Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley
“What does that mean?” said Skippy.
“It means that the horse wasn’t ready,” said Mary Lynn. “It means he would have maybe thrown himself out of whack with a race like that and had a big bounce or worse. Why don’t you ever listen to anyone, Skippy?”
“I listened to a good trainer who thought the horse was ready.”
“Skippy, when you go into discovery, do you take the advice of the opposing team about what you should pay attention to and what you shouldn’t?”
“I don’t consider Harry Jacobson to be on the opposing team. He’s a disinterested outsider. And he has a good reputation.”
“He’s on the opposing team to Deirdre here, right?” She cast a look at Deirdre.
“I would say so, yes,” said Deirdre, as always beginning reasonably, “He’s trying to steal the fucking horse,” and then ending offensively.
“Oh, please,” said Skippy Hollister. “When I asked him if he could do better with the horse, he said he didn’t think so, that Deirdre is one of the best trainers around, and whatever the horse has, Deirdre will eventually find it.”
“Mother of God,” said Deirdre.
“Skippy, I wonder that you are my life’s companion. I wonder that I allowed that to happen.” Then Mary Lynn said to Deirdre, “Honey, I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t use vulgarities in my presence. Thank you.” She smiled autocratically.
“Max Weber uses the guy. He’s won and won and won.”
“Skippy,” said Mary Lynn. “Has he profited?”
“Well, I suppose. How could he not?”
“Well, he has not. Jolene Weber told me they’ve spent millions on yearlings and two-year-olds in training and broodmares. They’ve won millions, too, but not as many millions as they’ve spent!” When Skippy looked at his wife, Deirdre had the distinct impression that she was going to slap him upside the head a couple of times. You could call her abusive in her way, but Deirdre found it rather satisfying. Other than horses, Mary Lynn Hollister did an incredible amount of volunteer work. She was a classic dragon of benevolence, and with luck Deirdre herself would end up in some care institution that Mary Lynn Hollister oversaw.
“You, Skippy, have profited,” said Mary Lynn. “Thanks to Deirdre, you are in the one percent that has profited.”
“These are horses here,” said Deirdre. “I don’t like to run them out unless they are at a fu—that is, at a hundred percent. Sometimes you use races to prepare for races. We’ve talked about this before.” She heard her voice rise irritably as she mentioned this last. Harry Jacobsons voice was ever and anon respectful with every owner or potential owner, and since every person in the world, through the striking of lightning or an Act of God, was a potential owner, Harry Jacobson was uniformly respectful to them, if not about them.
“I want to move the horse. Just that horse. Just to try it. We’ve profited, but we haven’t won a big race.” Now the note of petulance in Skippy Hollister’s voice was distinct. Deirdre wondered if maybe Mary Lynn had taken the wrong tack, treating Skippy like a child. She said, “I certainly respect your wishes, Mr. Hollister. If you wish to move the horse, you may. My bookkeeper will work up your final bill.”
“It’s an experiment, that’s all. The horse can come back here after a few weeks. Or something. I think a change would be good for the horse, maybe.”
Deirdre just couldn’t keep it up. She knew that, theoretically, she had a choice, and that making the right choice was in her long-term best interest, but she said, anyway, “I don’t fucking think so.”
“What?” said Skippy.
“I said … Well, you heard me.”
Skippy looked offended and so did Mary Lynn, unfortunately. Just then, George breezed into the office without knocking.
“Lovely animal, that one,” he said.
“Which one?” said Daniel Hollister, grumpily.
“Why, that Cozzene colt you’ve got there. I’m telling you, when I first saw that one, I thought he was a weedy thing.”
“We were just talking about him—”
“For sure you were, Mr. Hollister. They’re talking about this lad all over the track now, with that last race he ran.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mother of God, man, he’s a corker. But you know, these Americans, they don’t understand these Caro-line horses. Now, you know Caro, he was Irish to the core, that laddie was. You ever seen a picture of him? He looked like an Irish hunter, and he’s produced a few of them, too. Just the kindest young boyo in the world. Great sire, if you ask me. And he woulda been a great sire if some farmer had had him out in the back, the way they do in Ireland, you know. You finish your chores and get on the old man, and go out hunting for a bit, then you come home and let the lad chat up a few females, and pretty soon you’ve got a whole field of good hunters. Well. But he was something!”
“The colt was quite expensive,” said Daniel Hollister, stiffly.
“But, then, an expensive colt isn’t for someone who can’t afford it, is he?” said George. “Especially an expensive colt who takes some patience, some, let’s say, faith. Now, any of these boyos can be getting themselves a hot Storm Cat yearling and turning him around in a year, and then watching him break down after three or four races. But it takes a real horseman like yourself to develop a horse from a classic line like this Caro line.”
“I don’t think—”
“That’s what we say in Ireland—you can tell a horseman by his willingness to wait. A horse is no machine, is what we say, but a living, breathing, opinionated beast. You got to wait for them, and then wait some more. Isn’t it so, cousin?”
“Fucking right.”
“Listen to her! No manners, and a good education could do nothing for her.”
“Are you saying,” said Mary Lynn, “that another, less patient trainer might break down this extremely expensive colt that we paid, let’s see, $247,000 for?”
“Might well do that. You know what they say all over this track?”
“What?” said Mary Lynn.
“Well, you know, they’ll bet on anything.”
“I’m sure,” said Skippy Hollister.
“They’ve got odds on whether you’ll have the stomach to stay with the trainer you’ve got, or whether you’ll lose your courage and jump.”
“They do?”
Deirdre had her arms on the desk and her head down, she was so close to laughing out loud. She knew she looked, however, like she was stricken with dismay. That was fine.
George went on. “I put a bit of change down myself. You know, Mr. Hollister, I could lay out a tenner for you yourself on this side wager. You could make a bit of change, as only you know what you’re going to be doing.”
“What would I be doing with the horse? The horse is doing fine.”
Mary Lynn allowed herself one little smile, then there was a long pause, and then Daniel Hollister said, “Well, I suppose we’ve got that all settled now, huh.”
Deirdre lifted herself up and shook herself out. “I guess so. And thank you.”
“There’s a girl,” said George. “I almost always have to remind her to say please and thank you. But she’s a sight better than her dad. Cousin Devlin never says a word.”
Mary Lynn now turned toward George and seemed to melt visibly, though only within the bounds of propriety. She said, “You’re a wonderful addition to the barn, George, and you make everyone’s lives around here much easier, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“You may say whatever you please, ma’am, as long as insincere flattery of myself is a part of it.” George gave her a dazzling smile and a full-bore Irish twinkle. And then he did the same with Skippy, and then they were out of there. George let them get a step down out of the door, then he gave Deirdre a pinch on the arm and whispered, “Now, Cousin, you’ve got to walk them out of the barn and see them off.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
When she got back to her office, George and Helen were having a r
egular laugh fest. Deirdre greeted it as usual: “What’s so funny? Are there really odds about this?”
“Not a bit of it,” said George. “But Helen put on the intercom, and I saw what was in the wind, so I came up with something.”
“If that horse went to Harry Jacobson, I hate to think.”
“I hate to think,” said Helen. Deirdre knew that Helen was considering the welfare of her fiscal condition, not that of the Cozzene colt, for her book-keeper had only yesterday managed to trap her in the office long enough to have some serious financial discussion with her. Fortunately, the gist of that discussion had now become hazy in her mind. Nevertheless, the Hollisters were good owners—they paid their bills on time, bought and sold their horses as per Deirdre’s instructions, and didn’t insist on expensive jaunts to tracks that Deirdre considered beyond her depth, like Santa Anita and Gulfstream and Keeneland. It was well not to offend them, both virtuous and wise. As George often said to her, “You can’t persuade owners to recognize your native charm if you are cursing at them all the time, Cousin.”
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.
7 / JUST A ROBERTO
ROBERTO ACEVEDO 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. Und
er 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.”
“It means that the horse wasn’t ready,” said Mary Lynn. “It means he would have maybe thrown himself out of whack with a race like that and had a big bounce or worse. Why don’t you ever listen to anyone, Skippy?”
“I listened to a good trainer who thought the horse was ready.”
“Skippy, when you go into discovery, do you take the advice of the opposing team about what you should pay attention to and what you shouldn’t?”
“I don’t consider Harry Jacobson to be on the opposing team. He’s a disinterested outsider. And he has a good reputation.”
“He’s on the opposing team to Deirdre here, right?” She cast a look at Deirdre.
“I would say so, yes,” said Deirdre, as always beginning reasonably, “He’s trying to steal the fucking horse,” and then ending offensively.
“Oh, please,” said Skippy Hollister. “When I asked him if he could do better with the horse, he said he didn’t think so, that Deirdre is one of the best trainers around, and whatever the horse has, Deirdre will eventually find it.”
“Mother of God,” said Deirdre.
“Skippy, I wonder that you are my life’s companion. I wonder that I allowed that to happen.” Then Mary Lynn said to Deirdre, “Honey, I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t use vulgarities in my presence. Thank you.” She smiled autocratically.
“Max Weber uses the guy. He’s won and won and won.”
“Skippy,” said Mary Lynn. “Has he profited?”
“Well, I suppose. How could he not?”
“Well, he has not. Jolene Weber told me they’ve spent millions on yearlings and two-year-olds in training and broodmares. They’ve won millions, too, but not as many millions as they’ve spent!” When Skippy looked at his wife, Deirdre had the distinct impression that she was going to slap him upside the head a couple of times. You could call her abusive in her way, but Deirdre found it rather satisfying. Other than horses, Mary Lynn Hollister did an incredible amount of volunteer work. She was a classic dragon of benevolence, and with luck Deirdre herself would end up in some care institution that Mary Lynn Hollister oversaw.
“You, Skippy, have profited,” said Mary Lynn. “Thanks to Deirdre, you are in the one percent that has profited.”
“These are horses here,” said Deirdre. “I don’t like to run them out unless they are at a fu—that is, at a hundred percent. Sometimes you use races to prepare for races. We’ve talked about this before.” She heard her voice rise irritably as she mentioned this last. Harry Jacobsons voice was ever and anon respectful with every owner or potential owner, and since every person in the world, through the striking of lightning or an Act of God, was a potential owner, Harry Jacobson was uniformly respectful to them, if not about them.
“I want to move the horse. Just that horse. Just to try it. We’ve profited, but we haven’t won a big race.” Now the note of petulance in Skippy Hollister’s voice was distinct. Deirdre wondered if maybe Mary Lynn had taken the wrong tack, treating Skippy like a child. She said, “I certainly respect your wishes, Mr. Hollister. If you wish to move the horse, you may. My bookkeeper will work up your final bill.”
“It’s an experiment, that’s all. The horse can come back here after a few weeks. Or something. I think a change would be good for the horse, maybe.”
Deirdre just couldn’t keep it up. She knew that, theoretically, she had a choice, and that making the right choice was in her long-term best interest, but she said, anyway, “I don’t fucking think so.”
“What?” said Skippy.
“I said … Well, you heard me.”
Skippy looked offended and so did Mary Lynn, unfortunately. Just then, George breezed into the office without knocking.
“Lovely animal, that one,” he said.
“Which one?” said Daniel Hollister, grumpily.
“Why, that Cozzene colt you’ve got there. I’m telling you, when I first saw that one, I thought he was a weedy thing.”
“We were just talking about him—”
“For sure you were, Mr. Hollister. They’re talking about this lad all over the track now, with that last race he ran.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mother of God, man, he’s a corker. But you know, these Americans, they don’t understand these Caro-line horses. Now, you know Caro, he was Irish to the core, that laddie was. You ever seen a picture of him? He looked like an Irish hunter, and he’s produced a few of them, too. Just the kindest young boyo in the world. Great sire, if you ask me. And he woulda been a great sire if some farmer had had him out in the back, the way they do in Ireland, you know. You finish your chores and get on the old man, and go out hunting for a bit, then you come home and let the lad chat up a few females, and pretty soon you’ve got a whole field of good hunters. Well. But he was something!”
“The colt was quite expensive,” said Daniel Hollister, stiffly.
“But, then, an expensive colt isn’t for someone who can’t afford it, is he?” said George. “Especially an expensive colt who takes some patience, some, let’s say, faith. Now, any of these boyos can be getting themselves a hot Storm Cat yearling and turning him around in a year, and then watching him break down after three or four races. But it takes a real horseman like yourself to develop a horse from a classic line like this Caro line.”
“I don’t think—”
“That’s what we say in Ireland—you can tell a horseman by his willingness to wait. A horse is no machine, is what we say, but a living, breathing, opinionated beast. You got to wait for them, and then wait some more. Isn’t it so, cousin?”
“Fucking right.”
“Listen to her! No manners, and a good education could do nothing for her.”
“Are you saying,” said Mary Lynn, “that another, less patient trainer might break down this extremely expensive colt that we paid, let’s see, $247,000 for?”
“Might well do that. You know what they say all over this track?”
“What?” said Mary Lynn.
“Well, you know, they’ll bet on anything.”
“I’m sure,” said Skippy Hollister.
“They’ve got odds on whether you’ll have the stomach to stay with the trainer you’ve got, or whether you’ll lose your courage and jump.”
“They do?”
Deirdre had her arms on the desk and her head down, she was so close to laughing out loud. She knew she looked, however, like she was stricken with dismay. That was fine.
George went on. “I put a bit of change down myself. You know, Mr. Hollister, I could lay out a tenner for you yourself on this side wager. You could make a bit of change, as only you know what you’re going to be doing.”
“What would I be doing with the horse? The horse is doing fine.”
Mary Lynn allowed herself one little smile, then there was a long pause, and then Daniel Hollister said, “Well, I suppose we’ve got that all settled now, huh.”
Deirdre lifted herself up and shook herself out. “I guess so. And thank you.”
“There’s a girl,” said George. “I almost always have to remind her to say please and thank you. But she’s a sight better than her dad. Cousin Devlin never says a word.”
Mary Lynn now turned toward George and seemed to melt visibly, though only within the bounds of propriety. She said, “You’re a wonderful addition to the barn, George, and you make everyone’s lives around here much easier, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“You may say whatever you please, ma’am, as long as insincere flattery of myself is a part of it.” George gave her a dazzling smile and a full-bore Irish twinkle. And then he did the same with Skippy, and then they were out of there. George let them get a step down out of the door, then he gave Deirdre a pinch on the arm and whispered, “Now, Cousin, you’ve got to walk them out of the barn and see them off.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
When she got back to her office, George and Helen were having a r
“Not a bit of it,” said George. “But Helen put on the intercom, and I saw what was in the wind, so I came up with something.”
“If that horse went to Harry Jacobson, I hate to think.”
“I hate to think,” said Helen. Deirdre knew that Helen was considering the welfare of her fiscal condition, not that of the Cozzene colt, for her book-keeper had only yesterday managed to trap her in the office long enough to have some serious financial discussion with her. Fortunately, the gist of that discussion had now become hazy in her mind. Nevertheless, the Hollisters were good owners—they paid their bills on time, bought and sold their horses as per Deirdre’s instructions, and didn’t insist on expensive jaunts to tracks that Deirdre considered beyond her depth, like Santa Anita and Gulfstream and Keeneland. It was well not to offend them, both virtuous and wise. As George often said to her, “You can’t persuade owners to recognize your native charm if you are cursing at them all the time, Cousin.”
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.
7 / JUST A ROBERTO
ROBERTO ACEVEDO 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. Und
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.”