Horse Heaven (13 page)

Just the other night, George had said to her, “Cousin, it is beyond my understanding why the Lard above has given you so few instincts. A nice magnetic-resonance image of your brain would make an interesting article, I’m sure.”

So she followed her, okay? And there Mary Lynn was, throwing up into the toilet, and so Deirdre put her hand on the woman’s hot forehead, okay? And when she was done, she helped her out of the bathroom, and said, “What can I do for you?” Okay?

“Take me back to the hotel. No, have George take me back to the hotel. And don’t let Skippy buy either of those mares.”

“Which mares?”

“The Seattle Slew mare’s right knee turns out, and the Storm Cat mare is a Storm Cat mare.”

“Oh, those mares are too rich for us, Mary Lynn. Don’t worry.”

Mary Lynn gave her a look.

“We’ve got a plan, right?”

“Dear,” said Mary Lynn, “I will tell you the most annoying thing about Skippy. You know, neither of us came from anybody. We met in college, and we never had any money, but that didn’t matter. However little money we never had, Skippy would fill our place with bargains. In the early days it was yard sales, and the bargains all cost a quarter or a half a dollar. Later, it was Kmart, then Target, then Macy’s. He’s gotten bargains at Tiffany’s, Barney’s, Giorgio of Beverly Hills. Ever heard of Maxfield Bleu? That’s a store on Melrose in L.A., where they mark up the clothes a thousand percent and sneer at you, to boot. Skippy can come out of Maxfield Bleu thinking he got a bargain.”

“You’re saying he thinks anything he buys is a bargain.”

“No matter what the cost. Oh, God.”

They returned to the bathroom.

A
FTER
G
EORGE RETURNED
to the sales pavilion from the hotel, Deirdre tried to concoct a strategy with him. The first element was to sit as far away as possible from Snell. The second was to position Skippy between the two of them. The third was to handcuff his hands to his seat. The fourth was to tape his mouth shut. And the fifth was to enclose his head in a bag. Having concocted this strategy, they were laughing, which put Deirdre in a pleasanter mood, but didn’t give her any confidence in her influence over Skippy.

Deirdre herself had chosen ten good mares, and thought she would be lucky to get five of them. Only two were being sold this evening. When Skippy came to sit between them (they managed to put into effect the first two elements of their strategy), he was clearly at large again. The first thing he said was “So I suppose Mary Lynn is down for the night. I just talked to her on my cellular, and she doesn’t feel at all well.” He spoke triumphantly, sat forward on the edge of his seat, and plumped his hands on his knees. “When do they begin?”

They began.

“Ah,” said Skippy.

Into the ring walked a lovely chestnut mare, as matriarchal-looking as any mare Deirdre had ever seen. She looked in her catalogue. It was Red Shift, a famous mare, daughter of a famous mare, Red Beans, sister of three other famous mares, Red Scare, Red Square, and Infrared. These red mares were so famous that, no matter whom they were bred to, their offspring got names that alluded to them. Red Shift had begotten Night Shift, Shiftless, Moveitorloseit, and Day Shift, a two-year-old filly of the previous year who had run second at Saratoga in the Hopeful Stakes, against colts.

Deirdre and George exchanged a glance, just as, quite unexpectedly, Skippy’s hand went up. Deirdre snatched it down again, but not before the auctioneer noticed his bid. Fortunately, the next bid was immediate. Deirdre and Skippy had a little struggle, and Skippy said, in a tight voice, “Two hundred thousand is a bargain for this mare! I know that much!”

“It’s three hundred thousand now,” said George.

“That’s a bargain, too. Let go of me!”

“Keep your fucking hand down,” said Deirdre, too loudly. People nearby looked at her.

“She’s a great mare! She’s the best mare here!”

Deirdre now did something that later she wondered at. She swung her right leg around and mounted Skippy’s lap from her own seat, so that she was facing him and he could no longer see the ring. In his moment of nonplussed stillness, she put her face right against his and said, “Skippy, my darlin’, you do not deserve to own this great mare! I do not deserve to train her offspring! Leave her alone!”

She dismounted.

Skippy said, “What the hell are you doing? What the hell does that mean?”

“I have principles!”

“What principles? The mare goes to the highest bidder, no matter who he is!”

“I’ll not discuss it!”

And then the bidding was over, and the mare had gone for $936,000.

George offered Skippy a drink of water, which he took. Droplets of sweat pearled his hairline. He muttered to Deirdre, “I didn’t realize how strong you are. You look so little.”

“Darlin’,” said Deirdre, “when you have jumped thirteen-hundred-pound Holsteiners over five-foot and six-foot triple combinations and then turned back to a five-foot narrow and then galloped as hard as you could to a twelvefoot water jump, a lawyer isn’t much.”

“Well, don’t do that again.”

“Bid on what we agreed upon!” insisted Deirdre.

“Please,” suggested George.

“Please,” said Deirdre.

“Okay,” said Skippy. And he gave her a look.

Not long after, the Storm Cat mare, in foal to Theatrical (Ire.), bumped and jerked into the ring. She was grinding her teeth, switching her tail, and kicking out. “There’s a Storm Cat for you,” said George.

“They win,” said Skippy. He named the name of Snell and said that he owned four Storm Cats, two at the track and two at the farm. But he didn’t bid. The Storm Cat mare went for $564,000.

Now the Seattle Slew mare entered the ring, Belle Starr her name was. The catalogue said that she was due in February, and she looked it. In fact, Deirdre had seen this mare race. Her present calm look was in interesting contrast to her performance on the track—Deirdre remembered her in the Kentucky Oaks several years back, as tough and aggressive as a filly could be, going wide and fighting the jockey to run. Deirdre had thought at the time that she might have been on steroids, but now she was big in foal, a bit of evidence that her grit was more or less natural. That
would
be a mare to have, wouldn’t it. Deirdre glanced over at Skippy. He was sitting on his hands like a good boy.
She looked at the mare again. The bidding began, but it was slow. At the third bid, they were only up to seventy-eight thousand. Another imponderable, why some were hot and others weren’t. Deirdre looked at her catalogue. She had written down her estimated reserve—$350,000. There was silence. She said, “Bid.”

“What?”

“Bid ninety.”

He bid ninety.

Someone else bid a hundred and ten.

“Bid one twenty-five.”

He bid one twenty-five.

Someone else bid one fifty, and a third person bid one seventy-five.

Deirdre sat back, saved. She sighed with relief, and then the mare turned her head and looked across all the people in the first three rows, directly at Deirdre. How was it, Deirdre thought, that all horses’ eyes were brown and large and set in the same spot on the horses’ heads, and yet all looked different? How was it that some looked inward and some looked at the horizon, and some looked right at you? She said, “Bid.”

“It’s up to two twenty-five.”

“Bid.”

“Two fifty!” called out Skippy.

“Good Lard,” said George.

It got to three hundred.

“I am in love,” said Deirdre.

“Whose money are we bidding?” said Skippy.

“Yours,” said Deirdre. “Bid three twenty-five.”

In a moment it was at four.

“Snell is bidding against you,” said George.

“He is?” said Skippy.

“It’s only money,” said Deirdre. “You have plenty.”

It got to five, Skippy’s limit, and, dutifully, he put his hand down and sat on it.

It got to six.

The mare lifted her head, pivoted her ears at some sound. She was a bay. To Deirdre, who had seen thousands of horses in her day, she looked uniquely splendid. Deirdre said, “Bid seven, I’ll go halves with you.”

“What!” exclaimed George. “Love, you’ve not got that kind of money!”

“I’ll find it. Bid!”

Skippy raised his card and said “Seven.” That halted the bidding, and a minute later, they owned the mare.

George said, “Have you not heard of the winner’s curse, Cousin?”

“What’s that?” said Skippy. Deirdre had floored herself too thoroughly to speak.

“That’s an economic principle of auctions. Whoever wins is cursed, because they’ve paid a premium for the fun of winning.”

“God in heaven,” said Deirdre, realizing she would have to do something she had seen others do and sworn she herself would never do. “I’m going to have to mortgage my house for a horse!” She put her head in her hands. Deirdre’s house was her pride—she had bought it after selling her best jumper for a hundred thousand dollars, and when she handed over the check, she had vowed to herself that she would never own another horse. That was ten years ago, and the house had continued to express its difference from a horse by appreciating in value at a steady 12 percent a year. But with her eyes closed, she saw that mare’s face, clear as day, and, knowing it was now hers, she felt a bonafide surge of joy. And now the man with the clipboard came toward them, and Skippy lifted his hand and signed the paper.

D
ICK
W
INTERSON
was a successful trainer and a busy man. He had a string of million-dollar runners (well, some half- and some quarter-million-dollar runners—the pool of million-dollar runners, though deep, you might say, was also naturally rather small in circumference, and Baffert and Lukas had bought up most of the shoreline). But Dick wasn’t afraid of them. Most of the time. Some years before, Dick hadn’t been afraid of them any of the time. Or of Allan Jerkens or John Kimmel. Name any trainer you like, and that was a trainer that Dick Winterson hadn’t been afraid of. As a rule, Dick liked other trainers. They had something in common, and he was, or had been, an outgoing sort of guy. Probably now, unless, like dogs, they could actually smell it, Wayne, Bob, Allan, and John didn’t as yet know that Dick was afraid of them. He still joked around with them and the others when he saw them. He still stood next to them during morning training and talked horse idiosyncrasies with them. He still drank coffee and ate toast with them in the cafeteria. But after the workouts were over, when the others went into their offices and called owners or did paperwork, Dick went off to his therapist. He was a racing man, of course, and so he envisioned his fear and his therapy in a
match race, neck and neck, Sunday Silence and Easy Goer, Affirmed and Alydar, all the great racing couples. Or, God forbid, Foolish Pleasure and Ruffian. The problem was that, even after the second turn, he didn’t know which horse was his fear and which horse was his therapy. Sometimes he tried to gull his therapist with the idea that Thoroughbred training had changed when the quarterhorse guys got into it—they were a harsher, harder-bitten group—but his therapist ignored these realities and said that winning and losing was the source of his distress, not its solution, that quieter, more organic images would be more helpful. Blossoming. Budding. Fruiting. Digging the soil, sprinkling the fertilizer, gently mounding the dirt up around the stalk of the plant, etc. It was dead certain that Wayne Lukas never visualized his life in terms of gardening, Dick thought. He nodded when his therapist suggested this sort of thing to him, but couldn’t, or at least didn’t, take it in. Meanwhile, his fear and his therapy had turned into the stretch, and Dick had the distinct sense that in a matter of moments, so to speak, the race would be over. And now he was having an affair with the wife of one of his owners. That didn’t mean he was
more afraid
, he told his therapist, only that he was
afraid more of the time.
His therapist told him that this distinction was meaningless, but Dick actually found it rather comforting. It meant, somehow, that he wasn’t entirely panicked.

His establishment, he knew, the exercise girls and the grooms and his two assistants and his office manager and the feed man, were all operating on momentum at this point. He had set them going years before and they all knew their jobs. They kept their heads, took care of the horses, and rolled along. He was still winning races—his win percentage in the fall was 18 percent, as high as it had ever been. But none of the wins, not even the big-stakes wins, where he got his picture into the
New York Times
and the
Daily Racing Form
, proved anything to him except that life was fluky. He could send a horse out a one-to-five favorite, have the horse come roaring in by ten lengths of daylight, and still not be convinced. Convinced of what? Dick didn’t know. His brother, who taught French in a high school in Queens, said he was having an existential crisis. Dick didn’t really know what that was, but it sounded like a bad thing to have at Gulfstream, where everything was lovely, and an even worse thing to take back to Belmont Park with him. Belmont Park was big—a track of such vastness that it gave you the willies to begin with. Belmont Park was like an ever-expanding universe, a vacuum forming at your feet—Dick shook his head, scattering the images.

What he had to do was decide whether to take Luciano back to New York with him.

Luciano was his horse masseur, and the only balm to his troubled soul. Every day, after his therapy (over the years he had won so much money that he
could afford daily therapy), he came back to the track and watched Luciano massage the horses. Luciano was only half Italian—he was actually tall and Irish-looking, with reddish hair and blue eyes. Though he was just over six feet tall, he could palm a basketball. When the horses heard his voice in the aisle, they pressed against their stall guards to get at him. They loved him far more than they loved their grooms, and though Luciano only did horses and never people, Dick felt entirely certain that Luciano would be able to resolve his condition better than his therapist, one session, full-body, just squeezing and pushing the fear out. But he didn’t ask; he only watched Luciano do the horses and chatted with him.