Horse Heaven (47 page)

He made his way toward what he thought was still an empty stall in a leisurely manner.

William Vance was a middle-aged black man from central Missouri. His first memory was of a mule his father owned named Hyacinth, and his subsequent memories were all of the saddlebred horses his father trained, or retrained, at his little place near Sedalia. His father had begun as a farrier, then added working with sour or broken-down animals and getting them back into the show ring. William had seen his first Thoroughbred when he was nineteen, when he and some friends of his father’s had gone down to Kentucky to a big saddlebred show and sale. One Thoroughbred was enough for William. He’d found a farm to work at as a groom in Kentucky right that day, and stayed behind when his father and the other men had taken their horses home. His father had told him he would never make a living as a black racehorse-trainer, because white men wouldn’t bring their horses to him, so he had made a living as a black trainer for black owners. He had an interest in most of the horses he trained, so when they won he made some purse money. He paid his bills, he did not live at the track, his son didn’t have to work during high school, except when he didn’t get A’s on his homework, in which case he had to clean stalls, something he preferred studying to. William’s win percentage hovered at around 15 percent. He enjoyed himself.

He neared Justa Bob’s stall and heard a groan. The moment he saw that the horse was cast and only semi-conscious was one of the worst moments of his life.

Choosing whether to spend five thousand dollars on colic surgery for a
horse was a decision you had to make beforehand. You had to weigh the animal’s value, both commercial and sentimental, and the potential effects upon his performance. You had to decide whether the animal was a pet, an agricultural asset, or an athlete. You had to know your regular income and expenditures. You had to understand the worth of your nest egg and know your priorities with regard to drawing upon it. William Vance had duly made a distinction among the horses in his barn, which were worth the surgery and which weren’t, but he had no way of deciding into which category to place Justa Bob. He didn’t know the horse personally, and had very little idea of how he ran or what his potential was. He had never done more than run his hands down the animal’s legs and feel his feet, right after the race in which he claimed him. He didn’t even know if he was a good-tempered or bad-tempered animal, though he knew that as a gelding he had no future in the breeding shed. And so, for a short moment that seemed very long, he felt every single impulse as a temptation to sin.

There was the temptation to sin against his bank account, and just call the vet and do what was necessary, even though that very day he had been wondering where the extra money that his son’s life in Middletown, Connecticut, would require might come from.

There was the temptation to sin against manhood, just to turn away and pretend this wasn’t happening. As he was recognizing this temptation, the power browned out again, which reinforced this impulse; he could go right home and turn on the air conditioning and take off his trousers and—

There was the temptation to sin against compassion, to know what was happening, to recognize it, to be present for it, and to watch it happen. As he was recognizing this temptation, the power went on again.

But, in fact, his body was more decisive than his head. Even as he was considering his options, he was calling out for help. Romero came running down the aisle, and they went into the stall and grabbed the horse’s tail and pulled his haunches away from the wall. While Justa Bob was getting himself up after that, William was calling the vet on Romero’s cellular, and the vet was only one barn over, and was answering him, and was on his way. And so the decision had been made, because, once a vet and a trainer got together and started relieving pain and distress, it got to be very hard to stop yourself from going on with it, until the animal was standing and the vet bill was more than you could afford.

It was after Justa Bob had gotten to his feet, though unsteadily, that William realized he was going to carry this out to the end, and that the money would come from somewhere. Why this should come as a surprise to him was what should have come as a surprise to him. He always said, “Well, the money
will come from somewhere, I guess.” He stroked the horse on his sweaty neck and head. The horse’s body seemed to creak—that’s what the groans sounded like.

And so that was how Justa Bob happened to get on a trailer to make the nightmare trek through the snarled traffic to Naperville. At one time there had been a surgery at the track, but no more. It was Naperville or bust, literally, in terms of Justa Bob’s colon. William Vance had the sensation all the way out there that all the cars in Chicago had moved aside to make straight the highway for our Bob. Perhaps that was a sign that the compassionate choice was the right one, but all the time he was driving, William had more misgivings than he could shake a stick at. The surgery was only the beginning. If the horse died, it would be the end, too, but still five thousand dollars, and that might be the better outcome, because the aftercare would cost plenty, and then the horse would be out at the farm, burning hay and oats for three months at least until he could come back to the track and go back into training, as a six-year-old, don’t forget, and sometimes they never come back from colic surgery able to perform. But the only times in his life that William had ever hoped for a horse to die were when the horse was so injured that such an outcome was inevitable and better sooner than later. Right here was the difference between Hakon Borgulfsson and William Vance, even though Hakon was educated, benign, and kindly, and William was irascible and sometimes hard to get along with—Hakon thought that horse injuries and death came to you out of nowhere, the workings of blind fate, and William knew that usually death, and often injuries, too, were choices you made for the animal. Death had been a choice he could never make, even as a wish.

At the clinic, the choice was taken from him as soon as the horse came off the trailer into the possession of the vets, the anesthesiologist, and the assistant. “Come on, fella,” they said. “Easy, now. Keep walking. Here we go.” They took him into the ultrasound room and ultrasounded his belly. William watched this, not knowing what to hope for. The vet knew, however, and there it was, the simple twist in the large intestine, nothing as ugly and life-threatening as it would be in the more delicate small intestine. Then they walked him into the operating room, gave him Rompen and ketamine to collapse him, and eased him down. Then the straps on the rails came over, and they padded and strapped his cannon bones, and the straps tightened as he was winched up and swung over to the table. Then they lowered him onto his back, put rails and cushions around him, and a large tube down his windpipe. William left, and so he didn’t see Justa Bob lying there, his open unseeing eyes flicking left and right as he drifted deeper and deeper into unconsciousness, his
legs in the air as if he were a dog sleeping on its back, flexed, his long black tail draping softly to the ground.

As William drove home, he apprehended from his short experience of Justa Bob in distress the same thing about the animal that all of his owners had discovered, that he was patient, well disposed, and sensible, that he knew some things and could be taught more, that, though he wasn’t pretty or hugely athletic, he was worthy. William sighed the way he always did. The money would come from somewhere, the way it always did. By the time he dropped the horse trailer and the truck at the track, and checked one last time on the other horses in his string, it was nearly eleven o’clock and he was tired. He drove his girlfriend’s car to her house, and when he let himself in with the key, he saw that the lights were out and she had gone to bed. He slipped off his shoes and went softly into the bedroom. Her musical voice murmured, half sleepy, “Hi, babe. I missed you. Everything okay?”

So he took off his clothes and slipped in beside her, and she turned and put her arms around him, and he said, “Yeah, things are okay. Weather’s a bitch.”

“Thanks for coming back. I thought maybe you’d—” and then she was asleep.

At the clinic, saving Justa Bob was fairly routine. They made a six-inch incision through the fascia of the midline. The gas-filled large intestine seemed to bubble out of the incision, and they cut that open. A miasma from the sour, fermenting feed rose around them, not the sweet, healthy smell of manure, but a darker, more threatening odor. Then they cleaned the colon and washed it gently, always touching it as little as possible, knowing that, everywhere they touched it, it could be damaged and later adhere to the walls of the abdominal cavity. When it was clean, they sewed it up and allowed it to fall back into the spacious cavity that it had so recently filled up. Then they stitched the two sides of the abdominal wall firmly together, overlapped them just a bit. If the horse was ever to run again, intestinal-wall fortitude was the key. Then they stapled the shaved skin back together. It was a simple procedure, really, though neither easy nor quick. While they were at it, since the horse was totally relaxed, they cleaned his dangling penis, which Hakon had never bothered to do. Justa Bob was then moved again, swung over to a stall, where he was laid upon his side and where his eyes began to flick back and forth again, showing that he was waking up. As soon as he was mostly awake, the instinct to stand at all costs took over, and up he got, full of painkillers and soon attached by the neck to bags of fluids. His legs were treated and wrapped where he had abraded them. He was petted and made much of.

W
HEN HE GOT BACK
to the West Coast from Saratoga, it was late, after eight, and after nine by the time Farley stopped by the shedrow at Santa Anita just to make sure all the horses were alive and standing. And they were. One two three four five, all the way up to forty-two. It was reassuring, all those haunches in the air. It was thus, perhaps, all the more unexpected when he went into the office and opened the refrigerator for a bottle of water and saw the pig’s head in there, black and white, much bigger in the context of the refrigerator than it had been in the context of the filly’s stall. And even though Farley did recognize the pig’s face, he found himself, a moment later, running down the shedrow to the filly’s stall, just to make sure, and indeed, the filly was eating her hay all by herself, no pig. By now it was nine-thirty, and Farley was going to find Julio, the night man, or call Oliver, but he knew they were sleeping, and anyway, what would they tell him that he couldn’t surmise? The pig was big now. Farley had been half wondering what to do with it. The Guatemalan grooms, probably, had done the obvious thing. No doubt there were a couple hundred pounds of succulent pork scattered around the backside, in this refrigerator or that one. It was reasonable. It was rational. It was the only thing to do.

As soon as Oliver saw him in his office the next morning, he walked in, saying, “We are in deep shit about that pig.”

“I’m sure—”

“I tried to call you, but you’d already left the hotel, and then I tried your cellular.” Accusingly, “I left you a voice mail.”

Farley didn’t confess that he had decided to spend one day without checking his voice mail. He said, “As soon as I opened the refrigerator, I figured—”

“They chased it. That thing was running all around the shedrow and they were chasing it with knives.”

“Who?”

“Mario and Heberto and two of Logan’s grooms, too. He fired his. Horses
were going nuts with the squealing.” Farley stifled a smile, but not quickly enough. Oliver said, sharply, “The track officials are up in arms. You went too far with that pig. You let that pig go on too long.”

“I did,” said Farley. “Did anyone get hurt?”

Oliver shook his head. Then he said, “Well, except the pig.” Right then there was the whoosh of air brakes, and Oliver leaned back and looked out the window of the office. “And by the way,” he said, “Tompkins is sending down another horse.”

“How old?”

“Not a racehorse. You’ll see. He called while you were gone and asked about that filly of his and I told him she couldn’t settle. He’s got a theory about her.” And then he got up and exited. Farley wondered if he planned to quit.

Farley went out and saw the big Tompkins van. The driver had gotten out and was letting down the ramp. Then a woman he recognized at once got out of the cab and came toward him, smiling. That smiling face.

No doubt about it, Joy Gorham was a pretty girl. A little on the diminutive side, a little unkempt, a little androgynous in that horsey way. Her hands were surprisingly big and strong-looking, and Farley knew from watching her that she was built of muscle, the sort of muscle a ninety-pounder needed to get cooperation out of a twelve-hundred-pound horse. But even while Farley noticed all these things, he set them aside. The important thing was that he had seen that face only once before, and yet he remembered it perfectly. That had been a good day, a relaxed day, a day without fear or anxiety. Looking at Joy’s face made the feeling of that day flow back into him, in spite of the pig. Oh, lucky me, he thought.

Here he is, thought Joy, the man with the kindest eyes she had ever seen. Oh, lucky me, she thought. She handed him an e-mail Mr. Tompkins had sent her, watched her read, then had her print out. Mr. T. paused at the top of the ramp, alert. Joy went over and received the leadrope from the driver. Mr. T. descended. He looked about, first at the barns, then at the few horses walking by. She led him down the ramp. Farley went over and gave him a pat on the neck. Then he nudged Farley in the chest with his nose. Of course Mr. T., once dark gray with a diamond-shaped star and a white sock, now white with no distinguishing marks, remembered every human he had ever known. That’s what a horse was obliged to do as a relic of his ancestors’ lives as prey animals. Some humans, like Bucky Lord, were painful to think about, but Farley, his old trainer, was a pleasure to remember. He concurred with Joy’s view that kindness radiated off the man, heat or light, or simply promise and reassurance. Did now, always had.