Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  Now she had the horse on her back on the table in the surgery, her right front leg propped on a pole, the knee bent about thirty degrees. Her anesthesiologist, Portia Vedette, looked half asleep, as always, and the technicians were talking to one another in low voices. Karen scrubbed the knee three times, and made two small incisions for the arthroscope. The interior of the knee joint appeared suddenly on the TV screen beside her, and she began making the subtle movements with the scope that would enable her to find the location and dimensions of the chip—here was one edge—a new monitor would be nice in this surgery, she knew a guy who was working for sporthorse people, and he had much better equipment, you’d think that the richest track in America, if not the world—Portia said, “Huh,” and she followed around the edge, it was very thin, but seemed to be—Portia said, “Uhhhh, shit.” Karen looked at the EKG monitor, and the oscillating line depicting Residual’s heartbeat was flat as the Pacific horizon. She looked at Portia. Portia was wide awake, and the technicians had stopped talking and started gawking. Portia said, “Atropine,” and gave the filly a shot. The line began to oscillate again.

  Karen said, “How long was it flat?” She was breathing hard.

  “Only a few seconds, twenty, maybe. Where are you?” She was breathing hard, too.

  “I was finding the perimeters of the chip.”

  “Well, grab it and take it out, because this operation is over.”

  Looking back at the TV monitor, Karen inserted her forceps, found the chip, and eased it out of the incision.

  “Close it up,” said Portia, and Karen began suturing two small incisions. On her second stitch, Portia said, “Dead again.”

  Karen looked at the EKG monitor. The flatness of the line was absolute. She tied the suture, removed the drapes, and Karen had administered another shot of atropine, and still the line was laser-flat. “How long has it been?”

  “About forty seconds at this point.”

  “What now?”

  “Oxygen. Prayer.”

  Behind them, one of the technicians, Dorothy, said, “Come down, baby. Come down, sweetie.”

  Karen glanced at her. She was staring up into one corner of the room. She said, “I see you up there, floating around, trying to decide. It’s up to you, Mama. Your life has just begun. You’ve got a lot of stuff to do, Mama. You’ve got to win some more races and all of that.” Now the woman closed her eyes and rocked her head back and forth, and said “Yes, filly-girl. Yes, filly-girl, yes, filly-girl.” She was almost keening. Karen looked at Portia, who tore her gaze away from the monitor long enough to shrug a tiny shrug. The technician crooned, “There we go. There we go. Come on, little darling. Who are those babies going to go to if they can’t find you? Come on down, sweetheart.”

  Portia said, “She’s started again. There. It’s pretty strong, too.”

  The technician hadn’t heard. She was still rocking her head. She blew out her breath, snorted, and cried, “Come back, little girlie, little filly-girl!” Karen touched her on the shoulder. She said, “She’s started again.” The technician stood still and nodded, but she didn’t look at all embarrassed. She said, “Good. It worked.”

  “Something worked,” said the other technician.

  “The horse,” said Karen to Marvelous Martha and Andrea Melanie about half an hour later, “cannot undergo another surgery. She’s, let’s say, allergic to the anesthetic halothane. A certain percentage of horses are. It causes cardiac arrest.”

  “Oh my God,” said Andrea Melanie.

  “She did arrest on the operating table,” said Karen.

  “I knew we should have told Buddy,” said Andrea Melanie.

  “I doubt that he would have known of her allergy, unless she’s had surgery before.”

  “No, she hasn’t,” said Andrea Melanie. “She arrested? What exactly does that mean?”

  “She died,” said Marvelous Martha.

  “Yes,” said Karen. “She did. She died for about thirty seconds, and then she died for about a minute.”

  “Oh, Jason would kill me if she died!” exclaimed the owner. “Is she awake yet?”

  “No. We’re waiting for that. There’s one thing you should know,” she said.

  “She could wake up an idiot,” said Marvelous Martha.

  “There is a chance she’ll have the equine equivalent of cerebral palsy, yes. Why don’t we all go in and watch her for a bit.”

  The filly was still stretched out in the recovery stall when they entered it, an IV into her neck. The two technicians were squatting beside her. One was stroking her head. Marvelous Martha went and knelt beside her and touched her on the ears. There was no talking. After a minute or two, the filly opened her eyes and lifted her head. She sighed and looked around, then, a little hesitantly, she rolled up on her sternum and looked around again. “She’s quiet,” said Karen. “That’s a very good sign. If she was flopping around, that could mean there’s brain damage.” But it was clear to Marvelous Martha that the filly continued to be herself—calm, well disposed, sane. All she did was sigh a couple of times and shake her head and ears, the way you would. She passed her tongue over her lips, yawned, looked at everyone. Then she stuck out her forelegs and levered herself up.

  “Did you get the chip?” said Marvelous Martha.

  “I got the chip,” said Karen Busher-Sysonby. “And now I have another surgery. Please call me if there’s a problem.” Everyone nodded. As she left, Karen hooked her finger around the sleeve of Dorothy, and urged her toward the door. Dorothy gave her a look, an intimidated look. Karen leaned over her—the technician was rather short—and whispered in her ear, “You can work with me anytime. Thank you.”

  Scientific training and a natural bent toward objectivity were all very well, she thought, but with a filly worth over a million dollars, you had to play all the angles you could find.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, after she had returned to Berkeley, Marvelous Martha placed a call to Karen Busher-Sysonby. She said, “Did that filly die of natural causes?”

  “Ask me if she revived of natural causes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of the technicians called her back. She said she was floating in the room and asked her to get back into her body.”

  “I know someone that happened to. Her kids called her back.”

  “This was a horse.”

  “Well, you know, doctors always doubted acupuncture until they saw it work on horses.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But what killed her?”

  “Oh, as I said, sensitivity to halothane isn’t uncommon.”

  “And everything else was normal? All the pre-surgical workup and everything?”

  “Oh, yes. I mean, within the range. Her red blood count was high-normal, but that was all. Why do you ask?”

  “I ride her every day. I’m fifty-three years old. I want to make sure she has four legs, a heart, and a brain before I get on.”

  “Well, you won’t be getting back on for four months, anyway, so, when she comes back to the track, let me know, and I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  A WEEK LATER, after Buddy was back and the filly had gone to the farm to recuperate from her surgery (Buddy was angry that he hadn’t been consulted, but what could he do, it was a done deal), Marvelous Martha came down to San Diego from Berkeley for the day but did not go to the track. Instead she took a cab out to La Jolla, and paid a call on Andrea Melanie.

  Marvelous Martha was brown and stringy—all her flesh, of which there had never been much, looked welded to her bones. Her hands and her shoulders were large and powerful, as if leased from another body. Her hair and her blue eyes had lightened in the sun. Andrea Melanie was intimidated, the way you got looking at the desert horizon. She could not imagine how a person, a woman, could do such a poor job of taking care of herself. She was therefore somewhat distracted while Marvelous Martha was talking to her. On the one hand, sun damage was sun damage, not easy to repair, the best policy was always prevention. On
the other hand, a peel, or even a dermabrasion, worked wonders, especially the first one. You didn’t have to do it over and over and get that look you sometimes saw of a sort of incandescent fish-belly white. She said, “Excuse me?” Marvelous Martha repeated, “Deedee made some childbed confessions, and one of them was that Leon had seen Buddy and a well-known crooked vet standing outside Residual’s stall.”

  “Who is Deedee?”

  “The old exercise rider, who got pregnant.”

  That reminded Andrea Melanie that Marvelous Martha had mentioned boyfriends. That was interesting, given her looks. Andrea Melanie’s deepest conviction was that once your looks were gone there were to be no more boyfriends, and so you had better consolidate your assets early and hold on to them. She, for example, was eighteen years younger than Jason. His first wife was his age, and his second wife was only six years younger. His fifth wife, she thought, would be thirty or forty years younger.

  “I just have a feeling.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I have a feeling something unethical is going on. The vet said the filly’s blood count was a bit high.”

  “Well, she’s off at some farm for a while, and, frankly”—Andrea Melanie leaned close to the older woman—“I’m kind of relieved. Everything was getting rather exciting and distracting. Now we’re going to the Derby and now we’re not and now we’re running in a race and now the race is stopped and now we’re going to New York. I don’t know. It’s much too much like some kind of Hollywood movie, all these twists and turns in the plot line. You know, after we bought all that art a couple of years ago, the art didn’t then do anything. Horses keep doing things.”

  Marvelous Martha had to admit that she left La Jolla less hopeful than she had been upon arrival, especially since, after everything she said, Andrea Melanie seemed more eager than anything else to press upon her an unopened bottle of La Prairie something for putting on your face.

  Andrea Melanie, however, in spite of the distraction of having to deal with Marvelous Martha’s weirdness, understood fairly well that Buddy was doing something to the horse in order to get her to the Breeders’ Cup. But, she thought, wasn’t that his job? At seventy-five dollars a day apiece for the five horses Jason had in his barn, profitability was not necessarily required, but fun was, and Andrea Melanie had been in racing long enough to know that the Breeders’ Cup was the most fun of all.

  67 / SWAPS

  THE PLAN was that all of Limitless’s connections were going to meet in Los Angeles to watch him run in the Swaps Stakes, his first Grade One race. The race was for three-year-olds, the purse of five hundred thousand dollars would certainly be worth more what with late entries, and the population of three-year-old runners had been nicely winnowed down by the rigors of the Triple Crown. Elizabeth and Plato were finishing up their week on Kauai (“All I can say,” she told Joy, “is that, for true sexual enlightenment, you have to give up everything you think you know about sex, including who is the man and who is the woman.” “How do you do that?” said Joy. “I’ll say no more right now,” said Elizabeth) and flying in the night before the race. Al was flying from Japan to Rio de Janeiro with a twenty-four-hour stopover in Los Angeles. Rosalind was coming in from Edinburgh. Krista and Pete were coming, too, though only from the East Coast of the United States. They also planned to arrive the night before. Mr. Tompkins, who had taken an interest in the horse, was flying himself and ten employees down in the DC-3. Roberto was riding several races on the undercard, so all he had to do was walk out of the jockeys’ room. Farley had to come in from Arcadia. The only one Joy doubted the timely arrival of was herself. She had to find the sense to come in out of the rain.

  What she had done was, she had moved out of Farley’s condo without telling him she was going to about four days before the race. She did not then explain herself, because she didn’t know how to explain herself, or why she had moved. She had simply felt a longing for isolation. Her guesthouse up at the ranch had been perfect, she thought. Barricaded behind piles of horse magazines, tack, boots, stable equipment, work clothes, and riding gear, she had found herself with just enough to do, nothing, and the exact number of people she could handle to do it with, which was no one. She recognized this state of mind perfectly, having dwelt within it for almost all of her years in California, and though she didn’t welcome it, she saw that it was hers and claimed it. It was perfectly relaxing in its way, because by contrast the elevated degree of sociability she had been striving for since getting to know Elizabeth seemed exhausting. Everything was exhausting. Mr. T. was exhausting, Limitless was exhausting, Farley’s love and kindness were exhausting. They must be, because she was exhausted. The day after she moved out of the condo, into a motel in Ontario, she slept for sixteen hours.

  Once she had slept for sixteen hours, that is, through the night, through the morning, through the afternoon, and through her normal dinner time, there came to be a kind of languorous ease to not revealing her whereabouts, or even admitting to herself that she was “gone.” She wasn’t “gone,” because she was here, right where she knew she was, and she was fine, and another nice nap, she thought, would do her a world of good. But first, a bath. She went into the motel bathroom, a soothingly tiny and windowless space, with the bathtub stuck behind a damp, dark shower curtain. She ran the water, took off her T-shirt, and closed the door. The mirror steamed over immediately. She locked the door. The telephone was out in the other room, and she didn’t want to look at it. The tub filled and she climbed in.

  FARLEY WAS STANDING in the one place where he could see both Mr. T., in his stall, and Limitless, in his pen. Both horses were eating their hay, but both horses looked at him from time to time, the old horse turning his long white, dished head toward him, elegant and classic; the three-year-old popping up to regard him, his profile more unusual—not Roman-nosed, but long and straight, with those huge eyes and those nostrils round and open like the blossoms of a foxglove. It had been twenty-four hours since Joy’s departure, and he felt caught here, on this exact spot, as if, should he stand here long enough, she would materialize at the one point on earth where her three great loves—old horse, young horse, old man—intersected. He could also see the door to his office, upon which “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training” hung, grimy with the dust of years of horses. “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training” was not so easy to follow when your sweetheart had disappeared without a word. Now, at the twenty-four-hour mark, everything in the world, it seemed, urged you in an anti-Tibetan direction. “Do not pay attention or investigate” surely meant “Do not call the police.” “Do not see any fault anywhere” surely meant “Do not allow fear to turn into anger or despair.” “Do not take anything to heart” would mean “This is not something she did to you.” “Do not hanker after signs of progress” encouraged patience. And then there was “Do not fall prey to laziness.” Well, laziness would be letting this rise up and close over him, a fear so large and enveloping that it could render him thoughtless, moveless, hopeless. And a state of constant inspection was forcing himself to observe it all, to take an interest, to see what would happen. He gave himself one more minute to follow the Tibetan way, and then another minute after that. One minute at a time was about all he could manage. In that minute, and again in the next minute, he would try to listen to his intuition that, though everything was not all right with Joy, she was safe somewhere, thinking something through or feeling something out that he could not help her with.

  It goaded him to look at Limitless, though. She rode him, groomed him, walked him for hours a day. At the least sign of restlessness, she put the shank on him and led him out. She knew that Mr. T. could take care of himself, that he, Farley, could do the same, but only she could take care of Limitless, and that had turned out to be true. All day, the horse had been anxious and worried, suspicious of other handlers, including Farley himself. As Farley watched him, the colt’s head popped up again. At every sound, the colt’s head popped up. It didn’t
matter whether the horse wanted Joy because he was attached to her, or whether he wanted her because he wanted to get out, it was clear that he wanted her and was expecting her. Of course, should she not come back (Farley observed that, as he thought this thought, he gave out an involuntary little moan), the horse would accustom himself to others, but with the biggest race of his life only three days away, something like this could make all the difference.

  Farley turned away and walked down the shedrow. Walking down the shedrow gave him the illusion of looking for her, as if he would turn a corner and there she would be, rolling wraps or dumping a bucket of water or coiling a hose. But there she was not. He walked down the shedrow anyway, with each step listening to his intuition, with each step doubting himself and longing for advice. It had been a long time since he had wished so thoroughly to give himself away like that, to put himself in the hands of some authority and be told what to do. That would be the relief of calling the police, wouldn’t it? Or calling her mother, or calling Elizabeth. But her mother’s alarm would outstrip all but the most extreme situations, and Elizabeth, Farley still didn’t entirely trust.

  He got to the end of the shedrow, looked down at his feet, looked around, turned around, walked back. The six rules of “The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training,” he realized, invited exactly that, and that above all, trust. Trust that you don’t need to ask questions, trust that there is no one and nothing to blame, trust in the fact that you are not the center of the universe, trust that events will reveal their true meaning on their own, trust that you will not be overwhelmed, trust that you can see and understand if you have the calmness to do so. It was not that he had to trust Joy, but that he had to trust life itself. And how could you do that, after thirty years at the racetrack, where shock, surprise, and amazement were the daily fare?