Horse Heaven (90 page)

Justa Bob shifted his weight from one hind leg to the other and yawned, then blew the dust out of his nostrils. Doc’s Big Juan was right beside him, but he didn’t mind that anymore. He didn’t mind much of anything anymore. He had dropped two hundred pounds since William Vance knew him, and with the weight had gone many of the opinions he once held. He was seven now, but he looked seventeen—long whiskers, prominent ribs and withers and hips, harsh coat. Doc’s Big Juan looked a lot better—as a quarterhorse he was bred
to get by on lower-quality forage and less of it. Doc’s problem was that he couldn’t walk. The arthritis in his ankles and knees bothered him every day, and so he hobbled around the pen as little as possible, stiffening himself up still further. Justa Bob looked terrible, but he was sound, and the intermittent attentions of Angel’s grandson, Dino, kept him that way, since Dino loved to ride, but was afraid to do anything but walk. So Justa Bob got out of the pen about three times a week, and spent several hours walking around. Since Dino was too lazy to put the bridle or saddle on the horse, and didn’t care whether the horse followed any accepted protocols, Justa Bob could always spend at least part of his time grazing what little grass grew around the stable area.

Both horses continued to watch Angel Smith in his chair. Angel Smith was by no means fast on his feet. The horses had been with him for eight months, and they knew how he moved. Between the time the hay was given to the first horse in the morning and to the last horse, there was a prolonged period of shuffling and resting on Angel’s part. They were familiar with that. But now something was different, and it was no challenge to an observant animal like a horse to notice it. The challenge was to care. Justa Bob was depressed and Doc was achy and the weather was hot and the sun was bright and the hay wasn’t very good and the two of them were half asleep anyway. But still. Justa Bob yawned again, and then Angel slipped a little farther down in his chair and fell out of it.

Doc whinnied. No one knows what a horse is communicating by a whinny, except maybe “hello.” “Hello” is a safe bet, and perhaps that was all Doc was communicating. To Justa Bob, he communicated a discomfort that Justa Bob already felt. He whinnied again, and then Justa Bob whinnied. Once they started to get themselves worked up, it was easy enough to go on with it. Justa Bob whinnied again. Pretty soon, they were stamping around the pen, whinnying and whinnying. The horses they couldn’t see, inside the barn, heard them and responded—and perhaps all everyone was doing was saying hello, hello, hello. But they were making quite a ruckus. Angel Smith lay still. And then his wife opened the back door of their house and heard all the noise. She saw that Frank and Amigo were stampeding around in their pen. She came out a little farther and looked around for Angel to see what was going on, and then she saw him. When she ran over to him and bent down beside him and discovered that he was unconscious but still breathing, the horses stood still and watched her. That was okay, then, they thought, and it was, because for the rest of the day, what with the ambulance and the people coming and going and the relatives and all of the commotion, there was so much to look at that you didn’t even notice the heat.

———

W
HEN
M
R
. T
OMPKINS
got back from Paris, he didn’t quite know who he was anymore. Before he left, he had known exactly who he was—a man with vast agricultural assets, plenty of power in the state legislature, and a headache every day that grew right out of who he was like a tomato plant in a compost heap. When he got back from Paris, and five days in the bed of Elizabeth Zada, the headache was gone and the real property had assumed an unprecedented vagueness in his mind. His son and his secretary had to keep saying to him, “Dad?” “Mr. Tompkins?” Nor did he know who Elizabeth Zada was. On the one hand, there was this big old woman with a loud voice and an uppity manner and a way of talking about regular things like marriage and love and housework and even food and taking a shit that was weird to the point of incomprehensibility, and on the other hand, there was the magic she did to him that made him think thoughts he had never thought before and have erections like he had when he was sixteen, except that when he was sixteen they would shoot up and pop off as soon as he, or some girl, touched them, and now they came and stayed and seemed to get bigger and harder, and in all his years as a man of wealth and privilege and sexual appetite he had never heard of anything like it, not nude Asian women, not girls girls girls, not Hollywood Madam, because it had nothing to do with youth, nothing to do with looks, nothing to do with money, nothing to do with equipment. So of course it must have to do with love, though Elizabeth said that was the advanced course, and he was not allowed to tell her that he loved her, though he tried to slip it in.

Mr. Tompkins went into his office and closed the door, then picked up a secure hard-line phone and dialed Elizabeth’s number in Fresno. When she answered, he could think of nothing to say except “I love you,” but he dared not say that, so he just waited, feeling about twelve years old. Finally, her wonderful voice said, “Kyle?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see you Friday, as we planned. Don’t do anything.”

“I won’t.”

“Here’s an exercise. Open seven letters. Just take the first seven right off the top and say yes to every one of them. It’s perfectly safe, and you can afford it.”

“I know I can.”

“I’ll see you Friday.”

“All weekend?”

“All weekend.”

“Okay. I—” But she had already hung up.

———

“I’
VE GOT A JOB
,” said Deirdre. “And I like it.”

“I’m not trying to interfere with that. I just need you to tell me something,” said Tiffany.

“Ask me over the phone.”

“You have to come out and see.”

“See what?”

“Just come out.”

“I’m in quarantine. I can’t look at any horses except with Audrey.”

“Audrey will be there.”

“Send me a videotape.”

“I, Tiffany, want to see you. I haven’t seen you in three weeks.”

Deirdre laughed. She said, “How are your horses runnin’, darlin’?”

“I still don’t have a stakes winner, but Somnambulist ran third in the Kelso Handicap. How’s your job?”

“You know, Tiff, I don’t see how you can go wrong in Washington real estate if you have the right attitude. What you do is, you take your dullest clients to your strangest houses, and you say, ‘I don’t really think this is right for you, possibly a little, I don’t know, uncomfortable, but I thought you would like to see it, because so-and-so lived here,’ and pretty soon they want to show themselves that they’re just as cool as so-and-so, and anyway it’s different from what they had back home, and why else go to Washington in the first place?”

“It was nice of Mary Lynn to give you that house to list.”

“She set up this whole real-estate thing. I always said the best thing you could do was put yourself right into her hands. She told me how to sell it, too—she calls it Maison Billing Gates, for all the hours Skippy’s law firm billed to Microsoft.”

“Please come out.”

“There is a listing out that way I would like to see.”

“Thank you. Tomorrow.”

“Call me tomorrow and I’ll tell you.”

After hanging up, Tiffany turned to Ellen. “Sometime tomorrow.”

Ellen nodded. She said, “We’ll keep him in until just before she gets here.”

D
ICK WAS WATCHING
Luciano massage a two-year-old filly. Luciano was working on her gluteals now, and the filly was grunting very softly. After a
moment, she sighed. Then Dick sighed. Luciano said, “Ah, well, you know, that’s horses.”

“That’s not horses as we know them. No American horse has ever won the Arc before. I didn’t see it.”

“Did he have it?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see it.”

“Blinded by the Derby.”

“That’s right. I wouldn’t have thought of the Arc in a million years.”

“Well, there you go. You couldn’t have trained the horse, because the horse was going to win the Arc, and you weren’t going to get him there, so he had to find himself another trainer.”

“I bet Rosalind got the trainer to send him there. No California trainer would think that up on his own.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I believe it, though.”

“What if Rosalind had said to you, ‘This horse is going to the Arc’?”

“I would have ignored her.”

“You loved her.”

“Yes, I did. Probably that’s why I would have ignored her. I told her everything she knew about horses, and whenever she said anything about them, I didn’t listen because I’d heard it all before.” Dick sighed again. The filly sighed again. Luciano was gently pulling her tail, first left, then right, then down and back. “I met my ex-wife’s new boyfriend. He’s a sound engineer. They were very affectionate together.”

“You got a girlfriend?”

“Nah.”

Luciano came around the filly and started at her head again, this time on the right side. After a few moments, he said, “You want to go have something to eat? It’s about that time. I found this place where they make a great paglia e fieno. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“Your ex-wife’s got a boyfriend, your ex-owner’s horse won the biggest race maybe in the world, you don’t have a girlfriend and you also don’t know what paglia e fieno is? May I have your attention? May I tell you a few things? May I give you a little bit of help here?”

“I wish you would, Luciano.”

“Okay, then,” said Luciano. “The first thing you have to know is that paglia e fieno means ‘straw and hay,’ but what that’s referring to is the pasta, okay?”

“Yeah,” said Dick.

———

When Elizabeth picked up the phone, she thought the party on the other end of the line was going to be the interviewer from
The Independent
, whose call she had been told to expect by her English publisher. Instead, it was Joy. She sounded blue. She said, “Can you read Mr. T. from here?”

“You mean in France?”

“Yeah.”

“Sequentiality and locationality make no difference in this context.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Ask him yourself.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Yes, you do. Close your eyes if you have to. Just bring him into your mind.”

“You mean remember him?”

“Start that way.”

“Then what?”

“Well, start now and see.”

“Do it with me.”

“That wouldn’t do any good. It’s not like lifting a box, where we both take an end. It’s more like looking into each other’s faces. We’re both there, but we aren’t seeing the same thing. Just bring him into your mind.”

Joy was silent for a moment, then said, “Oh.”

“What?”

“Well, when he came into my mind I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking from him. The first thing I saw was lots of green close up, but also the horizon curving around that, and other horses between the close-up green and the horizon, but they weren’t very distinct to look at. I felt them, though. It was like some were resonating with me and some weren’t.”

“That seems familiar,” said Elizabeth.

“Is that what you see?”

“Something like it.”

“I don’t know whether to believe this.”

“You’ve always said that, then you’ve always acted as if you believed it, and what’s been the result?”

“The best relationship I’ve ever had with a horse.”

“Why question it, then?”

“Because maybe I’m making it up.”

“What if you were?”

“Then I would just be deluding myself.”

“By what standard? Doesn’t it make you happy to bring him into your mind?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if you ask me, the happiness that you feel when you bring him into your mind is your own self expressing love. That’s your only evidence that love exists. When Farley embraces you, your mind recognizes love in his embrace. It isn’t there unless your mind recognizes it. So, even when you think you are feeling Farley’s love for you, what you are really feeling is, once again, your own mind expressing love, but defining it as coming from him to you. You could drop that definition, though—all those definitions that have to do with location and time—Mr. T. was here and now he’s there, for example. Farley is apart from you, for example. One day we lift the box. We are weak and the box is heavy, and it’s hard to lift. Two weeks later, we’ve gotten stronger, and the box is light. We don’t ever feel the actual weight of the box. We only feel the ease or difficulty of the lifting. One day we feel unloved and alone. A week later, we feel loved. The difference is that we’ve remembered how to feel love, not that our circumstances have changed.”

“I never told you about the time I ran away, when you were in Hawaii.”

“You ran away?”

“It was exactly like that. I forgot how to feel his presence and love.”

“The easiest thing for me when that happens,” said Elizabeth, “is to do what we just did. Bring him into your mind and say, ‘I love you.’ ”