Horse Heaven (74 page)

Andrea Melanie, who was to convince Jason to foot the bill, thought they were all still traveling blissfully down the freeway toward her own starring performance in the greatest winner’s circle in America.

Buddy reminded himself several times that Keeneland was a destination rather than a goal. First you called Tex Sutton horse transport, then you put the filly on a van with her groom and her stuff, then she walked up the ramp onto the plane and was led into her stall. The back of the stall was set in place, and eleven or so other three-year-olds, some of them less famous than Residual and some of them more so, were led on, stalled in. The grooms got out their sleeping bags and their coolers and their magazines and their Diet Cokes and arranged themselves in the aisles between rows of horses.

After considering her personal requirements with regard to accommodations and nutrients, and weighing those against the chance to do yet another new
thing in the world of horses (she had flown FedEx and KLM, but never Tex Sutton), Marvelous Martha decided to go along, and it was a good thing she did.

Residual, of course, loaded onto the van calmly, unloaded calmly, stood at the bottom of the airplane ramp calmly, and loaded into the plane calmly. She was wrapped like a birthday present, green fur over her poll and around her nose, green wraps around her legs and tail, a soft, light, green sheet covering her from withers and chest to tailhead. She was the third-to-the-last horse on, against the far wall, just in front of the ramp. She hadn’t needed to be tranquilized, but Marvelous Martha had a couple of syringes in her purse, just in case. Of course it was an essential rule of horses that time is not of the essence, but they were loaded and taxiing down the runway by 9:00 a.m., only an hour and a half after the scheduled takeoff. As soon as they were in the air, Residual and her two companions began nosing their hay nets full of timothy, and Marvelous Martha took out her cooler and opened it. She had a banana-raspberry smoothie with apple-blossom honey, two slices of raisin challah with fresh cream cheese, a small thermos of cranberry juice, some water crackers, and a jar of gefilte fish. She set these out. For later, she had an individual quiche florentine, a cold liter of sparkling apple juice, and a fruit compote. To read, she had a copy of
A Chakra and Kundalini Workbook
, by Dr. Jonn Mumford. The other grooms and exercise riders were about half her age and not similarly equipped. She had just opened the book to the chapter on solar-plexus charging, something that would certainly come in handy in any horse-related activity, when she heard the first clang. She didn’t think anything of it. Above and to her side, Residual flicked her ears and went back to eating. A clang came again. Marvelous Martha looked up. Some of the other humans and all of the other horses were looking up, too, up and forward. The clang came again. Marvelous Martha took a bite of her challah, then packed everything neatly back in her cooler and closed it. She was a methodical person. She stood up, gave Residual a pat on the neck, and strolled forward to the front row of stalls. She did not like what she saw there, which was a bay colt tossing his head and rolling his eyes and trembling. Every time the metal stall partitions between himself and the horses to either side of him made a noise or even vibrated, the horse flinched and jumped. The pilot had the curtain open between the cockpit and the cargo area, and he was speaking to the groom. The groom was saying, “Yeah, I gave him the shot.”

“Give him some more.”

“I don know, boss, he might fall down. I don know.”

“Are you the only person with the horse?”

“Yeah, boss. The horse always good before. Never like this.”

Some other grooms were standing around. They parted when Marvelous
Martha came up behind them. Even the pilot was younger than she was. She said, “May I help?”

“This horse has got to calm down,” said the pilot.

Marvelous Martha went to the horse’s head, and he noticed her, which was a good sign. She stroked him along the neck and head, took his ears in her palms, fingered their tips. He let her do it, but when the metal partition creaked again, he jumped again. She asked the groom if she could give the horse another shot. He shrugged. The pilot said, “Give the horse another shot.” She gave the horse another shot.

But it was no good. Even after the few minutes it took for the tranquilizer to have its effect, the horse was trembling and rolling his eyes. Marvelous Martha couldn’t tell if it was something about the sound or something about the vibration or something about the metal itself. She stroked and talked: “Relax, sweetie. It’s all right. You’re a good boy.” The horse reared up six inches and caught himself against his tether. That frightened him even more, and he reared up again. The horses on either side of him were now moving restlessly, and the horses behind him were paying close attention. The interior of the plane suddenly seemed very small, very crowded, and very fragile. They were an hour into the flight, somewhere in Arizona. The horse’s own groom now leaned over and threw up.

“Oh, God,” said the pilot, closing the curtain.

The horse’s groom sat down, put his head between his knees, and closed his eyes. Marvelous Martha said, “What’s your name?”

“Maurilio,” he groaned.

“Maurilio, look at me. Take your wrists in your hands like this and press your thumbs against this spot, and you’ll feel better.”

He did so.

“Feel better?”

“Sí.”

“Now clean that up.”

But the horse was snorting and stamping now, and throwing his head. You could take your pick, thought Marvelous Martha—an angry horse, a stubborn horse, a fearless horse, and a panicked horse. The one you never ever in your whole long life with horses wanted to see, as mean as some of them could be, was the panicked horse. She held tight to his halter as he threw his head, and he lifted her right off the ground. You could feel the strength of the adrenaline pumping through him in that one moment alone. She pulled back the curtain between the horse and the cockpit, and she said, “He’s getting out of control. What do you usually do?”

“Shoot him or land.”

“Are we to that choice yet?”

“You tell me.”

Marvelous Martha regarded the horse. Sweat was pouring off him. Stamping around had caused his wraps to slip down under his feet, and two of them were flapping, but of course there was no going into the stall to fix anything. He was jerking at his ties now, and the two horses beside him were beginning to sweat, too. Panic could shoot around a herd in a heartbeat; in fact, panic did shoot around herds in the pounding of hearts. The quickest information passed between any two horses was always: Time to flee. He reared up again. She said, “Time to choose.”

The pilot said, “I’ll land, then.”

They landed in Texas, West Texas, on a runway barely distinguishable from the forbidding sagebrush prairie around it. The wind was blowing. Steers were standing on the other side of some rusty barbed wire, chewing their cud and staring. Dismembered pickup trucks lay here and there. It was hot, midday. There was no water. All of the horses had to be unloaded, all of the stalls taken apart. The panicked horse had to be left behind with his groom; providing for him took an hour on the phone. The other horses had to be led around. They wanted to try out the grass, which was at least green, but they couldn’t go into it, because it was full of holes and metal junk. Frustration and bad behavior ran through them, and even though Residual was the best behaved and the best provided with caretakers, she was the one who got kicked, right in the left hock. Later, when she told Buddy about it, Marvelous Martha did not tell Buddy she had seen it coming, but she had. One of the fillies was backing up toward another horse, yards away from Residual. Residual was minding her own business, but her groom, a good groom, decided to get a little farther out of the way, so he led her off, and here came that angry filly, dragging her groom, and she went right up to Residual and she whipped around and laid one on her. If that wasn’t karma, Marvelous Martha thought, then what was?

O
NE THING
Dick had noticed over the years, say forty-five of them, the length of his life, was that there was often some little thing that you hadn’t paid much attention to at the time that rose up to destroy you later. He knew that “destroy” was a strong word, but it was the word he chose. What happened was, on the day after the Paumonok, the starter came to him and
said, in a mildish tone of voice, “That Epic Steam horse needs some more gate-training. He delayed the race yesterday, and I don’t want that anymore.”

Dick, of course, had nodded. Horses sometimes needed more gate-training. The gate was a frightening, dangerous thing, a technological answer to the second-oldest question in horse racing—after “Who’s the fastest?” you got “Did they get off at the same time?” To use a starting gate with fit, lively, youthful Thoroughbred horses was emphatically to make the best of a bad situation. Horses fell down in the gate, fell over in the gate, fell backward in the gate, and even if none of those things happened, when they jumped out of the gate, the stress on their spines, pelvises, and hips of leaping from a standstill to a gallop was something neither God nor nature had provided for anatomically. And Dick’s understanding of this was all very well, but it did not make Epic Steam one whit more willing to go into the gate.

With a perfectly tuned sense of his own leverage in any situation, the dark colt used the attention that his associates were paying to this dilemma to demonstrate the many ways in which he was not in sympathy with their plans for him. Dick tried to listen to Frankie, who, of course, was the person most often in the gate with the horse. Frankie said, “If he’s gonna go in, he’s gonna go in. If he’s not gonna go in, he’s not gonna go in.” Dick recognized this as a tautology, but at the same time it had the ring of truth about it. The question was, how many times did you try it out, to see if he was gonna go in? On the one hand, each try irritated the animal. On the other hand, the first principle of horse-training was that if you allowed the horse to succeed in having his way he would understand all the more clearly his strength relative to yours, his ability to intimidate you relative to your ability to intimidate him.

As a result of this being the first principle of horse-training, it was a principle that had been applied to Epic Steam since birth. He understood it perfectly as the first principle of survival—every time a human ratchets up the pain, the horse must ratchet up the resistance. There is never so much pain that resistance is impossible; rather, the more pain there is, the more resistance is necessary. Epic Steam was a well-trained animal. He always took pain as a sign that something was coming and he’d better get ready.

Thus it was that, on the very first day of gate-training, when Frankie urged him just a little harder than usual to get up to the gate, he pricked his ears and propped his forelegs, and refused take a step some five or six yards back from the open doors.

Frankie waved his whip.

The horse rolled his eyes and tossed his head.

Frankie said, in a rough voice, “Get up there!”

The horse backed up a step.

Frankie bethought himself before bringing the whip down on the horse’s haunches, and called to a couple of assistant starters. He said, “Okay, start over.” He turned the horse in a circle to the left, then a circle to the right. He walked away from the gate, walked around the gate. The men opened the gate front and back and stepped away from it.

The horse was not fooled. As soon as Frankie got the idea “gate” in his mind, the horse stopped dead. Frankie chirped to him, gave him a little kick, closed his eyes, and tried to relax. The horse bucked.

Frankie hit the ground.

Frankie was unhurt.

The horse ran off a half-dozen steps, then stopped and turned around.

Just this, just this single evidence of interest in him, prevented Frankie from losing his temper. He got up, waved off the other men, and went over to the horse. He took the reins over his head and led him back to the open gate, then walked him through it.

Someone threw him up on the horse, and he walked the horse through the open gate again, this time mounted. After that, he said, “Okay, that’s enough. I’m not going to press my luck.”

Frankie, Dick thought, had done a good job. But that didn’t change the fact that the horse was further behind in his gate-training after the first day of gate-training than he had been after the race.

F
IVE DAYS LATER
, Dick and Frankie and Herman Newman were in Dick’s office with the door closed, discussing what had happened. At this point, Herman Newman looked more confused than unhappy. Dick knew that that would change. He said, “So the result is, I’m sorry to say, that the horse has been ruled off the track.”

“Tell me again what that means,” said Herman Newman.

“Epic Steam isn’t allowed to train or run at Belmont. He savaged a man.”

“I don’t see how his behavior was exactly savage; I mean, I understand what he did, but—”

Frankie piped up. “I had a good grip on his mouth. I just had the feeling that he was thinking something, so I had a good grip on him, but he jerked me right out of the saddle—”

“ ‘Savagery’ seems so strong a term—”

“It’s just a word we use. I mean,” said Dick, knowing he was lying, “we don’t know that the horse had savage intentions.”

“So tell me again. The guy—”

“Assistant starter.”

“In the gate with him.”

“Yes, holding his bridle.”

“And you were there, Frankie.”

“I was waiting for the gate to open.”

“He reached over and grabbed the guy by the shirt.”

“He took a piece out of his chest, too,” said Dick.

“And he pulled him down under his feet. Or the man slipped down.”

“Sir,” said Dick, carefully, “I believe that he pulled the man down.”

“But we don’t know that. We can’t read the horses mind.”

Yes, we can, thought Dick.

“And then he stepped on the man and broke his leg at the ankle.”