The Sport of Kings (69 page)

Mack was utterly useless before illness; he could do nothing but pace the row, sweating pungent sweat, muttering at his second-tier fillies, doing what he never, ever did: praying to the clerk of the course, the patron saint of the horse, and various other minor gods, Take any filly you want, but not this fucking one.

“Her temp's a little high,” said Don. “She break funny up in Camden? Finish funny? Go off her feed?”

Allmon shook his head, confused.

“Nothing?”

Mack said, “Reuben said he felt something at the wire, but she touched cool and looked good.”

Don sighed. “They're like cats, these horses. They'd rather die than let you know when they're hurt. Let's start with distal extremities, lower left first. Let's just get some shots.”

Allmon was desperate for something to do; he couldn't indulge in the luxury of Mack's rabid pacing. He carefully stood his meal ticket in her stall, arranging her hooves in a position she had at least a prayer of holding. He stared at her in desperation as if she was the only thing separating him from the void—and she was.

Mack quit his pacing to struggle into the lead apron Don handed him. “Hold her still,” said the vet as he clicked open his case, sliding out the laptop.

“Mack, hold the plate.” Mack squatted down around her rear left pastern and balanced the radiographic plate on the hay-strewn row, while Don stage-managed the shot.

To Allmon's eyes, the laptop screen showed nothing but the ghostly haze of the inside of the filly's leg—her beautiful bones glowed in photographic reverse like the dream of a horse—but Don stared long and hard. He made a clicking sound in the back of his throat.

“Goddammit,” said Mack, “what?”

“One more round on this leg,” said Don cryptically, and then the gods or Saint Eligius or some other rough divinity coughed up a small curse. The second round of shots showed a soft, snowy dusting of white on the thick, clean cannon bone near the hinge of the fetlock joint.

“Hairline fracture,” said Don, nodding grimly.

Mack said, “Do I shit or go blind?”

The vet was already emailing the images over to a colleague at Rood & Riddle, and two minutes later he was conferring with her on his cell. When he snapped it shut, his brows were drawn together, and there was little room for doubt in his voice: “Okay, two months of stall rest. That's the deal. I don't want her to take a single step anywhere, not one—do you hear me?”

“I'm not new here,” Mack snapped.

“I'm saying not a single step, Mack,” Don said, holding up one work-roughened hand to preempt argument. “Yeah, I know, buddy. But to be frank, you're lucky it's not a splint bone problem. We all realize you're sitting on a king's ransom here, but don't push your luck. Two months. Even that's a gamble.”

Allmon turned toward his filly and looked in one grave, rheumy, bitter chocolate eye, then the other. I'm gambling with my whole life here, you motherfuckers, he thought. Then he imagined Henrietta, and his heart burned with grief and betrayal in equal measure. But not guilt: guilt was dying with every moment, as surely as she had.

“Two months!” Mack moaned, as if the words were just now piercing the concrete of his skull. The blood vessels in his eyes looked fit to burst.

Don Patrick sighed. “Listen, we got a problem that we can't control, but what we can do is throw money at it. Let's do green juices, everything organic, some acupuncture, massage, electromagnetic stimulation, read to her,” he said, looking at Allmon, “and give her some treats, sweet-talk her. Do it all.”

“Fuck horses,” said Mack. He puffed out his cheeks, looked up once at the rafters of the barn as if for help, but apparently the gods were all ate up with bullshit today. He exhaled roughly. “Okay, well, I'm gonna go deal with Henry. Right now. It's not gonna be pretty. But okay.” And then he was gone as quickly as he'd come.

Don Patrick stood in his wake and sighed. He took stock of his patient. The filly was eccentric, sensitive, bold, petulant. A horse was a code of laws that few could read. On this one was written: Ultra.

“You know what?” he said suddenly. “I've been doing this a long time, and sometimes you just get a real good read on a horse. I'm gonna put her in an air cast. I'm not even going to bother with plaster of paris.”

“How come?” said Allmon. He could already feel Hell's fresh unhappiness in the air, and it matched his own. He knew he'd have to be more angel than groom to tend the devil of her dissatisfaction.

Don smiled wearily. “Because damned if she won't go in that stall and break her leg or worse trying to kick it off. When you've got a diva on your hands, it's always better to face facts. This here's a Scarlett, not a Melanie. And it's nothing but trouble when you trap an ultra in the middle.”

*   *   *

It wasn't something he was going to say over the phone, so he drove his blistering ass over to Forge Run Farm, rehearsing various ways of saying We're fucked You're fucked The filly's fucked I'm fucked You're fucked & Etc. He couldn't remember—truly could not recall—the last time he'd been this angry, fury stoked in him like an August barn fire. It was a fury brought on by stifled tears, not that he even realized that. Mack didn't do sad. He hadn't even cried at his dear mother's funeral, mostly because she'd looked better than she had in fifteen years. That mortician had been a wizard.

What he ended up saying, standing there in the Forge kitchen with his hat band-up in his hand, was very simple. “Hairline fracture on the cannon bone. Bad news but could be worse. That's the deal.” He had made a straining, sideways gesture with his mouth. He could barely meet Henry's eyes. He felt gutshot.

Henry reached out with both hands and clamped them on Mack's shoulders. With the scorched-earth eyes of inconsolable loss, he said, “Fix my filly. Do whatever you have to do to fix her.”

Mack nodded hard. He figured it was all fucked and dandy, but he said, “We're gonna rest her up. We're gonna baby her—”

“Fix her. Do you understand what I'm saying? Do whatever it takes to run my girl in the Derby. You and I both know what she's capable of.”

The air in the room stilled. Mack narrowed his eyes, slyly rooting around for permission. “Anything it takes?”

“Anything.” Henry said it as two implacable, final words.

“Goddamn right,” said Mack, and he popped his white, off-season Stetson back onto his graying head. “I'll get your little girl up and running.”

*   *   *

Mack was looking for an excuse and it didn't take him long to find it. One look at the kid made your own temperature go up. He was a walking fever—unsteady on his feet, his hands limp as rub rags; he was leaning into Hell like she was the support post and he was the sagging roof. Mack surveyed the situation with distaste, his lip curled, before he said, “I had no everloving idea black boys could turn pink. What in the name of God's wrong with you?”

Allmon didn't dare look up or the whole barn would swirl the drain. He still felt sideways with alcohol, but that didn't make sense. It had been too long. “I'm off,” is all he said.

“Well, don't lean on my goddamn broke horse, kid. If you're sick, I don't want you in here. They can catch what you got.” His voice was hard, but when Allmon turned his watery, febrile eyes on him, Mack didn't look angry. “Get to a doctor. I can't even believe I'm fucking saying it, but take a couple hours and go to a doctor.”

“I can't afford it.” Allmon didn't even have to ponder that.

“Well,” said Mack, and it bothered him a bit, the kid didn't look right, but he wasn't going to back down now. “Get out of here either way.”

Mack stood there in the stall and watched him limp off. Then he finished up the rub job with cursory movements and cogitated on the issue a bit more, took stock of the blue air cast around Hell's leg. He scratched with some irritation at his three o'clock stubble. On the one hand, things were getting tighter around the track, and you could feel it gathering like a storm; there was railbird chatter about a congressional crackdown right around the corner. On the other hand, that was Later and this was Right Fucking Now. On a totally different hand, this stuff could shrink up ovaries and screw up estrus, but on another hand, that's what long-term infertility insurance was for. On the fourth hand if you were counting: Hell was a filly; it wasn't as if Mack was risking his share on some hot stud. But on the most important hand of all, while it wouldn't make her run faster, it sure as shit would speed recovery, and recovery was half the game, especially for the Preakness. Besides, Hell didn't need more speed; she'd already bested the best. There simply wasn't another horse like her, and everybody knew it. But—goddammit—that's exactly why Mack just stood there motionless with the syringe in his hand instead of jabbing it into her rump and pressing the plunger. He'd perfected the art of bulking his ponies way back when he was running quarter horses up in dusty, middle-grade Wyoming, his motto: What separates the best from the rest is the best don't get caught. But the fact was he'd never seen a horse like this, at least not since 1973. She made him feel like a kid again, idealistic. He couldn't help but want to see what she could do on her own, without any help. So, against his better judgment, feeling like someone entirely unlike Mack Snyder, he repocketed the syringe of Winstrol and stepped out of the stall.

*   *   *

A year ago, there would have been a winter to describe—a palace of ice, hoarse winds that wound white ribbons around the houses with strange gunslinger lightning at Christmas. But this was a new year. The winter was unusually cold. It snowed heavily. That's all I can tell you.

*   *   *

In the dark heart of January, Henry was startled awake by a shrilling phone. Mack on the other end, his crude holler of triumph nearly indistinguishable from anger.

“Henry!” he barked. “Henry, we got it!”

Henry worked to draw his mind round. “Got what?”

“Eclipse Award! Two-Year-Old Filly!” The air was charged with his waiting, but when Henry didn't speak, Mack barreled on. “Awards are in Beverly Hills on January twenty-second. I'll be coming from Sarasota, so I'll meet you there. It'll be at the Wilshire Hotel. They make a damned good old-fashioned.”

Henry cleared his throat. “I won't be there.”

Now it was Mack's turn to be silent. He stopped pacing to peer mystified around his office, as though it had vanished before his eyes and he'd suddenly found himself in a bleak and barren wasteland.

“You're staying home,” he snapped shortly. “You—why?”

“Samuel.”

“Samuel fucking who?”

“Samuel's having recurrent ear infections and until that's cleared up, his pediatrician advised that we not fly. He goes where I go. Period.”

Mack tried twice to speak and failed. He tried again. He sounded like a jalopy engine sputtering. “You're staying home from the Eclipse Awards to take care of a baby?”

“Yes,” said Henry.

There was a silence as beautiful, delicate, and clean as Venetian glass. Then: “Okay!” Mack snapped. “Okay! We've worked for this for ten fucking years. Yes. WHAT???” And he flung down his cell phone with such force that the casing snapped and the battery went spinning out his office door like a small satellite careening out of orbit. Stalking to the row, he made a crazed, animalistic sound deep in his throat and grabbed his startled assistant trainer by the lapel so the young man flailed, thinking this was it, this was the moment when Mack would finally haul off and punch him in the fucking throat, but Mack just hollered, “Will someone please tell me where the fucking sane people live?!”

*   *   *

Which is not what he said into the cavernous ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel standing before thirteen hundred of the country's wealthiest and most ambitious horse trainers and owners, circled by the track writers and videographers who recorded it all for posterity.

Mack stood in the glare of the evening's lights, the whole fancy boondoggle sparkling in its black-tie finery, all those acquisitive eyes focused on him, his Zuni bolo tie suddenly feeling not unlike a noose. God, how he hated this primped-up bullshit, and he'd never forgive Henry for making him puke up a speech on his behalf, but Mack knew that horse better than anyone else, so he guessed he was the only other man for the job. He shifted at the podium, put those red, perma-chapped hands to the hips of his pressed jeans, and said, “Y'all know I'm no speech giver. I don't care for talk if there's horses to be trained and races to be run. But, it's January, there's nothing going, it's the Eclipse Awards. I'll talk for a spell.”

He sniffed hard, looked out at those expectant faces, all of whom had seen the filly run her races and knew what kind of extraordinary thing he was dealing with here. She was more than high-quality stock, more than good legs, more than brass lungs. She was hunger, and you couldn't buy that.

He said, “I've been running horses since I was yay high, and I've been training them since I was twenty and a half. Let no man say that I don't know a great horse when I see one. And by love of God and money, Hellsmouth is a great horse.”

There was rambunctious applause and hollering, but he just talked right over it. “This big black filly isn't just the best horse I've ever trained. She's the best goddamned racehorse I've ever seen. And she's just getting started.” He paused. “That's all.”

He stepped off the podium amidst the clapping and not a little eye rolling from those who'd rather have seen him shot than win another purse, and the genuine applause of the men and women he'd made rich. He shook a couple of hands on the way back to his table, where his drinking could be resumed, and he didn't think, How the hell did some poor Letcher County kid end up here with the brightest and best, but: They ought to pay to eat the dirt under my boots. I turn the mill wheel. Blue-blood silver-spoon trust-fund bastards.