Riders Down (6 page)

Chapter Nine

Sleep never came easily to Marnie Rankin, and when it did arrive it was thick with dreams that rarely varied in their length or vividness.

Each night, after going through the laborious process of transferring herself from her wheelchair to her bed, she settled back on the pillow almost resigned to what she knew her uneasy slumber would produce. She had the same two dreams almost every night, both of them amazingly accurate replays of events in her life.

The first dream was all too short. She was ten years old, riding her saddle horse Monty through the fields of her parents’ southwest Iowa farm. It was a morning in early summer, sunny, the dew glistening on the thick pasture grass, and she thrilled at the sense of speed and freedom she felt as she rode swiftly and surely in the protective envelope of her childhood. Nothing that followed in Marnie Rankin’s life ever approximated the innocent exhilaration of those Iowa mornings. But this dream never lasted long enough.

In contrast, the second dream was far too long. It always began the same way, when she heard her own voice crying out:

“
No…no…no room, dammit, no room.”

She was standing up in the irons aboard the blocky, hard-trying horse named Royal Rascal in a race at Bayou Downs in Louisiana, hauling back hard on the reins as Royal Rascal’s front hooves came dangerously close to the heels of Tucker’s Dream, the runner directly in front of them on the rail. At the same time, to her immediate right, Jesus Chavez—her major rival for leading rider honors a
t the
track—pulled even with her on the favorite, Mightily, and began edging closer to Marnie, pinning her and Royal Rascal down on the rail.

“No, no,” she repeated, begging for racing room, pleas that most rival jockeys would respond to and heed. She yanked on Royal Rascal’s left rein, pulling his head almost sideways. He edged closer to the rail and she felt her left leg scrape against the wood, stinging her calf muscle. Her arms ached from the effort of trying to slow down her horse and thus extricate the two of them from this moving box of peril in which they were trapped.

With an eighth of a mile to go in the race, Jesus Chavez looked over his shoulder at Marnie. He grinned malevolently. She saw him clearly, but the possibility of what he would do next never entered her mind. True, their mutual dislike was deep, and Chavez’ fiercely competitive nature was well known. Even so, when Chavez first eased his mount over another two feet, Marnie screamed as much in surprise as fear. Terror tore through her as Royal Rascal clipped the heels of Tucker’s Dream. As Marnie started to go down, Chavez yanked his mount’s reins to the outside and, with a crack of his whip, moved away into a clear lead.

Marnie’s screams of “no, no” trailed through the humid Louisiana air as she plunged off the right side of her falling horse, landing directly in the path of the trailing runners. Her first reaction was that of all good jockeys who fall—to roll, thus softening the impact of the abrupt landing from an animal going thirty-five miles an hour.

Marnie did that perfectly. When she’d come to a halt, she immediately tried to slide on her stomach underneath the rail. She realized her helmet strap had come loose, and she reached for the strap with her right hand. That was the last thing she remembered from that day.

In the next second and a half, despite their riders’ frantic efforts to avoid her, Marnie was battered in quick succession by the iron-shod feet of two rapidly moving horses. The first impact shattered her left arm. The second scraped a metal horseshoe across her face, slicing open her jaw. The third broke her life in two—a crushing blow to her spine that permanently crippled her.

Breaking the surface of consciousness in her bed each night, Marnie usually found herself wet with sweat in the wake of this dream. Struggling to prop herself up against the pillow, knowing she would be awake for hours now, she wished that, if the dreams must come each night, at least their order would be reversed. But this never happened.

The action sequence that caused Marnie Rankin’s injuries took seven and three-quarters seconds on the racetrack. She went from being a twenty-six-year-old athlete in peak condition to a permanently handicapped woman in the time it takes a thoroughbred to run slightly more than a sixteenth of a mile. Her subsequent hospital stays measured five months. More months of outpatient therapy followed. None of the post-fall events ever were in her dream—just the central event that decimated her body and her life forever.

Well before dawn, Marnie began her preparations for the day. She labored to transfer herself from bed to wheelchair, to roll the chair into the large bathroom of the specially constructed mobile home in which she lived, to empty her catheter, wheel herself into the shower, wash, dry, dress, turn on the coffee maker. What used to take her less than ten minutes now required more than an hour. During her riding career she had made good money and saved much of it. That is what financed construction of the trailer home, one designed specifically to meet the special needs of a physically disadvantaged person. Those savings also paid for her specially constructed Chevrolet van, with its elevator platform, swivel chair, and hand controls on the steering wheel. As independent as ever, Marnie was determined to do for herself. Those expenditures, however, had eaten up most of her savings. Now, she lived on her monthly Social Security check, a small disability pension from the Jockeys’ Union, and a modest monthly check from her parents, who still lived on their Iowa farm—a place that Marnie had no desire to revisit.

Marnie guided her wheelchair to the small dressing table in her bedroom. She tied back her blond hair in a ponytail, then applied lipstick. Her face looked as drawn as it had when she was riding, for she’d not gained much weight following her accident. The long scar across the lower right of her face shone a dull white before she applied powder that partly concealed it.

“I haven’t even got enough money to afford good makeup,” she said bitterly into the mirror. “And I was damn pretty, once…” She sighed and tried to rub away the dark circles under her sad blue eyes. She would be having a visitor today, and she wanted to look her best.

***

Claude Bledsoe had found Marnie Rankin in the course of his research at the UW library. After completing his telephone interviews with Bernie Glockner, Bledsoe realized that he needed a more strong tie-in to the racetrack—someone to answer the many questions he had regarding jockeys and how they lived, someone with direct knowledge. Of course, that person had to be exploited without Bledsoe revealing what he actually had in mind. Using Google as a search engine, and the library’s excellent filing system, Bledsoe tracked down and read hundreds of stories and articles about jockeys in the United States. He found many of them to be enlightening. The one that excited him was about Marnie Rankin. After reading it, Bledsoe said to himself, “Maybe secrecy wouldn’t be necessary.” He smiled. “I’m not going to chance it by telling her anything,” he said to himself, “but I doubt that this little person would mind in the least aiding and abetting crimes against her former colleagues.”

The article about Marnie, headlined “Looking Back in Anger,” had been written by reporter Lori Lang for
Women’s Sports Journal
, a national monthly magazine. It began:

One of America’s best-known female athletes, a vivacious and attractive figure who gained success in her profession and fame outside of it, now spends her days wheelchair-bound in a self-spun web of silence, broken only occasionally by comments as embittered as her past life was joyous. This is Marnie Rankin as we find her today, a resident of Shady Acres mobile home park near Elgin, Illinois, far from the horses she rode to more than one thousand victories, far from the television cameras that brought her smiling face into the consciousness of sports fans across the nation.

Rankin, the story continued, had never recovered, physically or emotionally, from her fall from Royal Rascal at Bayou Downs. “Thought to be near death at the time,” Lang wrote, “Rankin was rushed to a nearby trauma center where physicians saved her life, but not her cherished occupation. Severe spinal injuries would confine this once super-active young woman to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.”

Bledsoe read with interest the details of Rankin’s background. She had begun riding horses at age five and competing in Midwestern horse shows two years later, going on to win championships all over the country. The feisty tomboy evolved into an ultra-competitive young woman whose perky, blonde good looks worked to disarm those people she didn’t succeed in charming with her candor. She turned her attention to racehorses at age seventeen and, over her parents’ protests, began riding professionally at Nebraska tracks the next year. She was an immediate sensation, winning races by the dozens and winning over skeptical horsemen with her ability to “get the most” from her mounts. Her photo and articles about her appeared not only in racing publications but in
People
and
Parade
and
Vanity Fair
. In defiance of her horrified parents, she posed for one of the leading men’s magazines, wearing only an impish grin. She had fan clubs, vocal rooters at whatever racetrack she rode, and three years back had attracted a stalker who was apprehended and imprisoned in a much publicized case.

Unknown to people outside of racing, the story continued, was the enmity that Rankin incurred from some male rivals. “They resented the hell out of me,” she told Lang, “not just because I was getting so much attention but because I could flat out-ride most of them. And I didn’t take any of their crap. They had the idea they could intimidate this little girl from the equestrian shows. I showed them otherwise, and some of the guys just couldn’t stand that. They hated me—especially after I had that fight with Lenny Surrico and punched him out in the winner’s circle at Croft Park. That really pissed off a bunch of them,” Rankin recalled with relish.

“Then,” wrote Lang,

came the fall that changed it all, an incident intentionally caused, Rankin believes, although she does not claim that the offending rider, Jesus Chavez, wanted to see her wind up a cripple. “Injured, sure, he didn’t give a shit. He just wanted to keep me from winning that race by any means that he could,” Rankin said bitterly. “Chavez and I had a history—I’d beaten him in about five photo finishes, and laughed in his face about a couple of them. If I’d been one of his buddies down on the inside where I was in that race, he would have made room. Because it was me, he didn’t. And I guarantee you Chavez wasn’t the only one of the men jocks who would have cut me off like that if he’d had the chance.”

Lang described the three major operations Rankin underwent, the months of rehab and physical therapy, and the calamitous final diagnosis—that she would be permanently paralyzed from the sternum down. Her life savings had been depleted by medical costs and the purchase and expensive remodeling of her living quarters in order to make them as convenient as possible for a woman determined to make her way by herself.

So, she’s not only broken but nearly broke
, Bledsoe thought as he neared the end of Lang’s story.

Lang concluded by quoting Marnie Rankin:

“I was twenty-six years old. They took my life away from me. I’m struggling to exist in a damned trailer court on the edge of nowhere.

“Am I bitter about those jocks that had it in for me? You’re goddam right.

“Could I ever forgive them? You’ve got to be joking. I dream about that final race every night. When I wake up from those dreams, the first thing I think of is how much I’d love to see that bastard dead.”

Bledsoe printed out the article. He re-read it, then accessed Mapquest on the computer and requested directions to the Shady Acres trailer court near Elgin.

“She is one bitter little bitch,” Bledsoe said to himself, smiling as he exited the library. “This is the girl for me.”

Chapter Ten

Marnie heard the knock and rolled her wheelchair to the front door of her trailer home. Standing at the top of her wheelchair ramp was a bald-headed man so broad he almost blocked her view of the trailer court yard. “Ms. Rankin?” he said. “I’m Professor Kornkven…Harlan Kornkven.”

“Come in,” Marnie said, swiveling her chair and preceding him into the trailer’s long, narrow living room. “Have a seat.”

She watched the Professor unbutton his brown tweed sport coat before he sat down on the couch. He was wearing a light tan dress shirt, dark brown tie, and brown trousers and shoes. Placing a worn-looking briefcase on the coffee table in front of him, he adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses as he regarded Marnie.

“What can I do for you, Professor?” Marnie said.

“Oh,” the Professor smiled, “I think can we can do some things for each other.” He removed a yellow legal pad from his briefcase and took a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket. “I’d like to make some notes as we go along,” he said.

“Ms. Rankin,” he continued, “as I told you in our phone conversation the other day, I’m writing a book about gambling in America. Part of it—a large part—has to do with thoroughbred horse racing. It’s a subject that very few of us academics have dealt with,” he said, smiling again. Marnie thought to herself that the man’s smiles seemed forced. Almost involuntarily she moved her chair back a few inches from this odd-looking stranger whose presence so dominated her living room.

The Professor said, “I read with great interest that lengthy article about you in
Women’s Sports Journal
. The one written by Lori Lang, with all the detail about your life after your riding accident. As I said, it was interesting, certainly, but also extremely disturbing. You’ve really gone through hell,” he said sincerely.

Marnie looked away from him for a moment, attempting to hide the tears that had formed in her eyes. The Professor pressed on. “Would you say that story was pretty accurate?”

“About as accurate as any of them can make it,” Marnie said sharply. “The only people who really know about riders are riders. But that girl did a pretty good job,” she conceded. Marnie reached for her pack of Newport Lights on the coffee table. “One of the only vices I’ve got left,” she said. “Do you smoke?” The Professor said he didn’t. “Well, I do,” Marnie responded. “Do you want a drink?”

“No, thank you. Too early for me.”

Marnie reached under the coffee table and brought up a half-full 750ml bottle of Captain Morgan rum. “I don’t pay any attention to that ‘early’ and ‘late’ shit anymore,” she said as she poured the rum into a tall glass, then topped it from a can of Coca-Cola.

Bledsoe watched her intently. She must have been a real cutie, he thought, before disaster and disappointment turned her blue eyes sullen and the booze began to puff up her fine features.

Marnie took a long pull on her drink. “So you’re writing something about the Sport of Kings,” she said. “Sport of Bastards they should call it.”

“That’s what I would like to talk to you about,” Bledsoe said, leaning forward with an earnest look. “And I certainly intend to reimburse you for your time and efforts, just as I mentioned on the phone. I’ll pay you $300 per day for each day we talk. And they don’t have to be full, eight-hour days by any means.”

Marnie exhaled smoke and, eyes narrowed, looked at him speculatively. “Why are you so sure I’m going to help you?”

Bledsoe shrugged. “Well, why not?” he said. “Here you are, living on the edge of poverty, nearly immobile, bitter as hell—why shouldn’t you be interested in helping me by telling me the truth about racing as you see it? There’s money in it for you. You need money. All you have to do is help to enlighten me as thoroughly and completely as you can about the jockey’s role in racing. You’re a bright person. You’re capable of doing that.

“The money isn’t going to make you whole again,” Bledsoe added. “But it can make things a little easier for you. Don’t you think you deserve at least that much from life?”

Marnie looked at him warily. She took a long drink from her amber-colored glass. Finally, she said, “I’m not starting today. We’ll start tomorrow. But you’ll pay me for today.”

Bledsoe smiled. “Of course,” he said, “of course.” He took a thick brown envelope from his briefcase, an envelope that Marnie could see was packed with $20 bills. Her eyes widened.

“What time will you be back tomorrow?” she said.

***

That night Bledsoe stayed in one of the $35.95 per night motels just off Highway 55 west of Elgin, paying cash and registering under a false name. The “smoke free” room reeked of cigarettes. The bed sheets appeared not to have been washed, just reversed. Lying in the swale of the queen-sized bed, looking at the blotchy, water-stained ceiling, Bledsoe was restless as he thought of little Marnie Rankin and his meeting with her tomorrow. In a way, he felt sorry for her. But he knew he could not afford to harbor feelings like that. He had so much to do before next September.

***

At mid-morning of the following day, Marnie and Bledsoe were again facing each other in the living room of her trailer. After fixing herself a drink and lighting a Newport, Marnie said, “What do you want to know?”

What Bledsoe wanted to know, he said, were the details of a jockey’s life: daily routines, common likes and dislikes, habits, fears—things that would take even the most assiduous observer years to learn on his own. Bledsoe didn’t have years to spend on such a project. When he had returned to Marnie’s trailer that morning, he brought a long list of questions written on his yellow legal pad, answers to which he recorded on a small tape machine.

Among Bledsoe’s questions was “What time in the afternoon do jockeys have to be at the track to start work?”

Marnie laughed. “Damn, you
are
green. I could probably send you out looking for the key to the quarter pole.”

“What’s that,” Bledsoe said, looking puzzled.

“It’s a joke racetrackers play on newcomers,” she answered, adding, “there is no such thing.”

Marnie went on to say that most jockeys arrive for work between six and seven a.m. They exercise horses for trainers in hopes they will be asked to ride those horses in races. After training hours conclude at 10 a.m., Marnie continued, they go into the jockey quarters. “We, or I should say they, call it ‘the room.’ That’s where they wait for the races to begin three hours later.” Some of them, she continued, watch television and eat light lunches, play table tennis or cards, exercise on the machines provided, get messages, take naps, or spend time in the sweat box, reducing. After twelve noon they are not permitted to go out of those quarters except to ride in races or leave the track for the day, she said.

Bledsoe asked her about the backgrounds of various jockeys. Which jockeys did she like personally? It was a short list. What kind of horses were her favorites to ride? What were the toughest challenges facing riders? What methods did they use to control their weight, which could not exceed one hundred sixteen pounds and ideally came in at one hundred ten or less? Besides the sweat box, Marnie said, which was “like a sauna and you can sit in there in a rubber suit to sweat off the pounds,” there were diet pills, water reduction pills, and induced vomiting of meals just eaten. “They call that flipping,” she said. “Some of the guys do it all the time, even though it’s terrible for your health. But,” she explained, “there just aren’t that many natural lightweights. I happened to be one of them. That’s what my luck was used up on, I guess,” she said ruefully, reaching for another cigarette. Bledsoe encouraged her to talk as long as she wished on any of the topics that he raised or she brought up. He had carefully structured his questions so that the specific issues he was actually interested in were peppered among the generalized approach he was taking for his “book.”

Each of the days they met, Bledsoe arrived at Marnie’s trailer at mid-morning. Most of the trailer court residents had long before left for their low-paying jobs. The few senior citizens in residence usually devoted their days to enriching the nearby riverboat casino or staring at Oprah and then the soaps. If anyone did see Bledsoe coming or going from Marnie’s trailer, they glimpsed a man moving hurriedly, his jacket collar pulled up, tweed hat pulled down, large sunglasses helping to obscure the top part of his face. Bledsoe spent five afternoons doing this over the course of a week and a half, making Marnie’s total fee $1,800. He gave it to her in cash. On their fifth day of conversations he said, “I’m interested in identifying the jockeys who are the most influential in the biggest races. Jockeys that usually ride the best horses in those races. Can you help me with that?”

Marnie nodded yes. Bledsoe looked down at his legal pad. He said, “I’ve got a list of twenty names.” He began to read them off. “David Guerin, Mark Guerin, Randy Morrison, Eddie Calvin,” he began. As he read off each name, he waited for Marnie to indicate whether she ranked the man in the most elite group. When he’d finished, Bledsoe had put check marks next to eleven names. He put his pad away in his briefcase.

“This is quite a small sampling,” he said. “Are the Guerins related?”

Marnie said, “The Guerins are brothers. As a matter of fact,” she added, “Randy Morrison and Eddie Calvin are half-brothers. A couple of those guys on the list are brothers-in-law. When you think of it,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke across the coffee table, then sitting back in her wheelchair, “it’s kind of a tight-knit group.”

She put her glass of rum and coke on the coffee table and reached for her Newports. She regarded Bledsoe thoughtfully through another plume of smoke she exhaled. “I wish I knew what you had in mind here, Mister Professor,” she said.

Instead of responding Bledsoe excused himself, saying he wanted to use the bathroom. Marnie waved permission. Bledsoe got up from the couch and walked behind her wheelchair and down the short hallway before carefully closing the bathroom door. Three minutes later he returned, one of Marnie’s powder blue bath towels in his huge hands.

Moving quickly, Bledsoe reached around from behind the wheelchair, grabbed the startled woman by the jaw, and jammed a handful of towel into her mouth. He closed her nostrils with the fingers of his other hand, cutting off all the air to her lungs.

As Bledsoe continued applying pressure, holding her head back, suffocating her, Marnie looked up at him first with astonishment, then understanding, then hatred. Her hands reached up to grip his thick wrists and she tugged at them ineffectually. Almost reluctantly, he increased the pressure. The memory of Greta’s face beneath the water almost caused him to weaken. “Why must I be forced to do these things?” he whispered. But he took a deep breath and continued, though he averted his face as the life seeped from Marnie Rankin. Finally, he felt her go limp. Bledsoe was careful not to leave a mark on Marnie’s face. Days later, hers would be ruled “death from natural causes” by an unsuspecting medical examiner with a caseload of more raggedly obvious homicides to deal with.

Before leaving Marnie’s trailer, Bledsoe carefully replaced the powder blue towel on its rack in the bathroom. It took him three minutes to find the $1,500 he’d paid Marnie. It was in a brown Peapod grocery bag in the freezer of the trailer’s refrigerator. He put the money back into the brown envelope in his briefcase. He then pushed Marnie’s chair in front of the television, turned on Oprah, volume set low, and wiped his prints off every surface he had touched. After closing the trailer door behind him for the last time, he walked to his Taurus—the fifth different car he had rented from the fourth different rental agency in the past week and a half—and drove away. He’d gotten what he came for.