Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley
“Did ya see the filly, then? Ah, you’re smilin’ again, so ya must have.”
“I saw her.” Deirdre had flown all the way to Lexington to have a look at the newborn foal, born perfectly on the first of March.
“And the goddess?”
“And the goddess.”
“Lovely pair. She’s going to make a first-class racehorse, that filly.” Deirdre had brought back pictures.
“Bite your tongue, George!”
“You’re not smilin’.”
“Bite your fucking tongue! I will not have you refer to the future of this filly in any terms whatsoever, bad or good!”
George looked at her, then nodded. “I apologize, Cousin.” His handsome face was serious. He meant it. The bell clanged, and they remembered to watch the race.
The twelve horses came out in a good line, no one lagging, no one bolting. Deirdre had her glasses trained on Mighty Again, and saw that he was running fairly well, settling. It took about a month for the testosterone to clear a new gelding’s system, but the horse’s attitude showed definite improvement, as it had in training. Now the field was bunched along the backstretch the way twelve claimers would be—no strategy, no system, just trying to do the best they could.
If only it hadn’t been the front-runner, the number-five horse, who had gone to the rail right away and pulled ahead. It was a piece of special bad luck that it was the front-runner, because, when he stumbled and flipped, landing on his side crosswise, he landed in the path of every horse behind him, and over the next ten seconds four of them went down, one by one, like dominoes. Jockeys went down, too. Two horses managed to check and go around, one of which lost his jockey, and six pulled to the outside of the track fairly smoothly. Perhaps they ran home. Deirdre could not have said. George was on his feet, screaming. So was she. So was everyone. As soon as the last horse went around, the ambulance that followed the race was there, and Deirdre could see the vet’s car and the horse ambulance come onto the track. Deirdre strained her eyes and her glasses to see Mighty Again; he was a bay. One bay had gotten up. Someone grabbed him, and when Deirdre focused on him, she saw that his hoof was dangling. That didn’t make much difference to him, though. He wouldn’t be able to feel it for fifteen minutes or so. Deirdre caught his look in her glasses. It was a look of astonishment, and it wrung her heart. Four horses in one accident! God in heaven! Now two were on their feet, but Mighty Again was still down. She said to George, “Let’s go.”
They ran down from the boxes, through the betting arcade, down the steps, and out the gate to her car. She hated not being able to see anything, but she knew what was out there anyway. Death lay before them. It was only a matter of how many and who. She muttered, “Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, us horse-trainers, who have brought these poor beasts to this pass. Make their suffering short and show them your mercy. Amen. Why didn’t I wait? Why did I bring this horse to Philadelphia?”
She pulled next to one of the barns, jumped out of the car with George, went under the backstretch rail, and stood up. Briefly she took his hand. Then they went over to Mighty Again, who lay on his side, his eye rimmed with white, from fear, and his lips slightly parted. He looked normal, but he hadn’t gotten up, which was unusual for a horse. Horses hated to be down. Dominic, the jockey, was kneeling beside the horse’s head, his own face covered in dirt and blood. Ronald, Mighty Again’s groom, who had run across the infield, was squatting on his haunches, just shaking his head from side to side. Deirdre said, “Dom? Are you hurt?”
“Rib is all. Broke rib or something.”
“Dear, get into the ambulance.”
“They all went down together. How did they? We were up and then we went down. I don’t get it. Just tell me.”
She took his hands and turned him away from the horse. “The lead horse flipped, darlin’. Now you’ve got to get into the ambulance.”
“I’m okay.”
“Maybe. We’ll take care of the creature.” She touched her hand to his face. “Get into the ambulance, love. I don’t want any of your inner parts bleedin’. You’re a good boy.”
He got into the ambulance.
Mighty Again was still breathing, but his breaths were noisy and labored. His eye was now closed. He had never been one of her favorite horses, trouble from the beginning, and not very smart, but he had a pretty head. She knelt beside him and smoothed his mane along his neck, saying, “There now, sweetheart. You’ll be fine in a moment.” Ronald, who had complained about the horse, too, had tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t saying anything. The vet came up, the head vet here, whom she only knew by sight. He knelt down beside her and said, “We’ve got to roll him over.”
“This is bad.”
“It doesn’t look good that he’s not getting up.”
“What happened?”
“My guess is, the front-runner blew his aorta. His gums are white as paper. His jock got stepped on, but he can move everything. Another jock’s out cold. None killed. We might have lucked out.”
Mighty Again’s bulk was warm and huge. Never was a horse so huge as when you had to get him up. Once, at a show, a jumper belonging to another trainer had collapsed in the trailer, his legs underneath him. The only way to get him up was to whip him and encourage him until he made up his mind to get up; in that tiny space, there could be no lifting. But Mighty Again, stretched out in the middle of the expanse of sandy racetrack, they lifted. They wrapped slings around the knees and hocks, then, with some people pulling from behind, and some pushing from in front, they got his legs in the air, up and over. He groaned a deep hollow groan. As soon as he was over, he stuck out a foreleg and stood up. It was clear what the problem was—the left shoulder, the one that had been underneath before they rolled him over, was smashed, and he had a long gash along his rib cage, which was dented, as well. He stood on three legs. His left foreleg dangled. Deirdre looked at the vet. She said, “He’s a goner.”
“He’s a goner.”
“God in heaven forgive me for this sin.”
“Deirdre, it was an accident.”
But she shook her head.
Ronald led Mighty Again over to the horse ambulance, a matter of four steps or so, and the horse paused, then got himself in. Deirdre said, “George, go get the owners and bring ’em to the barn if they want to come. We’ll wait to euthanize the horse until we’ve talked to them.” There the two horses were, in the horse ambulance, a broken shoulder and a broken leg. They would be dead by the start of the next race, Deirdre suspected. She shook her head. The front-runner was already so dead that he no longer looked like a horse. The fourth horse was lying there, too. She glanced at the vet. He said, “Broken neck.” Deirdre groaned, feeling herself surrounded. She said, “Is this what it feels like on a battlefield?”
“I think so,” said the vet.
She looked across the field at the grandstand, at all the eyes and bodies straining to see and know what she saw around her and knew. It was too much. The physical enormity of death was too much for her—too much blood, too much bone, too many rasping breaths, too much sweat and stink too suddenly. She had seen several deaths, human and equine, over the years. She had almost died herself, for that matter, when she got pneumonia after breaking her back. How many times did you have to come back to it before you could stand it? It seemed like her ability to do so was growing weaker rather than stronger.
Behind her, George said in a low voice, “Nel mezzo del cammin’ di nostra via.”
She looked at him and replied in English, “I have lost the path, George.” Her cousin’s blue eyes were as beautiful as they could be, but there was no salvation in them. They walked together behind the horse ambulance as it made its funereal way down the track.
21 / A DAY AT THE RACES
FIRST THEY STOPPED by the liquor store his dad owned, and Jesse got a candy bar out of the cabinet while his dad opened the register and took out a handful of money. He didn’t even count it, but just shoved it in his pocket.
“I hope so, Pop.”
“I got my lucky socks on. You got your lucky socks on?”
“We hit that daily double that time when I had these socks on.”
“Your mom wash ’em since?”
“Well, yeah.”
They pondered this together, then Leo said, “Well, maybe that doesn’t matter.”
“Dad, I’ve worn them a lot of times since. We hit that daily double last summer.”
“But not to the track?”
“Not to the track.”
“This is the first time you’ve worn them to the track since then?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then.”
Jesse let out his breath.
Leo began to sing. Then they pulled off the highway and drove into the parking lot—on a lucky day they always parked in preferred parking, so they wouldn’t have to walk so far. That was five dollars. That was a part of your overhead, which you wanted to keep as low as possible. They parked, got out of the car, and locked it. There were two things his father never looked at at Santa Anita—the shopping mall next door and any Mercedes Benz automobiles that might be parked between him and the gate. It was okay if Jesse looked at them; in fact, it was better if Jesse spied them and reported them. Today there weren’t many, and Leo managed to keep his head down. He counted the money, too: $278.32, with the $.87 Jesse had in his pocket. They had to combine their money. That was lucky, too.
They were almost to the gate, and no Mercedes, when disaster struck. “Ah, fuck,” said Leo, softly and seriously. Jesse knew he shouldn’t, but he did it anyway. He said, “What’s the matter, Pop?”
“I looked at a fucking nun.”
“What?”
“I can’t believe I looked at a fucking nun. There she was, and I looked at her!”
Looking at a nun was the worst thing you could do, Jesse knew. Now they might as well go home. He looked around, though. Nothing. He proffered, “I don’t see any, Pop.”
“Over there.” Leo gestured toward the west without daring to look. Still Jesse saw no nuns, not even any women. But Jesse knew better than to argue. After a moment, he said, “Do you want to go home, then?”
Leo stopped walking and turned to Jesse. He had a very serious look on his face, and he put a hand on each of Jesse’s shoulders. Jesse lifted his face and looked his father right in the eye, as he had been told to do many times. “Jesse,” Leo said. “Jesse, son. On the one hand, we’ve got the, uh, you know.” Yes, the nun. “And on the other, we’ve got the socks, two pairs, the tree, no Mercedes, no shopping mall, and almost three hundred bucks. I’ll tell you what. Here’s the Racing Form.” He pulled it out of his pocket and opened it to the first race. “Read those starters.” Leo threw back his head and closed his eyes, listening.
Jesse read, “Lonesome Jones, Howdy Babe, Hickey’s Prince, Gottalotta-yotta, Prigogine, Sandtrap, Baby Max, and Holy Mackerel.”
Leo remained silent, mulling, for a long moment, and then said, “Don’t you have a friend named Max?”
“No,” said Jesse. “No Maxes.”
Leo threw up his arms. “Okay, then! Let’s go! That may just turn the trick. Let’s go look at some horses, boy!”
They passed through the gate, where the woman smiled and said, “Hi, Leo! Have a good day, now,” then went through the betting hall and out again, onto the tiled apron that sloped down to the homestretch, the finish line, and the winner’s circle. It was a sunny, clear day, a good March day, and the arc of the mountains was dark green against the blue sky. Since it was Wednesday, there weren’t many people in the stands yet, and so Leo staked out his spot—he had his Racing Form, covered with the notations he’d made after dinner the night before, his seat cushion, which he always brought but never sat on, his binoculars, his thermos of coffee, and his extra pens for making more notations on the Racing Form if he had to. He was smiling. He ruffled Jesse’s hair and said, “Well! Got here! Good deal! Really, this is the best place in the world, don’t you think? Hard work, harder than standing around the liquor store, but better, in the end.” Leo took a deep breath and threw his shoulders back, looked around his personal domain, and then said, “Okay, boy! Better get to work, there’s money to be made.”
In the first race, a thirty-thousand-dollar claiming race of seven furlongs, for three-year-olds and up, they boxed Lonesome Jones and Sandtrap in the exacta. Sandtrap was the favorite, but Leo thought he was coming down from his peak form. Lonesome Jones, however, had had a bad trip in his last race, his first start after a six-week layoff. He’d been bumped in the backstretch and gone wide on the turn as a result, but still come in third by only a head. His speed ratings in his previous starts had been at or close to the top for the horses in this race, and Leo thought, as a three-year-old, the animal could still manage a jump. Best of all, he was a good bet—the morning line often-to-one had dropped, but not very far, only to eight-to-one. Sandtrap was clearly the class of the field. Even coming off his best form, he was a contender, and the bettors were backing him heavily. Leo also boxed the two horses with a horse he liked in the second race, See Me Now, for the daily double. After placing his bets, he was very calm, and stood with Jesse in the grandstand to watch the horses make their way to the gate, which was positioned in the chute, as far away from the grandstand as possible. The announcer, whose pronunciation was clarion-crisp, said, “The horses are approaching the starting gate. The horses have reached the starting gate. We have Lonesome Jones in. Now Howdy Babe,” and on down the line, to Holy Mackerel. There was a pause, then a clang, and the gates were open and the horses were away. Leo’s binoculars were pressed to his head, and he was deadly silent. Jesse could see only the colors of the jockeys’ silks, but he knew that Lonesome Jones was in purple, and that purple was trailing by open lengths. The favorite was one of two horses in yellow. One of the two was in the lead. “All right!” breathed Leo, as the purple horse began to pass the others. And the announcer said, “And we have the number-one horse, Lonesome Jones, now passing Howdy Babe and Prigogine. Still on the lead is Sandtrap, the favorite.” Leo began to get more agitated as the horses came around the turn, bouncing up and down on his toes. Jesse could see them clearly now, from the front, their heads down, their feet up, the tiny rounds of their toes reaching up and forward, echoing the tiny rounds of their flared nostrils. Then they came into the homestretch, and the angle was different. They were horses now, pulled out like rubber bands from their noses to their tails, with the jockeys on top, also pulled out, hands, arms, heads, backs, and then the curl into their legs. Some of the jockeys’ colored arms were rising and falling, another stretched-out thing, a shoulder, an elbow, an arm, a hand, a whip. Behind Jesse was a lot of yelling, and beside him, too, from his father, because there came Lonesome Jones on the rail, finding a hole and slipping through it, eating up the track. By contrast, the red horse fell back, the green horse fell back, the blue and the black-and-tan horses fell back. Leo’s hand was on his head, and suddenly pressed down as the horses crossed the finish line. In a moment, the tote board flashed “Photo Finish,” and they had to wait. But Leo was sure. “They did it! They did it! I knew it! Perfect pick! One and six. That’s always been a great pick for me, because I dated this girl when I was sixteen, her name was Peggy Sue! It rea
The results flashed, and the winner was the number-seven horse, Baby Max, by a head. Lonesome Jones and Sandtrap were second and third.
“God damn!” said Leo.
That meant that all bets were off, the exacta, the daily double. Sixty dollars, Jesse thought, gone already. He said, “Hey, Pop, lets go home.”
Leo was staring at Baby Max, who was being led into the winners circle, but he shook himself and looked down at Jesse and smiled. “Nah, nah. We’re here. We’ve just got to work a little harder. Here, here’s ten bucks for something to eat. Go away and leave me alone for a while, I got to concentrate and you’re a little distracting. It isn’t your fault. I just have to get into a zone, you know. That’s a good boy.”
Jesse took the ten and followed Baby Max and his associates as they walked under the stands and out into the open air. The jockey and the trainer were smiling, but professionally so. This was only the first race of many today for the jockey. Jesse liked looking at him. He was, in fact, about Jesse’s height, but he walked like a man, and a very self-confident one, at that. When he looked up at the trainer to tell him about the race, he didn’t seem to be looking up, but to be looking down. Jesse liked looking at jockeys, and always tried to do so. They had different stomachs and backs from anyone at the track, strong, straight, supple, powerful. Something in their stomachs, as far as Jesse could see, was the thing that made them able to hold those horses. Leo didn’t pay much attention to jockeys, and had advised Jesse not to. “A winner never bets the jockey,” he said, but Jesse always thought that if he could get what the jockey had in his stomach into his own stomach other things would go away—butterflies, gas pains, that feeling that all his insides were dropping.