Horse Heaven (15 page)

Tiffany rang up the sale, $10.67, and counted $39.33 into his hand. He saw that she wore no makeup, and her fingernails were unpainted and short. She was absolutely and in every way the real thing. She tore his sales slip and put it into the bag with his Pepto, then she handed him the package and said, “Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.” Bone felt more than a little embarrassed, but also a little relieved.

And then, when he had turned and was two or three steps toward the door, she said, “Yes,” so he had to go on with it. Right there, she laid down her little Wal-Mart vest on the checkout counter, and said, “Just let me get my handbag. I’ll meet you at the front door.” When he got to the front door, Dolly was way across the parking lot and Bone couldn’t even warn him to keep a straight face or something. She came up behind him; Dolly pulled up in front. Bone said, “Hey,” and opened the glass door.

When he piled her into the Suburban, Dolly gave her the once-over, and turned to him and said, easy as you please, “Well, for once you came out of Wal-Mart with something worth bringing home.” Bone nodded like he was totally in charge, but actually he had no idea how this had happened or what was going on.

R
OBERTO
A
CEVEDO
wasn’t taking physics anymore. His father and, reluctantly, his mother had let him postpone his last year and a half of high school to keep riding while he was hot, and he was hot. With a double bug that allowed him seven pounds, he was riding at 107 pounds, about the same as some of the women jockeys, but he was strong, and they could put him on anything, it seemed. He had the hands, he had the hands, he had the hands. Everyone around the track knew he had the Acevedo hands the way Mozart had the Mozart ear: everything the other Acevedos had, and something extra. Roberto was superstitious, though. He suspected that the Acevedo hands were really Justa Bob hands, and he persuaded Buddy Crawford to let him ride Justa Bob in every race the horse ran in. It was a case of getting tuned up. Every few weeks, he would sense that he wasn’t quite with it, and he would take a lesson from the Master, come away utterly relaxed and self-confident, and take what he learned to the younger and less experienced horses. Justa Bob’s system was simple, and he never elaborated on it. It was, take a firm but gentle hold, pay attention, and go with the rhythm. Sometimes he showed Roberto how to find an opening, sometimes he showed Roberto how to go wide, and sometimes he showed Roberto how to not be stupid, because sometimes he indicated that, even though he and Roberto could see the opening, he wasn’t quite the horse to get out of it, should he get into it. This was a good lesson for an inexperienced jockey—to learn to pay attention to how much horse he had—and Justa Bob always knew exactly how much horse he was. In four starts, they had a win, a second (by a nose), a fourth (by a nose), and a tenth out of twelve. In this race, Justa Bob had indicated from the beginning that he didn’t care for the size of the field. Justa Bob now had thirty-two starts under his belt. He was six years old.

Roberto was standing there with Buddy when the guy came out and hung the red tag on Justa Bob’s nose. Buddy was philosophical, or, you might say, indifferent.

Though Roberto was intimidated by Buddy (who wasn’t?), he hazarded, “I hope the new owner lets me ride him. He was an education to ride.”

“My bet is, he’s going to Golden Gate or Bay Meadows.”

“Oh.”

“A good claimer here is an allowance horse up there.” He walked away. He didn’t ever have much to say to Roberto.

Roberto knew he shouldn’t be sad about this. But he was glad he happened to be crossing the parking lot when the horse left two days later.

When they pulled him out of the stall, his legs all wrapped and ready to go, it was like seeing your old girlfriend on the street. He was, after all, Justa Bob, a brown gelding with no particular distinguishing features—no star or snip or white foot. He was lanky, with a rather big head, long ears, and a good eye. They led the other horses that were going north up the ramp; several of them were real eye-catchers. Justa Bob was just himself, and no one paid much attention to him other than Roberto, who could see his general air of perfect self-possession and confidence. What really made Roberto sniffle a bit was that he should know the horse so well, know him as well as he knew any of his brothers or his sister, and have to see him walk out of his life forever, know him not in a way that he could talk about, but in his body somehow. They lifted the ramp, the driver got up into the cab, and the semi engine roared to life. Roberto found himself standing beside the groom who rubbed the horse for Buddy, who had come up to watch without Roberto realizing it. They spoke in Spanish. The groom said, “Well, you know what I’ll miss about that horse?”

“No.”

“He’s a real character, you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Every day, he shits in his water bucket. Every day, I clean it out, and I yell and scream about it. Every day, when I get to his stall, he’s standing there, staring at his water bucket, like he’s saying, How did all this shit get in here! I think he’s joking with me!” The groom laughed. “He’s the only horse I got with a sense of humor!”

Roberto laughed. Down at the end of the road, he could see the big Cargill van go past Security and head out to the road, then turn left and rumble away.

T
HE WINDOWS WERE OPEN
, and Justa Bob, one of the last horses on, could see out of them. Fact was, he hadn’t been away from the track, either Santa Anita or Hollywood Park, in almost three years, half of his life. The van rumbled down Century Avenue, past Jack in the Box and McDonald’s, past pawnshops and homeless people, and a man in pink cowboy boots who looked
up at the van and thought about horses he had known in Utah as a boy before the war. If Justa Bob and his companions had been expensive stakes horses heading east, the van would have headed toward the Ontario airport, but it turned north onto the 405 and Justa Bob and his new friends caught just a glimpse of the view from the freeway—the mountains and the cars and the buildings beside the road. They had a chance to contemplate the size of the L.A. basin and the size of the world, and its seething intensity. The van driver, who made this run every two or three days, had long since ceased contemplating the meaning of it all, whether as a manifestation of late-capitalist corruption of natural values by the industrialized commodification of time and distance, or as a manifestation of the human urge to build and then destroy, or as a manifestation of ever-thrusting, goal-oriented maleness pushing toward the blissful unchanging ocean just over the mountains. He sometimes thought how weird it was to be carrying a load of horses and he hoped to God, for he was a churchgoing man, that he never had an accident, because there could be no accident quite as spectacular as one in which a load of horses was involved. And as soon as he thought of that, he made himself not think of it.

After a while, they turned north onto the 5, and that was that for five hours or so. Perhaps the sight of the almond groves of the Central Valley was pleasing for them, or perhaps they didn’t notice, or perhaps they dozed, or perhaps they spent their time (surely some of them did) focusing on how much they disliked the horses beside them, who kicked and pinned their ears unsociably. The ride, at any rate, was smooth, and there were no sudden frightening noises. Sometimes the semi stopped, and one of the men opened the door and checked on them. It was better to move than to stand still. Although they had to brace themselves against the movement, it was soothing. Most of the time, it was quiet in the van, and Justa Bob himself was in a state of grace as much as he was in the State of California. He knew exactly who he was, exactly where he was, no memories, no anticipations. Just as Roberto had noticed about him, he was a smart horse heading down the road toward wisdom. Reaching the goal was inevitable. All he had to do to get there was stand quietly, his weight equally distributed on that most stable of structures, all four legs.

W
HEN THE HORSES
got off the van in the early twilight, at Golden Gate Fields, Fred Linklater, their new trainer, and Jose Quiver, their new groom, thought they looked pretty good. Like all southern-California horses, they looked accustomed to the best of care and the best of accommodations. As a group, they were shiny and sleek, their white markings glistening, their manes pulled, and their tails flowing and tangle-free. They were claimers who had
lived among stakes horses, and, like the worst houses in the best neighborhoods, they had benefited from the association. In fact, Fred always imagined the horses from southern California getting off the van, walking between the shedrows, and glancing around in dismay. Things were damp here. You could smell and hear the bay. The barns were old. The stalls were a little cramped, and the straw didn’t look as deep. Accommodations for horses and grooms were crowded. The horses knew, as the trainers knew, as the grooms themselves knew, that there were mothers and babies and children and men and even old people living in horseless stalls. But of course no one said a thing about it. Everyone was poorer here. There would be no Missing Link (thirty-five dollars per bag), no brown sugar in the feed, no little packets of vitamins. There would be less massage and chiropractic; there would be more bute and less Tagamet. There would be fewer pain-relieving injections of hyaluronic acid to the hock joints and ankle joints. Everyone would be expected to do the best they could for as long as they could. Most important, there would be no return to Santa Anita or Hollywood Park or Del Mar. Those days were gone forever, at least for these horses.

Justa Bob unloaded with his usual equanimity, looked around with his usual alertness. Jose liked him right away. Both Jose and Fred noticed that he was a little off in the right front, which seemed like it was always the case when you claimed a horse. Jose took him to his stall, led him in, turned him around, removed his halter. He didn’t really have time to spend with the horse—others had to be unloaded, too—but he paused to pat the horse on the neck and to speak to him in Spanish,
Caro caballo, muy bueno, sí señor.
You will be good here, no? Win Jose some races, no? Then Jose bent down and blew gently into the nose that Justa Bob always won by (this, like all of his other quirks, they would learn on their own and wonder about). Justa Bob flicked his ears. Then he went over and sniffed his hay (slightly different-smelling from the hay he was used to, but he would eat it eventually); then he went over and scoped out his water bucket. He didn’t take a drink. In the morning, Jose would remember that moment when Justa Bob stood staring at his water bucket and Jose didn’t know why. In the morning, Jose would know why.

S
INCE
F
ARLEY’S HORSES
were in Barn 26 and Buddy Crawford’s filled up Barn 88, Oliver didn’t run into Buddy very often except on the track. Buddy was too nervous to eat, or so it seemed. No one had ever seen him eat anything. He drank coffee and Dr Pepper, cases of which he kept with the supplements in the feed room. Thus it was that Oliver was much surprised and, he had to admit, disquieted when he was coming out of a stall where he had been looking at a new three-year-old filly from France only to see, or, rather, to feel, Buddy blow toward him down the shedrow like a damp gust presaging a storm. The odd thing was, he had no one with him. Normally, he strode around like a member of the royal family—he carried nothing, not money, not cellular phone, not even, maybe, a handkerchief. One assistant trainer on the right side and another on the left were supposed to answer to such requests as “Where’s the God-damned phone?” and “How do you get this God-damned thing to work? Dial the fucking number.”

Nevertheless, here he came, the thing itself, an unaccommodated man. Oliver stepped back into the stall, but saw when he did that he didn’t need to. Buddy’s eyes were focused on the closed door to Farley’s office, where the laminated “Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training” gleamed in a ray of noontime sunlight. Farley’s blinds were open. Oliver could see him inside, leaning over his briefcase, putting things in it.

Now Oliver watched Buddy’s back hunch as he arrowed down the shedrow. After a moment, he saw Farley look up and out the window. A look of surprise crossed his face, instantly replaced by the look of not paying attention or investigating. He closed his briefcase. Buddy flung open the door and closed it behind him. Talk about not investigating. Normally, Oliver liked to linger for a few minutes at noon, sauntering between the barns, glancing in at the horses, washed, dried, wrapped, and bedded, like brooches in velvet boxes, onyx, pearl, amber, garnet, but not today. Rather than linger outside the office,
trying to divine what was going on, he sprinted for the cafeteria. Whatever was going on, there would be news of it there.

Four tables were more or less full. Oliver took his coffee and sat at each for a moment. At the first table he learned that Harry Isenman had kicked out the beautiful English exercise girl he had been living with for the last six weeks because he hadn’t won a race since she moved in. This, he thought, couldn’t have anything to do with Buddy, because he looked at women even less than he ate. At the second table, one of the old-time trainers was telling the story of how Native Dancer got bred—there was the first part of the story, about how Native Dancer’s sire, Polynesian, was suffering some sort of apparently terminal lethargy until he got into a bees’ nest and was stung all over the head into a stakes-winning career. And then the second part of the story, that the great mare Geisha wouldn’t load into the trailer, so, rather than fighting with her, they just walked her across the road to Polynesian and eleven months later came up with, perhaps, depending on your preferences, the horse of the century. Then there was the usual discussion of luck, on the one hand, and who the horse of the century was and why, on the other. At the third table, there was the tiniest lead—Buddy and another trainer who trained for the same owner had gone up to the farm in Santa Ynez over the previous weekend to look at the yearlings. At the fourth table, there was a larger lead. Somebody had been in the racing office that morning, very early, that time when only Buddy was around, and had seen Buddy scratch all his entries for the weekend. During Oliver’s tenure with Buddy, he had been sent over to scratch a horse only one time. Usually, Buddy said, “Aw, let the damn jockey scratch him if he doesn’t like the way he’s going.” But that was the end of it. And, to tell the truth, no one was that interested. That was how you could tell that Buddy hadn’t many friends around. Everyone in the cafeteria was much more interested in Harry Isenman’s love life than in anything about Buddy Crawford.