Horse Heaven (24 page)

“I think so,” said the vet.

She looked across the field at the grandstand, at all the eyes and bodies straining to see and know what she saw around her and knew. It was too much. The physical enormity of death was too much for her—too much blood, too much bone, too many rasping breaths, too much sweat and stink too suddenly. She had seen several deaths, human and equine, over the years. She had almost died herself, for that matter, when she got pneumonia after breaking her back. How many times did you have to come back to it before you could stand it? It seemed like her ability to do so was growing weaker rather than stronger.

Behind her, George said in a low voice, “Nel mezzo del cammin’ di nostra via.”

She looked at him and replied in English, “I have lost the path, George.” Her cousin’s blue eyes were as beautiful as they could be, but there was no salvation in them. They walked together behind the horse ambulance as it made its funereal way down the track.

F
IRST THEY STOPPED
by the liquor store his dad owned, and Jesse got a candy bar out of the cabinet while his dad opened the register and took out a handful of money. He didn’t even count it, but just shoved it in his pocket. After they got in the car, Jesse surreptitiously looked down at his father’s socks. They matched, plain gray. They also matched his pants. That was a relief. They traveled in silence for a while, and Jesse stared out the window.
He rather liked the drive out to Santa Anita. It was long and sunny. Along about the time they were passing under Highway 5, his dad piped up: “Ah, Jesse! Look at that tree, there. That’s a beautiful tree. You know, that tree’s been sitting by the side of this road for fifty years, I’ll bet, and I never noticed it before. You go through life, and you travel the same road over and over, and all of a sudden you notice something. That’s a gift. That tree tells me something. That tree tells me we’re going to have a good day. Don’tcha think?”

“I hope so, Pop.”

“I got my lucky socks on. You got your lucky socks on?”

“We hit that daily double that time when I had these socks on.”

“Your mom wash ’em since?”

“Well, yeah.”

They pondered this together, then Leo said, “Well, maybe that doesn’t matter.”

“Dad, I’ve worn them a lot of times since. We hit that daily double last summer.”

“But not to the track?”

“Not to the track.”

“This is the first time you’ve worn them to the track since then?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then.”

Jesse let out his breath.

Leo began to sing. Then they pulled off the highway and drove into the parking lot—on a lucky day they always parked in preferred parking, so they wouldn’t have to walk so far. That was five dollars. That was a part of your overhead, which you wanted to keep as low as possible. They parked, got out of the car, and locked it. There were two things his father never looked at at Santa Anita—the shopping mall next door and any Mercedes Benz automobiles that might be parked between him and the gate. It was okay if Jesse looked at them; in fact, it was better if Jesse spied them and reported them. Today there weren’t many, and Leo managed to keep his head down. He counted the money, too: $278.32, with the $.87 Jesse had in his pocket. They had to combine their money. That was lucky, too.

They were almost to the gate, and no Mercedes, when disaster struck. “Ah, fuck,” said Leo, softly and seriously. Jesse knew he shouldn’t, but he did it anyway. He said, “What’s the matter, Pop?”

“I looked at a fucking nun.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe I looked at a fucking nun. There she was, and I looked at her!”

Looking at a nun was the worst thing you could do, Jesse knew. Now they might as well go home. He looked around, though. Nothing. He proffered, “I don’t see any, Pop.”

“Over there.” Leo gestured toward the west without daring to look. Still Jesse saw no nuns, not even any women. But Jesse knew better than to argue. After a moment, he said, “Do you want to go home, then?”

Leo stopped walking and turned to Jesse. He had a very serious look on his face, and he put a hand on each of Jesse’s shoulders. Jesse lifted his face and looked his father right in the eye, as he had been told to do many times. “Jesse,” Leo said. “Jesse, son. On the one hand, we’ve got the, uh, you know.” Yes, the nun. “And on the other, we’ve got the socks, two pairs, the tree, no Mercedes, no shopping mall, and almost three hundred bucks. I’ll tell you what. Here’s the
Racing Form.
” He pulled it out of his pocket and opened it to the first race. “Read those starters.” Leo threw back his head and closed his eyes, listening.

Jesse read, “Lonesome Jones, Howdy Babe, Hickey’s Prince, Gottalotta-yotta, Prigogine, Sandtrap, Baby Max, and Holy Mackerel.”

Leo remained silent, mulling, for a long moment, and then said, “Don’t you have a friend named Max?”

“No,” said Jesse. “No Maxes.”

Leo threw up his arms. “Okay, then! Let’s go! That may just turn the trick. Let’s go look at some horses, boy!”

They passed through the gate, where the woman smiled and said, “Hi, Leo! Have a good day, now,” then went through the betting hall and out again, onto the tiled apron that sloped down to the homestretch, the finish line, and the winner’s circle. It was a sunny, clear day, a good March day, and the arc of the mountains was dark green against the blue sky. Since it was Wednesday, there weren’t many people in the stands yet, and so Leo staked out his spot—he had his
Racing Form
, covered with the notations he’d made after dinner the night before, his seat cushion, which he always brought but never sat on, his binoculars, his thermos of coffee, and his extra pens for making more notations on the
Racing Form
if he had to. He was smiling. He ruffled Jesse’s hair and said, “Well! Got here! Good deal! Really, this is the best place in the world, don’t you think? Hard work, harder than standing around the liquor store, but better, in the end.” Leo took a deep breath and threw his shoulders back, looked around his personal domain, and then said, “Okay, boy! Better get to work, there’s money to be made.”

In the first race, a thirty-thousand-dollar claiming race of seven furlongs, for three-year-olds and up, they boxed Lonesome Jones and Sandtrap in the exacta. Sandtrap was the favorite, but Leo thought he was coming down from
his peak form. Lonesome Jones, however, had had a bad trip in his last race, his first start after a six-week layoff. He’d been bumped in the backstretch and gone wide on the turn as a result, but still come in third by only a head. His speed ratings in his previous starts had been at or close to the top for the horses in this race, and Leo thought, as a three-year-old, the animal could still manage a jump. Best of all, he was a good bet—the morning line often-to-one had dropped, but not very far, only to eight-to-one. Sandtrap was clearly the class of the field. Even coming off his best form, he was a contender, and the bettors were backing him heavily. Leo also boxed the two horses with a horse he liked in the second race, See Me Now, for the daily double. After placing his bets, he was very calm, and stood with Jesse in the grandstand to watch the horses make their way to the gate, which was positioned in the chute, as far away from the grandstand as possible. The announcer, whose pronunciation was clarion-crisp, said, “The horses are approaching the starting gate. The horses have reached the starting gate. We have Lonesome Jones in. Now Howdy Babe,” and on down the line, to Holy Mackerel. There was a pause, then a clang, and the gates were open and the horses were away. Leo’s binoculars were pressed to his head, and he was deadly silent. Jesse could see only the colors of the jockeys’ silks, but he knew that Lonesome Jones was in purple, and that purple was trailing by open lengths. The favorite was one of two horses in yellow. One of the two was in the lead. “All right!” breathed Leo, as the purple horse began to pass the others. And the announcer said, “And we have the number-one horse, Lonesome Jones, now passing Howdy Babe and Prigogine. Still on the lead is Sandtrap, the favorite.” Leo began to get more agitated as the horses came around the turn, bouncing up and down on his toes. Jesse could see them clearly now, from the front, their heads down, their feet up, the tiny rounds of their toes reaching up and forward, echoing the tiny rounds of their flared nostrils. Then they came into the homestretch, and the angle was different. They were horses now, pulled out like rubber bands from their noses to their tails, with the jockeys on top, also pulled out, hands, arms, heads, backs, and then the curl into their legs. Some of the jockeys’ colored arms were rising and falling, another stretched-out thing, a shoulder, an elbow, an arm, a hand, a whip. Behind Jesse was a lot of yelling, and beside him, too, from his father, because there came Lonesome Jones on the rail, finding a hole and slipping through it, eating up the track. By contrast, the red horse fell back, the green horse fell back, the blue and the black-and-tan horses fell back. Leo’s hand was on his head, and suddenly pressed down as the horses crossed the finish line. In a moment, the tote board flashed “Photo Finish,” and they had to wait. But Leo was sure. “They did it! They did it! I knew it! Perfect pick! One and six. That’s always been a great pick for me, because I dated this girl when I
was sixteen, her name was Peggy Sue! It really was, and that song was such a great hit that my statistical average with one and six over the years has been way out of the normal range! Now, you’ve got to have the information to back it up—only losers just bet patterns—”

The results flashed, and the winner was the number-seven horse, Baby Max, by a head. Lonesome Jones and Sandtrap were second and third.

“God damn!” said Leo.

That meant that all bets were off, the exacta, the daily double. Sixty dollars, Jesse thought, gone already. He said, “Hey, Pop, lets go home.”

Leo was staring at Baby Max, who was being led into the winners circle, but he shook himself and looked down at Jesse and smiled. “Nah, nah. We’re here. We’ve just got to work a little harder. Here, here’s ten bucks for something to eat. Go away and leave me alone for a while, I got to concentrate and you’re a little distracting. It isn’t your fault. I just have to get into a zone, you know. That’s a good boy.”

Jesse took the ten and followed Baby Max and his associates as they walked under the stands and out into the open air. The jockey and the trainer were smiling, but professionally so. This was only the first race of many today for the jockey. Jesse liked looking at him. He was, in fact, about Jesse’s height, but he walked like a man, and a very self-confident one, at that. When he looked up at the trainer to tell him about the race, he didn’t seem to be looking up, but to be looking down. Jesse liked looking at jockeys, and always tried to do so. They had different stomachs and backs from anyone at the track, strong, straight, supple, powerful. Something in their stomachs, as far as Jesse could see, was the thing that made them able to hold those horses. Leo didn’t pay much attention to jockeys, and had advised Jesse not to. “A winner never bets the jockey,” he said, but Jesse always thought that if he could get what the jockey had in his stomach into his own stomach other things would go away—butterflies, gas pains, that feeling that all his insides were dropping.

Out in the open air, he saw that the horses for the second race were leaving the saddling enclosure to go to the paddock.

Leo didn’t like watching the horses get saddled, or the paddock parade. He said it was too confusing, and that you ended up betting hunches when you should be betting form, numbers, past performances. Watching the horses in the saddling enclosure was like tempting yourself to fall in love at first sight, and if you couldn’t control yourself, then you had to control your circumstances, which Leo did by staying inside the track. Jesse liked the preliminaries the best, though. It allowed him to think that horse racing wasn’t really about betting, but about looking at the animals. The coolest thing about them was that they were all different. For example, in the second race, for maiden two-year-old
fillies, there were six entries idling with their connections. Of all the fillies, only one was calm. She was a chestnut, number two. She stood quietly with her head up and her ears pricked while her trainer smoothed the number-cloth over her back.

“That’s Buddy Crawford, that trainer,” said a woman standing next to Jesse. “He’s won a lot of races. They say he’s kind of a crook.”

Jesse liked the horse, though. He looked at the program. Her name was “Residual.” Jesse leaned on the barrier to get a better look at the filly. The people around the filly put the saddle on her, then did the girths. They petted her a lot, and Jesse could see why. She was very shiny, but even apart from that, something about her made you want to pet her. He wanted to pet her himself. Around her, all of the other fillies were doing something—twisting their necks or jumping around. One stood there rigid with tension, lifting one foreleg and curling it under herself, then putting it down and lifting the other. The only thing Residual did was rub the side of her nose gently on the sleeve of her groom one time, as if, Jesse thought, she was reassuring him. Now the number-one filly headed out, and Residual followed her. Behind them, the last four fillies made a ruckus, but Residual only looked at the fans lining the rail of the walking ring, and when she came to the spot where she was supposed to receive her jockey, she stopped and stood. Jesse took one last look, and ran under the grandstand. Leo was sitting on the concrete steps, still studying his form. Jesse went up to him. As Residual walked onto the track, he exclaimed, “Look at number two, Dad! You’ve got to bet on her.”

“I never bet maiden two-year-old fillies,” said Leo. “That’s like playing the lottery.”

Jesse looked up at the tote. He said, “Her odds are six to one. That’s good odds.”

“Those are good odds, yes. But I have standards, Jesse.”

Jesse said, “It’s Pincay, Dad.”

“Even so.” He put his hand on Jesse’s shoulder and looked him in the eye, then said in a very serious voice, “Jesse, son, these little girls don’t know a thing about racing. The gate is going to open, and they are going to be wondering what to do next. Anything can happen—”