The Black Stallion and the Girl (4 page)

The great stands were packed and overflowing. Everybody was tense. Everybody was waiting. There were nine horses in the post parade for the Roseben Handicap, a distance of seven furlongs (seven-eighths of a mile) for a purse of $25,000. But the crowd saw only one entry, the Black.

Everybody knew the champion would not be found wanting in speed, but there was always racing luck to consider … plus the heavy impost of 138 pounds on his back against light-weighted horses, some carrying only 103 pounds. Besides, it was a short race for the Black. He might have trouble catching the others before the finish
if his rider made a single mistake. There would be bumping and swerving in so large a field. So this might be a day to remember, the day the greatest handicap runner of all time was beaten, and they would have been there to see it!

Alec wrapped the reins about his hands and found himself suddenly thinking of Pam again. Had he been wrong in not telling Henry right away that he’d hired a girl? But the trainer hadn’t asked how things were going at the farm. He had been too involved in getting ready for this race. Now almost a week had gone by, and Alec wondered how Pam was doing with Black Sand and the others.

At the starting gate, Henry left him. Between the Black’s ears Alec could see the sun dropping behind the New York City skyscrapers to the west. He glanced at the other horses and had no fear of them. It was only their riders who could beat him. They were among the best in the business and capable of taking quick advantage of any mistake he might make, even helping him to make a big one that would cost the Black a victory.

They were on either side of him, milling behind the gate, awaiting assistant starters to lead their mounts into the padded, narrow stalls. Each rode slowly, whip in hand and ready. Their faces disclosed no emotion of any kind. They all might have been carved out of wood or cut from toughest leather. Their bodies were hard and fit beneath glossy silks; lips were thin and tightly clasped, looking cruel, as did their narrowed eyes.

Alec was one of them, and had been for a long time. He thought of Pam and the pure joy in her face when she’d ridden Black Sand. Was it to recall such
things again, things long forgotten, that he wanted her around?

“Get down to business,” he cautioned himself.

A moment later he rode the Black into the Number 1 stall. The other riders followed him into the gate, their voices rising above the din, hard and arrogant, shouting at each other and to the starter. All of them had supreme confidence in their ability to wring every last ounce of speed out of their mounts by the use of massive wrists and broad, thick hands. Slim, all muscle and bone, they sat their racing machines and waited.

Alec pulled down his goggles, his eyes on the lonely, empty battlefield before him. He was ready to go, legs raised at a sharp angle of knee to thigh, back slanted, shoulders hunched, muscles tense. He pressed his face against the Black.

“The most splendid gift of all is a noble horse,”
he recalled Pam saying. But he shouldn’t be thinking of her now.

The bell clanged and the stall doors flew open! Instinctively, Alec let the reins slide through his hands, his voice joining the cries of the other riders, “Yah! Yah! Yah!”

His hands suddenly tightened on the reins again, squeezing rather than pulling, as a horse moved directly in front of them and stayed there. Alec looked for racing room, knowing he’d been caught unprepared. He was furious with himself for having allowed his mind to turn to Pam, to anything but the race. He tried every trick he knew to get the Black free of the rush of bodies on every side of him.

His whip came hissing down, not touching the
Black, in an attempt to scare off the packed horses and riders. The wind carried his shouts to the other jockeys, his words threatening and challenging, those of a rider fighting for racing room and, perhaps, his very life. He drove his heels into the Black’s sides and his hands went forward in brutal suddenness, urging the horse forward with all his strength.

They raced down the long backstretch chute. There were three furlongs to go to the far turn, two furlongs around the bend, and two more furlongs for home. He had to get the Black free and running before they reached the turn, for the stallion’s long strides made it difficult to negotiate turns and he was apt to run out, losing ground. There might not be enough distance left in the stretch run to overtake the leaders.

Alec looked for a clear way through the traffic jam. He let the Black out another notch, not truly knowing where he was going but going anyway, for his need to do
something
was very great. He felt not only anger with himself but guilt. He sought relief in speed and more speed, and danger as well.

He had made a mistake, but there was time to correct it. He leaned into the Black, taking him over to the rail, only to pull him up abruptly when the opening he had spotted was closed by a plunging horse. Alec took the stallion back, moving him toward the middle of the pack, only inches away from the heaving hindquarters of horses directly ahead.

The Black was fighting for his head, trying to run over the horses in front of him. Beyond the bunched field, two horses were free and clear. Light-weighted sprinters, their legs moved in short, piston-like strides,
taking them toward the far turn like small, wound-up whirlwinds. Alec knew he had to get after them soon or the Black would be beaten.

He tried to move the stallion between two outside horses but was shut off again. He had to bring the Black almost to a stop to avoid going down; his hands took a tight hold on the reins and he jerked hard. The force of it wrenched the bit in the stallion’s mouth, tearing the flesh at the corners.

He heard the Black scream in rage and pain, and his heart felt a deep anguish. Yet he’d had no alternative if he wanted to avoid serious injury—even death. Suddenly he saw an opening and launched the Black forward again.

Lathered foam whipped from the stallion’s neck as he shot between horses. None of the jockeys had expected such a rush from behind with so little room between them. Above the din of racing hoofs, Alec heard the challenges the other riders hurled at him. One false step and the Black would go down. He guided him through the mass of horseflesh in a single rush, avoiding hoofs and bodies by inches. He rode as he never had before, using all his wits and skill with a strength and harshness he had not known he possessed. His daring, combined with the Black’s fury and speed, astonished the others and threw them off balance. They separated, and the leaping black stallion sped between them, free and clear!

Leaving the pack behind, Alec took the Black into the turn with only the two front-running sprinters ahead. They were setting a dizzy pace. Had he still the time and distance to catch them? The Black devoured
the track with his long strides, yet ran wide going around the turn. Alec tried to guide him over to the rail but his extreme speed made it impossible. The leaders were already leaving the turn and entering the homestretch with just two furlongs to go.

Alec flattened himself against the stallion’s neck, his face buried in the mane. There was no need to urge the Black on, for the racing stallion knew what was expected of him. He came off the turn, stretched low to the ground in the fury of his run. He was catching the leaders fast, outrunning them with every magnificent stride.

The crowd was on its feet. Was this to be the day the Black lost for the first time? The two leaders flashed by the sixteenth pole, their strides coming as one, a closely matched team of two, fighting, clawing their way to the finish wire.

The Black came down the track with a swiftness that could not be denied. But the fans were not really aware of the awesome power of his body, for he ran with such ease that his strides seemed to be a single flowing movement.

The finish wire was far enough away for Alec to know that the distance had not run out on them. He shouted into the wind created by his horse. Only the Black heard his cry of victory, but he was the only one that mattered. He caught the leaders two strides from the wire and swept under it all by himself.

Back in the stable area, Henry asked Alec, “You were caught napping at the start. Why?”

Alec shrugged his shoulders. “We made up for it,” he said.

Henry didn’t persist. It was not uncommon for a rider to make a mistake in the break from the gate—or even to know the fear of death. Many rode recklessly immediately afterward, as Alec had done, as if by daring fate to strike them down, they were able to regain their nerve and courage.

Henry decided to change the subject. His gaze followed a hot-walker going by, cooling out a chestnut horse that had been in the last race of the afternoon.

“What kind of a boy is that?” he asked sarcastically.

Despite the soiled blue jeans, sweatshirt and peaked cap, the walker had the unmistakable configuration of a female.

“The right size but the wrong sex,” Henry continued.
The girl was about five feet, one inch tall and weighed around 100 pounds, the ideal size for a rider. “Too bad. She’d like to have been a boy.”

“I don’t think she wants to be anything but what she is,” Alec said. He had seen this girl one evening in the lobby of a local movie, wearing high heels and a short skirt. Her hair had been as slick and polished as any mane she’d ever tended. What had been slim, hard boyishness during the day was girlish slenderness and softness at night. And the young jockey with her, whom he’d recognized too, had not taken his eyes from her for a moment, holding her arm and opening doors. Yet, all day long, she had carried her own pails, mucked stalls, cleaned horses and laundry and tack.

“I don’t like to see girls around horsemen,” Henry said. “Just because of their sex they create problems we wouldn’t have otherwise. It takes a man’s mind off his work. They get emotionally involved with horses, everything.”

“Is it any different from other businesses?”

“Sure. Ours is rough; it’s not for girls,” Henry said emphatically. “I think a woman should be a woman and a mother and everything that goes with it.”

Alec had heard all this before. Henry spoke of a woman’s
femininity
as though he had respect for it, but he didn’t. Alec had seen the old trainer with many girls in the stable area, and his attitude was always so severe and authoritative that he awed them to the point of fear. Perhaps it was his way of showing them they didn’t belong there. He reproached them for what he considered to be wavering courage in handling their horses or feminine weakness in doing their jobs. His
experienced eyes never failed to perceive their fright, weariness, carelessness—and he despised them for it. They, in turn, despised him.

Alec thought of Pam, and decided it was no time to bring up the fact that he had hired her, providing Henry didn’t talk about the farm. Yet in her defense, as well as the defense of all girls working at the track, he said, “You’ve got to admit that they keep tack and stalls cleaner than most men, and they seem to have more patience with the horses. They coax them rather than use a hard hand.”

Henry laughed. “They’re good at coaxing
anything
, that’s for sure, men as well as horses. Otherwise, trainers wouldn’t hire ’em.”

Alec said nothing. All his life he had been taught to have respect for older people, to accept the fact that their age and experience gave them the privilege to set the rules. Not that they were always right, he knew, or even that they claimed to be. But there should be no open questioning of their authority, and certainly no defiance.

He knew that most trainers felt more or less like Henry when it came to hiring women, but there was a labor shortage at the track. Not too many men wanted the job of caring for a race horse, day and night, seven days a week. They would find other work that was less confining.

Alec looked around the area at the stablehands working in the late afternoon sun, enjoying its warmth and softness, laughing and talking while they scrubbed leg bandages in iron tubs, hung their laundry, cleaned tack, bedded stalls and fed horses, all to blaring radios.
Some wouldn’t be done until long after dark and their day had begun well before 6:00
A.M.

All that most people knew about horse racing was the front side of the track, Alec decided, the big names of horses and trainers and jockeys—perhaps thirty-five in number. Fans knew little, if anything, about the backside.

The grooms knew their horses better than anybody, yet they waited like children to get what the front side gave them, which wasn’t much. New York City tracks were better than most, and yet the take-home pay for grooms was only about $90 a week, if they were lucky. Out of that had to come food and clothing and rent for themselves and their families. They had no union, no pension fund, no hospitalization, no way of improving their conditions, and certainly no job security. They could be fired on a moment’s notice.

Worse still, there was little unity among them. Discord prevailed. There were tensions and resentment between groups—racial among black, white and Puerto Rican; old men against young men; family men against single men; and, finally, men against women.

Why then did they work here? Alec had heard their reasons. They liked horses. The work was not hard even if continuous. They had to work somewhere. If they’d had sufficient schooling they wouldn’t be here. And for those who were young and had the ability, there was the opportunity of becoming exercise boys and galloping horses for $110 a week, with dreams of becoming jockeys.

Henry said, “Like I’ve told you before, Alec, I’ve nothing against girls but …”

Always the
but
, Alec thought, and now would come the ugly words, usually with some justification but based on the clear-cut classifications Henry had worked out years ago. In those days males and females had been forced to fit the typical pattern of stereotyping—the man being masculine and strong, the woman feminine and weak, if not altogether helpless.

“This is just another
movement
of women trying to compete with men,” Henry continued. “And in this business it’s dynamite!”