Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “Give him some more.”

  “I don know, boss, he might fall down. I don know.”

  “Are you the only person with the horse?”

  “Yeah, boss. The horse always good before. Never like this.”

  Some other grooms were standing around. They parted when Marvelous Martha came up behind them. Even the pilot was younger than she was. She said, “May I help?”

  “This horse has got to calm down,” said the pilot.

  Marvelous Martha went to the horse’s head, and he noticed her, which was a good sign. She stroked him along the neck and head, took his ears in her palms, fingered their tips. He let her do it, but when the metal partition creaked again, he jumped again. She asked the groom if she could give the horse another shot. He shrugged. The pilot said, “Give the horse another shot.” She gave the horse another shot.

  But it was no good. Even after the few minutes it took for the tranquilizer to have its effect, the horse was trembling and rolling his eyes. Marvelous Martha couldn’t tell if it was something about the sound or something about the vibration or something about the metal itself. She stroked and talked: “Relax, sweetie. It’s all right. You’re a good boy.” The horse reared up six inches and caught himself against his tether. That frightened him even more, and he reared up again. The horses on either side of him were now moving restlessly, and the horses behind him were paying close attention. The interior of the plane suddenly seemed very small, very crowded, and very fragile. They were an hour into the flight, somewhere in Arizona. The horse’s own groom now leaned over and threw up.

  “Oh, God,” said the pilot, closing the curtain.

  The horse’s groom sat down, put his head between his knees, and closed his eyes. Marvelous Martha said, “What’s your name?”

  “Maurilio,” he groaned.

  “Maurilio, look at me. Take your wrists in your hands like this and press your thumbs against this spot, and you’ll feel better.”

  He did so.

  “Feel better?”

  “Sí.”

  “Now clean that up.”

  But the horse was snorting and stamping now, and throwing his head. You could take your pick, thought Marvelous Martha—an angry horse, a stubborn horse, a fearless horse, and a panicked horse. The one you never ever in your whole long life with horses wanted to see, as mean as some of them could be, was the panicked horse. She held tight to his halter as he threw his head, and he lifted her right off the ground. You could feel the strength of the adrenaline pumping through him in that one moment alone. She pulled back the curtain between the horse and the cockpit, and she said, “He’s getting out of control. What do you usually do?”

  “Shoot him or land.”

  “Are we to that choice yet?”

  “You tell me.”

  Marvelous Martha regarded the horse. Sweat was pouring off him. Stamping around had caused his wraps to slip down under his feet, and two of them were flapping, but of course there was no going into the stall to fix anything. He was jerking at his ties now, and the two horses beside him were beginning to sweat, too. Panic could shoot around a herd in a heartbeat; in fact, panic did shoot around herds in the pounding of hearts. The quickest information passed between any two horses was always: Time to flee. He reared up again. She said, “Time to choose.”

  The pilot said, “I’ll land, then.”

  They landed in Texas, West Texas, on a runway barely distinguishable from the forbidding sagebrush prairie around it. The wind was blowing. Steers were standing on the other side of some rusty barbed wire, chewing their cud and staring. Dismembered pickup trucks lay here and there. It was hot, midday. There was no water. All of the horses had to be unloaded, all of the stalls taken apart. The panicked horse had to be left behind with his groom; providing for him took an hour on the phone. The other horses had to be led around. They wanted to try out the grass, which was at least green, but they couldn’t go into it, because it was full of holes and metal junk. Frustration and bad behavior ran through them, and even though Residual was the best behaved and the best provided with caretakers, she was the one who got kicked, right in the left hock. Later, when she told Buddy about it, Marvelous Martha did not tell Buddy she had seen it coming, but she had. One of the fillies was backing up toward another horse, yards away from Residual. Residual was minding her own business, but her groom, a good groom, decided to get a little farther out of the way, so he led her off, and here came that angry filly, dragging her groom, and she went right up to Residual and she whipped around and laid one on her. If that wasn’t karma, Marvelous Martha thought, then what was?

  61 / A NIGHTMARE

  ONE THING Dick had noticed over the years, say forty-five of them, the length of his life, was that there was often some little thing that you hadn’t paid much attention to at the time that rose up to destroy you later. He knew that “destroy” was a strong word, but it was the word he chose. What happened was, on the day after the Paumonok, the starter came to him and said, in a mildish tone of voice, “That Epic Steam horse needs some more gate-training. He delayed the race yesterday, and I don’t want that anymore.”

  Dick, of course, had nodded. Horses sometimes needed more gate-training. The gate was a frightening, dangerous thing, a technological answer to the second-oldest question in horse racing—after “Who’s the fastest?” you got “Did they get off at the same time?” To use a starting gate with fit, lively, youthful Thoroughbred horses was emphatically to make the best of a bad situation. Horses fell down in the gate, fell over in the gate, fell backward in the gate, and even if none of those things happened, when they jumped out of the gate, the stress on their spines, pelvises, and hips of leaping from a standstill to a gallop was something neither God nor nature had provided for anatomically. And Dick’s understanding of this was all very well, but it did not make Epic Steam one whit more willing to go into the gate.

  With a perfectly tuned sense of his own leverage in any situation, the dark colt used the attention that his associates were paying to this dilemma to demonstrate the many ways in which he was not in sympathy with their plans for him. Dick tried to listen to Frankie, who, of course, was the person most often in the gate with the horse. Frankie said, “If he’s gonna go in, he’s gonna go in. If he’s not gonna go in, he’s not gonna go in.” Dick recognized this as a tautology, but at the same time it had the ring of truth about it. The question was, how many times did you try it out, to see if he was gonna go in? On the one hand, each try irritated the animal. On the other hand, the first principle of horse-training was that if you allowed the horse to succeed in having his way he would understand all the more clearly his strength relative to yours, his ability to intimidate you relative to your ability to intimidate him.

  As a result of this being the first principle of horse-training, it was a principle that had been applied to Epic Steam since birth. He understood it perfectly as the first principle of survival—every time a human ratchets up the pain, the horse must ratchet up the resistance. There is never so much pain that resistance is impossible; rather, the more pain there is, the more resistance is necessary. Epic Steam was a well-trained animal. He always took pain as a sign that something was coming and he’d better get ready.

  Thus it was that, on the very first day of gate-training, when Frankie urged him just a little harder than usual to get up to the gate, he pricked his ears and propped his forelegs, and refused take a step some five or six yards back from the open doors.

  Frankie waved his whip.

  The horse rolled his eyes and tossed his head.

  Frankie said, in a rough voice, “Get up there!”

  The horse backed up a step.

  Frankie bethought himself before bringing the whip down on the horse’s haunches, and called to a couple of assistant starters. He said, “Okay, start over.” He turned the horse in a circle to the left, then a circle to the right. He walked away from the gate, walked around the gate. The men opened the gate front and back and st
epped away from it.

  The horse was not fooled. As soon as Frankie got the idea “gate” in his mind, the horse stopped dead. Frankie chirped to him, gave him a little kick, closed his eyes, and tried to relax. The horse bucked.

  Frankie hit the ground.

  Frankie was unhurt.

  The horse ran off a half-dozen steps, then stopped and turned around.

  Just this, just this single evidence of interest in him, prevented Frankie from losing his temper. He got up, waved off the other men, and went over to the horse. He took the reins over his head and led him back to the open gate, then walked him through it.

  Someone threw him up on the horse, and he walked the horse through the open gate again, this time mounted. After that, he said, “Okay, that’s enough. I’m not going to press my luck.”

  Frankie, Dick thought, had done a good job. But that didn’t change the fact that the horse was further behind in his gate-training after the first day of gate-training than he had been after the race.

  FIVE DAYS LATER, Dick and Frankie and Herman Newman were in Dick’s office with the door closed, discussing what had happened. At this point, Herman Newman looked more confused than unhappy. Dick knew that that would change. He said, “So the result is, I’m sorry to say, that the horse has been ruled off the track.”

  “Tell me again what that means,” said Herman Newman.

  “Epic Steam isn’t allowed to train or run at Belmont. He savaged a man.”

  “I don’t see how his behavior was exactly savage; I mean, I understand what he did, but—”

  Frankie piped up. “I had a good grip on his mouth. I just had the feeling that he was thinking something, so I had a good grip on him, but he jerked me right out of the saddle—”

  “ ‘Savagery’ seems so strong a term—”

  “It’s just a word we use. I mean,” said Dick, knowing he was lying, “we don’t know that the horse had savage intentions.”

  “So tell me again. The guy—”

  “Assistant starter.”

  “In the gate with him.”

  “Yes, holding his bridle.”

  “And you were there, Frankie.”

  “I was waiting for the gate to open.”

  “He reached over and grabbed the guy by the shirt.”

  “He took a piece out of his chest, too,” said Dick.

  “And he pulled him down under his feet. Or the man slipped down.”

  “Sir,” said Dick, carefully, “I believe that he pulled the man down.”

  “But we don’t know that. We can’t read the horses mind.”

  Yes, we can, thought Dick.

  “And then he stepped on the man and broke his leg at the ankle.”

  “Herman,” said Dick. “Mr. Newman—”

  “He stomped him,” said Frankie. “A colt or a stallion, that’s something they do. He stomped him and he was not intending to stop. He was stomping him good—”

  Dick gave Frankie a look. Frankie said, “Well, he was.”

  Dick said, “Entire male horses can be quite aggressive, sir.”

  “Entire?”

  “Horses with their testicles.”

  “Oh, that. So it’s a sexual thing.”

  “Yes.” Dick felt a moment of clearing.

  “So let’s remove his testicles and fix that.”

  “But he’s been ruled off, sir. Even if we geld him, they won’t let him come back.”

  “But if we know what the problem is and fix it, I don’t understand—”

  “Maybe, sir, we should have done that before. But now it’s too late. He savaged an assistant starter. That’s black and white as far as the track officials are concerned.”

  At last, Herman Newman’s face fell. The three of them sat there quietly.

  Herman Newman said, “Let me see. Now, Dick, was there something that you weren’t telling me about this horse, I mean, about his state of mind?”

  Dick looked up quickly, then away, then back. All those things he had said about the horse leapt to the tip of his tongue. Unpredictable, talented, quirky, not friendly, don’t try to pet him, don’t give him any carrots or treats. He could defend himself like that, and for a moment he was aching to do so. But he said, “You know, I don’t think, sir, that I communicated clearly the scope of the horse’s temperament problem—”

  “He is one son of a bitch,” said Frankie.

  “We did think, for a while, that we had him under control,” said Dick.

  “I’m disappointed,” said Herman Newman. And Dick knew that he was, and that his disappointment had nothing to do with the Derby or the Triple Crown or the money, but that it was a personal disappointment having to do with Dick himself. His shame at this was sharp and painful, but, then, at least it wasn’t ambiguous. Then he told him the really bad news. He said, “It’s likely that the horse won’t be allowed to train or run at any other good track, either. There was an incident at Hollywood Park last summer.”

  “Tell me again—”

  “I don’t believe I told you the first time, sir.”

  “Was anyone hurt in that incident?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “At any rate, the thing is, Epic Steam is a famous horse. He’s won several races, including the Paumonok, he was a good Derby prospect”—amazing how he could put this in the past tense and still say it so calmly—“and so other tracks are going to not want him to run or train there, either.”

  “Not want him to? Like they don’t want him to but he can?”

  “No. Like, they don’t want him to, and he can’t.”

  “That seems harsh, not to give him a chance.”

  “Oh,” said Frankie, “that horse has had plenty of chances. He is one son of a bitch, that horse.”

  “You said that,” said Dick.

  “I’ll say it again,” said Frankie. “However, it don’t mean I don’t like him. I do like him.”

  “It’s so black and white,” said Herman. “Surely there’s some sort of appeals process.”

  “There isn’t,” said Dick. He looked Herman Newman right in the face. In fact, he almost took his face between his two hands. He said, loud and clear, “The horse is finished, sir.”

  “It’s so hard to believe,” said Herman Newman.

  Ah, thought Dick. Ah.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Normally, an owner would sell him. He’s got good breeding, and he’s won some good races. Studfarms are used to dealing with these sorts of animals. You could realize most if not all of your investment—”

  Herman Newman stared at him. This, thought Dick, this is a man who’s never sold a bad toy to a little child. What could he possibly be doing in the horse business?

  62 / JUSTA FAVOR

  BACK IN CHICAGO, his horses pleasantly installed in the new stabling at Hawthorne, with spring just around a corner or two, the Skip Trial colt healing nicely, and his horses making money, William Vance couldn’t quite recall the state of mind he had been in down in Louisiana. It nagged at him, the way he lost Justa Bob like that, a horse everyone in Chicago asked him about as soon as he got back. The thing that nagged at him the most was how off the horse had been after the race. Had his guilty conscience magnified the horse’s lameness? Had it minimized his degree of lameness? Had the horse been bobbing his head or not? Had the coffin-bone fracture his new horse came up with given him the idea? The more he thought about it, the less reliably he could remember. His new state of mind convinced him that, whereas not so long ago he had found himself unable to keep hold of a horse he already owned, now he would be able to find a horse that had disappeared.

  The horse was no longer at Fair Grounds. A week’s phone tag with the racing secretary there told him that. Nor was he at another track in Louisiana—not Louisiana Downs, or Delta Downs, or Evangeline Downs, where horses might be training even though there were no meets. And William couldn’t remember the name of the trainer who had claimed the horse—somethin
g French maybe, a Louisiana name like Delahoussaye or Desormeaux, but not one of those. A “D” name? He woke up at night trying to remember.

  In this project, his own success was no help. He had thirty-two horses in his barn now, and they were running well and winning. He had owners to talk to and riders to direct and jockeys to hire, and it was exactly the sort of busy, enjoyable flurry that distracted you from that nagging worry that only returned when it was quiet, and everyone you might call or contact was away from the office. He put small ads in The Blood-Horse and the Thoroughbred Times: information wanted, brown gelding, seven years old, named Justa Bob, by Bob’s Dusty, out of Justa Gal, by Rough Justice. Five hundred dollars reward.