Gargantuan (18 page)

“I am,” she conceded. “Are you?”

“Yeah, of course, where else?”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“I miss you, girl,” I said, surprising myself by getting right to the point.

“You do?”

“That surprises you?”

“Oh—” She fell silent. I waited. She didn’t add anything to that “oh.”

“What are you doing at the track?”

“Watching some races. With Violet Kravitz.”

“Who is Violet Kravitz?”

“Married to Henry Meyer, the trainer? Had Spyglass, that nice sprinter last year?”

“Oh. Right. How’d you meet her?”

“Long story,” she said.

There was another pause.

“I miss you too,” she said then.

My mood improved considerably.

“Yeah?” I said.

At which point Lucinda appeared out of nowhere. I think I winced at the sight of her.

“Look,” I said to Ruby, “I got a horse running this afternoon, I’d better get her ready. You gonna be around in the next few days? Can I talk to you a little more?”

“Oh,” she said, a weird tone in her voice, “there’s intrigue actually. I’m not really around. But sort of.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you about it. Soon.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling deflated.

Lucinda was looking at me. Her eyes were so dark they were impossible to read.

“I’ll talk to you soon?” I said into the phone.

“Yeah. Soon,” Ruby said.

And that was it.

I hit the Off switch and put my phone back in my pocket. I looked at Lucinda.

“I didn’t get any lunch yet. Was wondering if you still wanted to eat,” Lucinda said, her voice catching a little.

What with fussing over Clove and worrying about Ruby, I hadn’t eaten either. I figured going to the cafeteria with Lucinda might put me in the path of Roderick or one of the others I was trying to establish contact with.

I found myself enjoying Lucinda as I watched her shoveling food into herself. When she’d refused breakfast this morning I’d suspected some sort of eating disorder, but, unless she was planning to trot off to the toilet and vomit, the girl apparently believed in feeding her healthy appetite. She was putting it away and, seeing the look of surprise on my face, motioned at her food, and said, “I don’t store it, I burn it.”

I could feel eyes on us as we ate. Obviously word had in fact spread about Lucinda and me. No one knew me from a hole in the wall but Lucinda had been a top exercise rider. Her accident—and her coming back from it—was the stuff of minor legends. People knew who she was and they wanted to know her business. All the more if it involved a low-rent trainer who couldn’t possibly advance her stalled career.

As we left the cafeteria, Roderick accosted us. He was warm now. Evidently, my friendship with Lucinda had earned me points.

“I was thinking,” he said, “you get so you need some help with your string, maybe I could give you a couple hours here and there.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, trying to look pleased. “That’d be great, Rod, thanks. Course, I’m not there yet. Can barely pay myself. But it’s nice of you.”

Roderick grinned, though more at Lucinda than at me.

“I gotta go get my mare ready, she’s racing,” I told Roderick.

“Okay,” he shrugged, looked at Lucinda from under his eyelids then turned and walked off.

Lucinda seemed oblivious to the fact that the slow-witted groom wanted to follow her off the edge of the earth. She also didn’t seem to have anything to do with herself. I asked if she wanted to come help me get Clove ready.

“Sure,” she said.

She was hard to read. Not that I wanted that badly to read her, just that I felt like I owed it an attempt considering our two bodies had pressed up close to each other.

FORTY MINUTES LATER
, Lucinda stood at my side as I gave the jockey I’d hired, Sylvere Osbourn, a leg up onto Clove and led the pair around the walking ring.

“What you want me to do with her, boss?” Sylvere asked in a condescending tone.

Sylvere had been a very successful apprentice in his native Panama before coming up to the States to seek his fortune. He wasn’t a bad rider but he refused to play politics and gave trainers and owners his undiluted and unsolicited opinion on just about everything. He’d have been better off having never learned English. There were plenty of riders who spoke not a word of it and thus couldn’t get themselves into hot water mouthing off. It was all the same to me though, the guy could ride and he was the best I could afford.

“She likes to come from behind so keep her in back of the pack awhile but don’t wait too long to make a move,” I told Sylvere. I’d gotten hold of tapes of three of Clove’s past races and had studied her preferences. I was hoping my conveying these to Sylvere wouldn’t go in one ear and out the other.

“She’s usually got enough in the tank to come wide though and she likes that better than waiting in traffic,” I added.

Sylvere nodded but I wasn’t exactly confident that he was going to follow my instructions. Of course, the way Clove had worked in a minute six, I didn’t have any great expectations. I watched him steer Clove onto the track and meet up with the pony horse. Clove looked pretty lively, like she was excited about racing.

I went to one of the betting windows and put fifty bucks on her to win. It was a stupid thing to do but I had to do it. To her credit, Lucinda didn’t bet my mare. Even though doing so might have curried favor with me.

“You don’t think she’s gonna do it, huh?” I asked Lucinda as we walked over toward the rail.

“She might,” the girl said diplomatically.

The horses were at the gate now. Clove loaded in peaceably and stood well as she waited for the bell. A moment later, the gates sprung open and the twelve fillies and mares bounded forward. I checked the tote board. Clove had gone off at 40-1. Second longest shot on the board.

To my astonishment, Sylvere seemed to be following my instructions. He was letting Clove settle at the back of the pack. A small chestnut filly had set the pace and it looked fast. At the quarter mile the announcer called the time: twenty-two and change. Which was suicidal for a route race for claimers and, ultimately, would benefit Clove’s running style. I felt a quiver of hope. Which shrank at the three-quarters pole when Clove was dead last, close to fifteen lengths off the leader. I looked away, pained. Suddenly though, Lucinda grabbed my arm.

“Look,” she said, motioning wildly at the track, “she’s coming on.”

Sure enough, my bay mare was on the move. Like a damned bullet. Using herself so beautifully it looked like the other horses were standing still. She effortlessly passed horse after horse, and, with less than a furlong to go, she caught the pacesetter and pulled ahead, widening the margin to two lengths under the wire.

I felt my heart hammering my chest.

“She won! She won!” Lucinda was saying, in case I hadn’t noticed.

This was my first win as a trainer. At 40-1 no less. And I’d bet fifty bucks on her. Not bad for a day’s work.

Lucinda was still at my side as I walked out onto the track and grabbed Clove’s bridle. Sylvere looked extremely pleased with himself.

“How you like me now, boss?” he said, grinning down at me.

I reached up and shook Sylvere’s hand then led Clove into the winner’s circle. Her eyes were huge and she was blowing pretty hard but her ears were forward; she was proud of herself. It was all I could do not to kiss the horse as I stood there, trying to keep her still for the photographer.

Once the photographer finished, Sylvere leapt down off Clove and, accepting a few handshakes from well-wishers, made his way to the jocks room to change his silks.

Lucinda was still glued to me as I led Clove back to the barn to walk her off and bathe her. I made a big fuss over the mare and she was clearly pleased with herself. She actually seemed to be holding her head a little higher and she had a new brightness in her eyes.

And then, as afternoon loosened and turned to evening, after I’d groomed and wrapped and lavished attention upon Clove and finally put her up for the night, I found myself with a great deal of nervous energy. I didn’t want the electricity to end. Lucinda was still there. Raking the aisle in front of my horses’ stalls.

I was torn. I didn’t think I could please this girl even if my heart had been fully in it. And it wasn’t. All the same, I felt like she’d had something to do with the beautiful hue of the day and I felt like I owed her something. I asked her to come home with me. She accepted. Not showing any feelings about it. Just saying, “Okay.”

W
hen I finally laid eyes on the little guy my heart started beating so fast I thought it might come drumming out of my chest. Darwin was three now but to look at him, I’d have guessed four. He was rippled with muscle and built solid from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail. What had been just flecks of gray in his coat had taken over now. He was a rich, dappled gray. He looked like a racehorse even though he’d only run one race so far. He was fussing at his groom, giving the guy just enough of a hard time to let him know who was really in charge. I felt so proud of the colt.

By now I’d been lurking around Belmont for a few days and had finally gotten a job grooming for a trainer named Carla Friedman. She was a tiny chain-smoking gal running a small string of claimers and low-level allowance horses. Of course, I’d asked Robert Cardinal, the guy training Darwin, for a job. But he wasn’t particularly friendly and said he didn’t need anyone right now. I’d then looked for trainers with barns close to Robert Cardinal’s. Which is how I’d found Carla. Even though I still didn’t know much about racing, I could tell that Carla was unorthodox in her training methods. She couldn’t afford to hire exercise riders so she galloped her own horses, in a
western saddle
. I’d watched her galloping a few that morning and it was the craziest sight you’d ever see. All those riders out there with their butts pointed in the air as they galloped and then here comes Carla, riding cowboy-style in that huge saddle, going full steam. She was the laughingstock of the backside but I
knew from looking in the
Racing Form
that she actually won races sometimes, which, she’d told me right off, she attributed more to her knowing massage therapy than anything. She had been a masseuse—a people masseuse—who loved horses, and one day she just woke up with a bug up her ass and went and worked at the track. No one she worked for would let her massage their horses because they thought she was weird, but she worked as a groom and then as an assistant for a few trainers and eventually took out a training license. Apparently she’d rubbed some goodness into her horses because none of them were much to look at. Didn’t move well and had obscure pedigrees. But Carla massaged the hell out of those horses and, in gratitude, they sometimes won races.

Darwin, I knew just by gazing at him right then, was going to win some races too.

I carefully studied his groom, making sure the guy was respectful of the young colt. I started involuntarily making that noise in my throat, the little chirping noise I used to make to Darwin, and though I was standing more than a hundred feet from him, I swear, the little guy heard. His ears suddenly shot forward and he abruptly turned his head in my direction, nearly pulling his groom’s arm out of the socket. I started slowly walking over toward the colt. I was being real conscious about how I was walking and I was thinking over what I was gonna say to the groom.

“Nice-looking colt,” I ended up saying. I was fighting with myself, holding back from throwing my arms around Darwin’s neck and burying my face in that dappled coat of his.

The groom looked me up and down, like he thought I was going to
attack
him or the colt. After a few long, awkward moments, he nodded a little. He was a young guy, probably barely in his twenties. He was the right height to be a jockey but too stocky. Had sort of rock-musician long black hair and a nose piercing even though he was Spanish and in my travels I’d noticed Spanish guys were a lot less inclined to pierce things.

I don’t know quite how I did it, but I got the guy—his name was Petey—talking to me, warming to me a little. I guess when I set
my mind to something, I can be pretty determined, and I
needed
for Petey to like me,
needed
to have access to Darwin.

“Yeah, the boss he got hope for this one,” Petey was saying now, scratching between Darwin’s ears—which I found slightly offensive because Darwin had always been fussy about his ears and I was upset that he was letting this pierced guy touch them.

“Yeah?” I said, trying to swallow my discomfort about that tender gesture between my horse and a stranger.

“Yeah, we’re running him next week, I guess. Be his second start but he’s barely three. February colt.”

Of course I knew this as well as anything. That Darwin had been born on February 13. But I just nodded and looked mildly interested.

Eventually, when I’d gotten a decent eyeful of Darwin and felt I’d cemented the beginnings of a friendship with this Petey person, I had to head back over to Carla’s barn and tend to things before everyone on the backside started getting suspicious about my lurking around Robert Cardinal’s barn.