Horse Heaven (9 page)

Now he said, “Well, Cousin. He is a nice animal, and he’s going to do well for you.”

“I think so.”

“I’ll take care of Daniel Hollister myself,” said George.

“Call him Skippy.”

“You know, I bet he would respond to that.”

The three of them grinned at one another, and Deirdre felt her luck holding. It was a nice feeling.
Ave atque vale.

R
OBERTO
A
CEVEDO
was sixteen years old, but he told everyone at the track he was eighteen, because he wanted to get some rides before he did become eighteen and was too heavy to be a jockey. That’s what happened to all the Acevedos—things looked great for a while, then one by one they hit real puberty, grew beards, topped five five, and couldn’t get their weight down below 123 pounds. The only girl, Inez, had developed even faster, and had to quit riding just after her seventeenth birthday. But they all were riding fools. The tragic irony, said Farley Jones, was that every Acevedo, male and female, emerged from the Acevedo foundation mare with great hands. Seven kids, fourteen great hands. Roberto was the youngest, the last in a classic line. The older ones, old enough to have their own kids, that would be Maurilio and Juan, had both married teachers, and even though they themselves still worked as exercise riders at the track, they had steered their own kids into things like algebra and gourmet cooking.

It was a generally held view in southern California that allowing Roberto Acevedo to masquerade as eighteen when he was only sixteen was a win-win situation, and also a way of bidding farewell to a long and honorable history. If you included Huberto Acevedo, the sire, then the Acevedos’ great hands went back to 1960, the first time Kelso was Horse of the Year, quite a racing tradition.

And so Roberto got up when the bell rang, signaling the end of third period (elementary physics—they were doing acoustical experiments with tubes), and left school for the track, knowing this was a unique day in his life, the day he would ride in his first race. It was the sixth race, post time three-twenty, a mile-long, twenty-five-thousand-dollar claiming race for male horses four years old and up who had not won a race in sixty days. He was riding a five-year-old gelding named Justa Bob, he had drawn the number-one position,
and even though Roberto had exercised upward of three to five horses a day for the last three years of his life, he was a little nervous.

It didn’t help that when he got into the jocks’ room everyone was looking at him but no one was speaking to him. This, his brother Julio had told him, was the inevitable sign that a prank would be played upon him, either before or after the race. Jockeys were terrific pranksters, in general, and another Acevedo characteristic was that they all reacted to pranks by getting hot under the collar. This was as a red flag to a bull as far as the other jockeys were concerned. The only way you could get at an Acevedo was by pranking him (or her). Any sort of abuse during the race, any pushing, shoving, shouting, razzing, passed an Acevedo without even making a scratch in the Acevedo consciousness, just as the acoustical properties of tubes had no effect on Roberto’s sense of either the world or himself. But a prank. Well, what would it be?

The first race went off while Roberto was cultivating his appreciation of the jocks’ room and his pleasure at being there. You had to stay in the jocks’ room until your race was run. You came in before the first race and you stayed until you were finished. If you had a horse in only the ninth race, well, you sat around for five hours maybe. There were plenty of amenities—hot tub, sauna, massage table, salad bar, regular TV, monitor for watching the races at both Santa Anita and up north, free copies of the
Daily Racing Form
, the day’s program, the L.A.
Times, The Wall Street Journal
for those who called their stockbrokers while they were waiting for their races, the magazine of the jockeys’ association, some Spanish-language newspapers and magazines, and a collection of books jocks had brought in and left behind—a couple of Bibles, for one thing, in both Spanish and English, and some novels. No one ever picked any of these up, even to throw them away, so it was a strange collection—Louis L’Amour, Danielle Steele, Frederick Forsyth, Guy Davenport, T. Something Boyle. There was also a copy of Shakespeare’s
Winter’s Tale
, from the library of Pomona College. You got all kinds at the track, that was for sure.

One thing Roberto had noticed was that time passed differently depending on where you were on the track. For example, if you were in the stands, time passed very slowly. The horses came onto the track, they took an ice age to get around to the gate, especially if it was a turf race and they had to go up the hill, then they took forever to get into the gate, and then even the race was too long. This was probably the reason that bettors tended to perceive every horse as slow. The horses weren’t slow, but time itself was. You could speed this up if you went back and forth from the saddling enclosure to the racetrack. Then time passed evenly and deliberately, the horses, since you knew them a bit, went a little faster, and the afternoon itself felt like an excellent day’s work, even though you weren’t betting. On the backside, in the mornings,
time passed quickly for a while. It seemed as though you were standing in one spot—right at the end of the row of stalls, and bing bing bing, the groom was bringing you one horse after another, chestnut, bay, gray, brown, and you got a leg up and off you went, and the intervals out on the track, galloping or working, were much shorter than that moment when the groom and the horse approached. The slowest moment in the universe happened if you stayed late in the morning, till eleven or eleven-thirty, which Roberto sometimes did in order to avoid going back to school, and walked around the barn and looked at the horses lying down in their stalls. They were utterly reposeful. Time stopped, dust hung in the air with the quiet, and the only sound was the rhythmical scratching of one of the grooms raking the shedrow.

The revelation was that, in the jocks’ room, time accelerated at a uniform rate. You came in, had a few thoughts, picked a tomato out of the salad bar, found your locker, started putting on your gear, because you had plenty of time, but then you didn’t have plenty of time after all, and they were calling the sixth race, and you had to get your helmet on your head in a hurry. Roberto had imagined this would be like walking through water, everything in slo-mo, but it was like being shot through space even though you were walking, not flying. Right then you were walking out the door and following your horse and trainer and owner out of the saddling enclosure and into the walking ring, and then you were standing there, but just for a moment, and then the paddock judge was saying “Riders, up!” and you barely knew what your horse looked like—an impression of brownness—and you were on his back, ha, let out some of the air you had been holding in for the last hour. There he was, right in front of you, and you did now know, from déjà vu, or dreams, what your horse looked like—a long shining dark neck in front of you, two unique ears, and the feel of his mouth, his personality, really, right there in your hands. Here was where time got normal for about twenty minutes. Under the stands, over to the pony girl and her no-nonsense palomino, then out onto the track, with the stands lowering above you and the milling crowd seeming about to tip over onto you. The only reliable thing was the horse, Justa Bob, many starts, many finishes, some wins, no accidents, right there between your legs, walking and then jogging and then cantering calmly along, saying as loudly as if you could hear it with your ears, “You’re okay, kid. I’ve done this a million times.”

Justa Bob didn’t care when they put him into the gate, a high point of anxiety for everyone at the track who knew anything, from the owners and trainers in the stands to the jockeys and the pony men and the assistant starters and the starter. But Justa Bob sighed, strode in, stood still, shifted his weight backward, and leapt as soon as the bell clanged. From that moment on,
Roberto felt that time was in the control of Justa Bob, no one else. Justa Bob hated the rail, everyone did, so hesitated a moment and let some of the others spurt to the front. Now he ran steadily but rather slowly, counting time with stride after even stride. All Roberto did was feel his mouth for him, to let him know that he was there. Around the first turn, Justa Bob picked an intermediate route, maybe five horses back and two lanes off the rail. Halfway around, he switched leads to refresh himself, and dug in a bit, lengthening his stride to pick off the fifth horse, but still running easily. As he passed the fifth horse, he pinned his ears for a moment, making a comment, perhaps, that only the fifth horse could understand. Down the backstretch, Justa Bob was like a metronome, and gave Roberto plenty of leisure to notice the melee around him. The two horses right in front of him bumped, the outside jock’s knee just kissing the inside horse’s shoulder, but the inside horse felt it and swerved toward the rail. Justa Bob switched leads again and overtook the inside horse. The noise was incredible—hooves pounding, horses breathing like the roar of a high wind, jocks talking and calling—and the whole time Justa Bob held Roberto’s hands with his mouth, steadily and calmly. Now they were on the second turn. Roberto found himself wondering whether Justa Bob would choose to go wide or slip through the hole between the number-three horse and the number-two horse, and then, when he realized it was supposed to be him making the decisions, maybe, Justa Bob chose the hole, and threaded that like a needle. The bay horse on the outside turned his head to bite, and his jockey gave him a jerk. The chestnut on the inside seemed to go backward. Still Justa Bob was counting steadily, one two three. There was only one horse in front of him now, but there was daylight between them. Roberto thought of going to his whip, but Justa Bob informed him in no uncertain terms that that would be unacceptable. He was a class or two above the company in this race, and to whip him would be insulting. So Roberto just continued to hold the animal’s marvelous mouth in his great hands, letting his own body stretch and fold with the rhythm of the horse. In the homestretch, their own noise was swelled by the noise of the crowd. Now Justa Bob began to close on the leader, a chestnut with a long silky tail that gleamed in the early-afternoon sunshine. Roberto could feel his horse gauge the distance and put on more speed, but Roberto didn’t quite know whether to trust the horse’s judgment. The chestnut’s jockey was really riding—going for the whip, yelling—and the red horse was responding. But this was Roberto’s first race; he literally didn’t know what to do, so he went with his instincts—just do the thing that feels the most delicious—which in this case was to let Justa Bob take care of it. Now the animal’s brown nose was at the other jockey’s knee, then at the other horse’s shoulder, neck, and head. The wire was upon them, and just then Justa Bob stretched out his
nose and stuck it in front of the chestnut’s nose. Three strides after the wire, Justa Bob was already pulling himself up. He cantered out calmly, turned without being asked, and returned to his groom, who said, “Hey, fella. No extra effort, huh?” Behind them, the tote board was flashing “Photo Finish!” and so there was plenty of time to be taken. But Roberto had no doubts, and neither did the groom. He said to Roberto, with a laugh, “This guy likes to give the bettors heart attacks, that’s for sure. He is such a character.”

Roberto said, “That was so much fun! Does he always make the decisions?”

“Always does. He does it his way or he doesn’t do it at all.”

“I can’t believe he doesn’t win every race. He seems to know how.”

The groom shrugged, and now gave Roberto the best lesson of his life as a jockey. He said, “Some jocks can listen and some can’t.”

Now the trainer, Farley Jones, came over and said, “Good ride, son. Send your agent around. I can put you on something else tomorrow; the regular jock has the flu.”

“I don’t have an agent.”

“Get one, then. Your brother Julio. He can be your agent for now. How did the horse feel?”

“Like the boss. I’d like to ride him again.”

Farley laughed. “I don’t see why not.”

Pretty soon, Justa Bob’s number went up on the board right next to the “
I
” and they stepped into the winner’s circle. It didn’t look like the owners were there, but that didn’t matter; everyone else made a big deal of Justa Bob, and he knew it. Roberto dismounted and took his tack over to the scales.

And then, as they came out of the winner’s circle and turned to go under the grandstand, the guy came out and hung that red tag on Justa Bob’s bridle that showed he had been claimed by another trainer. “Huh,” said Farley Jones. That was all he said, but Roberto could tell that he was upset. The assistant trainer was angry. He said, “I know it was Buddy. It has to be Buddy. Fucking Buddy Crawford. He’s claimed every horse we’ve put out there. He doesn’t care, you know he drove Ernie Jenkins out of business by taking all his horses, and Boris—”

“He did,” said Farley.

Roberto saw the groom’s face fall. There was something about it, thought Roberto. Most races were claiming races, and horses were claimed at the racetrack every day: they entered the starting gate belonging to one owner and left it belonging to whoever put down the required amount of cash in the racing secretary’s office. It was absolutely routine, and everyone played the game—daring another trainer to take a horse that might be on its last legs, or hoping
you could get away with a win without losing the animal. You could put a horse in a claiming race a dozen times and never have him claimed, or you could risk it once and bid the horse farewell. You never knew. Everyone was used to it, but somehow they all four of them slowed their gait and drooped as they went under the grandstand, in spite of the win.

“He was never going to stay an allowance horse forever. He’ll be six,” said Farley. Allowance races, Roberto knew, were like the middle class—a realm of hardworking stability that stakes horses rose out of on their way to wealth and greatness and claimers fell out of on their way to oblivion. Farley went on, “You’ve got to run them in races they might win or you’ve got to retire them. But I hate to see him go. He could end up anywhere. You know, horses start out in France and end up in North Dakota or Hong Kong. That’s always given me a funny feeling, to tell the truth.” The trainer sounded calm, but Roberto thought he looked depressed. Roberto sighed with him, even though for him the only challenge was getting Buddy Crawford to let him ride the animal.