Horse Heaven (18 page)

Crackling from China, the purring silken Middle Eastern and Irish voice of Gordon Lane said, “Dagoberto, son, I hear this Epic Steam horse got his gate card.”

“Yes, sir, he did. He’s a tough, smart horse, I think.”

“Good lad. What are your plans, son?” Although Mr. Gordon Lane always called Dagoberto “son,” Dagoberto was probably some ten years older than the man. But, then, Gordon Lane, even on one meeting, exuded that air of mysterious and ancient corruption that necessarily came from a life of habitual secrecy.

Dagoberto looked across the track, where Epic Steam was working four furlongs with an A.P. Indy colt, and said, “He should be ready to run when he actually turns two, sir. That’s in about two weeks. He’s a monster.”

“How much did we pay for him, Dagoberto?”

“Four hundred twenty-five thousand, sir.”

“Worth that?”

“He’s a forward animal, sir, but he’s hard to handle. A bit treacherous.”

“How does he like to run?”

“The boy has a hard time rating him, sir. But we don’t know quite yet how he likes to run. I put my strongest boy on him.” Sure enough, at the turn, Dagoberto could see Epic Steam pull away from the A.P. Indy colt, though the boy had been given strict instructions to keep even with the other colt. Then Epic Steam moved precipitously to the left, in front of the other colt, causing him to pull up all of a sudden and throw his head. Dagoberto frowned. You didn’t like to see one colt hand a distressing moment to another colt like that. And then the boy, who had been instructed to gallop them out easily, was standing in his stirrups and raring back, and Epic Steam had his head down, trying to pull his rider out of the saddle. Other horses on the track scattered out of his way. This was the work of a moment. It was also the work of a moment that Dagoberto said to Mr. Gordon Lane, “Sir?”

“Yes, son.”

“My, uh, instinct right now is to sell him.”

“Barretts’ two-year-olds-in-training sale?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re the boss, Dagoberto. Call Sir Michael, would you?”

“Yes, sir.”

They hung up.

Dagoberto couldn’t quite believe that he had just gotten rid of his most promising runner and maturest two-year-old. Ten minutes ago he had been watching the horse and planning his first race, thinking idly about the animal’s whole two-year-old season, which seemed to lay upon a table before him, six or seven wins, plums to be picked one by one out of a bowl and put into a basket he was carrying. The horse was as classy and talented and healthy as any horse Dagoberto had ever seen.

Epic Steam came around in front of him and he called down from the trainers’ stand, “What was that, Jonas?”

“He nearly pulled my arms out of the sockets.”

Jonas, who rode in tank tops here in Florida because of the heat, had the biggest shoulders on the track. The muscles fanned down from his neck over his back, and his shoulders and biceps bulged like grapefruits in a sack. But the muscles in the horse’s neck and shoulders were smoother and stronger. And he was not a horse who seemed to feel pain.

Dagoberto put his cellular back in his pocket. The A.P. Indy colt and his rider trotted below them. Dagoberto called out, “I saw that. Your colt okay?”

“He din like it, boss. I tell you, he ain no pussy, this boy, but that black one makes him nervous. When we was standin’ in the gate, this boy, he wan to push himself over away from that one, and he watchin’ him the whole time.”

“We won’t train them together again, then.”

Epic Steam was a hot walker’s nightmare. While he was being bathed, he tried to bite at the streams of water running down his chest. He pawed and struck out with his hooves, he jumped around. You had to run the chain of the shank under his lip, over his gum, and hold it tight, and you also had to have your elbow at the ready to pop him in the face if he tried to bite you. Only Rosalba was strong enough and calm enough and tall enough to handle him. As for Epic Steam, he respected Rosalba just a little bit, because once in a while, when he was pursuing his own agenda with special fervor, she would grab his ear and twist it hard until he had to put his head down. She was tricky about it. She didn’t do it very often, and always when he wasn’t expecting it. Her hand shot out quick as a snake and grabbed it. It was for this reason that he wasn’t really headshy, and so no one, least of all Dagoberto, realized that he
was being treated in this way. As for Rosalba, she thought the horse needed more of the same. When a horse came to the track, it was already bigger and often faster than you were, but it didn’t know that yet. You had about a month to get in there and confirm the horse’s opinion of your power and his weakness. This Epic Steam was a very good example. He didn’t give Rosalba one bit of trouble. He had a healthy fear of her, even though he didn’t like her. But there was too much talk about that kind of stuff in Rosalba’s opinion anyway. The world didn’t run on liking and disliking. It ran on everybody knowing who was the boss. With Epic Steam, she was the boss. It was as simple as that.

But Epic Steam did not live in a world of liking. Since no one had ever liked him, he didn’t know what liking was. He was rarely, perhaps never, stroked. His groom, the one who would normally stroke him, talk to him, and give him carrots, was afraid of him. He kept Epic Steam’s stall scrupulously clean, wrapped him with care in his night bandages, and did everything by the book. Lots of the time, if he was going to have his back to the horse for more than a moment, he got Rosalba to hold the animal for him. But in the end, he felt guilty about how he treated Epic Steam, and so he stayed away from him even more, hardly even looked at him or said anything to him in the course of the day. From the way the horse looked, that was fine with him. He never offered himself to you the way most horses did, and he was studdish, to boot, which was an annoyance on its way to being a problem. He whinnied at fillies all day and pounded around his stall if a filly in heat passed by. Most colts got used to coeducation if quarters weren’t too close and a trainer took some precautions, but Epic Steam did not. When Dagoberto told everyone the colt was leaving in a few weeks for California, there was prospective relief at the end of all the noise.

Rosalba was personally of the opinion that they ought to geld the animal and get it over with.

Epic Steam’s groom was of the personal opinion that they ought to geld the animal and get it over with.

Jonas was of the personal opinion that the horse was already so strong in the neck and shoulders that if they didn’t geld him he would become unridable.

Dagoberto thought he might have suggested to the world-traveling and unreachable owner that the horse be gelded, but now he was going to be sold. A horse with his breeding and talent would get tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands less at a sale as a gelding than as a colt.

Well, everyone thought, they only had to put up with him for a while longer. That was a relief.

It could not be said that Epic Steam, standing in his stall, neatly wrapped
for the night, spotlessly clean, and strikingly beautiful, had all that many intentions. Yes, he was a monumental hassle from the moment the groom got to him first thing in the morning until everyone was happy to dispense with him for another twenty-two hours. But he didn’t exactly mean to be a jerk. That was the way he knew how to express himself. In fact, now that he was at the track, he was happier than he had been ever in his short life. Without knowing what a track was, he had known when he set foot on it that he was right where he should be. He loved to run. He expressed his love of running by rearing, bucking, bolting, veering to the left or right whenever his rider tried to rate him. He thought maybe if he got rid of the rider he would be able to run in his own way and for his own purposes. It was clear to him that the purpose of running, as of everything else in life, was to make contact with fillies. Fillies gave off a loud and clear signal that they were waiting for him and that the other colts on the track were very much in the way. It was his job as a colt to get those other colts out of the way, even though plenty of them were older and more experienced and tried to demonstrate to him that they were in charge. Mornings out on the track were, for Epic Steam, a gauntlet of challenges by older colts. Almost all of the older colts and the fillies, too, knew plenty that Epic Steam did not know—they had been in races, knew about running, strategizing, winning, knew about being cared for, liking others, and being liked. They lived in a social world of humans and horses. Epic Steam, in this context, was a primitive and a brute. He was not truly crazy, as his sire was, but the rumors drawing a genetic connection between the two of them were in every mouth. Epic Steam was getting famous around the track already, and he hadn’t even run in a race. As he stood munching hay in his stall, was he nursing his grievances and getting ready to make trouble? Everyone thought so.

He was doomed to get bigger than life, doomed to be discussed and exaggerated about, doomed to live up to his fate, or so it seemed.

T
HE TRAINING FACILITIES
at Tompkins Ranch California Headquarters—Central Valley Complex, Worldwide Racing and Breeding, The Finest Thoroughbreds, which were located five miles down the highway, past the resort and the restaurant and across the road from the almond and apricot orchards, did not allude, in their architecture, to England, Ireland, France, or
Kentucky; that is, the buildings were not elegant, or mossy, or old-looking. They could have done that—the Tompkinses could import and pay for anything, even the sort of drippy, misty moisture you needed for mildew and eternal damp—but the architect they’d hired in the thirties had done his last work at a grocery-store/movie-house/department-store complex in Hollywood, and saw everything in terms of the Baghdad/Mecca/Culver City axis, so the training facility had tiles, fountains, and flowers; domes and pendentives distributed along the length of the roof of the barn; a minaret growing out of the hay-storage facility. The windows of the large-equipment shed were domed and pointed and outlined with mosaic pictures of small boys in turbans. The horses in training were groomed and saddled in a garden courtyard before being led to the training track under an arch that sported a faded mural of Bedouins galloping their Arabian mounts across the sands. It was here that Froney’s Sis was transported, along with four of the other forty-two two-year-olds still belonging to the ranch, when she was brought back into training after two months out in pasture, on the first of February.

She was put in a stall. Froney’s Sis had been in a stall the last time she was here, but she was otherwise accustomed to a large, sunny, irrigated pasture with only some tin-roofed sheds for shade. She was accustomed, as well, to the constant physical companionship of other fillies, who bumped her, nudged her, groomed her neck and withers, bit her, kicked her, and in general told her every minute of the day and night what she was supposed to be doing. In her new accommodations, she could see one filly on one side, one filly on the other, and several colts and fillies across the way, but the most she could do to touch them was to stick her upper lip through the bars between them. Her relationships, which had been endlessly palpable, had suddenly gotten abstract. And so Froney’s Sis paced her stall. Her groom noticed it the first night and the second night and the third night, after all the other fillies and colts had begun to settle. Back and forth, back and forth, from one front corner to the other, turn right, turn left. The other youngsters ate up their hay with contemplative gusto, but Froney’s Sis left much of her hay and most of her grain. By day four, she had lost, Jack Perkins estimated, fifty pounds. “She’s still a worrier,” he said.

Nor were her daily lessons going well. The horses came out in a group. The first day, all he did was lead them around the Moorish complex, showing them the bushes and the flowers, the fountains and the gravel paths. They were led around the large-equipment storage shed and allowed to snort at the John Deeres inside. They were led out to the training track. When they snorted and reared and backed away, their handlers followed them with soothing words. The older horses, called “ponies,” there for reassurance, looked on without
interest. Each session on the first day took about an hour. Froney’s Sis’s first session took two hours and tried everyone’s patience, including that of the pony, an old paint horse who began to pin his ears at her approach. Finally, though, she managed to make trembling progress from fountain to garden to shed to training track to garden to fountain. At the end she was so covered in sweat that she had to be bathed, which, fortunately, she was too tired to mind.

The next day, when the other youngsters were progressing to a pleasant stroll around the perimeter of the training track, Froney’s Sis had to repeat her lesson of the day before with another, more gracious pony. At the end of that day, the trainer had consigned her, in his mind, to the slow-learners group. Orphans were sometimes like that. He could count on one hand the orphans he’d had that made racehorses. Somehow, they just seemed to have less sense than other horses.

Still, though the filly’s progress was slow, for seven days or so, it was steady. She was not an ill-disposed filly. She seemed to like her groom. She stood for bathing, picked her feet up nicely. She never pinned her ears or got irritated. She was just nervous, or confused, or both. New experiences seemed to do her in. On day eight, the groom brought her out, stood her next to the pony, and placed a light racing saddle on her back. Then he went around to the left, pulled the girth underneath her chest, and buckled it on the first hole. She stood still. The groom looked at his assistant, who looked back at him, then tightened the girth one more hole. The filly stood still. The groom smiled. The third hole was the charm. The worst thing that could happen would be for the saddle to slip around the filly’s barrel and get under her legs. At the third hole, it would be tight enough not to do that. He gently pulled up the girth, and got one buckle into the third hole. The filly stood still, and the groom thought he was home free. He began tightening the other buckle. Normal procedure, normal reactions. Everyone felt hopeful.