The Sport of Kings (25 page)

But by late April, the “For Sale” sign had been taken down, and one of the abandoned pastures had sprung up a mass of rye as tall as her hips. Still there were no people to be seen. She went wading into the pastures and was soon wet with dew, as wet as a wader in the sea. With her jeans heavy and suckered to her thighs, she could watch morning rise. The fringed rye shook and shimmied, its braided feather tips strung with beads of lit dew glazed white like the hides of those long-gone winter hares. The sky conducted, its windy arms swept low as waves of rye moved in a rustling choral. At this particular hour between first light and the sun's emergence, the birds didn't sing, they screamed for morning, as if the wait itself did some kind of violence to them. Then when the sun began to grow a crescent on the horizon, the birds were calm and easy again and began to call for mates now that the first matter, the matter of survival, was settled. The world was renewing itself and it sustained the birds with their small fears and sustained the girl who stood motionless, chilled to the bone and watchful.

Then one morning Henrietta arrived in the early hours to find two white SUVs parked in the driveway of the mansion behind a moving van. And two days later, when she chanced by with her father, she saw that the front paddocks had been mowed and horses installed, horses that turned to watch with dark, extinguished eyes as she passed.

*   *   *

On a mild winter night in 1990, Hellcat gave birth to a foal. It was not a colt but a gentle, bug-eyed filly that Henry, in his initial disappointment, could not bring himself to name. Henrietta called her Seconds Flat, in honor of her sire, Secretariat, and, hopefully—pray gods and goddesses—her propulsive, thundering, unbeatable speed.

*   *   *

The life of the racehorse unfolds: first there is the bright newness of the suckling, all dawn-eyed and gawky with legs too long for the body. Seconds Flat was even more awkward than most, her legs just brown crutches she stumbled upon, suggesting a height she would not ultimately deliver. As a weanling, she was still tethered to Hellcat, but haltered and handled now and beginning to explore the limits of her paddock. In the blink of a breeder's eye, she was turned out in a fresh field with the other motherless foals, skittish and afraid, tracing bereft circles in the grass and gentling to human hands, turning yearling under the watchful eye of her handlers, settling into tender legs and attaining slowly a hint of the conformation of her sire. She was still small with a lady's legs and a trimmer waist, but possessed his sharp head, the same steely, intelligent eyes, and a haughtiness that made her bite. The grooms knew to be wary of her, and when, as an eighteen-month-old, she was shipped to a trainer's farm to begin the process of saddling and bridling, they remained circumspect, careful. One man forgot and nearly lost two fingers, but he never forgot again. Her life in training there was a regular one—a pattern of feed and water and stall work, walking in circles, learning to bear the saddle pad and the corset of the surcingle. She snapped and whined when a man lay like a sack across her back for the first time. She fought against the bit as well but ultimately took it, and when the saddle came again, this time with a man atop it, she bucked, emitted a piercing cry that made the other horses dance with anxiety, but then took that too, as they all would, each in their turn. They were broken now and learning to canter on the outdoor track, then jogging singly, sprinting in packs, and the filly began to show the long reach of her inheritance—the balance, self-assurance, stamina accruing like money in the bank.

The second year in a Thoroughbred's life, the watershed year, begins quietly. Seconds Flat was released to pasture to gain weight. The stem of her neck elongated, the buds of her eyes brightened, then she surprised them all by not growing taller but filling out with a sprinter's cabbagey, bunched muscles. As the weather turned and her winter coat began to shed, she returned to the track for conditioning. She galloped hobby-horse miles and dropped her winter fat, so dappling sprung up on her hide like sunflung shadows. She learned to slice through mere slivers of air that separated horse from horse in a pack, and to hold her power in reserve, then finish with decisive strength. But she was a young gladiator with one terrific weakness: she balked at the starting gate. She would rear and buck and snap as four men forced her from behind into the padded enclosure. Once inside the panic box, she shook and whined until they led her out again and back around. The pushing, crying, and straining was repeated until finally, when they were all exhausted, man and horse equally, her resistance failed and she managed herself at the exhausted brink of terror just long enough to qualify, then leaped clean from the gate at the bang of the bell and was issued her gate card. She was gleaming, muscled, dappled, fearsome, and terrified; she was ready to race.

And race she did. They never did discover the distance her pedigree promised, and she remained clumsy if propulsive out of the gate, but grew to be a terror in the half mile with the speed of a young colt, a jetter, a fast-twitch bitch, as Henrietta liked to say. Never as elegant as her sire, she chopped the air with her forelegs like an overeager dog, so that Henry would cover his head with his
Racing Form
, his cheeks bright red, but she won—four first-place wins in her juvenile year, and as many seconds. By the spring of her third year, her Derby year, she had no more fear of turf flung into her eyes or slippage on wet dirt tracks; what tremblings had existed the year before had been burned from her in the refining fire of competition. Her speed was only increasing. The Derby was in sight for Henry Forge.

*   *   *

Henrietta, at nineteen, could remember the names of every horse she'd ever seen place. From enduring stars like Silver Charm, Unbridled, and Thunder Gulch to those who shined brightly in a single classic, then fell away swiftly from the public eye, they were all locked in her memory. It wasn't love or passion, but the taxonomical principle of her mind at work.

It was life between the races, the quotidian details of a horsewoman's day that had become indistinguishable, save the strange or startling detail. She recalled one day in the saddling enclosure when a horse reared in fright and fell backward, breaking its own skull, so its blood unfurled like a red flag on the brick—it was euthanized on the spot, its tongue bitten in half between its clamped teeth; there was the man she'd had sex with in a private bathroom upstairs, only to find out he was an old friend of her father's and in the Assembly, no less; the day she'd been overcome with food poisoning on the back stretch and run to kneel behind a stable, vomiting into the dirt when a tiny Peruvian jockey known only as Minnie Ball rounded the corner and found her. He'd held up an apologetic hand and said, “No problem. Me also. I do this also.”

And, of course, she remembered all of the Derbys, though like most in the business, she was interested in the results and impatient with the festivities, which rankled like overeating store-bought cake on a full stomach, all sickly sweet layers of drunkenness, celebrity, and overexposure of every kind. She wasn't one to mingle in Millionaires Row, watching men shake hands and clap each other on the back, standing dutifully beside her father in their hermetically sealed box. She spent some of the afternoon checking in on Seconds Flat on the backstretch, then braving the crowds at the betting arcade and the food stands, where bettors jostled cheek to jowl and the offense of hot burgoo, sweat, and treacly perfume was undercut only by the persistent and oddly comforting odor of manure. The celebrities were mostly up top in the grandstand; down here the mildly monied pressed against one another in a crush, their cheer tinged always with the tang of violence—and the drive to perpetuate the species. Nowhere else outside a Nevada brothel could you see so many bosoms on display down to the edge of puckering areolas. Coral and red lips and chalk-white manicures, precipitous candy-colored pumps. Men with their penguin chests puffed, strutting dandy before the women, purchasing wine and Cokes and waving stubs and pretending to a knowledge cribbed quick for the first Saturday in May. At the Derby, every male was an expert, so long as there was a female in the room.

Without really intending it, Henrietta wound up near the rail with the other onlookers. She realized suddenly it was almost four thirty, and the Turf Classic was complete with the winner in the circle. She ought to make her way back into the interior of the marvelously white grandstand—white spires looming over white porticos and white pillars under white clouds—and over to the saddling paddock, where, under the Longines clock, the little jocks would come lining out from their official portrait to be tossed onto their mounts at the call: “Riders up!” But it was too late.

the sun shines bright on my old kentucky home tis summer the darkies are gay the corn tops ripe and the meadows in the bloom and the birds make music all the day the young folks roll on the little cabin floor all merry all happy and bright by and by hard times comes a-knocking at my door then my old kentucky home good night

The rising roar of the crowd was a 747 engine on the ascent. The horses, including a nervy, prancing Seconds Flat, were emerging from the tunnel with their lead ponies and silked riders, some skittering in fright, some perking before the attention. Henrietta made a quick decision—if she left now to return to the box where her father waited, she would likely miss the race. So, she remained where she stood, hands on the rail, eyes locked on Seconds Flat, their tough, gritty, game, and slightly ridiculous girl. Even at a walking pace, her inelegant gait was clear; any amateur eye could detect it. She danced and overstrode on skinny scapes, a seeming galoot amidst nobility with only a smart head and big ass to show for herself. She still careened from the gate like a drunk, but she was loaded with talent and ran hungry; once balanced, she was all head drive and forward motion. And one thing was certain: she was a hell of a closer.

the head must bow and the back will have to bend wherever the darky may go a few more days and the trouble all will end in the field where the sugar canes may grow a few more days for to tote the weary load no matter twill never be light a few more days till we totter on the road then my old kentucky home good night

The postparade took its perennial course counterclockwise to the green gate on the backstretch, where the crew forced jittery horse after fractious horse into their coin slots. The jocks, starved and sweated down to weight, were perched with their goggles strapped six deep, crops in hand. Blood coursed quick for both man and animal, but time crawled, then slagged, then stopped. No one breathed.

The bell rang, and the gate clanged wide.

The crowd glassed the field in a single motion. Seconds Flat launched herself with furor from the gate, but as always, she moved more sky than earth, more the ungainly deer than an elegant Thoroughbred. She corrected quickly under the seething ministrations of her jock, who locked on her mouth and piloted her forward. They settled into a solid, unremarkable sixth when Henrietta, who had no binoculars because she'd never meant to stand at the rail in the first place, lost her in the mix of bays and ruddle reds attenuating to a shifting line on the backstretch. The track was slick with earlier rain, and the muck soon transformed the horses to dun and the jocks to gingerbread men—their cornflower, scarlet, and sienna silks splattered until identical—as they tore goggle after goggle from their browning faces, half-blind as their mounts jostled and edged neck to neck around the precipitous turn.

The second horse, Major General, running hard at the lead's shoulder, didn't go down on the curve, where he bore along under the eightfold drag of centrifugal force, straining the tiny, countless fractures he'd sustained from running too much as a juvenile, unable to heal because the heart heals first, then striated muscle, then bone, and bone only if the training regimen allows. Instead, he went down on the straightaway when, with an arrow's unerring attack, he began to stretch out of the pack, his nose edging toward the distant wire, his mane a flag snapping in his jock's joyous face. When he had barely gained a head, his cannon bone fractured through the flesh with a resounding
snap!
, his right hoof flopping suddenly behind in a gruesome, dismissive backhand to the field. His bulk toppled hideously onto his outstretched neck, which broke without a
snap!
, tossing his jock forward like a child from a bike, too stunned to protect himself as the two horses directly behind tripped on the fallen horse and went down themselves, one with a fractured skull, one with a shattered shoulder, the latter screaming for the four minutes before all three could be euthanized with a syringe to the jugular.

“Oh!” cried the man beside Henrietta, his beer sloshing over the lip of its cup. “They totaled the car! It's a fucking smashup!”

A fourth colt careened wildly to the outside and pulled up in front of the whitened faces of the shocked railbirds, who only now, as the full meaning of the
snap!
registered, began to groan as if they and not the horses had sustained the injuries. Seconds Flat, sixth at the turn and still accelerating where her peers stumbled or veered over the prone, stunned bodies of the fallen, simply used her natural, instinctive chop to leap over them—horses and jockeys all—more like a champion jumper than Secretariat's get.

Still accelerating, she passed second under the wire.

“It's nothing short of a miracle these three jockeys are alive,” Henrietta heard the announcer cry. With broken arms and ribs and concussions, they crawled like toddlers back to their mounts, one of which had now sprung up on three legs to hobble frantically about, head jerking manically, so saliva was slung around its neck like a necklace, but two of which could not move at all save the stunned thumping of a tail. Two of the jocks sat in the mess of churned mud, crying like children over their broken horses where they lay, listening as the colt with the injured shoulder screamed.