Horse Heaven (30 page)

A
LWAYS AT THE END
of April, southern-California racing moved from Santa Anita to Hollywood Park. Although Oliver was still in a nonhankering-after-signs-of-progress mode, he did allow himself to pray for mercy. He felt good, moment by moment, but when he looked up, there were still no winners. There were, to be sure, winning horses in the barn: Redhead (half-sister to the great fillies Red Shift, Red Scare, and Infrared, all daughters of the great race and broodmare Red Beans, and granddaughters of the great runner Red God), who had won two million dollars and all kinds of big races, went out for the Santa Anita Derby in perfect condition, five-to-one, perfect odds for the best horse in the field of males, was running down the backstretch in apparently good form, only to have her jockey pull her up. “I thought she stepped on herself,” said the jockey, and though on the videotape there was no sign of a misstep, the jockey was resolute in his conviction that the mare had grabbed herself and that the only safe thing to do was pull her up. Farley agreed with the jockey, though all over the track bettors were consulting their favorite hitmen to see how much it would cost to have the jockey eternally retired.

And then there was A Likely Prospect. A Likely Prospect was a two-year-old by Mr. Prospector himself, out of a Secretariat mare, as well bred as an earthly horse could be. He was ready to run, training perfectly—knew how to
break from the gate, knew how to run in company, knew how to move off the rail and onto it. He was getting ready for his first race, galloping on the track. The exercise rider had just finished the gallop and was trotting the horse out when another two-year-old threw his rider and came barreling blindly into A Likely Prospect, knocking him out cold, in fact, so that when the exercise rider jumped up she was screaming, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” And then the horse lifted his head, and then Farley got there from the grandstand, with Oliver right behind him. The horse scrambled to his feet, but he was hopping lame, and turned out to have broken a sesamoid bone. They didn’t have to euthanize the horse. He would live to, perhaps, reproduce his own sire’s stud career. But he was out of the barn.

There were others. The whole meet at Santa Anita had been full of fluky accidents and incidents. It didn’t help Oliver that Farley’s way of assimilating them was to relate stories, of which he had an endless supply, of even flukier accidents—a Horatio Luro story about Hialeah, where the horse won the race, broke through the rail into the infield, and drowned in the infield pond; the story of a training accident where the horse had just worked and was pulled up to catch his breath facing the rail, when two other horses ran by and the inside rein of the outside horse broke, the horse veered off, into the standing horse, and the irresistible force killed the immovable object. And then there was the worst one Farley had seen himself—a good horse was doing a fast work on the rail, and as he came around the turn he collided head-on with a loose horse taking the rail in the opposite direction. Both horses were killed. Whereas Farley seemed to gain some sort of it-could-be-worse peace from telling these stories, they only made Oliver feel more anxious, as if accidents and deaths were littering the track and he had to pick his way around them every day.

But, of course, the most dispiriting thing was Buddy Crawford’s success. His win percentage was around 30, and Oliver could see, every day out on the training track, all of his horses, from claimers to stakes winners, training like monsters. He had stopped claiming Farley’s horses, but it was small enough consolation.

Farley’s problem, in Oliver’s view, was that, instead of figuring out a way to reverse his decline, he was paying too much attention to the pig.

The pig had arrived in February, a gift from a farmer down in San Diego as thanks for allowing him to take away for free the hay and grain that had been left over the summer before. The pig was about a month old, and weighed maybe twenty pounds. Farley thought it was cute—it was a black-and-white pig, which Farley said was a Poland-China pig—and put it in a wire-mesh pen out in the yard. Then a filly came in who was a nervous wreck. She paced her stall, bit at her stall guard, kicked out when other horses passed. Farley put the
pig in with her. The filly calmed down at once, instantly interested in the pig, sniffing the pig, nuzzling the pig, rolling the pig over with her nose, herding the pig here and there. At first the pig was afraid of the filly, and the barn was filled with high-pitched squealing, which made the other horses nervous. But at afternoon feeding time, the pig discovered that he could troll for feed under the filly’s feed bucket, and so he shut up. About three days later, the pig discovered horse manure, and made this the principal item of his diet. Both the filly’s groom and Farley found this a matter of much satisfaction, the groom because he no longer had to clean the stall, since a large quantity of horse manure was now recycled through the pig into a much smaller quantity of pig manure, concentrated and easy to dispose of. This, said Farley, was the Hong Kong principle—in Hong Kong, where Farley had been to the track a number of times, provisions went in vast quantities into the big expensive restaurants early in the evening, were passed, in smaller but still-considerable quantities out the back door somewhat later, and into the kitchens of lesser restaurants, and on down the line, until much smaller quantities ended up, five hours and five cycles later, in the food stalls by the water. Farley stood around and watched the pig sometimes for twenty minutes on end.

And then there was a crisis. Farley ran a two-year-old in an allowance race that the colt wasn’t quite ready for. He got a little washy in the walking ring. After the jockey had mounted, Farley said to Oliver, “He’s going to scratch the horse. I know it.” Then, after they went up to the stands to watch the race, Farley said only one thing more. He said, “You know, that was my conscience talking. This horse shouldn’t be running.” The horse ran fifth, not a bad race, but the owners were disappointed. Back in the barn, Farley said only, “I will never do that again,” and then he didn’t run a horse for a week. No one in the barn could figure out what was going on. The horses were working and galloping but every one entered in a race was scratched. The chorus of whining from the gallery of owners swelled to a roar, and all Farley did was observe the pig. The pig was now a sight larger than it had been, and was following the filly around, right between her back legs, hoping to catch, and succeeding at catching, much of the manure as it dropped. The stall was immaculate, though the pig’s head was dirty. Manure would land on it, and he would shake it off and wolf it down. Even the grooms, always prepared to take a more basic view of survival than others, were a degree more disgusted by this than Farley was. That was something you could say about Farley—nothing unusual disgusted or bored him.

On Friday, Farley told Oliver to scratch the one horse they had running and took the plane to San Francisco to go to a play about a Chinese man in the twenties with three wives, who decides to convert to Christianity so that he can
have a marriage based on love and companionship. One of the wives, Farley told Oliver the next morning, kills herself with an overdose of opium, and another dies mysteriously, and the man is left with the only wife he never liked in the first place. “What do you think?” asked Farley. “Should he have converted or not?” Oliver had no idea why they were having this conversation. “I don’t know,” said Farley. “I think the play was saying that personal happiness is not the point.”

Oliver very much felt that Farley’s own thoughts should not travel too far in this direction. And then Farley told him to scratch the only horse they had running that day, too. Buddy Crawford won the second race, the third race, and the ninth race, with a horse he had claimed from Farley when he was still claiming Farley’s horses. The weather was lovely, the trees were swaying, the horses were beautiful, the afternoon was passing into twilight, but Oliver all at once felt that nothing could make him understand the game ever again. Every face he looked into was a blank wall, telling him nothing about who he was, where he was, or what he was doing.

It was no help that his girlfriend was out of town with some other travel agents, making an inspection tour of all the sites in the British Isles that seemed to have been built by space aliens. They were putting together a big seventeen-day tour that also included shopping at Harrods and Fortnum and Mason and going to a musical in London as a two-day commercial respite from the vast and mysterious. By the time he had gotten some swordfish tacos with pico de gallo and some rice and beans and brought them back to his apartment, eaten them, and set his alarm for three so he could get back out to the track by five, his dad’s hardware store back in North Carolina was looking pretty good to him. Washers, bolts, screws, ax handles, hammers, tool belts, circular-saw blades, nails, eyebolts, lock sets, sanders, slot-head screwdrivers, routers, ripsaws. There was a lot to be said for the orderly and calm contemplation and then selection of objects that could not move of their own accord, that had no agendas of their own, that stayed where you put them. In that world, being well organized would actually have a terminal effect—you would put something away, or hang it up, and come back an hour later, or a year later, and find it right there, essentially unchanged. With a horse, you never found anything unchanged. The best you could hope for was minimal change along a predictable path. At three o’clock, without having slept, he hit the alarm before it went off, and got dressed and went back to the track.

He was always the first one there, and only in June and early July did he arrive after sunrise. Wasn’t it depressing somehow that he hadn’t missed a sunrise in five or six years? Was he really a morning person? He didn’t know. Horses were morning people. All the horses were wide awake. He went down the rows
of stalls, stripping off wraps and feeling legs, noting which animals had a little heat, which were iron cold, knee to foot, front and back. That was a pleasure, he had to say, feeling the legs of a horse who had galloped or worked the day before and thinking of a wrought-iron post—hard and cold and incapable of pain. In Farley’s barn, more were cold than hot. In Buddy’s barn, yes, more were hot than cold. Some days, every one was hot. He reminded himself that there were twinges of conscience that he had suffered every day of the four months he had worked for Buddy that he suffered no longer. But, on the other hand, he also couldn’t remember them very well, and he was beginning to remember the money and the winning very well.

Farley came in when they were exercising the second set. The only thing he said after asking how all the horses were was “Scratch Duplicate Deputy in the third.”

“But he’s ready,” said Oliver. “He’s fit. He’s sound.”

“It’s not the right race for him.”

“Why? I think—”

Farley shook his head, always agreeable, always poised. “Scratch him.”

Oliver turned on his heel without saying anything, and headed for the telephone.

On the phone to the racing secretary at Hollywood Park, he was disloyal. When the man objected (but not too strenuously) the field was rather large, he said, “The horse is ready. I don’t know.” He sounded like he knew what he was doing and Farley didn’t. And then, every step back to the track, he regretted it.

Farley was in his office with the blinds drawn, on the phone. When the third set was ready to go out, Farley came out and gave them their instructions, then followed them out to the track. It wasn’t a pleasant day, windy and chilly. Just as they entered the grandstand to watch, Farley’s cellular rang. Farley answered it, and Oliver listened in on the conversation. Farley’s side went: “Hey, Bob.… You’re a lawyer? … Yes, Ms. Hornsby.… Yes, I know that Mr. Huxley is the CEO of Soma Features.… I don’t train any horses for Mr. Huxley.” There was a pause. Oliver knew all about Bob Huxley. He had fabulously bred horses, but he was exacting, to say the least. Farley said, “Yes, I am. And with pleasure.” When he put away the cellular, Oliver said, mildly, “What was the pleasure?”

“Refusing to train any Huxley horses.”

“He has good horses!”

Farley looked at him, amused. He said, “Well, after he stopped threatening me, he put his lawyer on, and she threatened to sue me three times in that call alone.”

“She doesn’t mean it. That’s just the way they talk to each other in Hollywood.”

Farley shrugged. Oliver knew that, if he opened his mouth right now, the end result of it would be sorting hardware back in Carthage for the rest of his life.

After all the sets were finished, Oliver had to go into the office. Farley was reading some papers. He made some marks, took off his glasses, said, “How’s that pig? I love that pig.”

Oliver didn’t say anything.

“Say, you know, Oliver, you know what I’ve been thinking about?”

“What?” He knew he sounded angry.

“Well, this happened a couple of years ago, just after the foundation mare and I broke up the studfarm and went our separate ways.”

Farley never talked about his divorce, so Oliver sat up and listened.

“About nine months or so after I moved out, I got up one morning, and the first thing I thought was ‘Why am I not getting laid?’ ”

Oliver was twenty-eight, and this was a familiar thought to him.

“Now, I had been in therapy for two years at that point.”

“You had been?” Nobody at the track ever admitted to going to therapy.

“Sure. And going to a support group two or three times a week.”

“You did?”

“Well, of course. This is California, isn’t it? Anyway, I had several women friends whom I liked, one or two of whom I liked a lot, actually. I knew the answer to my question perfectly well. There were lots of answers, both specific and general. One of the women had another boyfriend. One was recovering from an abusive relationship. One was sexually active and I didn’t want to get into that STD tangle. And I had been working hard to understand my sexual history, which hadn’t been pretty.”

“It hadn’t? Too much or too little?”