Horse Heaven (14 page)

Though they had never spoken of it, Dick knew that Luciano knew that Dick was in trouble. Luciano, therefore, offered a lot of well-meaning advice, which was sometimes of an Italian nature and sometimes of an Irish nature. Today, when Dick saw Luciano pass his office door (he was pretending to be scanning the condition book in a rational manner, but about two weeks before, he had started picking races by tosses of the coin; this had not affected his win percentage), he got up and came around his desk, then looked out the door. Luciano was ducking under the stall guard of a four-year-old named Rah Rah, who had won about half a million so far. Dick flipped his last coin, received from that the information that the filly Laurita should run in the Shirley Temple Handicap, a hundred thousand dollars added, and he walked out into the aisle. He could see Rah Rah’s head, haltered, his shank hanging over the stall guard, and he could hear Luciano mumbling. He strolled over and said “Hi.”

“Hey, Dick,” said Luciano. “How’s it going?”

“Okay. Had a win and a place yesterday, out of two races. The owners were thrilled.”

“Great,” said Luciano.

Dick, his own hands in his pockets, watched as Luciano pressed his fingers into the colt’s neck, making small circles, sometimes pausing to manipulate little knots, other times stroking, other times running his thumbs part of the length of the muscle. Rah Rah stood calmly. Dick stepped toward him, and touched the animal’s nose, knowing what would come next, and it did. Rah Rah lifted his nose and began working on Dick, on his neck right where it came into his shoulders. With his mobile upper lip, he pushed and dug at the skin of Dick’s neck inside his shirt collar, sometimes moving down his shoulder, sometimes moving up his neck and sometimes working on the line of Dick’s jaw. Dick let him do this, although he knew he was in danger of being nipped—during mutual grooming, horses often nipped one another, and because of their manes and coats, they liked it. Unprotected, Dick liked it less,
but he recognized it as a gesture of equine attachment, and no horse had ever drawn blood.

“Now, listen,” said Luciano.

“I’m listening,” said Dick.

“How does your wife fit in here?”

Dick flinched, but hid it. He said, “She doesn’t.”

“Where did you say she works, again?”

“She teaches vocal technique at a college in New York.”

“Like singing?”

“Yes, singing. She hates the track. And she hates Florida.”

“Is she a good singer? These owners might like to, you know, talk with a good singer like that.”

“She’s a good singer, but she sings songs that don’t have any real melodies. You know, Charles Ives. Anton Webern. Alban Berg. Sometimes she sings some Schubert.”

“I’ve heard of him,” said Luciano.

“I’ve found that, if you listen to those Schubert songs about fifty times, they get pretty.”

“But she doesn’t like the track?”

“Never has. She’s a little afflicted with agoraphobia. The track is no place for an agoraphobic.”

“What’s that?”

“The word means ‘fear of the marketplace.’ Fear of busy places.”

“Oh. So she wouldn’t like to sit up in the boxes and talk to the owners about concerts and things? Ballet? Opera? Owners like to seem to have class.”

“Some owners do have class, Luciano.”

“That lady who owns that filly who jumped the other horse.”

Dick stepped to the right, and Rah Rah began on the left side of his neck. Luciano had, meanwhile, moved back to Rah Rah’s withers. “Laurita.”

“Yeah. Mrs. Maybrick.”

“Yes. She does have class.”

They were silent for a moment. Luciano had gotten to Rah Rah’s back, and was really digging in. Rah Rah now forgot about Dick, and lowered his nose nearly to the floor, at the same time turning his head to the side and extending his upper lip. He gave a couple of grunts, huh huh.

“He likes it!” chortled Luciano.

“They all like it,” said Dick.

“So maybe she would like to meet your wife?”

Dick stared at Luciano, wondering if some mindreading was going on, then opted to say, “But Louisa doesn’t like the track.”

“How did you meet her, then?”

“We were in a band. Sort of. We hung around the band, and sometimes we played with them. I played guitar and she sang.”

Luciano ran his hands sweetly over Rah Rah’s haunches, and then began the small circles in the large muscles there. Rah Rah leaned into the pressure. Luciano said, “You were a musician?”

“Musicianlike. I was pretending to my father that I wasn’t going to train horses, but it didn’t last.”

“Well,” said Luciano, “I can see that. Training horses is a full-time job, as far as I can see. You’re out here before dawn, you stay all day, you go to the races, you put the horses to bed. If your wife never comes to the track, when do you see her?”

“My therapist and I have been talking about that.”

“Probably a good idea,” said Luciano. He shook out his hands and came around the horse, beginning at the neck on the right side. He had been working maybe twenty minutes. He charged fifty dollars a session. Each horse who was on a training-and-racing schedule got one session a week. Dick had absorbed the cost himself, effectively lowering his training fees by fifty dollars a week per horse. On the other hand, his winnings had risen, sometimes and sometimes not making up the lost fees. The difference, the vig, you might say, was the amount of time he didn’t have to spend explaining to the owners how much the horses liked it, how it wasn’t mumbo-jumbo, how his barn was happier as a result, how
he
was happier as a result of their being happier, of watching them, every day, be made happier. Living at the track was a hard life for a horse—no grass, no turnout, no buddies to nuzzle. Fortunately, Thoroughbreds were pure workhorses. No plowhorse ever concentrated on doing his (or her) job the way the average Thoroughbred liked to do, but it still gave Dick a pang, the way they lived. But what was a pang to him, these days? A pang was a moment, every moment was a pang.

Luciano said, “So you seem a little down.”

“Do I?”

“Change always brings stress.”

“Does it?”

“You just don’t know where you’re going to be in six months.”

“In six months I’ll be at Saratoga.” Heaven, thought Dick. I hope I’m in the mood.

“You think so now, but, hey, in six months you could be dead.” He shrugged a specifically Italian shrug.

“Thanks, Luciano.”

“Who says that’s bad?”

“True enough.”

The masseur eased toward the withers and the horse stretched his head and then rested it on Dick’s shoulder. Luciano continued in a philosophical vein. “See, every moment, you pretty much know where you are, who you are. That’s life. Even if you make the mistake, which I try never to make, of examining your life, you still are more or less the same from moment to moment. That’s reassuring. But then all those moments add up, and pretty soon you’re somewhere, as someone, that you never expected to be and, even worse, that you could never have understood if you had ever known you would be that person. Understand what I mean?”

“I suppose that’s the story of my marriage, actually. Hers, too.”

“Whose?” said Luciano.

“My wife’s,” said Dick.

“Yeah,” said Luciano. “Everyone’s the same. I take comfort in that. Of course, horses are all different. Now, take my dad.”

“Your dad?”

“My dad was a baron.”

“He was?”

“Sure,” said Luciano. “He knew everything about being a baron, too.”

“What is there to know?”

“Well, if you are an Italian baron, there’s wine, there’s women of various kinds, there’s food, there’s property considerations, there’s debt, there’s relatives all over the place. He knew all that stuff. But the war came along. The war, my dad always said, was not run by barons for barons, and so barons did not fit the war and the war did not fit the barons.”

Dick laughed.

“Well,” said Luciano, perfectly serious, “that happens. My dad happened to be here in Florida at the time of the war, and he stayed here. Nothing he knew really applied here, I mean, all his information was wrong, because it was Italian information, but he didn’t know that, and so he did what he was in the habit of doing, and by the end of the war, he had a restaurant here that served good wines, he had a wife, a mistress, a couple of nice pieces of property, and some debt, too. So the war ended, and he went back to Italy, thinking everything would just resume where it had left off, but of course Italy was much different. The thing was, my dad was much different, too. Now he knew all about being a baron in Florida, but not much about being a baron in Italy anymore. Here’s what I think. I think the two of them, Italy and my dad, were exactly equal in their difference from what they had been, and if he had made up his mind to really be there, he and Italy would have converged again, but he didn’t know that. He just thought he hated Italy now, but he hated Florida, too, and
he wasn’t much pleased with either his wife or his mistress. So there was his mistake. He thought the problem was in them, but there was no problem.”

Dick was beginning to lose Luciano’s train of thought.

“There is no problem. When I think there’s a problem, I come over here, and I put my hands on the horses, and then I go have a little plate of gnocchi with some gorgonzola sauce, and there’s no problem. If I keep thinking there’s a problem, well, then, I have a little glass of wine.”

Now he came to Rah Rah’s back again, and the horse did the same thing as before—he stretched his head down, closed his eyes, and grunted, only this time his knees started to buckle. Luciano said, “Has he been back-sore?”

“A little frisky when someone first gets on him. Your dad must have stayed in Italy, if you grew up in Rome.”

“He did, but he spent the whole time complaining and wishing he was in Florida, so when I got over here I was supposed to go to California, but I ended up right here!” He laughed.

It was true. Luciano, perhaps because he was half Italian, was much wiser and more comforting than his therapist. Dick said, “Say, Luciano, you want to go back to New York with me? Live up there for the summer season?”

“Hey, I don’t know. I mean, I know it around here. I can’t say. It’s expensive up there. You know, I’ve lived here all my adult life. Sometimes I can’t believe that.”

“That’s a reason to go, then.”

“We’ll see.”

“I’ll have work for you every day, as much as you want.”

“Huh,” said Luciano, leaving it up in the air. And Dick’s assistant, Andy, appeared at his elbow. He said, “Is your cellular turned off? You have six messages from Al Maybrick about the Laurita filly.”

Dick sighed, pulled out his cellular, and turned it on. It rang at once. “Hey hey hey,” said Dick, his cheerful greeting. This was the way he greeted the man he had cuckolded now, much more enthusiastically than he had when his irritability with Al had been simple and pure.

“This is Al Maybrick, Dick. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. I’m a b—”

“Hi, Al. Yes, I’m going to enter Laurita in the handicap. You coming down for it?”

“I don’t know. It’s a big jump in class for her—”

“I thought you were eager for that.”

“I was, but when I talked about it in my group, they said my eagerness was because of my grandiosity, and that I should listen to you more carefully because you are the expert, and not so subject to fantasies and all that.”

Dick’s heart sank at the thought of the two of them trying to come up with
a rational plan together. On the other hand, the coin toss had been decisive. Dick said, “Well, okay, Al. I have thought about it, and I think she’s ready. So let’s do it.”

“We’ll be there,” said Al.

“You and—?” That was good, that pretend ignorance.

“Rozzy and I. She’s not much for racing. I’ve explained everything to her until I’m blue in the face, but she just gets that look, you know.”

Did he know? “What look?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Never mind. I’ll be there, anyway.”

“Great!” said Dick, so utterly, cheesily, frighteningly craven.

B
ONE
B
ONES
, whose baptismal name was Chester Johnson, after his maternal grandfather, surely did need some Pepto-Bismol, probably because he was finding himself in Lowell, Massachusetts. Bone had noticed about himself that his body was like a map of the United States, and the only place that didn’t give him a pain somewhere was his old hometown of Boonville, Missouri. In San Francisco, a town that most of the other members of the entourage didn’t mind, he always had pains in his feet. In New York City, he got headaches that ran around his temples. In Phoenix, his left knee always just killed him. But New England and the Pacific Northwest were the worst—all internal afflictions, stomach pains, liver pangs, sore throats. Anyway, he was out of Pepto-Bismol, so he persuaded Dolly, Ho Ho Ice Chill’s other regular security provider, to stop at the Wal-Mart they were passing so he could go in and get some.

“No shirts,” said Dolly.

“What?” said Bone.

“You’re a sucker for Wal-Mart style. And no flip-flops. Your feet are too big for those things, and they’re ugly, to boot.”

Bone’s stomach hurt so much that he agreed to these restrictions just so that Dolly would quit driving around the parking lot and let him out at the doorway. By the time he was in the pharmacy area, he could barely see, and he realized that he had to go to the bathroom, but he was in so much pain that he couldn’t figure out where it was. He stopped and put his hand out, and leaned against some merchandise. Right then, maybe the most beautiful babe
he had ever seen came around the end of the aisle and stopped in front of him. She was tall and she moved like long grass bending in the breeze, then standing up again. Her lips parted and her eyes widened, and her cornrows shivered and she said, “You okay?”

Her name tag said: “My name is Tiffany. May I help you?”

Bone said, “Where’s the can?”

Tiffany said, “Turn around, then walk straight along. It’s right over there.”

He came out painfree and utterly revived, ready to buy a shirt, he thought, except that he had been forbidden. All members of the entourage were required to buy their clothes in Los Angeles. He went back to the pharmacy aisle, picked up two large bottles of Pepto-Bismol, and carried them to the checkout. The checker was bending down, doing something under the counter, so he didn’t notice her until she stood up and smiled at him, and then he saw that he hadn’t been wrong at all. Here was this Tiffany person again, and even when he wasn’t in pain, her beauty was a balm to his soul, as his grandfather often called things that were especially good, like catfish from the Missouri River by Boonville, breaded in cornmeal, fried in butter, and served with hot sauce and steamed greens. Although he had never actually done this before (he had heard that they did this sort of thing in other groups, though), Bone said in a very cool voice, the way you would have to, “Ho Ho Ice Chill sent me in here to find you, sweetheart. Can you take the afternoon off?” This was made up. Ho Ho was taking a nap.