Horse Heaven (76 page)

“Walk her around,” said Sam, thoughtfully, “she’ll be okay.”

But it still seemed like another thing to Krista. Did every strange thing in the world have to happen to them?

Himself looked more surprised than anything else, that and tired. He shook his head impatiently.

Sam said, “Ejaculatory incompetence.”

“Is that a disease?”

“No, just an event. Okay. Okay. I’ll do what I once saw your grandfather do.” He went over to his truck while Krista and Pete kept the animals moving.

Sam brought back his stainless-steel bucket, the twitch, a coil of rubber hose, the mouth pump, the funnel, and a pint bottle of a clear liquid. In a moment he had twitched Himself, and had Pete holding the twitch. Himself stood there with his head forward, his eyes half shut, that look on his face of a twitched horse, half pained, half pleasured, all lost in space. He might be being treated for colic. Only his erection showed that there was something else going on. Sam fed the tubing down the stallion’s nostril coil by coil. Himself did not object. Then the vet put the mouthpiece in his own mouth and cleared the hose. Finally, he poured the clear liquid slowly down the funnel into the hose and into the horse’s stomach. It was so quiet Krista could hear the birds singing and the maple leaves sighing. Krista sighed herself. In a moment, Sam was finished, and he eased out the tube. Pete untwisted the twitch. Himself came to, and bent his head down to rub his lip on his knee.

“What was that?” said Krista.

“Gin,” said Sam. “He was just a little overexcited. We’ll wait a few minutes for the medicine to take effect.”

“A pint?” said Pete.

“Basically a shot and a half, at his weight. We’ll see.”

And they did see. And it was pretty good, Krista thought; if not that, then at least a relief. The mare was cooperative, the ejaculation was thrilling. Later, when Krista came out from putting the mare away, giving her a bag of carrots and a nice big flake of grass hay, Pete and Sam were drinking shots of their own, but of bourbon, not gin.

Krista came up to them. “Why gin?” she said.

“Well,” said Sam, “your grandfather used to say racing is an English sport of long tradition. Gin would be the traditional remedy. I think of it as a kind of veterinary heredity, just like, and parallel to, all these horses descending from Eclipse.” He regarded his glass for a moment, one of the ones Krista and Pete had gotten for their wedding. Then he said, “Let’s make this a courtesy call. I always wanted to try that gin cure. Bottoms up.”

F
ARLEY THOUGHT
it was always rather peaceful in California during the Triple Crown. Hollywood Park was open and the horses were running, but it was sleepy—only a few stakes races, and the best of those for turf horses. What it was, was that the press was elsewhere, and so were the Industry Leaders. The Industry Leaders had made it their personal mission to bring horse racing to the attention of the general public, with the NFL as their model and television as their medium of choice, which was fine with Farley, though his own view was that horse racing out at the track, newspaper reading, still photography, placing bets in person, and writing thank-you notes by hand were all related activities, and football, ESPN, video, on-line betting, and not writing thank-you notes at all were another set of related activities. In short, with everyone who was young, up-to-date, well dressed, and ambitious away in the East, the dedicated horse-players had the track to themselves. And the dedicated horse-players, in their quiet way, liked Limitless quite a bit.

After a cold winter, the weather in Pasadena was everything that those who had paid to live there expected—balmy, bright, hopeful. Farley was hopeful, too. He and Joy got up every morning after sunrise and went to the barn. His forty-six horses were wide awake and ready to work, and they were working well enough. Every day or two, he shipped a couple over to Hollywood and ran them. After the races he shipped them home. Or not. Claimers were always
coming and going. He was starting to like that game again, too. Joy devoted herself to Limitless. He came back from the ranch just as fit as when he left. Farley did not put him on a regular work schedule, but let Joy decide, when she got him out to the track, whether he felt like running or not. At first this was scarier than Farley had thought it would be—here he had always considered himself sensitive to the needs of individual horses—but when Joy said that the horse was ready to run two days in a row, and then again on the third day, Farley balked. The horse was young and foolish. He didn’t know how he was stressing himself. For his own good—

“The thing is,” said Joy, “he is having a really good time. I don’t like to say no to him. I really think—”

“When Rosalind said to let him do what he wanted, I didn’t think he was going to want to do so much.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying racing is in their minds.”

“And I’m the one who keeps thinking soundness is in his bones. What if he—”

“ ‘What if’ is my line, not yours. That’s when they start you on Prozac, you know, when you say ‘what if’ all the time.”

“Oh, yeah?” Farley loved a joke from Joy. “Let him go, then. We’ll pretend no what ifs.”

She took him to the seven-eighths pole and let him run. He blistered the track for half a mile, then trotted around with his ears pricked as if waiting for a round of applause. In the afternoon, she took him out and walked him. Sometimes they were gone for a couple of hours. He let himself say, as if his fear that she would slip away from him was just generalized cautiousness, “I don’t like you wandering away. What if—”

She smiled.

He shut up. On the one hand, there was the truism that if you visualized a bad outcome your own expectation would cause it. On the other hand, there was the truism “Be prepared.” Surely by this time in his life he should have drawn some sort of conclusion about the relative merits of these truisms, but they seemed equally possible, along with “Speak of the devil and the devil doth appear,” “Least said, soonest mended,” and “Leave no stone unturned.”

Three weeks after the horse’s first race, Farley put him in another one; the purse this time was forty-eight thousand dollars. Still allowance company. Roberto brought him in cruising, three lengths in front. Farley said, “Okay, you’ve ridden him twice. Tell me how he likes to run.”

“You can see, boss—”

“I can see, but you tell me.”

“Well, he’s a closer. He likes those easy early fractions. You know, most of
the time when we’re back there in the last group, I don’t get the feeling he’s thinking about things at all. It’s like he’s just enjoying himself. Scoping out the others, you know. He doesn’t put in a lick of work the way you think of work.”

“He’s got quite a stride. You should see him as well as ride him someday.”

“It’s easy, boss. Just slippery. Then, about the three-eighths pole, he kind of wakes up, looks for a hole, and goes for it. I don’t get the feeling that he’s looking at the other horses as horses at all. Like, you know, most of them, they get their eye on a horse coming up on the outside, and they just hook onto that, and that makes them want to put themselves out there. I’ve seen that so many times when I’m coming up on a horse. His eye rolls and you see the white, and he’s looking at your horse and saying, ‘No way, buddy.’ But this guy, he doesn’t even think of them as horses or something.”

“Maybe he’s looking for a better class of company.”

“I think so, boss. But the one thing is, besides his mouth, he doesn’t like to go fast early. I wouldn’t like to push him if you had horses that were going to eat him up in the early fractions.”

So he sent him to the farm for a week, then moved him up ten days later to sixty thousand dollars, but still in allowance company. For this race, Rosalind showed up. Al was in Uzbekistan again, but Rosalind expected him home sometime soon. The morning line on Limitless for the race was three to one. By post time he was the favorite, two to three. Joy sat next to Rosalind and glanced at her from time to time. What she admired about her was the subtle smile that burnished and lit her up as she gazed toward the starting gate. On the other side of Rosalind, Farley said, “The trouble is, he’s running out of conditions. If he wins this race, I’m going to have to put him in a stakes race.”

“That sounds good to me,” said Rosalind. “Don’t you think he can do it? He’s posting great works.”

“And a lot of them,” put in Joy.

Farley stared out at the track, stroking his beard with his hand. Joy continued, “But it’s like having a present to open. Sometimes you just want to put it off a little longer. At least, that’s what I say.” She reached around behind Rosalind’s chair and found Farley’s hand. He grasped her fingers. He said, “That’s not what I say.”

“What do you say?”

“Bit by bit over the last few weeks with this horse, I’ve dropped all these big chunks of what I knew about horse-training.”

“Like what?”

“Like that you shouldn’t work too often, that long slow gallops are better for the horse than frequent works, that the jockey rides the horse, and asks for this here and that there, you know.” He smiled. “That a horse lives in a stall at
the track twenty-two hours a day.” He grinned. “That I know what is going on with this horse.”

“Not even Elizabeth and Mr. T. know what’s going on with this horse,” said Joy.

“Who’re they?” said Rosalind.

“Mr. T. is that white horse in the stall by the office and Elizabeth is our animal communicator.”

“What do they say?”

“Well, Elizabeth says that Mr. T. does not recognize Limitless. She can’t pin him down on what he means by that. When he streams a picture of Limitless to her, his outlines are only semi-filled in.”

Rosalind looked at her. She said, “How funny.”

Farley said, “Do you buy this animal communication, too?”

“I don’t know, but his breeder said to me his eyes looked to her like the eyes of a woman about to let her silk robe drop to the floor.”

“And, you know,” continued Farley, “I always thought that a big horse had a big personality. A multitude of quirks are supposed to be a sign of intelligence and self-respect in a horse. But he’s, oh, I don’t know, sort of colorless.”

The horses approached the starting gate. Joy saw Limitless enter the fourth slot on a loose rein. The other horses entered like horses, that is, with some urging on the part of their jockeys. She said, “He’s not affectionate. When he sees me, he never nickers, he just paws to get out until I put the leadshank on him. I think he would have a personality if he wasn’t so absorbed.” One by one the back gates snapped shut. There was silence, then clanging turbulence as the front gates opened. “And it’s a fine start,” proclaimed the announcer’s voice upon the quiet air.

Rosalind thought that exerting her powers with her own horse would constitute a conflict of interest, and so she refrained from giving any signals at all, but sat in her chair with a space in her head and her hands folded in her lap. She made no wishes. Next to her, Farley said, “Easy enough.” One furlong into the seven-furlong race, the number-one horse had taken the lead, with the number-ten horse right on his heels. Then four more were bunched. Limitless was next, with three horses strung out behind him. She remembered how she had felt about racing for so many years—all races were the same. Some horses ran. Most often, the ones toward the end of the line came up and won. Or the horse who started out in front stayed in front. Over and over, the same pattern worked itself out, number one through number fourteen, in various shades of earth tones. Owners, trainers, jockeys, bettors exulted or sighed or cursed or cried, and then it was time for the next race, and the pattern worked itself out again. However personal every interested party considered the outcome to be,
it was not personal—the numbers had to come in in some order or other; the pattern had to work itself out in some way or another, eight or nine times a day, week after week, year after year, decade upon decade. How boring she once thought it, never quite believing it was the grand opera or the great adventure that others saw. Now, though, she had grown sensitive to the variations on the theme. You didn’t have to have a big-stakes race or designated great runners for the race to be beautiful and compelling. You didn’t even have to have a betting interest. All you had to do was pay attention. Every race formed itself as a picture, or as a story, or as a design. In this case, the picture was of two chestnuts at the front, neck and neck, and Limitless drawing to the outside, passing the second group, and taking a bead on the leaders. The story was of the timing of his move. He had not been paying attention for several furlongs—you could see that without binoculars—and then he dug in, closed on the second horse, who, perhaps tired from the early fractions, bumped him in the stretch, startling him. The design was adagio, vivace, rest, adagio, as Limitless recovered from being bumped, but not quickly enough, and ran third. And then, of course, another way of looking at it was introduced, as the sign “Inquiry” flashed on the screen, and Farley jumped up to run down to the track, and the race became a piece of litigation.

“He doesn’t like physical contact at all, I’ve noticed,” said Joy. “It doesn’t surprise me that he was offended at being bumped.”

The numbers went up, and Limitless remained in the show position. Rosalind and Joy went down to meet the others on the track.

Farley was shaking his head. He said, “He wasn’t bumped. He thought he was going to
be
bumped.”

“Touch me not,” said Rosalind.

The jockey, Roberto his name was, glanced at her and nodded.

“I told you he was awfully opinionated,” said Rosalind.

Farley looked at her as they followed the horse and his groom under the stands. He said, “All the great ones were. But mind you, that’s not a promise.”

“Just let him do what he wants,” said Rosalind. The next day she left for a week in Sri Lanka, although her gallery was pretty full already, but she loved making it look crammed, like a treasure chest. Limitless left for the ranch.