My Year of the Racehorse (8 page)

Claimed horses are ceded over at the barn. Given all the ceremony involved in the frontside, it's surprising to imagine horses being handed off like pieces of junk mail.

Maybe it's because Randi's off, but Blackie isn't acting right, either. She's quieter than normal, which makes Randi wonder if she's sick.

“It could also be that she's horsin',” says Randi.

“Horsing?”

“Horny.”

“No,” I say flatly. “That's not how she's been raised.”

She laughs. “I've seen it happen.”

As we jabber, a woman with a needle and clipboard strolls intently down the shed row. She carries a sheepish expression on her face. When Randi catches sight of her, she groans with self-pity.

“What a fucking nightmare,” Randi tells me.

“What?” I ask.

“She's being tested.”

This woman explains that Blackie's been randomly selected for a Milkshake Test, which detects sodium bicarbonate, baking soda, in a horse's bloodstream. Larcenous horsemen use baking soda to reduce fatigue in the horse; it can also mask the presence of other performance-boosting drugs.

Randi's face trembles as she stomps away from us. “The last few times I've had to do a Milkshake Test, the horses fucking sucked,” she says when she turns back.

“I did two tests last night,” says the track attendant, who lets herself into the stall, “and both horses won.”

“I'm ready to shoot myself.”

Randi fantasizes about suicide on an hourly basis. It's a release valve for her that's turned when the day's going badly or a horse runs poorly—or when someone in the shed row screws up—and belongs in the same vein of hyperbole that lets her call her beloved horses pigs and bitches. Other times, she speaks about her self-inflicted demise with the same wishful relish that other people might describe quitting their jobs and moving to Mexico. It's both a faraway fantasy and a last resort.

WE STAY NEAR Randi's regular spot to watch the races, at one of the picnic tables across from the tote board. Blackie, in a blue saddle cloth and with jockey Fernando Perez on her, starts third from the rail. Midway through the top stretch the favourite horse, a brown mare named Angel Came Down, takes a length-and-a-half lead. (A length is about a fifth of a second.) Blackie's second and in good position, near the rail by the first quarter mile, followed closely by two other favourites.

“THEY'RE MIDWAY DOWN THE BACKSTRETCH AND ANGEL CAME DOWN HAS THE RAIL AND THE LEAD BY THE HALF,” says the announcer. “MOCHA TIME IS SECOND BY THREE-QUARTERS OF A LENGTH. GRAYROSS GAL IS THIRD.”

Blackie's trying hard and staying in the race, but maybe Randi's pessimism has affected me, because I never feel she'll win. On the backstretch, Perez puts the stick on her, but she doesn't take the cue. She and Grayross Gal, a nine-year-old bay mare, duke it out for second, but Angel Came Down is never threatened. She breaks ahead down the lane, two-three-four-five lengths ahead of Blackie, who sits second from wire to wire. Grayross Gal and another mare named Mystic Pass, who's made a late surge, vie for third.

“Something wasn't right about her,” Randi says to Nick.

“She wasn't digging like she normally does,” Nick says.

The race had set up the way Randi wanted it to, with Blackie near the front where she's happy, but it had set up even better for Angel Came Down, a speed horse who was never really challenged early in the contest and used her untapped reserve of energy to pull away for the easy victory after the final turn.

Again, I wince bitterly as the winner's photo is staged. But my disappointment with the race is forestalled because of the triactor bet I hold. (A triactor or triacta is a bet that picks the first three finishers in a race in correct order.) The sign on the tote board says “photo finish,” but from where we were standing it looked like Grayross Gal withstood the late rally by Mystic Pass—which means I'm holding a big-for-me payout.

This is when my luck turns as a gambler. This is when my time communing with thoroughbreds in the barn pays off. I'm no longer a dilettante now, I tell myself. My horse loves me now. I am handsome. This is when I prove myself a man.

As the final results light up to show Mystic Pass in third, I let out a yelp, “No-ow-ooh!” the kind of squeaky, bathetic howl that leaves a fourteen-year-old's mouth when his kid brother rips the corner off his favourite comic book. Randi and Nick wince.

I'm ready to shoot myself.

EARLIER THAT SPRING, Alex, the eighty-year-old hot walker, did one-arm push-ups on a local TV news broad cast, in an instalment of a long-running segment that focuses on human-interest stories. Whenever I bring friends to the track and mention his TV appearance, Alex proudly drops to the ground and begins levering himself up with his right arm. I know it's bad to do that to him, but along with letting kids feed carrots to Blackie, it's a highlight of the tour I give.

In the shed row, Alex is either dead silent or talks a lot. When he does feel chatty, he'll yoke his life story with elements drawn from a dreamier precinct of his mind. A story might, at first, concern his previous career as a welder—plausible enough—but it will weave into his other, much less plausible, career as a criminologist and the cops who are still chasing after him. Or he'll let it be known that he once lived by the dump with his son, who's now twenty and works at the harness-racing track, until they were forcibly evicted by the Taliban. His stories unspool from one digression into another, until you forget where he began and fear he'll never end.

Today, he's showing me how to hot walk Sylvester. “Sylvester isn't that high-grade class of horse, but what he does have is heart; he loves Randi and he loves me walking him,” Alex tells me, holding Sylvester after a gallop while Randi hoses the horse down. Sylvester rubs his head up against Alex, whose feet slide back. Alex turns a shoulder towards the horse and leans into him.

“You can put the lip chain on him,” Randi says, “so he don't fuck around.”

“All he's doing is nuzzling,” Alex says. “I don't mind.”

Randi's often impatient with Alex and his requests for extra money for betting, but now she laughs. “Alex loves Sylvester.”

The horse flicks the water from his back like a dog stepping out of a lake.

Afterwards, Alex hands the lead to me as I take the horse outside the barn. “If you give him the knob, he'll chew on it,” he says, letting the horse gnaw on the end of the leather lead. “All in all, anything he wants to do, he'll probably do it. So just let him have a little rope, like fishing.”

Sylvester's shoes click against the pavement. The six-year-old gelding is actually easier to lead than my parents' nine-year-old Labrador, though I feel like I'm driving a boat or my dad's old gigantic, second-hand Mercedes—my sense of control is only provisional, almost dream-like. “If you want him going this way, you push his head over this way,” Alex says, before gently nudging the horse to the right. “And when you want him to come that way, you make a wide turn, because he's a big horse.” North American racehorses, in fact, spend almost their entire lives going left, from the racing oval to their hot walking routes; going right becomes counter-instinctual.

The horse stops to look inside a bin filled with recycled cardboard. “And sometimes we stand here and look at that sun and the way you're going now we'll just walk and the sun will just cook him on all sides.”

We walk around the stable towards the tack shop and loop back. Sylvester stops at a pile of horse dung. Alex laughs. “Oh, he likes to smell the turds,” he tells me. “Now he can tell if it's a female horse or a male horse, or if there's drugs.”

As we head back to Sylvester's stall, Alex takes the leads from me and gently ushers the horse back inside. I stroke the horse's neck, grateful that he didn't exploit my sense of terror. “Now you're a horseman,” he tells me. “Wasn't that easy?”

“You're a good teacher,” I say.

“Well, you're a good student.”

ON THE DAY I walk Sylvester, I run into an old friend in the backside. It's been seven or eight years since I last saw Kulwant, and it takes me a moment to recognize him even though he doesn't look any different. He's still slender, bearded, and tall, with a prideful, rude-cum-shy demeanour. When I finally place him in this unlikely context, I flinch, unsure of his reaction. He's in a plaid work shirt, faded jeans, and has a bridle looped around one shoulder. Behind his wire-frame glasses, his eyes chew through me like a sewing machine.

“What the hell brings you here?” he asks me. “Is there a creative writing class for jockeys?”

Some explanation ensues before I ask him whether he works in the stables.

“No, I only live here,” he says. “Actually, I make my living as a banker.”

Kulwant has been a groom for three years and is one of the two hundred or so stable hands, including Alex, who live alongside the thousand or so horses in the backside like dorm mates. The tack rooms they occupy are clean, rent-free, and come equipped with complimentary cable, but are no one's first-choice digs. Working at the track, of course, is no one's first-choice job. A groom's tasks are physically taxing, require early hours, take up six days a week, and pay, depending on your experience, anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000 per month. During the off-season, when Kulwant goes on Employment Insurance, he lives off even less.

In first-year university, we briefly played together in a band before he dropped out after a single term to live on a commune in Oregon. He moved to Montreal and toured extensively throughout Europe and Australia as a drummer in a klezmer rock collective. The last time I heard from him, in 2003, he was in Berlin, taking on freelance carpentry work between sets at open-mike nights. Whenever his wayward life led him back into town, we would go for a beer. Each time, he would push a new CD in my pocket and make fun of my clothes. As we speak, he digs his hands in his pockets and rocks on his heels, as though he were desperate to leave.

“Can I buy you a coffee?” I ask. “You can tell me about your music.”

“I hate to disappoint you, but I'm on my way to a black-tie fundraiser,” he says. “But I was planning to leave the fairground on Saturday night. Take me somewhere professional writers go, with beers in foreign languages.”

I jab my finger skywards. “I know just the place.”

“Sure you do. Nice shoes, by the way.”

We arrange to meet at a Belgian alehouse at 7 PM, because Kulwant works mornings. But he arrives half an hour late. “Sorry,” he says, taking the stool next to mine. “All the places in the area look exactly like the others. You live around here, right?”

Our first two rounds are spent discussing the album he's saving money to make, a track-by-track response to Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads. “The recording technology is cheap, but I want to buy a van. I hated the last girl I dated but we stayed together because she owned a Volkswagen minibus. Then she sold it,” he explains. “I also want to pay my lap-steel guy. And, thus, I exploit myself to keep him from getting exploited.”

“Is your job that bad?” I ask.

Kulwant shrugs and lets me buy another round. He works with six horses, cleaning their stalls and brushing them, then walking them after they run. “Not bad so far as shit-work goes,” he says. “Would you want to live in a tack room instead of a van?”

“Well, neither. That's why I write three hundred words on new slow cookers,” I say. “That's why I teach part-time.”

He draws back the $11 beer. “Exactly, at least I do something honest.”

If we were drinking anything else, I'd have probably left after this remark. Belgian Trappist ale, however, goes down like beer but has the alcohol content of fortified wine. The night has already begun to assume a dissolute momentum, and it's not too long until we're ordering a couple more rounds, with an order of moules frites. Soon enough, respectable patrons have left, the chairs are upturned, and the now-you're-ugly lights are hastily undimmed.

“You want me to call a cab?” I ask, staggering from the bar like a gigantic, B-movie lizard. “I don't know if any buses are still running.”

“How far do you live from here?” he asks. “I don't have cash for a cab.”

I hesitate to answer. For many years, Kulwant was the ruthlessly funny, tirelessly anguished friend I had to please. He was the one who gave me the flummoxing books and albums that eventually forged my tastes. He was the one I routinely let down with my concessions to the imperatives of convention and comfort. When I decided to let someone else disappoint him, it took only two unanswered emails to deflect him from my social orbit. His default bitterness makes it hard to tell whether he's sore with me, so I'm thrown off by his request to crash at my place.

Eventually, we stumble fifteen blocks to my apartment. I've been at the same address for six years now. It's filled with cheap furniture, used books on every horizontal surface, and an area rug that I bought at Costco for $30. I've stayed so long because the place is central, not too far east or too far west, not too far from my parents—geographically ambivalent, how fitting.

Kulwant settles back on my IKEA couch as I bring him a glass of water. Normally, when guests see my place, I figure they're making mental calculations, imagining the set of bad decisions necessary to bring someone with a solid upbringing to these circumstances. But I can tell that Kulwant, who also lives where he works, is doing that math on himself. My apartment compares favourably to his tack room. That look of unrestrained envy on his face makes up for the bar tab I covered.

“So how many Crock-Pots do you need to sell to live here?” he asks, after he downs his water in two messy gulps.

I pull out the cot from my closet, and then head to the washroom. “Not as many as you think,” I say. “I'm only a renter.”

“At least you're not that guy Harris. Remember him? You will never believe what he's doing for a living.”

“Well, his dad sold real estate, too,” I say from the bathroom sink, where I'm brushing my teeth.

“That guy sold his soul. You've just leased yours out.”

When I re-emerge from my bedtime ablutions, Kulwant is sitting on the cot, stripped down to his underwear.

“You need to be up at dawn, right?” I ask. “Should I set an alarm?”

“These days I get up without any help. I sleepwalk into the stalls,” he says. “Do you remember the time I peed on you?”

“Uh-huh,” I say.

It was back in the nineties when Kulwant lived in an attic apartment, above a deaf woman who didn't mind loud music. I was on the couch of his two-room place and he was so drunk that he mistook my head for the toilet bowl. Fortunately, I covered my face with his comforter—which I continued to sleep under until I woke up three hours later.

My bed fits into a windowless nook, five feet from my toilet. That night, it takes me longer than usual to nod off—I'm half-expecting to be Kulwant's latrine—but at some point, I'm so exhausted that I stop worrying about it. When I rise in the morning, Kulwant is already gone, the bedding folded neatly on my couch, leaving only the impression of his hairy form on the empty cot and a CD of his newest songs.

“CLEANING DINKS WAS one of the first things I learned as a groom,” Randi tells me, lugging the bucket that she uses to wash horse penises down the shed row to another trainer's stable. “Nowadays, people don't have enough time.”

In his stall at the track, lying on bedding, a male horse will collect dirt, scum, and sawdust in his nether regions. After a few months, the horse penis, which retracts into a sheath, becomes a smegma factory, which leads to infection, discomfort, and difficulties with urination. Cleaning a horse penis is a straightforward, if unsavoury task that many of today's newfangled grooms are too icked out to perform. At the same time, handling a thousand-pound animal's junk requires confidence and finesse; a bold novice might get himself hurt if he squeezes or pulls too hard.

“You have to fucking have a knack for it,” Randi tells me. “You have to be gentle.”

When other trainers found out that Randi was willing to do the work, it became a lucrative part-time job for her—at $20 a go, cleaning half a dozen horse penises at a time. Randi even had joke business cards made:

Once we get to the other barn, Randi introduces me to a groom named Daryl, a friendly guy wearing a baseball cap over his mullet, who holds the horses while Randi roots underneath them.

The first horse, a four-year-old named Surprisal, lets Randi give him the reach-around with little apprehension. Randi uses soap and a sponge, though some of the horse-care websites I visit afterwards also suggest using K-Y Jelly. She leans under him with her free hand dangling back for balance as though she were fencing.

“He's not very dirty,” Randi says, turning to me with an almost disappointed look. “I've done him a few times before.”

Like many horses at Hastings whose bloodlines aren't worth passing on, Surprisal is gelded. An unaltered horse brings another degree of awkwardness to dink cleaning. Randi, who's taken a week off from the post office, says that she cleaned a ball-swinging colt the day before. “He kind of liked it, which can make the job easier,” Randi says, breaking into a smile. “Usually, when they're studs, they're real jerks.”