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Now the filly had been saddled, had Chris McCarron on her, and was jogging around to the starting gate. Farley was enjoying the comforting presence of Alise and Vincent, who were sitting beside him in his box, holding hands and talking quietly to one another. They always spoke quietly. They never asked questions, but they were always interested to hear what he had to say. They had excellent manners, like the filly. Perfect owners. Farley yawned. He almost never yawned before a race. He was almost always a little tense. But there was something entirely reassuring about that French filly and her owners. He felt better today about his career and his life than he had in months. In the light of this good day, he saw how bad he had been feeling.

  Now a group came into the next box, Joe Zimmer’s box. Farley smiled, because it was a Tompkins group, probably from the ranch. Kyle Tompkins had horses with trainers all over the track, all over the country, all over the world. The group from the ranch were all wearing chambray shirts with “Tompkins Ranch Means Perfect Beef” in a circle around the head of a Hereford steer. Only one of them, an extremely tall, large woman with a loud voice, had escaped the uniform. She sat nearest to Farley, just on the other side of the railing. There was still a long way to go to the starting gate—the horses were only beginning the backstretch. The sun was warm. Overhead, round-bodied jets were arriving from Europe. Farley closed his eyes.

  “Which one is ours?” said the loud voice.

  “The chestnut with the blaze. The jockey is in all white with a silver ‘T’ on his back.”

  Silence.

  “No. Can’t see it,” said the loud voice. “That chestnut is ouchy in his back, just behind the saddle.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Zimmer would run an unsound horse.”

  “He’s not unsound yet. Just ouchy enough not to want to really put out.”

  “Who do you think?”

  Silence.

  “That brown one in the pink shirt with the green dots.”

  “She’s a filly. The rest are colts. I don’t know.”

  Silence.

  “Well, she’s feeling good from top to toe.”

  Yes, thought Farley, and opened his eyes. The other woman, not the big one, but quite a little one, was looking right at him. When he opened his eyes, she smiled. He said, “You’re talking about my horse.”

  “The filly?”

  “Yes. She just came over from France about a month ago.”

  “What’s her breeding?”

  “Blushing Groom.” The horses went through an opening in the inside rail of the dirt track and up the hill to where the gate was positioned on the grass.

  “Mmmm,” said the little one, still not looking away from him. He knew he was smiling. She was smiling, too. He said, “No white coats.”

  “We threatened to strike if we had to wear the white coats off the ranch, so he compromised with these. Tomorrow we have shirts that read ‘Perfect Skin Can Be Yours’ across the back. He flew us down in the DC-3. On the tail, it reads ‘Tompkins Fleet Perfection.’ ” They laughed.

  “I train a few for Kyle Tompkins.”

  “They’re in the gate,” said Alise. Farley tore his eyes away from the little one. She was very pretty, he thought, in that half-sundried, sparkly, horsey way. She had blue eyes. The gate opened right in front of them, and the filly took off. She ran as if alone, two or three lengths ahead of the other horses. Farley put his binoculars to his eyes and focused on the jockey’s face. Chris looked relaxed and happy. His lips were moving.

  It was the most boring race Farley had ever witnessed. The filly ran well ahead all the way around, and then took off after the second turn, and eked out another three lengths. Her ears were pricked the whole way. When she crossed the finish line, Alise said, “How marvelous! What a lovely day we are having. Thank you so much, Farley.” And Vincent said, “Good job, I must say!” There was no screaming. The Tompkins horse had come in third.

  Well, the thing was, they had to go down to the track and the winner’s circle. They had to make much of the filly, who was hardly sweating. They had to do this and that and that and this, and when Farley got back up to his box, the Tompkins crew was gone. Before the fifth race, he called Joe Zimmer’s cellular and Joe answered. He said, “Hey, baby. This is Farley Jones. You know that Tompkins bunch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was the name of the little one? The little blonde one.”

  “I don’t know, Farley. I didn’t catch it. Was she cute?”

  And then Farley was embarrassed, and so he mumbled something, hung up, and put the whole incident out of his mind. Do not investigate or pay attention. Do not take anything to heart.

  Sometimes these precepts were harder to follow than other times.

  TWO DAYS LATER, in the office, Joy took Mr. Tompkins’ copy of the Thoroughbred Times out of his box and leafed through it. She put it back. She took out the new Blood-Horse and leafed through that, but it was no use. There were no pictures of Farley Jones in either of them, and after she had looked for five minutes, she was so embarrassed at herself that she shoved the magazine back in the box and scurried out of the office the moment she heard Hortense returning from the rest room.

  AS FOR FARLEY, it was a shock, was it not, to return to what had become his normal state of mind. He knew for sure that very day, that very moment when Joy was looking for his picture, that he was just enduring. The one day in months when he hadn’t had to keep his spirits up had shown him just how hard he was working every other day to do so. Today. Tomorrow. Telephone calls-horses-death. The connection jumped into his mind instantly, and even though he laughed at it at once, so silly, too silly ever to actually say, it stayed right there, a Black Hole the size of a pinprick right in the center of his brain.

  32 / BELMONT

  DICK WAS ALONE in his box, binoculars in his hand, waiting to want to watch Laurita make her way around the track to the starting gate, which was a furlong down the track. Her morning line had dropped from two-to-one to eight-to-five. She was the favorite, with Exotic Wood, who had shipped in from California, the second favorite at two-to-one. A year older and several lifetimes meaner, the California mare would be hard to beat, and Dick was a little intimidated by her and her connections. Or he would have been, if he’d had the mental space anymore for anything other than reliving his time, now finished, with Rosalind Maybrick.

  Although the Bird of Paradise was a big race, and Laurita’s picture had gotten into the Form, Rosalind and Al were not in New York but in Europe somewhere. Al was sorting out the production of large metal objects that could only be lifted by heavy equipment, and Rosalind was sorting out the consumption of small porcelain objects that could only be lifted with the utmost care. Hungary. That’s where they were. Al had told him that. They were supposed to call him tonight and find out about the race.

  In fact, it was good to be alone. He sat quietly. Sometimes he thought about Rosalind, or, rather, he re-experienced, as if it were actually happening, the feeling of her fingers on his shoulder and neck, over his cheek and chin, back down his neck to his shoulder again. That’s where she had him, not in the lovemaking or the gazing or the other accoutrements of an Affair, but in that liquid touch. Right there, the very thing at the nexus of his marriage, touching, and the nexus of his life with the horses, touching, right there he found the source of his deepest longing for Rosalind.

  On the other hand, there was Louisa’s cousin, who had just come to visit and to talk to him about Louisa. Louisa, in the opinion of the cousin, was holding, but barely. He was worried about her. They had spent two days wandering around the track, the cousin in dress shoes, discussing Louisa with much intensity. Dick had not confessed his affair, but the cousin had commented that he seemed a little on edge.

  It was nice to watch a race. In a race, anything could happen. Laurita was behaving herself very nicely. She was one of those horses who could have had any sort of life and done well in it.

  The cousin was a therapist, which had reminded
him that he could go back to his own therapist, which, guiltily, he had not. The cousin had started out as a comedian many years ago (he was now over fifty), moved into psychotherapy, and now counseled only the dying. He called himself a death therapist. In Dick’s estimation, the man, though kind and well meaning, and certainly fond of Louisa, was obsessed with his own death.

  As nice as Laurita was, though, this Exotic Wood mare made her look like an amateur. She strode out, glanced around, put the pony in his place. She had “boss mare” written all over her.

  Another way Rosalind had liked to touch him was just to stroke his stomach and chest, lightly, idly, first down, then up, then around in an inward-turning spiral, then back around, in an outward-turning spiral. They would be talking about horses or something and he would barely be noticing. So how was it that right now he could feel the hair under his clothes flatten this way and then that way? He almost looked down his shirt to see what was going on in there.

  The cousin’s father had, indeed, suffered an unusual fate, but Dick wasn’t sure what meaning there was in it, or if it had any meaning at all. At one point, he had given up his day job, insurance underwriting, to take up his first love, playing the trumpet in a big band. All during the death therapist’s early life, the father was away much of the time on musical engagements. The band went by bus.

  Now the horses got to the starting gate and entered as quietly as debutantes lining up to receive admirers. After they were all in, there was an unusually long pause, during which Dick imagined all these experienced fillies and mares discussing their male trainers and jockeys in the frankest terms. And then the bell rang and the gate opened.

  Sometimes, not even erotically, Rosalind’s fingers wandered over his testicles and down the insides of his thighs. Dick stifled a little gasp at the memory.

  The young ladies were running well, in a bunch, the way they might on the range somewhere.

  One icy night in New Hampshire, the band bus got into a terrible accident, and several of the band members were badly injured or killed.

  The speedball, an A.P. Indy filly named Ann Page, put daylight between herself and Exotic Wood. Laurita was fourth or fifth, deep in the pack.

  Other times, she would just run her finger up his spine and tickle the back of his neck.

  One of the band members who died instantly was the death therapist’s father. He was impaled on his trumpet. When the death therapist said these words, “impaled on his trumpet,” Dick had laughed so hard he nearly fell down. Fortunately, the death therapist had been doing therapy for so long he took nothing at all personally, so he waited calmly for Dick to pull himself together.

  Exotic Wood began her move on the turn. Ann Page dropped like a rock. Laurita, who should have been making her move, made no move.

  Once, he had been lying on his stomach, half asleep, and he had felt her cool palms and cooler fingers encircle his heels. When he glanced over his shoulder at her face, he saw that she was pondering his feet, it looked like. Looking at her face made his feet get warm.

  Laurita still didn’t fire, but another filly, an Irish Kenmare filly, did, and moved up to duel it out with Exotic Wood.

  It was 2:00 a.m. on a bus in New Hampshire. Wouldn’t the trumpet have been in its case, under the seat? Did he have it in his lap? In his mouth? Was he playing at it? Looking at it? How could it be that, at the very moment when the trumpet was poised as a weapon, the bus crashed?

  Exotic Wood flattened her ears to her head and bared her teeth. The other filly was intimidated, which sometimes happened in races for females, and lost her concentration. Exotic Wood crossed the finish line first, by a length. Laurita was fifth. Dick got up and went down to talk to the jockey, but it was clear enough what had happened, or, rather, clear enough that something had happened that was fairly mundane.

  What did it mean, to do something you loved, something as normally safe as playing the trumpet in a big band, and be killed by it? Where had the wrong choice been made? By whom? Jockeys made life-or-death choices every day, but musicians? As a rule, jockeys’ children did not go on to become death therapists. They often went on to become jockeys.

  He knew it was true that his longing for Rosalind had intensified after she broke off their relations. What had happened was, she had met him for dinner at Forty-four’s, on, of course, Forty-fourth Street, while Al was off somewhere and Louisa was teaching late, and over the crayfish risotto she had said, “This is too much for me,” which was quite a surprise, because the whole thing was too much for him, but he’d thought it was not quite enough for her, and so he had said, without meaning to, “Yes,” and had not said what he meant to (or sort of meant to), which was “Don’t,” and Rosalind had turned her head, and he had felt exactly as much relief as sadness, and when she turned her head back to him, she had read that in his face. They finished their meal and split the check, and he had had the sense not to ask if this meant he was no longer their horse-trainer, and she had never touched him again.

  This jockey, the son of a jockey, said that she hadn’t liked the footing. A little deep from rain the day before. The filly never really took hold. Dick nodded. Perfectly understandable.

  How did the cousin’s own dilemma reflect on his ability to advise Dick about Louisa? Was there a thread here, tying together the trumpet and the cousin and Louisa and Rosalind and the personality of Exotic Wood and all of these solitary moments and thoughts and his utter inability to accept the end of that touching? At the hub of all of this, Dick felt perplexed and overwhelmed. Meanings seemed to press themselves upon him, but what meanings? Wasn’t the lesson of racing that there was no meaning, no pattern, nothing except chaos daily engaged with? Dick thanked the jockey, patted the filly, and sent her back to the barn with the groom to be massaged and made much of. Then he went out to valet parking and asked for his car. When the guy brought it, she wasn’t in it, even though it was commonly said that anything could happen at the racetrack. But Dick was also willing to admit that, during the affair, if Rosalind had unexpectedly appeared, he was as likely to have flinched from her as embraced her, or, rather, first he would have flinched, then he would have embraced, or vice versa. Only now, with embracing out of the question, did he want to be doing it all the time.

  33 / MATCH RACE

  WHEN BUDDY GOT into his Lexus at three in the morning to head for Hollywood Park, he was already in a cold sweat. The press had him on the hot seat every single day now, it seemed like. He was getting as famous as Baffert or Lukas, and even though, let’s say, five years ago Buddy would have licked his chops at the whole experience, now he woke up in a panic every time he managed to get to sleep in the first place, which wasn’t more than every three or four nights. The publicity was all good so far, but any publicity presented Jesus with the perfect opportunity to trick you. Buddy thought this way about everything now. Each morning he got up and prepared himself to negotiate the day’s landmines—avoid them, defuse them, fall into bed eighteen hours from now exhausted from the effort, and lie awake worrying about the day to come.

  You would have thought he only had two horses in his stable, Residual the angel filly and Epic Steam the devil colt. They were neck and neck. After breaking her maiden at the beginning of May, the filly had won an allowance and a stakes, in the clear by six to ten lengths and run a close second in another stakes. Now Buddy had her pointed at the Valley Girl Stakes, a week away. The very next day, Epic Steam was running in his fifth race, the Albert Brooks Handicap. After breaking his maiden, also in May, he had bitten his groom in the chest, knocked him down, and pawed him, then won his own allowance, then won the Hollywood Producers’ Stakes and the Century Boulevard Handicap. His running style was different from the filly’s: he was a stalker, and liked to have the pace set for him. On his way through the pack, he had to be restrained by the jockey from biting the other colts, and there was always a moment when the jockey had to make a fuss to get him in front. The choice was to run or fight. So far, with considerable terror
on the part of his regular jockey, Rinaldo Ortega, who had always liked to think he could get any horse to go somewhere, the horse had chosen to run. The filly had won $148,000. The colt had won $214,000. Should they both win, the filly’s earnings would rise to over three hundred thousand, and the colt’s to nearly four hundred thousand. The filly’s owner, an elderly woman with pots of old California money, considered Buddy a natural-born, bona-fide saint for discovering this filly as a twenty-three-thousand-dollar yearling at Keeneland and “bringing her into my life. She is an angelic presence. I am so lucky,” she said to every reporter who called her, interviewed her, glanced in her direction. To Jason Clark Kingston, Buddy’s sainthood was still an open question, but as Epic Steam closed in on half a million dollars in winnings, Jason was thriving on his new status as a sportsman. He had a firm grasp on the fact that the animal’s real fiscal potential was as a stallion rather than as a racehorse. He would therefore have disapproved of Buddy’s current hormonal program for the horse, which included a nice progesterone implant in his neck, underneath his mane, where no one would ever feel it, because no one ever petted the animal. There was nothing illegal about using progesterone in a filly. Trainers did it all the time. It put the gal out of season for the season. But using progesterone in a colt to mitigate his aggressiveness was so unheard of around the track that Buddy knew the animal would never be tested for it.