Horse Heaven (55 page)

I
T WAS RAINY
and chill on the backside at Pimlico, too, where Tiffany was bedding the stall of Hopefully, a four-year-old gelding who was out galloping and would be back in twenty minutes or so. She had dragged the bale of straw into the stall, and now took out her knife and cut the baling twine. The straw, golden and clean smelling, popped apart. Tiffany put away her knife and picked up her fork and began poking the flakes of straw and tossing them. Deirdre liked the straw to be deep all around, and mounded up against the walls in a big cozy nest. Tiffany wasn’t thinking about the Breeders’ Cup, or about anything else. She was just poking and tossing and hearing the comforting rustle of the dry stalks, feeling the now familiar wooden handle of the fork in her hands, bending and stretching and lifting. Bedding stalls was almost as pleasant as rubbing the horses. First you attached the horse by his halter to a tether in his stall, then you took the black rubber currycomb and made small circles all over his body from his ears to his tail, but never on his legs. Then you brushed him down with a stiff brush, this time including his legs. Then you brushed him down with a soft brush. That was when you did his face, down the nose, around the ears, under the jaw. Usually they turned their heads toward you for that, even the ones who didn’t like currying and brushing. Then you stood on his left side, facing the back, and picked up his feet and cleaned them out with a metal hook called a hoofpick. Then you combed his mane and forelock and picked the tangles out of his tail. And then you woke up and noticed that fifteen minutes or twenty minutes had passed and not only did you feel kind of warm and buzzed inside, the horse looked shiny and neat. It was just the way Tiffany had thought it would be at Dagoberto’s when she was begging Dagoberto to let her get closer to the horses. As close to the horses as possible was exactly where she wanted to be, close enough to touch them and pet them and hear their jaws masticating hay and their bellies gurgling and the air moving in and out of their nostrils. And the Breeders’ Cup had nothing to do with it.

ROSALIND GOT OUT OF BED
, sat down at her desk, read over entries for all the races at Churchill, then took out a sheet of stationery, and quickly wrote down seven names: Silverbulletday, Answer Lively, Reraise, Da Hoss, Escena, Buck’s Boy, and Awesome Again. Then she sealed them into an envelope
and signed her name across the back of it. She slipped it into a drawer in her desk and locked the drawer. Eileen, who had been under the covers, jumped off the bed, stretched, and went out into the hallway. Rosalind barely noticed. She was thinking that she knew horses now. What it felt like was that somehow all those years of being around Al and Dick and the trainers they had before, all those years of going to the races and going to the backside and listening to them all talk, had not been wasted, but had been waiting for a slot in her brain. Making that space for Dick, painful as it was, had made that other space, too.

It was clear from the shadow of an argument that she and Al had had the night before that Al was on to her. That, in itself, was an embarrassing dilemma, and Rosalind felt exposed. Feeling exposed led to several other unpleasant feelings—shame, grief, ambivalence, fear. All of these feelings had their ignoble side. In the case of the fear, the ignoble side was just about the only side it had. Fear was most certainly always about not getting away with something, that’s what it looked like to her now.

She got up from her desk and went into her walk-in closet, where, in accordance with her usual habit, she assayed her pale, elegant, expensive wardrobe and decided what to wear. Except today these clothes had a distinct fleeting quality about them, as if they were not hers, as if even choosing, buying, appreciating, and wearing them, having them mold themselves to her body, had not quite established her possession of them. It gave her a moment of vertigo, and she leaned against the door.

R
OBERTO
A
CEVEDO
was in the hospital with three broken ribs from a training accident at Hollywood Park just the day before. The colt jerked away from him, tossed his head, and fell over the inside rail. It was a freak accident, and Roberto’s first real injury. The horse got right up, unhurt. Roberto was five three and a quarter now, seventeen years old, 115 pounds, hungry hungry hungry. He didn’t have long, so he planned to be out of his hospital bed by that evening and back on a horse Monday. Normally, with training and race riding, he averaged eight horses a day. As a concession to his injuries, he planned to cut back to six. For inspiration on this score, he read Dick Francis novels. He had one right there in the hospital with him, mostly about landscape painting, but a little bit about horses, too. He had read so many of them by now that he knew perfectly well what he was going to do after he hit five four, 120 pounds. He planned to go to England and become the first Mexican steeplechase jockey to win the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

———

H
AVING DECIDED
on an activity for the day, and a strategy of demonstrating his dissatisfaction by leaving without telling anyone, Al got up from the breakfast counter and took his coffee cup to the sink, where he turned the water on low and ran some into the cup. Eileen entered the kitchen and leapt silently onto the breakfast counter, making it on the first try.

A
UDREY, WHO HAD
just had her thirteenth birthday, got up before dawn. She had the special editions of the
Thoroughbred Times, The Blood-Horse
, and the
New York Times.
She had also culled from the Internet every article about the Breeders’ Cup and printed them out. The first thing she noticed was that that jockey, Roberto Acevedo, was not riding any of the California horses, which was a bit disappointing. However, she favored Da Hoss in the Mile, Silverbulletday in the Juvenile Fillies, Escena in the Distaff, Buck’s Boy in the Turf, and Skip Away in the Classic, but it would be foolish, she thought, to bet against entry one in the Classic, three excellent horses running as one betting interest. And there was considerable doubt in her mind about whether Skip Away could handle the footing at Churchill. He’d had trouble there before. Her mother wasn’t even awake yet, but Audrey was dressed, lying on her bed, weighing her bets.

In the pre-dawn dark, she could sometimes hear her father’s voice in her head, as she had often heard it when he was alive. He’d always gotten up between four and five, made himself coffee, gotten ready to go for a run, hummed or talked to himself, checked on her, given her a kiss, straightened her covers over her. He knew nothing of the house they lived in now, nothing of her school or the stable where she took riding lessons, or her new friends. But a year ago they had talked about Skip Away, the wonderful gray, all morning before he went to work, and then he had called her from the office and they had watched the race together. When he came home, he had a surprise for her, the forty-six dollars he had won on the race in the office betting pool. Now, besides herself and her mother, of course, Skip Away was about the only thing unchanged between last year and this. Audrey sat up and looked at the horse’s picture again, then lay down and closed her eyes.

A
L TURNED
from the sink just in time to see Eileen remove the pink doughnut from the open box and, head high, trot across the counter and leap
to the floor. The most maddening thing was that she would trot in that off-hand way, her insolent comma of a tail pointing in the air, and his only intention, at first, was to make the little bitch run for her life.

J
USTA
B
OB WAS
eating his morning hay. He had galloped four furlongs and trotted out four furlongs and was pleasantly fatigued.

E
LIZABETH AND
P
LATO
had taken advantage of his regular 4:00 a.m. erection. After they made love and he turned over to go back to sleep, she got up, energized, and went into his new kitchen (he no longer lived in Berkeley, but in a nice condo in Fresno) and had her favorite breakfast—white-corn tortilla chips with parmesan-jalapeño-artichoke dip and a bowl of matzo-ball soup. Today she planned to begin her chapter on non-reactive child-rearing. While she was eating, she realized that the first line would be “As soon as your child can talk, you may teach him to say to you, when you are angry, ‘Mommy, what are you afraid of?’ ” After she wrote that down, she went out in her robe and picked up the paper in the driveway. She turned at once to the sports section. Coverage was pretty minimal, but that was okay, she had made her picks. Mr. T. had no access to information about many of the horses in the Breeders’ Cup—no way to judge between Skip Away, whom he didn’t know, and horses he had seen. And he himself had never raced at Churchill Downs, so he had no comment to make on the footing. The problem with a betting system devised by a horse, Elizabeth reflected, was that it was very immediate—there weren’t many patterns you could extrapolate as general principles. But Mr. T. wasn’t big on general principles as a rule—it was only because he was a gelding that you managed to get any larger perspective at all.

F
OR
R
OSALIND
, the first question was not what was Eileen doing and why was Al yelling, but how had a pink doughnut gotten into the house? That was the very thing that was going through her mind when Al put his hands on her shoulders and came very close to shaking her but did not. Instead, he took his hands down off her shoulders without hardly gripping her. Contact had been made for, at the most, half a second. She knew that even while their gazes locked and they stood there at the door of the bedroom, staring at one another. But she had felt his strength, anyway, the difference between her weight and his, the difference between her size and his, the difference between her gender and his, all of that information passing as if digitized between them. She made
herself look away, down the long hallway toward the kitchen, the richness of the floors and the Persians, the wintry light falling through the windows, the dark uprights of the doorposts and the window frames, everything solid and stationary and quiet. She recognized that the moment to be afraid was already over, and she took a deep breath.

A
UDREY’S NEW
riding instructor, Ellen, picked her up in the Cherokee. With her were some people Audrey didn’t know, and Audrey kept her mouth shut, a little disappointed. But as they drove, the horse talk rolled and splashed and bubbled around her, and she had her money and her picks, and when she talked about them, the Irish one, Deirdre, who turned out to be a horse-trainer at Pimlico, thought they were good ones. The other one, Tiffany, owned some horses in New York and was working for Deirdre and was really pretty, too. Of course she could almost sense her father in the car with them as they drove to the simulcast, and when she mentioned this, that her father took her to Pimlico four times, Deirdre gave her a little squeeze around the shoulders, and she realized that they all had talked about her before coming, and they all knew that her father was dead, and at first that bothered her, but then it was almost comforting.

T
HE ONLY THING
Sir Michael Ordway liked about parties anymore was the remote possibility that
she
would turn up. He used to be interested in the rest of
them
, but the beauty died, and one by one he got jaded, the way you do.
She
was the last, most piquant pleasure. He looked for her at every gathering, his expectation feeding on the very knowledge that
she
couldn’t possibly show up, until he got himself into a bit of a fever about the whole thing. It was just like the only thing he liked about life anymore—which mogul, at any moment, could he sell a horse to? It was so easy, selling racehorses to moguls. He’d sold horses to software, hardware, stocks and bonds, of course they were naturals, lingerie, cosmetics, toys, golf-course developments, commercial rentals, American trailer parks, rock and roll, rap, hip-hop, and Bach (a cheap horse, a hard sell, a challenge met). He’d sold a horse to every enterprise except maybe French Deconstructionism, and that was just because the Deconstructionist had had a heart attack before he sent the check. Every sucker (American word, he liked it) got what he paid for—four legs and a fantasy. He watched the door.
She
was in Scotland, last he heard. He wondered who
she
favored in the American race. He sipped from his glass of wine. He talked, as always. Sometimes he checked in on his talking with his actual brain. It was a good party, moguls
abounding. And then there
she
was.
She
had not come in by the door, but perhaps through the roof, from the Empyrean.
She
was there, across the room.
She
was carrying her handbag.
She
was smiling.
She
was there. “Sir Michael,”
she
said. “Your Majesty,” he replied. “Are you well?”
she
said. “Very well,” he replied. “You know,” he said. “Yes,”
she
replied. “I know a lovely colt by Land of Magic that might be available. Remember him?” he asked. “I do,”
she
said.

W
HAT HAPPENED WAS
, Buddy said to his wife one day that on Breeders’ Cup day he wanted to be as far away from the whole deal as he could possibly be, and so, two days ago, they arrived here, on the Big Island of Hawaii, about three arduous miles back into a jungle canyon at the northern end of the island. Buddy, a man without inner resources, had been asleep more or less since they arrived. The suites were treehouses and, of course, had no television or newspapers. Before they left Pasadena, she had removed all copies of horse magazines from his suitcase. They had also brought their own food, which was converting itself to mold before her very eyes. As she sat gazing at him and listening to the waterfall outside, scenting the mildew that rose from their sheets, Buddy’s wife was not quite sure that this was the place she should have chosen, but tomorrow, after the dangerous day was over, they would be moving to the Mauna Lani, a real resort, where she would no longer have to ponder her own lack of inner resources, where she could buy some magazines, go shopping, call the children, and get away from Buddy, who must have been better company thirty years ago, but maybe not.