Horse Heaven (48 page)

Farley read, “ ‘Jack Perkins said the filly trained pretty well with this guy,
so I sent him down. Try him out.’ ” Farley’s hand moved to the horse’s neck, up his neck to his ear, and Mr. T. dropped his head to enjoy the caress. Joy said, “He’s an old stakes horse that ended up back at the ranch. I ride him, and the filly did well with him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mr. T.”

But she didn’t mention his registered name, which Farley would have recognized; the last time she read through his race record, she hadn’t noticed the names of the trainers.

Mr. T., a horse of excellent manners and great reserve, didn’t press his attentions upon Farley. Feats of memory didn’t surprise or impress him, anyway, nor did coincidences. He was a horse. He had no expectations about what was normal. His whole life was a demonstration that anything at all could happen at any time. You could go anywhere, do anything, have anything be asked of you, from running and jumping in paradise at one end to starving in Texas at the other. He sighed a large horse sigh, though. Some of Jim Logan’s horses walked by, followed by Logan himself. He shouted, “Hey, baby!” And then he snorted like a pig. Farley saw that it was going to be like that all day.

He said to Joy, “What are you doing for breakfast?”

Joy said, “Waiting for you to ask.”

“We can go to the cafeteria, but there’s going to be a lot of pig noises. I became a legend yesterday.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Orlando rode Mr. T. out to the training track, and Arturo, her regular rider, rode Froney’s Sis. The two horses greeted each other subtly, or perhaps they did not greet each other at all, but the large steady presence of the old gelding did seem to relax the filly and make her less susceptible to the influence of the other horses on the track. She jogged nicely in his shadow, straight and smooth. Farley and Joy leaned companionably on the white plastic railing. They had eaten breakfast. They had eaten lunch. They had gone to the races. They had eaten dinner. They had heard the story of the pig from every possible point of view, and in every form, tragedy, comedy, satire, lament, outrage, joke. She had stood with him beside the remains of the pool where the pig was bled out. She had looked at the head in the refrigerator. He had driven her to her hotel at night and picked her up in the morning. Now they were talking the easiest talk—horse talk.

He said, “He’s a nice mover.”

“He won some stakes in Europe.”

“How many starts did he have?”

“Fifty-two.”

“Huh. Where did he run?”

“Around here. Lots of places.”

“I wonder who trained him?”

“I don’t remember. I can ask Hortense when I get home.”

“When do you have to go back?”

“Oh, tomorrow, I guess. Do you think I could—”

“What?”

“Do you think I could ride him around the backside tomorrow one last time? I’ve been riding him every day all year.” She didn’t say what she was thinking, that there wasn’t much for her at the ranch with Mr. T. gone.

She was looking down, then looking intently at the two horses. How many times had Farley seen that look over the years, the gaze of someone looking at a beloved equine, a mixture of softness and rue, wonder and reserve and pleasure? Love animated her features, a love that he perfectly understood himself. What was it, fourteen hours they had spent together? Plenty of time when you thought about it. Farley said, “Say. Joy. Why don’t you not go back? I’ve got work you can do. It’s August. I’ve got horses here and at Del Mar, and it’s been a little bit of a stretch this year. And your broodmares don’t start showing up till December, really. You could—”

“It’s a critical time for the weanlings, though.…” Joy thought of herself trudging alone from hot, dusty pasture to hot, dusty pasture. She looked at him. She already didn’t know what he looked like anymore. She turned her gaze and looked at Mr. T. and Froney’s Sis, at all the other horses and riders. At the trainers leaning on the rail, at the grandstand and the liveliness and the lush landscape. How much did it take to trade in the Central Valley for Pasadena and Del Mar, at least for a while? She licked her lips. Yes, she thought. “Yes” was a hard word for her to say. “No” was much easier. She was a “no” sort of girl all the way—no roommates, no friends besides Elizabeth, no boyfriend, no parties, nothing unusual supposed to happen at any time. She didn’t think she could get herself all the way up to a yes, so she said, “Okay.”

He grinned, which reminded her of what a good sport he had been all day the day before about the pig.

She said, “Are they ever going to let you live down that pig?”

“And sacrifice a story like that? Nope, I’m eternally attached to that pig now. I’ll be lucky if they don’t start calling me Piggy.” But he smiled.

A moment later, he said, “Ever ridden a racehorse?”

“Only Mr. T.”

“Well, you’re built for it.”

In the years since his divorce, he had dated plenty, and had, in spite of the
story he’d told Oliver that time, eventually gotten laid, too. During these years, he was interested to note, he had grown increasingly indifferent to what a woman looked like or could do. Every woman these days looked great and could do something. Women in their thirties and forties and fifties at the end of the millennium were doers without peer. They lawyered, they mothered, they doctored, they cooked, they show-jumped, they organized their closets, they developed real estate, they openly discussed sex, politics, money, gender roles, and his own idiosyncrasies. Going among women these days was a succession of splendors, Farley sometimes thought, and he counted himself lucky to be having this opportunity after so many years of marriage. Even Marlise had become a butterfly of doing—her real talent, she told him, lay in target-shooting with some sort of special pistol. It turned out she could shoot in time to the beating of her heart. She went to competitions all over the state where she ran up hills and threw herself behind barriers and shot into targets shaped like the silhouettes of men and antlered prey.

In the admittedly few hours they had spent together in the last day, Joy had talked about horses and Mr. Tompkins and this woman Elizabeth and sometimes about what she had done at a university in the Midwest before taking the job at the ranch. She was kind and competent with animals. But unlike most of the women he knew, she didn’t seem to aspire to anything, or to have an agenda of wants or needs; she didn’t ask him about horses who might be leaving the track or talk about horses she wished to have. She rode this old gelding. In their fourteen hours together, she hadn’t talked about owning anything.

He remembered, as a very little boy, maybe three or four, lying on a blanket in his backyard where he had been told to take his nap, watching his mother hang sheets on the line. His mother would have been about twenty-seven then, blonde and graceful. The sun, as he remembered, was behind her, and would cast her dark outline on each white sheet as she pinned it up—her upraised arms and elbows, her hips and waist. Below the sheet, she would rise on her toes each time she attached a clothespin. It was like watching a shadow play. As he lay there sleepily watching, he saw her pass along the line of sheets, setting poles between the sheets to prop up the lines, sometimes as a shadow, sometimes as his mother, and the brevity of the moments between the sheets, when she was there, glancing at him, her real self, made them startling and filled him with love. There she was, and then, a few seconds later, there she was, and then there she was again. Something about that moment reminded him of Joy—something in her was momentarily visible from time to time that was not looks or doing or wanting or intending or even having done anything.
It was something else that was perhaps visible only to him, and perhaps not even there. He couldn’t tell yet, but that’s why he was suddenly so interested, he thought.

He turned after a moment and watched the two horses again. The filly really did seem quite relaxed. The gelding, though, was tossing his head and pulling. Farley shouted to Orlando, “Send him in a little gallop!” He nodded, and then they were off—about three strides of canter before the old horse took hold, changed leads, and shot away from the filly. “Uh-oh,” said Farley. “That was a mistake.”

Orlando was a strong rider, and immediately steadied his bridged reins on the old horse’s neck. A horse not under human control was presumed to be out of control altogether, but it was clear to Joy as she watched the white gelding lengthen his stride that he was under his own control. He was resisting Orlando, but actually he wasn’t paying much attention to him. He was watching the other horses. His ears were pricked. He was neither upset nor frightened. He was simply going very fast.

“Beautiful big stride,” said Farley.

“I’ve felt that,” replied Joy, “but I’ve never seen it.”

“Look how open his shoulder joint is. His forelegs are long, and he can really stretch them. And even though he must be ouchy somewhere at his age, he’s very even and efficient. There we go.” The horse came back to the trot. Farley said, “Well, I don’t think there’s going to be a problem working the two together, unless she can’t keep up with him. Boy, I would really like to know who trained him. How old did you say he is?”

“Eighteen.”

“Huh.”

Froney’s Sis had bucked once and tossed her head when the gelding galloped away from her, but now she trotted calmly up to him, and the two riders brought their horses down to a walk and moved way to the outside of the track.

Only then did Joy realize what she had agreed to do. Staying here? Leaving her little cocoon? Finding a new place to live? Moving or discarding all that stuff? Changing her routine? She glanced at Farley, who was saying to another trainer, “Yeah, the head is in my refrigerator, but Heberto swears he’s got some recipe for it.” The scariest thing was all her stuff. Her little house was stacked and jammed with piles of horse equipment, clothing, books. She herself could barely function there—when she ate she had to clear a space on the table, when she slept she had to clear a place on the bed, only the bathtub was empty—the stuff would never come out of there—

The other trainer left and Farley turned to her again. He said, “You know, here’s an idea. Stay through the Oak Tree meet. Maybe the filly will learn enough in three months so that Mr. T. can go home at the end of the meet, and by that time you can decide if you like this life. One thing’s for sure, there’s nothing like it. My office manager can help you find a room—” And so he went on, a kindly lullaby. Joy nodded and nodded, and by the time they had followed the horses back to the barn, she knew what her duties would be and what her pay would be and what she would learn. She managed another “Okay.”

“Did I ask you Mr. T.’s registered name?” That she had said “okay” delighted Farley more than he dared show, if not to her, then to himself, so he pursued this neutral topic.

“Oh. No. Let me see. Terza Rima.” Joy coughed. Second thoughts had shot up all around her, a palisade. She looked at her feet.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. That’s what it was. When he came in he was so ratty-looking, I thought it was a little preten—” It took her just a moment to recognize the true amazement in his voice. She looked him in the face.

Perhaps it was the first time they had made distinct and prolonged eye contact. It had its customary effect.

Farley was laughing in amazement. “I trained that horse myself for about a year! He was such a beauty! They had a picture of him in the paddock at Hollywood on the back cover of some publicity brochure for years!”

“Really?”

Later, that’s what Farley marveled at, not the death of the pig, or even the arrival of Joy and the way those events woke him up, but the unlooked-for return of the old gelding, whose stride he now recognized perfectly, who was strangely unchanged for all the damage that age and miles had wrought upon him. And then, the next morning, the head of the pig was gone from the refrigerator, and Farley didn’t ask a single thing about it.

W
HEN
D
ICK
W
INTERSON
got back to Belmont Park from Saratoga in September, he realized that maybe he should have spoken to Dagoberto Gomez about this Epic Steam colt before shipping him out from California, but, then, what difference would it have made anyway? The animal could run, he was bred to the max, he was a monster of equine beauty, he might win the Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont, the Travers, the Withers, the Ascot Gold Cup, the St. Leger, the Grand Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, the Dubai World Cup, any, all. So he had bolted at Hollywood Park. A bolter was a bolter. There were bolters all over the world. And a little studdish, that was obvious. But he was a Land of Magic colt. Land of Magic colts littered the landscape. You got tough with them, they backed down most of the time. As he looked at the horse in his stall, ears pinned, lips wrinkled, the color of mink, shining like stainless steel, hooves counting out a tattoo in the straw, he found himself thinking that he had been training horses for, what, twenty-five, thirty years? If he played this out right, it could be the culmination. Maybe a little bit of a challenge was what he needed to get him out of the doldrums. So, after all, it was a good thing he hadn’t spoken to Dagoberto. Dagoberto would have warned him off, started him thinking about why not rather than how. The only way forward into the future was how. Why, why not, those were questions he couldn’t answer anyway, better to leave off trying.

And anyway, what experienced horseman had he ever known, in racing, jumping, dressage, cutting, you name it, who looked at a horse at the beginning and said, “Won’t even try”? Out west there were guys in the rodeo who climbed on different bucking horses over and over, and hoped to hell the new horse would give them a jolt no horse had ever given them before. You could almost understand that if you didn’t think about it very much. “I can do it” was something a horse brought out in a guy, something Epic Steam brought out in Dick Winterson. So what if he couldn’t do it with his wife, couldn’t do it
with his mistress, couldn’t do it with himself. At least he could do it with a horse, whatever it was. The day after he got home, he had the vet tranq the animal and give him a going-over. When nothing turned up, he sent him out for a jog. It was about two months since the now famous bolting incident, reported in both
The Blood-Horse
and the
Thoroughbred Times.
What Dick took away from the article, other than the fact that the exercise riders had botched things, was that the filly was a speedball, but that the colt had nearly caught her even though he was fighting his rider the whole way. That showed, Dick thought, that there was something real inside the horse that you could get at if you had a little imagination.