My Year of the Racehorse (20 page)

ANNE MACLENNAN, WHO makes silks, saddle towels, hel met covers, and blinkers for horsemen at Hastings and Woodbine, has been involved in racing for three decades. She's managed breeding farms, galloped, and trained. After Bolulight, the horse she owned with her then-husband, won the B.C. Derby in 1991, they took their local champion down to Golden Gate Park for three years. As a Canadian, she could only work on her own horses; in her extra time, she volunteered with the woman running the Golden Gate silks shop and learned enough about the trade to start her own business, which now employs two other women, in Vancouver.

I've commissioned her to design my own personalized silks for Blackie's final race this season. It's only just occurred to me that I could dress up a jockey according to my whim.

“Bright, contrasting colours are the best,” she tells me in her apartment as she looks over the crudely drawn sketch I've made with felt-tip pens. “Tasteful earth tones don't work because they blend with the scenery.”

“What if I wanted to put boobs on them?” I ask, thinking strictly in theoretical terms. “What if I wanted really firm, perky boobs?”

“You probably can. I've had people ask me if you could put marijuana leaves on their silk.”

Jockey silks are too important for boobs or weed. I'm designing my own flag or coat of arms, not a souvenir shot glass or a set of big-wheel mud flaps. The silks are my own personal stamp on my horse; the more it says about me, the more it will be as though a part of myself is on the horse as she races.

What a set of silks should actually convey are the things you value. In my case, I feel that my silks, like a totem pole or a religious painting, should tell the story of my season at the track, when I first met Randi and Blackie. And so while my initials might appear in the silks, the black Gibson SG guitars, blue lightning bolt, and NASCAR-style black-and-white checks on the sleeve are a tribute to Blackie and Randi, who sings AC/DC's “Back in Black” to the horse when they walk. And the red and blue of the body remind me of the Rosie the Riveter poster you see on Randi's door. These are things that are special to me.

BLACKIE IS ENTERED in the ninth and last race today, but I arrive early to cheer Sylvester on in the fifth race. On the grassy island in the paddock, I watch Randi kiss her favourite horse on the neck. After she gives jockey Robert Skelly instructions for the race, I follow her to a spot on the apron near the finish line. It's a bright, albeit chilly, day.

“If he sucks in this race,” Randi says gruffly, “he's going to be a show horse.”

Skelly rides Sylvester up by the rail, which the horse doesn't like. “He won't go on the rail, he just won't,” she says. “I forgot to tell Skelly, but I can't remember to tell everyone fucking everything.” The horse has a tough trip, finishing fifth.

Afterwards, when she watches the replay, Randi points out where Sylvester is blocked as he tries to make his move. She seems both angry about Sylvester's bad luck and relieved that she has reason to believe that he can still race.

“I don't even want to fucking run Blackie,” she says in the stable afterwards. “I'm just going to fucking scratch her.”

I'm glad she decides otherwise, as I have friends and family coming down. Back in the frontside, I catch up with Harris, Angie and their kids. I suggest we go to the restaurant, where I've made a reservation for twelve.

“My parents and their friends are coming, too,” I explain to Harris as we climb the stairs into Silks. “They were here the first time I won, so maybe they're lucky.”

“Do they have long moles with hair growing out of them?” Liam asks me.

“What are you talking about?” I ask him.

There's an extra element of oddness to Liam today. While Jack is dressed in an age-appropriate T-shirt and cut-off jean shorts, Liam is wearing corduroys and a blazer. Despite Angie's repeated insistence that he stand straight, he's hunched over when I see him, too.

“Some Asian people grow hairs out of their moles for good luck,” Liam says.

I turn to Angie and Harris. “Is that really true?” I ask them.

“Well, I would check with another source,” Angie says to me. “Google it when you get home.”

An Internet search later confirms this superstition.

The afternoon starts well. I pick the winner in the sixth; I pick the winner in the seventh but change my mind at the last moment and ask the cashier to change my bet to a horse that loses; and then I get the winner of the eighth.

“Why did you bet on that horse?” asks Liam, who has insisted on sitting next to me. “Is he the speed?”

“Uh-uh,” I say. “He's a closer. There's too much speed, and none of it's any good.”

While his brother, Jack, makes bubbles in his cola, Liam watches me examine the Form, then he turns to his own copy of the racing broadsheet, crossing out underlays—the bad-value bets.

“I shouldn't have cut my nails today,” Harris says as we watch the seventh race replay on the TV screen at our table. “I have nothing to bite.”

“We're not leaving with even our shirts,” suggests Angie, whose husband only recently stopped complaining about his breached testicles.

Harris riffs off his wife's joke: “I'll bet this sweater on five to win.”

My parents and their friends, friends of my father from the Rotary Club and their wives whom I've known for at least two decades, show up fifteen minutes later. They introduce themselves to Harris and his family. We watch as Fernando Perez appears in the television monitor wearing my new blue-and-red silks. My dad, in his checked sports jacket, is in high spirits and even willing to put some money on my horse.

“A cook who used to work for me saw you here the other day,” he says to me. “He wasn't sure he should tell me, because he thought you might have a habit.”

“If the horse wins,” I say, “I'll buy your next set of winter tires.”

He nods. “It's a deal.”

Now that Blackie's back in an open claiming race, she's no longer a favourite, running at 6-to-1 behind favourites like Beautiful Breeze, Sultry Eyes, and Quickens. The gates open and Blackie, racing out of gate number four, breaks well and takes the lead by the turn. She hasn't been the early front-runner much this season, and when she runs the first quarter at a zippy time of 22.48, followed closely by Quickens, I worry that she'll fade.

We get up from our tables and begin cheering and shouting. For the first time this season, I am no longer cheering for my glory or my wager but for my horse; I'm no longer cheering for a win, but a safe finish. Your horse's only job is to run. It's your responsibility to love her. Your job is to show your appreciation for an animal who lets you live through her; who allows you to claim her determination, class, and grace as your own; who's there for you to forget, momentarily, the muddle you've made of your life, your own awful way of going—your own sore spots and bad trips.

Midway through the backstretch, Quickens overtakes Mocha Time from two out, and I begin to think that she's already used up her best. But Blackie seems even more determined than usual. Perhaps she knows the season is closing in and that there's no reason to reserve her strength; perhaps she just feels good today; perhaps she woke up today and decided she wanted to come first.

For whatever reason, she refuses to give up ground, and the two horses run neck and neck at the turn and then the home stretch. In that flash of red and blue silk that we spot from the distance, I see myself and the year that's passed so quickly.

Now I know Blackie will win. She can do it, everyone thinks she can do it, she's about to do it, she almost does, but then Quickens prevails by a neck.

IT WOULD HAVE been nice to have that winner's photo, but most of us make money from our bets anyway, and we leave happy. My parents invite me and Harris's family to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, but the kids want to feed carrots to the horse, so we decline. The track is already starting to empty by the time we leave for the barn. Jack and Liam stroll ahead, Liam still stooped over as he walks.

“If you're going to be Liam's role model,” Angie says, “I wish you would improve your posture.”

I throw my shoulders back and straighten out my spine. “What do you mean?” I ask.

“You don't see it?” Harris says. “Liam wants to be like you when he grows up. Not me, the guy who puts a roof over his head, but you.”

I can't resist gloating.

“So that's why he's wearing the blazer?” I ask. “And that's why he's slouching?”

Angie nods. “He's going to have to save his birthday money if he wants to buy his own horse.”

Liam is standing by the paddock fence, staring at his copy of the Form as though the races are still underway. He doesn't look like me. To my eyes, he's copying some of the railbirds here, the guys who seem to have been born with a neck wattle and a prescription for Lipitor.

“It's just a phase,” I say. “He'll grow out of it.”

“He's an oddball,” Harris tells me, “but there are worse people for him to be like. There are rapists, for example.”

That night, I go home and take down my to-do list.

1.
BECOME A HOME OWNER
BOUGHT A RACEHORSE

2.
FIND TRUE LOVE
VISITED A BREEDING SHED

3. SETTLE DOWN & START A FAMILY

4.
SEE THE WORLD
VISITED SARATOGA

5.
LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE
TALKED LIKE A RAILBIRD

6.
START A RETIREMENT PLAN
REDUCED GAMBLING LOSSES

7.
GET A TATTOO
SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED GETTING A TATTOO

Crossing out the last un-struck item, I write after it: “BECAME A FATHER FIGURE TO LIAM.” And then I toss out the list.

I accomplished everything I wanted by not accomplishing those things. Instead I bought a racehorse. From her example, I come to see persistence as its own success. You might win some and lose others, but you prove yourself every time you run honestly.

THE LAST TIME I see Blackie is January, when Aki and I make a six-hour drive to Portland to watch her run in a mid-week sprint. Because the horse ran so well that summer, another trainer convinced Randi to ship her horse south for the winter rather than turn her out to a farm for the off-season. When she sees me, Blackie, who's had a tough season adjusting to her new home, nips my collar looking for treats. Aki and I both insist that it's our presence, a mini-reunion with familiar humanoids, that pushes her into a second-place finish that afternoon.

By early April, Blackie is due to be sent back to Vancouver for the start of the Hastings meet, where she won $22,707 the year before, but the Portland trainer decides to enter her in one last race. In that race, Blackie is claimed. I want to claim her back when she races again, but Randi, who owned the bulk of the horse through the winter, says she can't afford it.

I don't want to overstate the loss of the horse. Claiming horses come and go. But I do feel as though a wonderful period in my life has passed. In the end, I get what I originally wanted—to own a racehorse for only a year. In all my life, it has never sucked more to get what I want.

When the racing season starts up again, I'm still not sure what to do. Nick hasn't been quick to return the money I gave him earlier; the cheque I gave him went to another trainer in Portland, who had access to Mocha Time's account and cleaned it out. She blamed her misfortune on a client who stiffed her for an even-bigger bunch of money. And so it goes.

With that outstanding cash, I could reinvest in another of Randi's horses. While I'm back at the track, I catch up with familiar faces. Sylvester starts the season as a pony horse, but finishes second in a race that September. Riley, who's become enormous over the winter, runs for the first time—and finishes dead last—later in the season before being given away to be a trail horse. I also meet new horses like Twobit'n Billie, who won three times at three different distances, and other winners like Macondo and Cry Cry Cry. Aubrey Road, also known as the Girl, is retired from racing to become a broodmare; her first foal is due the next spring. I follow Blackie's race results online as she runs and loses at county fairs across Oregon.

On one race day, I see Sid Martin, who tells me he's done what he swore, months earlier, he'd never do—retire. (Martin would die of cancer the following year, in 2011, at age 82.) That same afternoon, I see Chad Hoverson, who has set aside any plans to quit riding, saddling up in the paddock. My friend Kulwant, however, has quit his job at Hastings. He's in Mexico, working on an organic farm and living out of the van he purchased from Antonia. (Despite her original, cautious attraction, Antonia later decided Kulwant was not her type. He remains proudly single, and she's dating a local political blogger.)

Near the end of the summer, Alex is found dead from a heart attack by a security guard at the harness track in Cloverdale. Randi cries when she learns the news. “Shawn is still working here, but he looks like a lost soul,” she tells me in the summer. “I'm going to try to look out for him. His dad was all the family he had.” When she brushes Sylvester, she sings the songs Alex made up for him.

In 2011, I take the money still owed to me and put it into the almost gibbled little dude—Freddy—who will start running as a two-year-old in the fall. “He's not gibbled anymore,” Randi says. “He's a friendly little thing, but he's kind of high-strung. A dink. I'm hoping he will be a runner.”

“Do you think I can walk him around the shed row someday?”

“Maybe. He'll have to get his nuts out first.”

A FEW MONTHS before Alex's death that spring, I rejoin Randi on her route. It hasn't gotten hot, so it isn't yet unpleasant. I follow her to the back-fence gate of one house to greet an old Rottweiler with watery blue eyes named Bosco. “I haven't seen you in so long, Bosco,” she coos. “Did you miss me?” The dog yelps as he gobbles up the biscuits Randi throws at him. “I'll give you a couple more since I haven't seen you in months.”