Horse Heaven (23 page)

Ho Ho had been a rap star for about two years. Tiffany had heard of him. He wasn’t as big as some, was bigger than others. Like the rest of the family, he was dynamite at marketing. He had a real instinct for knowing what people wanted just before they wanted it. He also had his father’s height and build, which made him look more threatening than he really was. He had an entourage. He had girlfriends. He had videos and advisers and hangers-on. What he didn’t have, and where would he get it, Tiffany thought, was a sense of himself as a killer. Instinctively, Ho Ho knew that he wasn’t going to jail, the way that instinctively Roland had known when he was ten that he
was
going to jail. Ho Ho thought that his career might last another year and then he would market something else. But to get that other year, he thought, he had to have some new material, and that was what Tiffany was for, telling him everything she could remember about Roland, which he then wrote verbatim into songs. Although she and Ho Ho did a good imitation of being hot for one another, they weren’t, and they both agreed on this. She didn’t like sex much and Ho Ho was in love with one of his comparative-literature professors from his only year in college, whose Ph.D. dissertation he kept next to her picture by his bed. Tiffany liked the title of her dissertation, “Getting from Here to There: The Visionary Travels of Matsuo Basho.” Even so, when Ho Ho talked about the woman and what she did all day, Tiffany didn’t think that was what she, Tiffany,
would like to do. Nor, when all was said and done, did she want to linger much longer at the lovely house in Connecticut, even though she preferred that to traveling to musical engagements, and most of the entourage liked it so much there, they were ready to move right in. After it was clear that he didn’t expect her to devote herself to satisfying his passions, she often said to Ho Ho, “Well, baby, what do you think I should do?”

School. Office work. Modeling. School again. A restaurant career. Retailing. Property management. School. Actually, thought Tiffany, the surroundings were nicer but the problems were much the same in Connecticut as elsewhere. And the weather was depressing her. There were daffodils out, but it was chilly and damp. It looked like you could go outside, but you couldn’t. Marie offered to teach her to cook, but though Tiffany enjoyed those dishes and very much appreciated their names, she did not want to make any of them for herself or others.

It was Ivy who, when they were sitting around the dinner table one Sunday, eating one of Marie’s cassoulets (another wonderful word, Tiffany thought), said that Ho Ho ought to buy a racehorse. Lawrence shook his head. He said, “That used to be a good tax write-off, ten years ago, but now you’ve got to pay attention to it.”

“What’s a tax write-off?” said Tiffany.

Ivy looked at her kindly. “It’s when you’re making too much money and you need something that you’re losing money on to offset what you’re making.”

“Well,” said Ho Ho. “I like horses.”

“I’ve never seen a live horse,” said Tiffany. “Only on TV.” Everyone was careful to use standard English around Lawrence, even the rougher members of Ho Ho’s entourage.

Everyone at the table looked at her.

Marie said, “Mon Dieu! Chérie, you have never seen a horse? My father back in France, he used to rescue the horses. Once we had thirty horses in our yard, and the newspaper came and took a picture and wrote a piece, and all of the horses went away to homes.”

“I want to win the Kentucky Derby,” said Ho Ho. “I want to be the first black man and rap singer to own a Derby winner.”

“There was a great black jockey, you know,” said Lawrence. “Won the highest percentage of races of any jockey ever. His name was Isaac Murphy.”

“What’s the Kentucky Derby?” said Tiffany. She was sort of joking. But it was always interesting to see where Ho Ho went with her queries.

“Ho Ho,” said Ivy with a laugh, “buy this girl a horse. She needs to be educated.”

Ho Ho turned around in his chair. The chair creaked under his weight. He was one of those big black men who looked fearsome alone on the street. Part of the reason he had an entourage, Tiffany knew, was to reassure white people—no group of black men could dress so outrageously, cop such an attitude, and be so numerous without corporate sponsorship. To not be intimidated by him, you had to get close enough to see his eyes, dark, twinkly, and good, the eyes of a man who could and would still sing the lullaby his mother had sung to him twenty years before. He said to her, “You want a horse, baby?”

Tiffany nodded.

“What kind of horse you want?”

“
Do
you want,” said Marie, correctively.

“What kind of horse
do
you want, baby?”

“The kind of horse that wins the Kentucky Derby,” said Tiffany.

“Well, we’ll do that, then,” said Ho Ho. “Who’ve we got from Kentucky?”

“Lamar is from Kentucky,” said Helen.

“We’ll call him tomorrow,” said Ho Ho.

Though she had never seen a horse in the flesh, he came easily, fluidly into Tiffany’s mind, some kind of red color, like a penny, and shining. Tiffany saw that Marie was smiling at her. She said, “What was it like, having all those horses around?”

“It was a great deal of work. Some of them were very thin and sick. We fed them and brushed them and petted them. They were most grateful.”

“They were?”

“You know, a horse is a very affectionate beast,” said Marie.

Tiffany turned to Ho Ho. She said, “How about after supper, um, dinner?”

Everyone laughed indulgently. That was the way they laughed in the Mortons’ household, always indulgently.

I
T WAS FUCKING COLD
. Even though the stands faced into the setting sun, there was no warmth, and the forty-degree breeze felt like a freezing torrent. In twenty-two years in America, this was the thing Deirdre hadn’t yet adjusted to—the weather: ninety-four degrees and 90-percent humidity in the summer, bitter cold in the winter, and not much in between. The twelve
horses in the race, all of whom had looked chilled in the paddock, were now trotting around to the backside, where the gate stood like an ice tray in the pale sunlight. George was betting. The horse Deirdre was running was named Mighty Again, but in fact he would never be mighty again. Three weeks before, Deirdre had had him gelded in a bid to focus his attention. The owners, two guys in cold cuts, were down on the rail. They had been bettors for years, had only just gotten to be owners. They still preferred it down on the rail and they always wore their lucky clothes when they were running a horse. Their lucky clothes were a motley collection of items from all fashion eras, including the one’s father’s lucky oxfords from the 1940s, when the father in question had hit a 125-to-1 shot at Oaklawn. Deirdre couldn’t decide if these owners had style or had no style, but she liked them. They were Irish way back, Mahoney and Byrne. But that wasn’t why she liked them. There were whole populations of Irishmen that Deirdre didn’t like.

One of these was not George, who came up the steps and sat down. He said, “Good Lard, Cousin, it’s colder than the devil’s navel up here!”

“Don’t be picturesque with me, young man.”

“You’re smilin’, Cousin.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Once in a while you can’t help yourself. Try as you might—”

“Try as I might.”

Deirdre put her glasses to her eyes to watch the loading. Uneventful but lengthy. Twelve horses was too many. Always too many, but especially too many at this time of the day. She sighed.

“Did ya see the filly, then? Ah, you’re smilin’ again, so ya must have.”

“I saw her.” Deirdre had flown all the way to Lexington to have a look at the newborn foal, born perfectly on the first of March.

“And the goddess?”

“And the goddess.”

“Lovely pair. She’s going to make a first-class racehorse, that filly.” Deirdre had brought back pictures.

“Bite your tongue, George!”

“You’re not smilin’.”

“Bite your fucking tongue! I will not have you refer to the future of this filly in any terms whatsoever, bad or good!”

George looked at her, then nodded. “I apologize, Cousin.” His handsome face was serious. He meant it. The bell clanged, and they remembered to watch the race.

The twelve horses came out in a good line, no one lagging, no one bolting. Deirdre had her glasses trained on Mighty Again, and saw that he was running
fairly well, settling. It took about a month for the testosterone to clear a new gelding’s system, but the horse’s attitude showed definite improvement, as it had in training. Now the field was bunched along the backstretch the way twelve claimers would be—no strategy, no system, just trying to do the best they could.

If only it hadn’t been the front-runner, the number-five horse, who had gone to the rail right away and pulled ahead. It was a piece of special bad luck that it was the front-runner, because, when he stumbled and flipped, landing on his side crosswise, he landed in the path of every horse behind him, and over the next ten seconds four of them went down, one by one, like dominoes. Jockeys went down, too. Two horses managed to check and go around, one of which lost his jockey, and six pulled to the outside of the track fairly smoothly. Perhaps they ran home. Deirdre could not have said. George was on his feet, screaming. So was she. So was everyone. As soon as the last horse went around, the ambulance that followed the race was there, and Deirdre could see the vet’s car and the horse ambulance come onto the track. Deirdre strained her eyes and her glasses to see Mighty Again; he was a bay. One bay had gotten up. Someone grabbed him, and when Deirdre focused on him, she saw that his hoof was dangling. That didn’t make much difference to him, though. He wouldn’t be able to feel it for fifteen minutes or so. Deirdre caught his look in her glasses. It was a look of astonishment, and it wrung her heart. Four horses in one accident! God in heaven! Now two were on their feet, but Mighty Again was still down. She said to George, “Let’s go.”

They ran down from the boxes, through the betting arcade, down the steps, and out the gate to her car. She hated not being able to see anything, but she knew what was out there anyway. Death lay before them. It was only a matter of how many and who. She muttered, “Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, us horse-trainers, who have brought these poor beasts to this pass. Make their suffering short and show them your mercy. Amen. Why didn’t I wait? Why did I bring this horse to Philadelphia?”

She pulled next to one of the barns, jumped out of the car with George, went under the backstretch rail, and stood up. Briefly she took his hand. Then they went over to Mighty Again, who lay on his side, his eye rimmed with white, from fear, and his lips slightly parted. He looked normal, but he hadn’t gotten up, which was unusual for a horse. Horses hated to be down. Dominic, the jockey, was kneeling beside the horse’s head, his own face covered in dirt and blood. Ronald, Mighty Again’s groom, who had run across the infield, was squatting on his haunches, just shaking his head from side to side. Deirdre said, “Dom? Are you hurt?”

“Rib is all. Broke rib or something.”

“Dear, get into the ambulance.”

“They all went down together. How did they? We were up and then we went down. I don’t get it. Just tell me.”

She took his hands and turned him away from the horse. “The lead horse flipped, darlin’. Now you’ve got to get into the ambulance.”

“I’m okay.”

“Maybe. We’ll take care of the creature.” She touched her hand to his face. “Get into the ambulance, love. I don’t want any of your inner parts bleedin’. You’re a good boy.”

He got into the ambulance.

Mighty Again was still breathing, but his breaths were noisy and labored. His eye was now closed. He had never been one of her favorite horses, trouble from the beginning, and not very smart, but he had a pretty head. She knelt beside him and smoothed his mane along his neck, saying, “There now, sweetheart. You’ll be fine in a moment.” Ronald, who had complained about the horse, too, had tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t saying anything. The vet came up, the head vet here, whom she only knew by sight. He knelt down beside her and said, “We’ve got to roll him over.”

“This is bad.”

“It doesn’t look good that he’s not getting up.”

“What happened?”

“My guess is, the front-runner blew his aorta. His gums are white as paper. His jock got stepped on, but he can move everything. Another jock’s out cold. None killed. We might have lucked out.”

Mighty Again’s bulk was warm and huge. Never was a horse so huge as when you had to get him up. Once, at a show, a jumper belonging to another trainer had collapsed in the trailer, his legs underneath him. The only way to get him up was to whip him and encourage him until he made up his mind to get up; in that tiny space, there could be no lifting. But Mighty Again, stretched out in the middle of the expanse of sandy racetrack, they lifted. They wrapped slings around the knees and hocks, then, with some people pulling from behind, and some pushing from in front, they got his legs in the air, up and over. He groaned a deep hollow groan. As soon as he was over, he stuck out a foreleg and stood up. It was clear what the problem was—the left shoulder, the one that had been underneath before they rolled him over, was smashed, and he had a long gash along his rib cage, which was dented, as well. He stood on three legs. His left foreleg dangled. Deirdre looked at the vet. She said, “He’s a goner.”

“He’s a goner.”

“God in heaven forgive me for this sin.”

“Deirdre, it was an accident.”

But she shook her head.

Ronald led Mighty Again over to the horse ambulance, a matter of four steps or so, and the horse paused, then got himself in. Deirdre said, “George, go get the owners and bring ’em to the barn if they want to come. We’ll wait to euthanize the horse until we’ve talked to them.” There the two horses were, in the horse ambulance, a broken shoulder and a broken leg. They would be dead by the start of the next race, Deirdre suspected. She shook her head. The front-runner was already so dead that he no longer looked like a horse. The fourth horse was lying there, too. She glanced at the vet. He said, “Broken neck.” Deirdre groaned, feeling herself surrounded. She said, “Is this what it feels like on a battlefield?”