Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Buddy trained his glasses on the fillies. He could see them easing to the pole, and then they were off. The lights over the track had begun to pale as the sky lightened. The Glitterman filly was a brown, so the two were easily distinguishable, even at this distance. The fillies ran neck and neck for about a furlong, as per instructions, and then Residual began to pull away. What a Ferrari she was. At two furlongs, the Glitterman filly seemed to hit a wall, though that was only an illusion. Buddy’s clock said she was running as well as ever, though perhaps her heart was breaking. That was something else you sometimes had to do on the way to the Breeders’ Cup, pick a rabbit and break her heart over and over, every five days, just to keep the big horse thinking well of herself. Residual was to do three-eighths, but not a bullet work. Just something to keep her tuned. She came around the turn toward the box, running easily, ears pricked, happy. The girl, Deedee, sat still on her, coiled like a cat, the wave of the horse’s stride passing through the girl’s body. One of the reporters said, “They remind me of water. That girl ever tried to be a jockey?”

  “Too long in the leg,” said Buddy. That was what he said. Later, he remembered that perfectly.

  The Glitterman filly was trotting now. Buddy noticed that. And other horses were scattered around the track. The sun was coming up pretty good. All seemed in order. And then one of the reporters said, “Look at that,” and there was Epic Steam, just to their left. What he had been doing Buddy didn’t know, because he was watching the fillies. Epic Steam must have been watching the fillies, too, or at least watching Residual, because first he was squealing, then he was bolting right after her, and his rider was yanking and pulling on his mouth, trying to twist his head around. But the horse had a neck of granite and a mouth of steel. He bore down on the filly, those muscular shafts they called legs stretching and folding, stretching and folding. The filly, who was coming down to a jog, flicked her ears, and Deedee, Buddy could see this, tensed and turned her head. It must have been a frightening sight, the sight of that giant dark beast heading down the track at them, for only Jesus knew what purpose. The filly flicked her ears again, backward, forward. It was hard to know his intention. Normally, a stallion wouldn’t dare approach a mare incautiously, but that would be a stallion who knew something. You never knew what Epic Steam knew. As he ran at the filly, she took off. They were right below the trainers’ stand. Buddy could see Deedee’s white face. But she took hold, steadied the filly, and crouched against her neck. The girl and the filly had decided to run for it. Around him, the reporters noticed the same thing. They shut up and hunched forward. In a moment, the big dark horse was on the filly’s heels, his own rider standing in the stirrups and leaning back against the reins. They ran like that into the turn, the filly on the rail, the colt right against her, her ears pricked, his pinned. Every horse in their way scattered to the outside. The colt was fighting the bit. Buddy knew he wanted to bite her. Some stallions were like that. He’d seen it in the breeding shed, a stallion attacking and biting the mare, knocking her down. And he was so much bigger than she was—he probably outweighed her by two hundred pounds—he had muscles upon muscles. But, coming out of the turn, she did it—she floated away from him as easily as she had distanced the sprinting filly, effortless, joyous even, happy to whip him. Soon she was two lengths in front of him, and they stayed that way, the colt straining to catch the filly, the filly easy and smooth. Twenty strides? That many? And then the colt’s fatigue brought him inside the circle of the rider’s strength, and the rider managed to turn his head to the outside, and pull him up. As soon as they were out of danger, the filly and her rider floated to a trot like a big jet plane coming in for a perfect landing.

  “Wow,” said one of the reporters.

  “Shit,” said Buddy.

  “Yeah,” said another of the reporters, “that can’t be good for your plans, huh, Buddy?”

  “Filly looked good,” said the guy from The Blood-Horse.

  “That filly—” said the guy from the Thoroughbred Times. And then they all looked at each other. What their faces said was: You saw it, didn’t you? You saw what I saw? Yes, yes. If they never race again, still we saw something.

  “Just think if the rider hadn’t been fighting him the whole way,” said another guy.

  “Geld him,” said the guy from The Blood-Horse. “Geld him and you’ll win the Kentucky Derby.”

  “But that filly!”

  It went on. Buddy watched the filly through his glasses, trotting, trotting, walking. She looked done in now. What had she run altogether, a mile? That was a lot of ground for a two-year-old. Her head was down; even from this distance he could see she was blowing as hard as she could. He turned his glasses to the colt. He was still pumped with adrenaline. Still fighting, still wound up, but in spite of that, Buddy saw that he had two tired horses, two very tired horses, who probably should be scratched from their respective races.

  What a relief that was.

  And it was a relief, after all these months of patience, to have a temper tantrum back at the barn, after the reporters left. “Boss!” exclaimed Duane, Epic Steam’s exercise rider. “I couldn’t hold him! We got over there too fast, and then he was rearing up and spinning and pulling me around. There was guys all over back there. I just thought, Maybe he can run some of this energy off!”

  “Boss,” said Leon, the assistant trainer, gravely, “I have no idea how these reporters found out about this work. Really. No idea. But I will look into it, I promise that.”

  “Boss,” said Deedee, the exercise rider, softly, “I was just scared shitless. But I knew she could outrun him. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  The tantrum, the excitement, the morning, the hundred horses to train, the day’s races, the day itself ebbed away, and the next thing Buddy knew, he was sitting on his bed four or five days later, taking off his shoes. It was just dark, and the green light on the fax machine glowed, as did the red digits on his alarm clock. Really, you had to admire the way Jesus answered those prayers, even the ones you didn’t know you had made. The press, for example, was gone. No calls, no approaches, no stories about his career that made it seem strange to him. And Epic Steam was gone, too. On the day of the race he was supposed to run in but had been scratched from, Sir Michael Ordway had called him and told him he had just happened to see Jason Clark Kingston at a party in Los Angeles, and he had just happened to ask him how the horse was doing, and Jason had just happened to tell him that the horse was an uncontrollable filly-rapist of whom Andrea Melanie was deathly afraid, and Sir Michael had just happened to have spoken that day to a man in New York who was interested in a promising runner and had some money to spend, and blah blah blah, and so they had made a deal, Jason Clark Kingston holding out for $1.2 million, which, since the new owner had recently sold his chain of toy stores for four billion dollars, seemed like nothing to him. Epic Steam, well and truly tranquilized, had been put on a plane back to New York, and everyone in California, except, of course, Jason Clark Kingston, had profited from his sojourn there.

  The filly’s elderly owner, adept at looking on the bright side of things, was concerned that the filly had tied up a little upon returning from the barn, and then colicked a little the following evening and had a little filling in her right front ankle. “Oh, the poor thing,” she lamented. “I talked to the vet myself, Buddy, and I know you hate that, but I felt that I had to really just get his unvarnished opinion, and I am sending her back to the farm. She’s done enough and more than enough for such a baby. Poor thing. I’m sure she was frightened to death.”

  And so the filly had gotten on the van just that morning, and was right now, probably, getting to know the good life near Santa Ynez. And then the filly’s owner had said, “But let’s do go to Saratoga for the sale this year. That filly has just given me something to look forward to every day. Thank you, Buddy, you are a genius, darling.”

  And so Buddy set his shoes beside the bed, closed his eyes, and gave thanks, real thanks,
heart-opening thanks, that the tests were over for the time being, and Jesus was giving him a break, a rest, five weeks until the yearling sales, to marshal his forces and catch his breath.

  JULY

  34 / ONTOLOGY

  IT ALWAYS PERPLEXED Joy that the first Tompkins, Jacob his name had been, had established his ranch right here. From almost any point of view, “right here” had nothing to offer, and didn’t even have any “righthereness” about it, since the landscape stretched away for miles in every direction as flat and dry and featureless as any landscape Joy had ever seen. Anyway, even without humidity, it was too hot to think, ride, talk, touch horses, or lift your eyes from your feet. The Tompkins Ranch Hotel and Resort (Destination Perfection) had three swimming pools and was designed to remind the weary resort-hopper of a combination of Tahiti and Jamaica right here in the middle of nowhere. It was considered highly imperfect for the ranch personnel to insert their dusty Central Valley selves into the Caribbean-South Pacifican road-side fantasy, no matter how hot it might become.

  Nevertheless, Joy did not hesitate when the phone rang in the office and Elizabeth Zada invited her to join herself and her new lover, Plato Theodorakis, at the resort, where Plato had taken a suite for three days. Elizabeth and Plato had been seeing each other for some undefined period of time, at least undefined to Joy, and Joy had not met him yet. He turned out to be thirty-two years old and remarkably short and hairy, not Joy’s type at all, but clearly Elizabeth’s type. And she, post-menopausal and loud, seemed to be his type, too. Ah, well, thought Joy, surveying the spectacle of their relationship, you really never never never knew.

  Plato was an assistant professor at Berkeley. His field was future theory. In her own way, Elizabeth was also working on future theory, because she was writing three books simultaneously, the journal of her personal spiritual journey, the description of her system, and her spiritual guide to household tasks. Plato specialized in the future of buying and selling. This included everything from the future of money to the future of natural resources to the future of mercantile relationships. Plato, who had been born on Crete, had returned to graduate school after making a not-inconsiderable sum trading currency in Chicago, but, as he told Joy, at heart he was a theorist. He was also a big spender, but, as a theorist of spending, he kept careful records, and deducted everything he spent from his taxes. He had seven years to produce a book, and a profit. Plato and Elizabeth had met when she called him to ask about household management in that land of the future, China. They liked each other’s voices so much that each other’s appearance had hardly made a dent in their mutual attraction. “You know,” confided Elizabeth to Joy when Plato went for a dip, “I never liked a hairy man before, but if you already like him, then the way the water runs off him like rivulets through long grass is more endearing than anything else.” Joy supposed so.

  The three-pool complex, embraced by the luxurious arms of the resort, was blocked from the rest of the ranch by several rolling hills that Mr. Tompkins had installed as a part of the concept. You lay on your chaise longue under a series of pergolas and umbrellas that shaded you from the relentless Central Valley sunshine, and everywhere you turned, you saw the trickle and plash of waterfalls and streams connecting the pools to the golf course to the veil of palms and pines imported from Hawaii that hid the view of the hundred-thousand-head cattle feedlot beyond. Cabanas and guesthouses hung with irrigated bougainvillea and jasmine and surrounded by royal palms disgorged guests into the compound, where they were confronted at every turn by tables laden with food, mostly chilled fruits and pastel-colored drinks. Beef (Tompkins Perfection Blue Ribbon) appeared only as a subtle accent on these tables, most often dressed in exotic spices and herbs. The pervasive cowboy ambience of the rest of the ranch was noticeably absent here. After they had gazed at Plato swimming and diving for a while, he rejoined them. He said, “You know, once I saw a production of Romeo and Juliet set in Scandinavia. There were runes all over the stage, and Romeo and Mercutio and Tybalt all wore helmets with horns. Everyone else wore fur hats. There was something of a Russian accent, too, in the boots. That’s what this place reminds me of. Things yoked together that might never otherwise meet. But that’s the future. That’s why I like it here.”

  “You ought to meet Mr. Tompkins,” said Joy. “Diversifying is his life.”

  “Does he have a company theoretician?”

  “I don’t know. But everyone wears white coats. You’ve got to be willing to do that.”

  “What is it you do here again?”

  “I work with the racehorses. The breeding stock, really. In the spring, I work with the broodmares; in the summer and fall, I work with the weanlings. Then the breeding season comes around again.”

  “You live here?”

  “Well, in Waterone. I lived on the ranch for a while a long time ago. I rent a little guesthouse in Waterone.”

  “People in Waterone have guests?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve rented this guesthouse for years.”

  Plato looked away from her with evident lack of interest in her staid and rusticated occupation, but when his eyes fell upon Elizabeth, who was wearing a black-and-silver swimming suit and a silver sarong, he smiled with evident pleasure. She smiled back at him. Joy felt a sudden pang of loneliness. Although she had not wanted a friend, and Elizabeth had not been the friend she had wanted, and she often thought of her friendship with Elizabeth as something good for her as well as a defense against several things generally deemed undesirable, like the concern of others and lots of brooding and overwork. Since the onset of this affair, she had seen Elizabeth less and she missed her. Of course, she had thought of Elizabeth’s age as her protection against that trial of adolescence, your best friend getting a boyfriend and you not getting one. But, in fact, Elizabeth had been warning her that something like this could happen at any time, because her sexuality was a work-in-progress. One good thing about watching them was that they were too wrapped up in one another to notice, and another good thing about it was that it really made you believe that two souls could find one another, love one another, and desire one another whether either one, or, in this case, neither one, conformed in any way to accepted standards of pulchritude. As if to confirm Joy’s observation, as she was watching, Elizabeth reached over and began to tickle the pelt over Plato’s breastbone, and he then took her other hand with evident ardor. Their gestures were idle. Really, they were looking at one another more than anything else. Perhaps, Joy thought, she, with her envy, jealousy, and loneliness, felt their touch more than they did. She wanted to look away, because it was unpleasant to think of how long it was since she had last been in love, but she wanted to look, because it was pleasant to think that love existed, and close at hand.

  Elizabeth said to Joy, “How’s Mr. T.?”

  “Ask him that.”

  Elizabeth looked at her and laughed, then said, “Okay.” A moment later, she said, “His automatic waterer isn’t working, and he’s thirsty.”

  Joy sat up in alarm. “Really? In this heat?”

  “What’s going on,” said Plato, “who’s Mr. T.?,” as Joy jumped up and went over to the phone on the towel stand.

  When she had come back from putting a call in to the stallion manager, asking him to investigate Mr. T.’s waterer, Plato was sitting forward, looking at Elizabeth with particular glee. He was saying, “He told you that another horse had some disease that radiographs didn’t pick up, and when it was scanned another way, they saw it?”

  “Oh,” said Joy. “That navicular horse. The barrel horse from the western side. Yes. Though it isn’t a disease. It’s a syndrome where a little bone in the horse’s hooves starts to deteriorate.”

  “He saw it as flashing lights,” said Elizabeth.

  Joy hadn’t realized how routine these conversations had become for her and Elizabeth, but Plato’s disbelief and amazement made her feel weird, as if she had wandered into craziness without knowing it.

  Elizabeth sa
id, “But I can scan them myself. We went to the track once and I scanned every horse in the race and picked out the only one who really was healthy from top to toe. She won, too.”

  Joy hazarded, “Didn’t you think that trainer had a pleasant face?”

  Plato ignored her. “Did you have a bet on her?”

  Elizabeth said, “No. Forgot to bet.”

  “You went to the races and forgot to bet?” Plato’s amazement at this burned up all previous amazement. “You know, when I was in Cambridge that year, I went to the race meets every weekend. Betting in England is the purest form of market speculation there is. The parimutuel is a philosophical abomination in my opinion, a form of socialism. You know, in England, the owners have pedigrees, the horses have pedigrees, the trainers have pedigrees, the punters have pedigrees, the bookies have pedigrees, the jockeys have pedigrees. You could put them all in a database and sort through them the way they do with horse pedigrees, and you could plot their relative rates of success and failure, their historic relationships, and the relationship of nature to nurture. I mean, the human-genome project would be nothing to a study like this.”

  “You always think big, darling,” said Elizabeth.

  “Mr. T. has English bloodlines,” said Joy.

  “So what have you asked him that’s interesting?”

  “Oh, let’s see. What he thinks of the other horses. How he’s feeling.”

  “Everything immediate.”

  “Well, yes,” said Joy. “Horses are very immediate in their thinking. Be here now, you know.”

  “How do you know?”

  Joy smiled, then looked at Elizabeth, who was looking at her.

  “Well, that’s just the way they are. Physical,” said Elizabeth.

  “How do you know?”