Horse Heaven

by Jane Smiley

  “You know, Buddy, we’ve been friends for a long time, and with all due respect for your intelligence, I’ve got to tell you that I am. Between you and me, I’ve got a lot of plans. I’ve had one of those midlife crises myself, just this summer, and what I came up with was that I deserve better. Better treatment, just in general a better life. And, you know, everyone knows that no one’s going to give you what you haven’t got the guts to go out and get for yourself, so I made up my mind to go out and get it, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Buddy.

  “So, Buddy, you’re my first stop on this train. We’ve been friends a long time and we’ve done a lot of business. So, if I want to turn my life around, you’re the obvious place to start. My bet is that we’re going to be spending a lot of time together. What’s your bet?” He smiled for the first time this morning, and Buddy noticed that his voice had lost that eager-to-please quality.

  “I bet we are,” said Buddy. For all the fact that Buddy knew that Curtis Doheny was a loser and maybe worse than that, that the man was ugly, damp, disheveled, gross, and did not seem at the moment to have his, Buddy’s, best interests at heart, there was something, oh, don’t you know, relaxing about being with him and going along with his program. Though Buddy wouldn’t have thought of introducing him to any of his owners or of having a closer relationship with him twenty minutes ago, well, the fact was, why not? Curtis could be useful to him, but that was the least of it. And Curtis could hurt him, even physically, though that seemed unlikely. The fact was, it was kind of nice to be with someone who knew what he wanted. At least what he wanted was specific and clear. And he really seemed to want it. That was something, too, something to appreciate and observe. Buddy stepped up to Curtis and looked up at him. Behind him, he could see that the lights had gone on in the office, and that Danny and Raoul were heading down the shedrow, a couple of Diet Cokes in their hands. He said, “You know, Curtis, I’m sure we can work something out.”

  Curtis grinned pathetically, suddenly transformed from angry to happy, like a kid, Buddy thought. He stepped back. He said, “You know, Buddy, I don’t mean to get that way. But let me tell you, things haven’t been easy for me,” and as they went out of the feed room and walked down the shedrow, Buddy saw that maybe this was to be his penance, on the principle that no kindness goes unpunished—to listen, hour upon hour, to Curtis’ life story.

  SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER

  70 / PRÉ CATALAN

  AFTER LIMITLESS WON the Del Mar Derby, Grade Two, nine furlongs on the turf course, and added $267,000 to his previous winnings, Rosalind, who was there for the win, called Al, who was in Helsinki, and said, “Honey, where are you going to be the first weekend in October?”

  Al liked it that she had called him “honey,” even though she often called him “honey.” He checked his virtual calendar and said, “I have a meeting in Berlin on Friday evening, and one in London on Tuesday, but I haven’t got a plan for the weekend itself. Is he running that colt in the Breeders’ Cup? I want him to run that colt in the Bree—”

  “How about Paris?”

  “Ooh,” said Al. “Are you making a date?”

  “I am.”

  “Where are we staying?”

  “How about the Georges Cinq?”

  “Where are we eating?”

  “Well, Sunday night at the Pré Catalan.”

  “Didn’t we eat there once before? Isn’t that quite a romantic eatery?”

  “On our honeymoon.”

  “Did we have a honeymoon?”

  “Yes, Al, we did. And maybe we’re overdue for another one. But I thought I would invite some friends to come along.”

  Al wondered if Rosalind had positive memories of their honeymoon. There were those, he knew, who would doubt the very idea, but with Rozzy, you never knew. He said, “Not too many, okay? And make sure I know them all.”

  “I will.”

  “I leave it in your hands, honey. But you tell him—”

  “I know what to tell him, Al.” Her voice was very sweet, which reminded Al, Another month of this and I’m done. It wasn’t quite possible to know yet how many men and women now unemployed or marginally employed would soon be making primally heavy and large metal objects in factories now being built by Alexander Maybrick Industries International, but when all was said and done and everyone had expressed their opinion about the Information Age and the shift from manufacturing to service industries and ascendancy of bioengineering over plain old engineering, large and heavy metal objects were still going to come in handy as long as people were intent upon reproducing themselves and then piling up air miles, land miles, sea miles. He had been home for sixteen days out of the last ten months. He had seen Rosalind four times, though he talked to her almost every day. Truth to tell, he could have been home more, he could have seen her more, but he had been trying it out, being without her. And when all of that was said and done, after she did something to you and you did something to her, and you were resentful and hurt and you had all these other feelings you couldn’t quite name, what you had to decide was very simple—with her or without her? When you were thirty or forty, maybe without her seemed rather attractive. But when you were sixty-five, without her seemed like a life sentence, and a short one at that. So, he then thought, the horse could run on dirt and turf, sloppy and fast. So, he thought, the horse has won three-quarters of a million dollars in a couple of months. I’d like to see the damned animal race. I’d like to see the damned animal race in the Breeders’ Cup. All well and good, but Al could hardly remember what the colt looked like. Bay, probably. Most of them were.

  In the meantime, Rosalind was placing another call, from her hotel, the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, to Farley’s office at Del Mar, where Farley was overseeing the morning’s training. Rosalind said, “Well! Good morning! How is the star this beautiful day?”

  “He’s fine. Legs are ice cold, attitude is pleased and proud, but not arrogant.”

  “What does Elizabeth say?”

  “Well, she says that, all things considered, he prefers the turf and what’s next?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Well, there’s something of a layoff until the Oak Tree meet. He can go back to the farm, though it seems a shame right at this point. Eight lengths over the best turf horses on the West Coast, and hardly breathing hard, is pretty fit—”

  “Al has his heart set on the Breeders’ Cup.”

  “That’s a definite possibility, though with it at Gulfstream this year, I don’t know. Racing in Florida sometimes comes as a shock to a California horse. One race in between—” said Farley, but while he was speaking, he got an entirely distinct, non-Breeders’-Cuppish tingle of anticipation. Maybe it was the tone of evident delight in her voice. He only had time to recognize that his heart was already pounding when she said, “I think I’ll give a party in Paris the first weekend in October, three weeks from now. I think Limitless will be the guest of honor.”

  Farley didn’t say anything. It was as if she had read his mind, but not his present mind, the mind that understood the exigencies of real life, that rather dreaded shipping the horse to Gulfstream, even for the Breeders’ Cup. The mind she was reading was a mind he had given up sometime ago, that still thought anything was possible. He said, cautiously, “You know, Rosalind, the one American-raced horse ever to do anything in the Arc was Tom Rolfe, and he only finished fifth.”

  “Then there’s nothing to lose. Besides, isn’t Tom Rolfe somewhere in the horse’s pedigree?”

  “Tom Rolfe was Lake of the Woods’ broodmare sire. He was a son of Ribot, who won the Arc twice. Lake of the Woods has Ribot on his sire’s side, too.”

  “And Limitless’s dam has all that other stuff.”

  “Yes, the Nasrullah and Hyperion and Mahmoud breeding. But the course at Longchamp is usually really deep in the fall—”

  “Didn’t he win that race in northern California on a soft course?”

  “Yes, but
there’s also a long hill at the end of the race. It’s very punishing—”

  “The horse doesn’t know how to be punished. He’ll run his own race and we’ll see what happens.”

  “It’s a mile and a half.”

  “Well, what can happen? If he can get a distance, he can get a distance. Wasn’t his broodmare sire a steeplechaser?”

  “Yes. Bold Ruler’s older brother, Independence.”

  “Don’t steeplechasers have to get a distance?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Well, then.”

  She said she would be out later, and hung up. The Grand Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe! Farley had to sit at his desk awhile, his head spinning, before he could get up, go out, and tell the others.

  THE HARDEST THING to do, Joy realized, was to maintain your routine. The first temptation was to move Limitless back to Santa Anita and start training him a little harder, thinking of that distance and that long hill before the finish line that American horses weren’t used to and all the rest of it. But when the van came to pick the horse up two days after the race, as usual, Joy put him on it, and watched it head in the usual direction, back to the ranch. If the horse was used to a week at the ranch after a race, then a week at the ranch he should have. The second-hardest thing to do was to attend to business as if nothing were happening. In fact, nothing was happening. The Del Mar meet was ending, the horses were moving back to Santa Anita. The vast quantities of equipment that went with them had to be organized, cleaned, packed, loaded, and sent. And of course there were other arrangements to be made, too, but they were just arrangements. She got on the phone to the only travel agent she knew, Oliver’s girlfriend, and she asked for four tickets to Paris, France, for September 28 to October 5, and one, for Roberto, the jockey, September 30 to October 3. Hortense, up at the ranch, had already told her that she would handle the arrangements for Mr. Tompkins, should he decide to go. And Limitless’s groom, Rafael, and his hot walker, Lupe, would go with the horses on the horse jet.

  Oliver’s girlfriend said, “You’re all going to Paris? How perfect.”

  “Farley has a horse running in a race there.”

  “Oliver’s in sales now, you know.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Toyota sales.”

  “Really.”

  “He’s doing very well.”

  “That’s great.”

  “He sold twelve cars last month, including two Land Cruisers.”

  Joy had no way of telling whether this was doing well or not. The woman said, “Oh, God,” and started to sniffle.

  Joy said, “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t want him to be a car salesman.”

  “Maybe there’s something else he could do—”

  “Take Oliver back! I don’t want to be married to a horse-trainer, either, but he wants to be a horse-trainer.”

  “I’ll talk to Farley. We would need someone to manage the horses while we were gone.”

  And so she bought the tickets, and the girlfriend gave her a very good deal. Then she called Tex Sutton.

  AT THE RANCH, they gave Limitless the biggest pasture there was, one of the ones set a little back toward the hills. It rolled a bit, the way pastures did in the East. Three days later, there was a freak rainstorm, two inches in four hours. Limitless galloped.

  ONE NIGHT at the dinner table, with two of his older brothers there and three of their kids, and a nice pork stew with garbanzos that his mother had made sitting in front of them and Roberto thinking that he could eat maybe a garbanzo or a chunk of the pork, but not both, he said, “So, Dad, where is Paris, France, anyway?”

  He wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this. Certainly, he had heard of both Paris and France, in the same way he had heard of semiconductors and Bob Dole and DNA, while at the same time not knowing as much about any of these things as he did about riding racehorses, buying sports cars, and investing his winnings in mutual funds, which his father insisted upon. He was reaching for the serving spoon to the pork stew, but hadn’t quite grabbed it yet when his father exploded into a torrent of Spanish, reached across the table, and knocked him out of his chair. While he was on the floor, his two brothers jumped up, grabbed his father, and sat him down again, the kids started crying, and then his mother said, in English, “I will not talk about this until you have apologized to Roberto, Huberto!”

  “He should apologize to me!”

  “For what?” And now she went into Spanish, and they had a furious argument that Roberto, whose English was better than his Spanish, couldn’t quite follow, but he did notice that he was being referred to more than once as an ignorant, stupid, horse-riding idiot who would never make anything of himself in spite of all their efforts, and was this their reward after seven children, to hear that his son did not know where the most famous city in the world was?

  This led to going into the back storeroom and finding all of Roberto’s old school records, and then his grades for ninth grade, where they had taken world history, and according to the grade report, Roberto had gotten a B in the class both semesters, although, to be frank, he couldn’t remember anything much about the class, even the teacher. But his father forgave him for not knowing where Paris, France, was in the present, since it appeared that he had known where it was at one time, before these damned horses drove everything out of his mind, and wasn’t that always the way, and so his father made him a list of four places to go to, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Champs-Élysées, and Notre-Dame, and told him that he could not come back into the house without some proof of having visited these places while in Paris, and Roberto nodded and agreed, and family peace was restored. At the same time, it was also true that Roberto had eaten two big helpings of the pork stew while all of this was going on, and so, when he got up in the morning, he had gained a pound. But there was no racing, anyway.

  LIMITLESS CAME BACK from the ranch, with no apparent loss of fitness or readiness to run. Joy had him out of his pen almost all the time she was at the track now, but that wasn’t because of any plans they had. He was just so bursting with go that confinement was a torture to him. Thus it was that when Elizabeth wanted to talk to her she had to come to the track, which was okay, because she wanted to see Mr. T. in person, anyway, and thank him for some recent tips which would make it possible for her to do some important shopping during her own sojourn in the City of Light. She found Joy and the horse wandering around at the far end of the barn area. She gave Joy a hug, and got right to the point. She said, “Mr. T. raced at Longchamp.”

  “Yes, he did,” said Joy. “He won two stakes there. What a good boy he was.”

  “He wants to go back.”

  Joy had a sinking feeling. She said, “You mean, to advise us? How does he know we are going?”

  “When something is in your mind, it’s available to him.” Yes, thought Joy. Like refusing a jump or bucking. Why not this, too? “He just wants to go back. He keeps streaming me pictures of turf like I’ve never seen in California.”

  Joy assembled all the negatives as best she could. “It’s thousands of dollars, and he’s never been a part of Limitless’s training routine like he was with Froney’s Sis. I don’t know that we can persuade the Maybricks to pay for something like that. Anyway, I gather they don’t keep a lot of horses at Longchamp, so that means finding him a place in Chantilly, you know. And he’s old. Travel like that is hard on a horse.” Joy wasn’t quite sure why this idea was getting more and more upsetting for her.

  “He wants to go. If we’re there for a few days I bet I can win his airfare back. Or, rather, he and I can.”

  Joy regarded Limitless, who was putting his nose under the fence and trying with his upper lip to reach a tuft of grass. She said, with glum certainty, “He wants to stay there.”

  “He’s not saying that. He doesn’t understand time. But returning to the scenes of childhood is always a powerful impulse, maybe even for horses.”

 
Joy felt the tears come up.

  “Or I’ll get Kyle to front the money.”

  “Kyle?”

  “Mr. Tompkins.”

  “You call him Kyle now?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

  Joy felt the tears dissipate, as a result of mere curiosity. Elizabeth said, “I’ll work on it. Now I have to go.” She gave Joy a kiss and a hug, and walked away. Really, Joy thought, she looked awfully good for a woman of her age. It was right out of her book—the chapter she had shown Joy called “Transformation as the Ultimate Cosmetic.”

  A while later, she put Limitless back in his pen and went over to Mr. T.’s stall. She hadn’t ridden in him two weeks now, even though everyone knew that, to keep an old horse going, you had to keep him going. He turned from his hay as soon as she approached and nickered. She palmed a piece of carrot between his lips and stroked his ear while he crunched it. Their last ride hadn’t been much, either, only a walk around the backside and out to the parking lot. It was clear even to Joy that he had to go somewhere, but how she could let him go there without her was not clear at all.

  PLATO OPENED the mail center, and scrolled up to an e-mail he had gotten about a week before. He opened it, read it, then wrote in reply:

  Dear Dominique,

  As I mentioned to you before, some friends and I will be in Paris at the last of September and the beginning of October. We are coming for a horse race. I must say that I have been reading the book you sent me about fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-dimensional statistical calculations as a way of understanding phenomena that don’t seem to fit into our three-dimensional world. I wanted to refer you to an article I read last year about bee dances as a possible example of a larger-than-three-dimensional phenomenon that appears as a two-dimensional shape, namely a hexagon, in our world. I also found much of interest in the chapters on time. While there were some points made about sequentiality/non-sequentiality that I myself had been working with in my attempts to “predict” economic patterns, there was much else that was new to me and that I failed quite to grasp. It would be helpful to me to perhaps meet with you and discuss these ideas, while at the same time, of course, enjoying a good meal and a glass of wine.