Horse Heaven (37 page)

Exotic Wood began her move on the turn. Ann Page dropped like a rock. Laurita, who should have been making her move, made no move.

Once, he had been lying on his stomach, half asleep, and he had felt her cool palms and cooler fingers encircle his heels. When he glanced over his shoulder at her face, he saw that she was pondering his feet, it looked like. Looking at her face made his feet get warm.

Laurita still didn’t fire, but another filly, an Irish Kenmare filly, did, and moved up to duel it out with Exotic Wood.

It was 2:00 a.m. on a bus in New Hampshire. Wouldn’t the trumpet have been in its case, under the seat? Did he have it in his lap? In his mouth? Was he playing at it? Looking at it? How could it be that, at the very moment when the trumpet was poised as a weapon, the bus crashed?

Exotic Wood flattened her ears to her head and bared her teeth. The other filly was intimidated, which sometimes happened in races for females, and lost her concentration. Exotic Wood crossed the finish line first, by a length. Laurita
was fifth. Dick got up and went down to talk to the jockey, but it was clear enough what had happened, or, rather, clear enough that something had happened that was fairly mundane.

What did it mean, to do something you loved, something as normally safe as playing the trumpet in a big band, and be killed by it? Where had the wrong choice been made? By whom? Jockeys made life-or-death choices every day, but musicians? As a rule, jockeys’ children did not go on to become death therapists. They often went on to become jockeys.

He knew it was true that his longing for Rosalind had intensified after she broke off their relations. What had happened was, she had met him for dinner at Forty-four’s, on, of course, Forty-fourth Street, while Al was off somewhere and Louisa was teaching late, and over the crayfish risotto she had said, “This is too much for me,” which was quite a surprise, because the whole thing was too much for him, but he’d thought it was not quite enough for her, and so he had said, without meaning to, “Yes,” and had not said what he meant to (or sort of meant to), which was “Don’t,” and Rosalind had turned her head, and he had felt exactly as much relief as sadness, and when she turned her head back to him, she had read that in his face. They finished their meal and split the check, and he had had the sense not to ask if this meant he was no longer their horse-trainer, and she had never touched him again.

This jockey, the son of a jockey, said that she hadn’t liked the footing. A little deep from rain the day before. The filly never really took hold. Dick nodded. Perfectly understandable.

How did the cousin’s own dilemma reflect on his ability to advise Dick about Louisa? Was there a thread here, tying together the trumpet and the cousin and Louisa and Rosalind and the personality of Exotic Wood and all of these solitary moments and thoughts and his utter inability to accept the end of that touching? At the hub of all of this, Dick felt perplexed and overwhelmed. Meanings seemed to press themselves upon him, but what meanings? Wasn’t the lesson of racing that there was no meaning, no pattern, nothing except chaos daily engaged with? Dick thanked the jockey, patted the filly, and sent her back to the barn with the groom to be massaged and made much of. Then he went out to valet parking and asked for his car. When the guy brought it, she wasn’t in it, even though it was commonly said that anything could happen at the racetrack. But Dick was also willing to admit that, during the affair, if Rosalind had unexpectedly appeared, he was as likely to have flinched from her as embraced her, or, rather, first he would have flinched, then he would have embraced, or vice versa. Only now, with embracing out of the question, did he want to be doing it all the time.

W
HEN
B
UDDY GOT
into his Lexus at three in the morning to head for Hollywood Park, he was already in a cold sweat. The press had him on the hot seat every single day now, it seemed like. He was getting as famous as Baffert or Lukas, and even though, let’s say, five years ago Buddy would have licked his chops at the whole experience, now he woke up in a panic every time he managed to get to sleep in the first place, which wasn’t more than every three or four nights. The publicity was all good so far, but any publicity presented Jesus with the perfect opportunity to trick you. Buddy thought this way about everything now. Each morning he got up and prepared himself to negotiate the day’s landmines—avoid them, defuse them, fall into bed eighteen hours from now exhausted from the effort, and lie awake worrying about the day to come.

You would have thought he only had two horses in his stable, Residual the angel filly and Epic Steam the devil colt. They were neck and neck. After breaking her maiden at the beginning of May, the filly had won an allowance and a stakes, in the clear by six to ten lengths and run a close second in another stakes. Now Buddy had her pointed at the Valley Girl Stakes, a week away. The very next day, Epic Steam was running in his fifth race, the Albert Brooks Handicap. After breaking his maiden, also in May, he had bitten his groom in the chest, knocked him down, and pawed him, then won his own allowance, then won the Hollywood Producers’ Stakes and the Century Boulevard Handicap. His running style was different from the filly’s: he was a stalker, and liked to have the pace set for him. On his way through the pack, he had to be restrained by the jockey from biting the other colts, and there was always a moment when the jockey had to make a fuss to get him in front. The choice was to run or fight. So far, with considerable terror on the part of his regular jockey, Rinaldo Ortega, who had always liked to think he could get any horse to go somewhere, the horse had chosen to run. The filly had won $148,000. The colt had won $214,000. Should they both win, the filly’s earnings would rise to over
three hundred thousand, and the colt’s to nearly four hundred thousand. The filly’s owner, an elderly woman with pots of old California money, considered Buddy a natural-born, bona-fide saint for discovering this filly as a twenty-three-thousand-dollar yearling at Keeneland and “bringing her into my life. She is an angelic presence. I am so lucky,” she said to every reporter who called her, interviewed her, glanced in her direction. To Jason Clark Kingston, Buddy’s sainthood was still an open question, but as Epic Steam closed in on half a million dollars in winnings, Jason was thriving on his new status as a sportsman. He had a firm grasp on the fact that the animal’s real fiscal potential was as a stallion rather than as a racehorse. He would therefore have disapproved of Buddy’s current hormonal program for the horse, which included a nice progesterone implant in his neck, underneath his mane, where no one would ever feel it, because no one ever petted the animal. There was nothing illegal about using progesterone in a filly. Trainers did it all the time. It put the gal out of season for the season. But using progesterone in a colt to mitigate his aggressiveness was so unheard of around the track that Buddy knew the animal would never be tested for it.

Buddy liked to think that putting Epic Steam on progesterone was an inspiration from Jesus himself, a demonstration, through Buddy, of Jesus’ charitable nature. The horse was a menace, and the groom’s misadventure had been a specific sign that it was time to do something. Unfortunately, the obvious thing, or at least the obvious mode of doing it, cutting the horse, could not be done, precisely because it was too obvious. The horse had a set of testicles like a pair of grapefruits, and Jason Clark Kingston would recognize their absence. The man himself was a sex maniac, Buddy thought, and Epic Steam’s overt sexual characteristics were the other thing besides the money that recommended him to his owner. There couldn’t be much else—the sort of mooing affection that Residual’s owner showed for her, and that the filly seemed to reciprocate, with nickers and nuzzlings and long warm looks, wasn’t in the cards for a horse that you could hardly approach without a weapon in hand. Jason liked those testicles, and the one time Buddy had done the right thing and urged the owner to have them removed, using the usual excuse, that they seemed to be “bothering” the horse, Jason had said, “Well, if they’re bothering him, then he won’t like having them touched after he works. Let’s try that.” And so Buddy had been obliged to walk up to the horse and grab his testicles right in front of Jason, and he had done so; the horse, for once, had stood like a gatepost. No pain, no gain, at least for those who had to deal with the animal moment by moment. Jason’s problem, as far as Buddy was concerned, was that, even though he knew nothing about horses, he was interested and he was smart. He always knew what was two and he always could get from two to four
to eight to sixteen with no trouble at all. Jason came out to the track all the time.

Press-wise, it didn’t help Buddy that Jason courted news coverage, so the news that he was a successful racehorse-owner was a Godsend for everyone in every section of the paper. The owner of Residual, too, frequented the newspapers, though in the society pages rather than the business pages, and as a mover and shaker of humanitarian causes—she could move the earth (get any number of people to a fund-raiser) and shake the money tree (every fund-raiser she put on broke a record of some sort). All of this was seen by the reporters themselves as a dream-come-true for Buddy, who was portrayed as a hardworking middleweight horse-trainer who had never really made it big. Rather than run down the list of the races he had won over all the years while he was mistakenly thinking he was successful and important, he listened to Jesus and kept this mouth shut and his lips stretched into a charming smile.

A lot of press coverage, though, meant different things to different people, and to Buddy it meant that not only was there the remote chance that someone would get wind of Epic Steam’s implant (was it working? was it not working? Buddy changed his mind every day), there were other remote chances, too.

There was the remote chance that the fact that the truck owned by Curtis Doheny, D.V.M., was parked outside his barn every single day would be noticed by someone and commented upon. Curtis Doheny was a crooked vet. Many years before, when Buddy was mostly running claimers, Curtis and Buddy had worked closely together on several projects, as Curtis liked to say, and very few of their associates had been on a need-to-know basis with regard to these projects. Certainly not any jockeys, exercise riders, other vets, other trainers, owners, racing officials, or officials of the Jockey Club. Curtis’ course in life had taken him through several detoxification programs, and even his dearest friends, like Buddy, had lost confidence in Curtis’ ability to keep his mouth shut. Curtis’ strategy of late had been to engage in a form of advertising. Whenever a trainer was known to be hot, with several good horses running and winning, he would park his clearly marked truck outside that barn, whether or not he happened to be working on any projects with that trainer at the time. The intent, Buddy thought, was to imply to other trainers, specifically the younger and more ignorant ones, that the hot streak was owing to “the old Curtis magic,” as Curtis had been wont to call it. Curtis’ truck had been parked outside of Buddy’s barn for ten days. All he needed was for one of those reporters who actually knew something—for example, Curtis Doheny’s reputation—to ask him about Curtis. Then to ask Curtis about him. Curtis, like all track characters, had a deep well of stories that he liked to dip into, and
no sense about whom they might hurt. For example, he could tell those Marcaine stories, where you would block a joint so the horse would feel no pain. Usually, he would come back alive, but not always. Or there would be the Sublimase stories. Sublimase was a synthetic thing like morphine, kind of. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, though part of the good idea was never to tell the jockey that the drug had been administered, either before or after the breakdown. And how many horses had Curtis nerved for him over the years? You cut the nerve above the knee, and the horse didn’t feel his tendon or his suspensory ligament ever again. Trainers had been doing that for generations, maybe. At any rate, Buddy didn’t think his mentor, Simon Dawkins, who had come from England by way of Australia as a young man early in the century and had known all the tricks, could have run a training stable without nerving 10 percent of the horses he had.

There was the remote chance that one of these reporters would turn up for the first set of the morning, which Buddy liked to have out there just as the sun was rising over Century Boulevard. Should such a reporter be astute enough and have night vision, he might see that the lovely Residual was not quite the girl she had been at the beginning of the season. It would have to be a very astute reporter, because no one—that is, except Buddy—could quite put his or her finger on how the summer campaign was affecting the filly. She still ran easily, with her ears pricked. Her loss had been quickly and honestly attributable to a virus and a fever spiked for many witnesses, some of them unimpeachable. Yes, his vet said, if the filly were 100 percent, she might not have gotten that virus, but a virus was a virus. The press understood a virus. Baffert’s horses got viruses. Skip Away got a virus. Even Buddy, not known as a man of science, could explain to a reporter that hundreds of horses gathered in one spot during warm weather after a wet winter presented a virus with a field day. But with almost a hundred horses in his barn, Buddy also had several vets. He had always had several vets, even in the old days, when most trainers used one vet for everything. Vets differed in their opinions. For example, one of his vets thought the filly was feeling the pressure of the campaign. She had begun to eat less even though she was training hard. That vet put her on some Tagamet every day just to make sure. After a week she began to clean up again. Another of his vets was more philosophical. Of course she was feeling the pressure—that was just something you helped her deal with. First, you gave her progesterone to remove the added stress of going into season every three weeks, then, you know, steroids often had a wonderful effect on a filly, especially if she began to run with colts. Steroids were in common usage, not illegal, though they often made fillies hard to deal with. In fact, Buddy couldn’t see much of an effect upon Residual. She retained maybe 98 percent of her former personality.
Did she run a little harder? Was she a little more competitive? Hard to tell—as a front-runner with speed, she didn’t have to be all that competitive.