Horse Heaven (73 page)

“This horse has enough energy for both of you. Look at him. He’s made of energy.”

Joy put the halter over the horse’s head and led him out of the pen. He perked up immediately.

F
ARLEY OFTEN WATCHED
them together, more than he had to, more, even, than love, or curiosity about this particular horse, would require. When he assigned the horse to her, he had lied a bit. She wasn’t quite experienced enough—there was a wider margin of potential danger than he liked—but, frankly, it was possible that he could pin her down this way, through both pleasure and obligation, possible that he could give her enough to do and to think about that what she called “her thing” would stay in abeyance each day, day after day, that she would stick with it, if not with him. For himself, he remained doubtfully nonchalant. He pretended that he wasn’t noting every sigh, eyeballing the angle of her shoulders, awakening in the night with her. He pretended
he wasn’t waiting, wasn’t looking for signs, wasn’t heaping things upon her—tasks, affection, attention, thoughts, touches, looks, overreactions to her every move and word. A man of lifelong reserve, like himself, could perfectly mimic reserve, could quell panic any time he wished to. In the meantime, the horse was something else.

A
FTER HIS TWO
required works, some ten days after his arrival, Farley ran him. The race was a thirty-two-thousand-dollar maiden allowance race for colts and geldings three years old and up. Farley went out one morning and came back an hour later. When he came back, he said to Joy, “I found Roberto Acevedo.”

“What did you ask him?”

“If he could ride a horse with a silk thread.”

“What did he say?”

“That he would like to try.”

After the race, which Limitless won by two lengths, Roberto said to Farley, in Joy’s hearing, “He’s got a homing device on his nose. All he has to do is leave the gate. I would have had him on a looser rein, but I was afraid of snatching him by mistake.”

That evening, Farley called Rosalind, who was in Istanbul, and told her the news. She thanked him and said, “Send him to a farm for two weeks. One with lots of big pastures.” It was all very easy and routine. Farley’s considered opinion was that the horse might turn out to be a useful animal.

I
N
I
STANBUL
, Rosalind hung up the phone and lay back down on her bed. It wasn’t yet dawn, but outside her window, the shouting, noisy business of the city was well begun, and she was wide awake. Eileen leapt up on the bed and nestled into Rosalind’s armpit. Rosalind wondered, what is the sound of a nick? Bold Ruler approaches Somethingroyal. Polynesian approaches Geisha. Pharos approaches Nogara. The mare stands still, flips her tail to the side. The stallion leaps, the deed is quickly done. The assembled men are occupied with leadshanks and leather capes and fleece boots. There is noise, yelling, encouragement. The mare is made much of. These are the sounds of ignorance and hope. Twenty or fifty years later, Secretariat, Native Dancer, Nearco, the products of these matings, cast the light of good luck back over these routine events. No Thoroughbred is conceived without intention, but these transcend mere intention, they transcend wish, they transcend dream. The most assiduous and dedicated breeder feels in his bones undeserving of their genius and
beauty. It is a pure gift. It must be a tone, thinks Rosalind, a dark, sonorous, resonant tone for Nearco, a liquid pure middle C for Native Dancer, a bright ethereal note for Secretariat. The sound of a nick would be music as quiet as a thought, but lingering, audible even now to those who could hear it. It was after 6:00 a.m. in Istanbul, and so after 6:00 p.m. in Los Angeles. The day’s racing would be over, the barn would be quiet, with the horses standing in their wraps, eating hay. Rows of horses, clean, well fed, rustling in their straw, grunting, snorting, shaking themselves, switching their tails, whinnying from time to time, and all of them sounding several of those silent notes, the Nearco note harmonizing with the Princequillo note, the Seattle Slew note harmonizing with the Buckpasser note, the ancient Teddy note still harmonizing with the Fairway note. The hum around Limitless was unusually delightful. Rosalind knew that as well as she knew anything beautiful. And there was a nick with the trainer, too. The trainer brought his own music that was partly intuition and partly knowledge and partly intention and partly desire. All those things mattered to the owner. But what mattered to the horse, Rosalind suspected, was something else, some consonant vibration that relaxed him and focused him and allowed him to play his own song, the song of the DNA, all the innumerable measures and bars of A T G and C that unreeled themselves within. The phenotypes lifted their heads, pricked their ears, pawed, looked at one another. The genotype swirled through them all, a full score of nicks playing itself in a thousand stalls. Thank you, thought Rosalind. The golden cup has come around to us now, Al and me, Farley and Joy, Roberto and Rafael. Better to recognize it and receive it with care.

She turned back to the phone and picked it up. Al was but two hours ahead of her, though she was hazy about his exact location. She tried his cellular number, and he picked it up on the first ring. He said, “Yeah.”

She said, “Hello, dear.”

“Rozzy.” His voice softened. But, then, his voice always softened. It struck her there for a moment that Al really did love her.

“The horse won his race.”

“Well, maybe he’s not such a useless animal after all.”

“I don’t think Dick was the right trainer for him.”

“Nah. Nah, he wasn’t.”

Now there was a very long pause. At the end of it, she knew that he was thinking about the last year, and she was thinking about the last year, and he knew that she was thinking about the last year, and she knew that he knew that she was thinking about the last year, and so, when she said, “Forgive me, Al,” he could say, “Ah, I already did, Rozzy. I was just trying to figure out a way to tell you that.”

“I, um—”

“We don’t need to talk about it, Rozzy. Anyway, until sometime when we can barely remember anything about it.”

“All right, Al.”

There was another pause, into which she felt it was expected, but not desirable, to insert some information about what would happen next. Better, she thought, to close that space for the time being, so she said, “How’s it going?”

“They don’t have a thing here except the ore. Talk about infrastructure. You can’t talk about infrastructure. If I had any brains, I would forget all about it. Jerry keeps calling me, every day, and telling me to forget all about it. It’s not like I’m known for my social conscience. No brains, no social conscience, I can’t stand a lot of these guys, either, and Maybrick Industries is not made of money—”

“Come home.”

She surprised herself, saying this, especially since she herself was nowhere near home.

“Nah,” he said. “Nah. It’s kind of fun in a way. At least I get to blow my stack a lot and they don’t mind. Blowing your stack is the way you do things here.”

“I—” But did she? Did she miss him really? Enough to say it?

“Yeah,” he said, “I miss you, too.”

“I—” Her tongue was completely tied. She knew that for an absolute fact, but he said, anyway, “Yeah, honey, I love you, too.” After he hung up the phone, she looked at it for a moment before setting it in its cradle.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Joy called up Mr. Tompkins and asked if Farley might send along a horse belonging to another owner, just for a vacation. Mr. Tompkins, of course, said yes, what was one more horse among hundreds, and so Limitless found himself in the center of the world—a hundred thousand beef cattle on one side, a South Pacific paradise on the other, Hollywood and Arabia over the way, almond groves and peach orchards and mares and foals and alfalfa fields stretching everywhere, and the bright hard glare of the central-California sun burnishing all creatures from above. He lived outside, day and night, for two weeks.

Y
OU COULD GET
to the Derby for six hundred dollars if you put your money down by the beginning of February. Of course, between the beginning of February and the beginning of May, keeping the horse on course cost about twenty thousand dollars, so that six hundred didn’t seem like much, which Buddy thought was a pity, since almost four hundred owners had put down their six hundred dollars. It was like the start of some marathon somewhere that you saw a picture of in the paper, a nation of runners bunched and nobody looking special or anointed. Buddy saw in
The Blood-Horse
that Lukas had twenty-one, Baffert had sixteen, and this kid from New York had twelve. Buddy had one. He might have had two if he hadn’t let that crazy black horse go. That crazy horse, not seeming crazy at all, had won a stakes race in New York. Maybe, Buddy thought, he was the one who had been crazy, all those thoughts about Jesus when he should have been training horses, getting to races, going with his instincts. Yes, you could say, as he had said to himself, his instincts were suspect, morality-wise, but he kept coming back to them. That had to be for a reason, if only for the reason that he wasn’t smart enough or young enough to get himself any better ones. At any rate, that way Jesus had wanted him to train horses, that way was too laborious for him. He hadn’t the energy both to get his work done and to wrestle with his conscience. It had to be one or the other.

There were seven other fillies nominated. The most fun, Buddy thought, would be an all-female Kentucky Derby, but of all the unlikely things that might happen in racing, probably that was the most unlikely. Three fillies had won the Derby in 125 years. But Residual had beaten all the other fillies based on the West Coast at one time or another, though each of the ones she had beaten had also beaten her, so she wasn’t a shoo-in. Last summer, when he had had two shoo-ins, he hadn’t even enjoyed it. Well, it all went to show you that introspection just ended up with things like you sleeping the sleep of
the dead in some dripping jungle treehouse in Hawaii while the best Breeders’ Cup day ever went on without you.

Never again, thought Buddy.

Never again, vowed Buddy.

Residual, on steroids, progesterone, and regular shots of hyaluronic acid to her joints, was running like a machine. She was feeling like a machine, too. What everybody said was that she had matured. Certainly she had grown an inch and put on about a hundred pounds. Her coat was nearly as fine and shiny as it had been—she was very similar to that former filly—but what it felt like to everyone was that, rather than adding something, maturity had taken something away from her. Maybe it was that running was now her vocation, whereas it had formerly been her avocation. Her former vocation, affection, was now just an occasional hobby. She came forward for her carrots, she let herself be petted, she nickered at this one or that one, but she was altogether more reserved. She worked every five days, always giving the satisfaction of a job well done. Marvelous Martha enjoyed riding her, and considered her a good filly, but she and Deedee had never compared notes. She thought Deedee was a little self-indulgent (had she herself not ridden Grand Prix at Indio when she was six months pregnant?), and Deedee was speechless with envy that the filly she considered her own, just on loan to Martha, might get all the way to Churchill Downs, and so hadn’t ever mentioned the day when that crazy colt chased them and the filly found a whole easy, happy, insolent realm of speed that felt like greatness to Deedee. Not knowing it was there, Marvelous Martha didn’t think to try and find it.

Now that Buddy was back to his old self, Leon, assistant trainer to Buddy and husband to Deedee and prospective father to Alana Marie, thought not at all about the risks you had to take to get your own future stable of racehorses and more about keeping his job. He was respectful, anxious, and easily intimidated. The only creature around the barn who still really liked him was the filly, but even though she only had eyes for him, he only had eyes for Buddy.

Every time the Kingstons came out to the track, Buddy made so much of them, and showed them and told them so many things, that even Jason Clark Kingston seemed pleasantly confused. Andrea Melanie was gaga. Whereas Jason seemed to take the idea of running his filly in the Kentucky Derby as his due, and therefore not surprising, Andrea Melanie’s mind seemed blasted. When Buddy looked at her and said, “Derby Derby Derby,” she just looked at him and nodded nodded nodded.

But the fact was that, whereas once everyone had agreed that Residual was an astounding, wonderful, unprecedented filly, now they all agreed that she
was a very good filly, one of the best, and certainly something like the Derby was possible for her, you never knew.

T
HE THING WAS
, Buddy thought, to get the filly to Keeneland. The Keeneland meet lasted fifteen days, the shortest meet in horse racing, but in fifteen days they gave out something like seven or eight million dollars in purses. Every race was worth plenty, and everyone who could take it was there, training their horses, eating in the clubhouse dining room, gossiping, going to parties at night, eyeing all the three-year-olds, and feeling the field for the Derby jell around them. When Keeneland was over, you moved up the road to Louisville. Buddy had gotten to Keeneland once before, but his horse had popped a splint there (such a little thing, fatal to nothing but Derby hopes) and he had never gotten up the road to Louisville.

Certainly everyone in the barn was willing, and even eager, and even desperate to get to Keeneland. The jockey saw the size of those purses in all those races that he might be able to find a ride for as a blue-chip investment in his pension plan. Marvelous Martha, for all her experience, had been to Keeneland only once, and then as a pedestrian. To go as the fifty-two-year-old exercise rider of a Derby hopeful, and a filly at that, would be a story to catalogue right beside the time she jumped a horse over a five-foot course in a muddy farmer’s field in Ireland, after dark, lit only by the headlamps of two cars and a horse van. Didn’t have a single pole down, either. Leon was well aware that no one in Keeneland knew him at all, so he could get a fresh start there on being the sort of person he had always meant to be. Deedee just wanted them all to get the hell out of southern California and give her some peace.