My Year of the Racehorse (15 page)

Martin flips open his pack of cigarettes at the table, but finds it empty. Without a second of panic, he replaces it with another pack from his shirt pocket. “Do you smoke?” he asks me.

“Sometimes when I drink.”

“Try one of these. I've got lots of smokes.”

As I try to keep from coughing, I bring up the poem that Glen wrote for him. The register of Martin's voice drops fractionally, growing slightly more hoarse.

“It was the last thing that should have happened to him because he was the most generous man; everyone liked him,” says Martin, who has three other children, about Glen's murder. “The last thing he deserved. He'd drive across town because so-and-so needed a chair. He'd have barbecues here, and it was all on his own dime. I used to say, ‘If I had one of your friends, I wouldn't need enemies.' They were down-and-outers, but he overlooked it.”

Martin was aware of his son's involvement with drugs since the early eighties, when he was forced to spring Glen out of jail after being held for drug charges in Mexico. He dismisses his son's marijuana dealing as a game. “If he ever made anything, he'd give it all away,” he says. “He was hyper, and he said the marijuana calmed him. He was really a good horseman. When he was eight in school, he had some baby chicks. He put them in a cardboard box. In the cardboard, he made lanes and had the kids come after school betting on the chicks to race. He wrote up a racing form. It was perfect.” Martin's eyes crinkle the way they do when he tells his jokes.

Glen Martin got his trainer's licence in 1999 and won his first race early in the season. A Province article written by Tom Harrison describes the younger Martin as “a man who is full of life with plenty of well-earned chutzpa and tonnes of confidence.” The article also hints at his tenuous relationship with his father. “For years, my dad would tell everyone he would have a good day if I was not on America's Most Wanted,” he's quoted as saying. “It took awhile for both of us, but I feel he is very proud right now.”

Only three years afterwards, he was found dead. “A person doesn't understand unless you go through it,” Sid says. In the first few summers following his son's murder, Martin trained in Winnipeg, where he galloped horses forty years ago, to escape any reminders of Glen at Hastings. He was right to do so. Wilson, who was a jockey's agent as late as 2004, would have breezed past Sid in his barn as he hustled mounts for his rider. Your stomach turns on Martin's behalf.

“He never walked through my barn,” Martin says defiantly. “I saw him from a distance and I could tell he was a scumbag from a hundred and fifty feet away.”

The horses, as usual, have been Martin's consolation, even if this year hasn't been fruitful. “It costs you an arm and a leg to keep in the game,” he says. “I'll reduce down to one by the end of the meet. I think this filly could be worth keeping. I really don't see myself retiring.” He shakes his head emphatically. “I'd be bored sick in a week if I didn't have something to do.”

From the same pocket where he kept his extra smokes, Martin brings out his most recent newspaper clipping, this one written a few years ago when he was at Assiniboia Downs in Winnipeg.

I glance at the article and see a quote I like. “‘You give a yearling to a sick man and he'll live forever,'” I read back to him. “Did you make that up?”

“It's an old adage. It's the best therapy in the world to be involved with horses. It's like family down here.”

AFTER LUNCH, CROSSING the backside to the parking lot, I catch sight of actual family. Alex and Shawn are walking towards the gambling floor with the kind of deliberate, patient tread you develop when you make your living trading strides with twelve-hundred-pound quadrupeds. To my eyes, father and son regard each other mindfully, each of them treating the other as though he were the high-priced and fragile creature who demands care and protection.

Martin doesn't notice. At the parking lot, when I remove the box of scrapbooks from my car, he insists again on accepting the load himself. A man his age doesn't need to prove his strength. But then that box contains his clippings and his winner's photos, every professional high point as witnessed by others— a notarization of a life's worthiness. It must feel good to carry that weight.

LESSON TWO: Be Low Maintenance.

It's Christmas night, 2045. I sit in my basement suite alone, eating fancy-grade cat food—it's a holiday, after all—as my second-hand hologram player shows a pornographic cooking program. No one has called me or sent me a neuro-transmitted holiday greeting, except for my sponsor at Gamblers Anonymous.

I am without friends. It was around my time at the racetrack that I coined and subscribed to this new adage: Friendships are acts of consensual psychological and emotional nipple-twisting. We deliver and sustain small doses of neglect and abuse. That was how I alienated everyone.

Before that, I always felt as though I were an exemplary friend: generous, convivial, and a fun drunk. Most of all, I was low maintenance. I didn't expect much from my friends with the implicit understanding that they shouldn't expect much from me. What I ultimately learned was the harm one could inflict by doing nothing at all and refusing to engage.

FROM
WHAT I LEARNED AT THE TRACK:
A Manual of Failure

HANGING AROUND THE backside, I've been dreading my next run-in with Kulwant. Since our get-together, he's left two unanswered voice mails and emailed me an unreadable op-ed piece about global poverty in hopes that I can help him get it published. At Trackers, where I'm buying a coffee, and some apples and bananas for Randi's horses, I find him sitting alone with a chicken burger and a beer. A library copy of Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas sits in front of him, opened and faced down.

My first impulse is to run away, but these encounters will continue in the future. The best course of action, then, is to finesse myself through the awkwardness. Failing that, I'll take a body splash into said awkwardness.

“Hey, I've been looking for you,” I say with faux cheer. “Mind if I sit?”

He looks up, taking a bite of his burger before saying a word. He's wearing a T-shirt, and I notice, for the first time, the etched muscle in his forearms; groom work has transformed him into the wiry proletariat he's always fancied himself to be. “You'd honour me,” he mumbles through his half-chewed lunch.

I apologize for not returning his calls and mention I'll need to read his commentary again. “I've been out of town a lot,” I say, “and doing, like, a hundred things all at once.”

“Dilettantes don't have it easy,” he says. “I cleaned up horseshit for the 393rd consecutive work day, then someone bought the used van I wanted to buy, which would have been my ticket out of the tack room. But your life—now that's hard.”

In years past, I would pay back the sarcasm. Perhaps it's some newfound maturity, or my old-found emotional distance, that lets me shrug it off. This seems only to infuriate Kulwant further. “So, how's your little bottom claimer?” he asks me.

I perk up. “Good, which is why we don't like the layoff,” I say. “I'm lucky to have”—and here I throw him a term I picked up from the Form—“such an honest runner.”

“Huh,” he says. “Once you get bored of thoroughbreds, what's going to be your next manly passion? Omaha Hi-Lo? Small batch ryes? Don't tell me you don't have something lined up already.”

“Actually, there are some great new ryes coming out of—” I say, before reconsidering. “I need to go.”

He looks over his shoulder as I exit. “Have fun, horseman.”

KULWANT ISN'T THE only friend I've pushed away, although in Harris's case it's done more unwittingly. My first inkling that he might be miffed comes when he doesn't attend Blackie's race with his family. Later, I don't hear from him about plans we made earlier in the month to see a show by a band we both liked in the nineties. At first, I decide to let it drop. Friendships, after all, benefit from their fallow periods, and I wear people down, over extended periods, with my standoffishness and crotchety ambivalence. But then again, I really want to see this band play, and no one else will come.

On the only free day I have, a Sunday, I find out through Angie that Harris is working an open house on the east side. The condo is located in a building with a speckled brick facade; the patio decks of the units facing the street are stuffed with unused exercise equipment and storage bins. It is immediately recognizable. Harris buzzes me in.

The elevator takes me to the third floor, where a muscle-memory makes me turn right towards the end of the hallway with the burnt-out light. Liam lets me in, and then runs back to his brother. The apartment is furnished more sparingly than my previous visit here. As I enter, one young couple is leaving the place with an information sheet.

“Wasn't I supposed to buy this place?” I ask.

“Yeah, in February,” Harris says, handing me a printout. “Make me an offer. The price has been dropped by twenty grand.”

The condo was taken off the market in the spring and listed again, through Harris, in July. Jack and Liam are whispering to each other in the windowless “flex space” that I was expected to slide my desk into.

“What are they up to?” Harris asks.

When we open the mirrored, folding door, we find them each under a box. Harris hoists one box and finds Liam crouched on the floor.

“What are you guys doing?” I ask him in a patronizing kid's voice.

“Pretending,” Liam says.

“What are you pretending to be?”

Liam starts scratching his arms. “Bedbugs.”

Jack lifts up one side of his box.

“We're bedbugs,” he screams. “You have to burn all your clothes!”

The open house ends. Afterwards, before it gets dark, we escort the kids to the park across the street and watch them take turns on the slide. “So, why didn't you come to the track the other day?” I ask.

Harris sighs, stretching out his feet as he leans into the bench. “I don't know,” he says. “I had a client, and it's a hassle, and I mean, what's the big deal—am I your lucky charm?”

“What's wrong?” I ask him.

“Well, I have an appointment for a vasectomy upcoming, and now I'm stuck selling a bedbug-infested shithole.”

I give him the stink-eye. “You told me it was a ‘cozy entry-level unit.' You were lying, weren't you?”

“Let me ask you this,” he says. “Was my book that bad that you couldn't say anything about it?”

I'd promised, for the third time, to read it a month ago, but again I found other, more pressing work. In reality, the idea that Harris—who, already in my mind, had enough—could write a decent book pissed me off.

“Actually...” I begin.

As I confess, Harris's lower lip begins trembling. “What is wrong with you?” he asks me. “You know this is important to me.”

“I know.”

“I've waited months.”

“Well, I've spent almost a decade trying to write my second novel,” I say. “It's like my personal Iraq War.”

“Oh, that's hilarious,” he says. “Why does it always have to be about you and your multitude of hang-ups?”

Harris only lets up on me when Jack and Liam stop running around the tire swing and begin watching us. We smile and wave at the kids, who take their time getting back to their circuit. Liam calls their race like the announcer at Hastings—they're at the finish line when he edges out his overmatched younger brother at the wire. “It's Mocha Time to score!” Liam screams. Jack doubles over, his cheeks pink.

RANDI'S FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY falls on July 31, three days prior to my thirty-fourth. “Before we all got too tired,” Randi says, “I used to be in charge of finding fun things to do. One time we rented a limo on my fortieth birthday, or at least people thought it was my fortieth. Another time we had a girls' shower party for getting married and we rented a bus. It was my idea—it was so stupid. We met at the track and made everyone pay, like, ten dollars, and then we went to a bunch of bars. Then some girls met some guys and took them on the bus. It was kind of a blur. We were dancing on the table in a bar downtown.”

“You're dancing on the table in a lot of your old stories,” I tell her. The previous week she told me about dancing on a table in Mexico, to “Enter Sandman” by Metallica.

“I know, I used to do that a lot.”

“Was ‘Enter Sandman' playing?”

“No, my stripping song is AC/DC's ‘You Shook Me All Night Long.'” She sings the song's opening line: “She was a fast machine / She kept the motor clean.”

I finished the line for her and we bobbed our heads in unison: “She was the best damn woman that I ever seen.”

A few weeks earlier, we agreed to get tattoos on her birthday from one of Randi's exercise riders, Cenek, who does tattoo art as a hobby. Randi still seems keen on the idea.

“I could get something writing-related to remind me of you,” she tells me. “Like a pen.”

“Ugh,” I say. “Why don't you just get a panda bear? It's hairy and Chinese.”

“And you could get a picture of Blackie on your arm.”

“Yeah, but I bet she'd get claimed the next day,” I say. As much as I like my horse, I'm not sure she's arm-worthy. “I was thinking a Triple Crown winner, or maybe a champion— like Barbaro.”

Randi wrinkles her nose. “Really, why would you want that?”

Because of my dithering, Randi's birthday goes by un-tattooed. Instead, her friends drop by the shed row bearing cake and gifts. Alex, who normally gets $100 from Randi for his birthday, decides to give her a C-note with the stipulation that she use the money to wager on “Mummy's numbers”; one summer afternoon, they spend the day betting 2–3–6 triactors. I bring her a plush pillow made to look like a horse's head—as in the scene in The Godfather where Don Corleone has the severed head of a racehorse placed in the bed of an enemy as a breakfast-time surprise. It gets a laugh.

I step outside to say hello to Blackie. Her head is jutting out of her stall, but when she catches sight of me, she ducks her head inside. I peek in; she is munching hay.

“You know what?” I say to Blackie. “This is getting old.”

She turns back to me; I must have caught her attention.

“I've already doubled my share in you,” I continue. “I don't expect you to fall over me with appreciation. But I wouldn't mind it if you acted as though you didn't hate me.”

The horse does a three-point turn in her stall, and I back away as she pokes her head out. Her ears are pricked eagerly.

“I'm glad we talked this through,” I say. “Who cares if people think it's stupid to talk to a horse?”

When I reach out to stroke her neck, Blackie bites my arm. Whimpering, I rub it as she returns inside to graze on her hay bale in peace.

SINCE SHE'S NOT at the post office, I imagine Randi would be in a better mood on my visits. But when I follow her on her mail route, she's glad to have company. When I show up to the stable while she's working, even with my enhanced stake in her horse, I'm nothing but a nuisance.

“You always pick the worst times to show up,” she tells me one morning. “I can't talk.”

“That's okay,” I say, disappearing into the break room to read a book.

A few minutes later, she comes into the room looking for her cigarettes. “I can't answer no fucking questions,” she says.

“I'm not asking any,” I say, holding up my hands in protest.

A couple of minutes later, I see Nick pass by, his face shadowed as he seeks out Randi. Their argument involves a horse that Nick entered for Randi in a race that features an overwhelming favourite.

“Just once,” I hear Randi yell, “I would like you to listen to me.”

“The race is in two days,” he says back. “There's no reason to let it ruin your mood for that long.”

“I mean, we're just running for the second-place money.”

“I can't fucking look at you. Stupid cow.”

I see Nick storming by in the other direction.

Randi returns to the break room. “I can't have you here right now,” she says.

“I'm not saying anything.”

“I know, but I just want to be alone.”

As far as I can tell, Randi hates being alone. Once or twice, after I go on her route with her, she'll cajole me into helping her feed the horses, because the stables are pretty empty in the afternoon. And if we're parked in different lots at the track, she'll ask me for a ride because she doesn't want to walk alone.

I tell myself that verbal abuse from Randi is a by-product of her affection. I tell myself that big boys don't let mean ladies hurt their feelings. It doesn't work.

So I avoid the front- and backsides for a week, only returning to cheer on Sylvester, who's racing at his lowest-ever price, $17,500. The favourite in the race is Distorted Glamour, a five-year-old California-bred gelding who's the wastrel trust-fund brat of the field. According to the Form, he was sired by Distorted Humor for $150,000; by comparison, the stud fee for Sylvester's dad was $4,000 and none of the other entries in the six-horse field were sired for more than $30,000. And yet the horse only has lifetime earnings of $29,732—less than a third of Sylvester's earnings.

Wearing white blinkers and starting on the outside, Sylvester begins well, moving inside and sitting second behind Distorted Glamour, who builds his lead in the far turn. Coming down the stretch, Sylvester manages to hang on for third.

I win some money on Sylvester, but my gambling day limps on in misery. I try to make back my losses on the final race on a card, a mile-and-an-eighth route where the two and three horses are heavily favoured; and I like the five-horse because Dave Wilson, who rode the horse to second place in his previous race, is on him again. The guy sitting next to me tells me to go for the six-horse.

The six-horse, who's actually the third-favourite in the race, doesn't look bad but I like the five-horse more and make a show bet on him and then a $2 2–3–5 triactor bet. It's only after I've placed a wager, and the horses are in the gate at the top of the far stretch, that I realize that Alex's numbers, 2–3–6, are actually the favoured horses.