Horse Heaven (20 page)

“A mare reared up and fell down last week, and then the stallion bit her. It was quite a to-do.”

“Could be the same one.”

Joy was sure it was.

“What time is it?” said Elizabeth. “I’m exhausted.”

“It’s about nine.”

As they drove home, Joy could not stop feeling that a veil had been lifted between herself and the horses, and a not very thick veil, at that. It gave her a chill, and yet it seemed so simple and obvious. Why not? Why not, indeed?

———

N
OW A VERY IMPORTANT
stallion came in from Kentucky. He was fourteen years old. He had won the Preakness and the Jockey Club Gold Cup and the Santa Anita Handicap. He had produced several good stakes winners over the years and had plenty of excuses for not producing more. Within a week of the news that he was moving to California, his book was full—eighty mares at five thousand dollars a pop. Mr. Tompkins told Joy by e-mail (Mr. Tompkins loved to e-mail her from across the office and then sit there with his dusty cowboy boots up on the desk and watch her read it, a bona-fide miracle of modern technology) that Jack, over at the training complex, would be expecting Mr. T. He could pony in the morning and she could ride him in the afternoon. She turned in her seat to nod, and he said, “No! No! E-mail me!” So she e-mailed him that she would trailer the horse down there that afternoon. “Great! Thank you!” he e-mailed back to her.

And that was how Mr. T. became Froney’s Sis’s regular pony, and the filly’s training began to move along at a faster pace once Mr. T.’s participation became routine. For one thing, everything that a man could in good or bad conscience do to a horse was old hat to him. Saddling, bridling, longlining, sacking out with a bag on a pole, the weight of an arm across her back, the weight of an arm and a shoulder, the weight of a chest, the weight of a rider. The filly trembled. Braced her legs. Passed through panic and came out on the other side, where Mr. T. was standing calmly, one hind leg cocked in relaxation.

They taught her to pony, to walk along beside him, led by his rider, and discovered that Mr. T. was strict about ponying. He didn’t like her head to get past his shoulder, but he didn’t like her to lag behind, either. When she misbehaved, he pinned his ears and wrinkled his mouth at her and kept going. She elected to go along. And he was big where she was small. It seemed to Jack that she took some sort of reassurance in the gelding’s grand proximity. Jack saw the whole thing as a typical male-female relationship—the gelding had wide-ranging interests and concerns, the filly only had eyes for the gelding; his accommodation of her was rather impersonal, an expression of his natural character, but she took every attention personally, and, frankly, she blossomed. She was still immature, compared with the others, but toward the first of March, she was beginning to function as a racehorse.

Joy came every day after her own work was done, lugging her dressage saddle. All the horses were put away by this time, and Jack let her work the old horse in the infield of the exercise track. Once in a while he watched her. He’d seen dressage before. He didn’t think much of it, at least for Thoroughbreds.
One day, he made himself some work and lingered until Joy brought the old horse back into the courtyard. That leisurely chock-chock on the gravel was a sound Jack especially liked, the rhythmical accompaniment of his entire adult life, and he fancied that he could hear a good mover as well as see one—four solid, distinct, even beats in which the horse sounded his relaxation and self-confidence. Mr. T. came chock-chock-chock-chock across the gravel, Joy stopped him and pulled off his saddle, and Jack said, “You should gallop him around the track every week or so, as long as he’s over here.”

“Good Lord, Jack, he’s eighteen years old. He’s just coming back from starvation.”

“Do him good. That dressage business is stiffening him up.”

“Dressage supples them. It makes them lengthen their topline and come under.”

“How many starts did you say he had?”

“Fifty-two.”

“You gallop him. Slowly, to start. He’ll like it, and it’ll get all those fluids moving around in his body, clean him out.”

Joy smiled a little private smile. This idea sounded very much like something her grandmother would have said. But she said, “I can’t, anyway. I sold my jumping saddle. Galloping is awkward in a dressage saddle.”

“Use an exercise saddle.”

They looked across the courtyard at the pieces of nothing that were holding stirrups together on the saddle racks. Joy shook her head. “If you think he needs to gallop, okay, but someone else can do it.”

“You’ve never done it?”

Joy shook her head. Jack caught her gaze, and in his face she saw, even though the thought was not actually in his head, a judgment, “What kind of horseman are you?”

She said, “You show me, then.”

“I will. That old guy’s a good one to learn on. He’s big and steady and experienced and he doesn’t want to fall down. You’ll have fun.”

Joy glanced at Mr. T., standing beside her, grinding his teeth, acting for all the world as if he hadn’t heard a word of this conversation.

The next afternoon, Jack himself hoisted her up onto the little slip of leather that had been girthed over Mr. T.’s back. She put her feet in the stirrups to about her big toe. Her knees were in her throat, along with her heart. The groom led Mr. T. into a walk, and Joy felt like she was swaying from side to side on a moving fence rail. For maybe the first time in twenty years, she grabbed mane. A ripple of fear ran up out of her chest and into the back of her neck, but then some pictures of jockeys came into her mind. When she folded
herself up as they would, she felt more secure. The groom led her across the grass and onto the training track. Jack was standing at the rail already, a big grin on his face. He said, “Just nestle in there, stay over his center of gravity, and let him balance you. If you’re right in the center, and make yourself small enough, the faster he goes, the more secure you’ll feel. It’s the gyroscope effect.”

Mr. T. was clearly intrigued by this new development. He flicked his ears back and forth and took big, happy strides. She saw that several of the grooms and exercise boys were now drawn up along the rail. She hoped it was only to see the old horse perform, not to see the old girl bite the dust. Of his own accord, Mr. T. lifted himself into a big trot, launching her with every stride into a high post. She fitted her hands around the wide rubber reins, and took stronger hold. The horse tucked his chin, not objecting, but taking stronger hold of her. It made her feel like the back of her head was connected to his jaw by a wire that both held her in place and vibrated with information. She trotted once around the track and came up to Jack again. He said, “Now, this guy isn’t much in condition, but you can’t weigh more than ninety pounds. Pick up a little canter here, canter slowly to halfway around, then chirp him into a gallop. When you come around to me again, bridge your reins, put your hands up on his neck, curl up, and let him do what he wants to do. He’ll probably change leads and really take hold. Don’t lose your reins when he does that, and don’t fight him. He’s going to use you a little bit to keep his balance. He has to do that to compensate for your weight on his back. When he starts to tire and seems to give you something, just bring him down.”

Yeah, thought Joy, we’ll see. She loosened her grip a bit and he moved up into a canter. Her plan, as opposed to Jack’s, was just to canter pleasantly around the track and try this galloping thing another time. But the canter was sweet—she didn’t rock with it; it seemed to rock beneath her, floating her along like a flea on the horse’s neck. Coming around the turn, she most assuredly did not chirp, but he moved smoothly into second gear anyway, and after two or three strides, she thought she could feel the quick four beats of the gallop beneath her. She said, “Hey!” The horse seemed to elongate and get lower somehow. Her eyes were tearing and her ears seemed filled with blank sound. She said, “Whoa!” But he did not whoa. Old and ill-conditioned as he was, he moved forward smoothly and there was no holding him. She got back to Jack significantly faster than she had gotten away from him. As she passed him, noting his grin that looked like a smear, she bridged the reins. Immediately, Mr. T. braced himself against her hands and arms and shoulders, so that she had to press her fists into his neck. If she hadn’t been right with him, he would have bounded out from under her. But she was right with him. He
seemed to fill her with power as he sped up, power that ran from her toes and her hands to the center of her body and gathered there, giving her the strength and the balance to be still. He was running as fast as any runaway she had ever ridden, but she got no sense that he didn’t know what he was doing—exactly the opposite, in fact. He knew where every foot was, because he put it there. Her hearing and sight were useless now—her eyes were entirely blurred and all she could hear was her own voice, making a sound that wasn’t speech and wasn’t moaning. They went some distance. She could not have said how far. He seemed to surge with each stride, so that she gave up the idea of checking or holding him, and then the surging dropped off, and then her body knew that he had spent himself and was ready to come back to the trot. When they had done so, she realized that she was trembling all over as if she had lifted a huge weight and exhausted herself. By the time they were walking, she was ready to fall off.

“How’d ya like it?” called Jack.

“I don’t know,” she called back. “I need a nap!”

His laugh rang out.

Mr. T. did not need a nap. No one who fulfills a long-standing passion to be once again a long-legged colt, flowing with movement and energy, needs a nap, at least not until the next day, when the aches and pains set in, and you can barely hobble around your own personal Arabian-fantasy domain and even the precious-as-emeralds-and-rubies irrigated grass doesn’t look quite as good as a quiet doze in the shade.

I
F
B
UDDY
C
RAWFORD
had thought regular life at the track was a life of stress and pressure, and he had (Who else had the sleep problems he did, he would like to know? Who else had the bowel problems, for that matter? Pressure twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week, that had been his life for thirty years and he wasn’t complaining, though maybe it didn’t suit him. He often thought that being a professor at a college or something like that would have suited him better—he had this cousin who read books all day and took some notes and he lived a good life though he wasn’t physically fit. Kind of fat. Really fat, actually. But maybe that was a decent trade-off. Sometimes over the years he had thought about that in a sort of wishful way, when the pressure really got bad, but of course it was too late for that), then let’s talk about the new life.

Talk about pressure. Running two-year-olds was pressure, always had been. If you adhered to his culling theory, then the two-year-olds were the base of the pyramid. A whole lot of them came in, then a whole lot of them went their way, and what you were left with was the three-year-olds who had survived being two-year-olds. The kind of pressure he was under now, though, pressure supplied by Jesus himself, was a new kind of pressure. The thing about Jesus was that he laid down the rules, but you had to figure out how to abide by them yourself. Or, as Buddy’s father used to tell him, “I just say ’em, I don’t explain ’em.” Jesus did not allow you to run a two-year-old whose growth plates hadn’t closed. Jesus didn’t allow you to run an unfit horse. Jesus didn’t allow any toegrabs or turndowns. Jesus didn’t allow you even to think about buzzing the horse’s neck with a hot electrical device to remind him that he hadn’t arrived at the finish line yet. What Jesus liked, Buddy quickly discovered, was a fair race—no gimmicks, no drugs, no subtle interference on the part of jockeys. No trying to evade the rules. And the thing about Jesus, as
everyone who had ever been to Sunday school knew, was that, unlike track officials, he couldn’t be fooled. Jesus saw every minute of every race as if his eyes were a million video cameras, shooting from every angle.

Add that to running maidens and see what you get. Buddy’s horse Elijah was making his first start, and he wasn’t the only one in the race. Out of seven horses, three had never been in a race before, and one had only run once. The jockeys were terrified. Buddy’s own jockey, experienced as he was (every limb broken twice, skull fracture, broken nose, punctured spleen, cracked ribs), whitened as Buddy told him something he would never have told a jockey in the old days, that the horse lugged to the right and was a little clumsy. “We’ll give him a chance,” Buddy said. “Everyone deserves a chance.” The jockey looked at him, “Why?” expressed clearly in his eyes.

They loaded. You could thank Jesus for that. While they were loaded, you couldn’t see them very well, and you could thank Jesus for that. Then the bell rang and the gate opened, and the chaos began. Three jumped right out, two were a stride behind, one was a stride behind that one, and the last lonely fellow let the others get a hundred yards away before his jockey managed to whip him into the race. Then he stopped dead. Buddy shifted his gaze to the field, through his binoculars. Elijah was in front of one other colt, who had that startled look of a horse getting dirt in his face for the first time. Right as Buddy was noticing that, Elijah took off, first to the right and then to the left. If the last horse had been within twenty lengths, he would have gotten cut off, but that one had thrown in the towel and was barely cantering. Only the first horse wasn’t weaving. Behind him, Elijah was now caught in a traffic jam that looked very much like four scared children clinging together for solace. They crossed the finish line in a photo, and one by one straggled and stumbled down to a trot. No one hurt. Thank Jesus for that. Elijah on the board for a little bit of money. Thank Jesus for that. And Buddy Crawford saw that he was out of the starting gate, too, on his new life within his old life. His hands were shaking. He hadn’t won, thank Jesus for that, because one of the things he had to get used to was being a loser. Jesus himself had said that, as hard as it was for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, it was even harder for a trainer with a 25-percent win ratio to get into heaven.