Horse Heaven (19 page)

The filly fell down as if she had been cold-cocked.

The pony jumped back two steps.

The groom’s assistant ran for the trainer.

The four of them, groom, trainer, groom’s assistant, pony, stood around the filly in a circle, regarding her. The groom’s assistant thought she was dead. The groom thought she was a pain in the ass. The trainer thought she was too complicated for a man whose heart was no longer really in his work, now that he had taken up golf as a sideline avocation and had a two-sixteen tee time on the resort course. The pony could not remember ever making such a big deal of anything as this filly made of everything.

The groom’s assistant said, “You want me to throw water on her or something?”

“We can wait her out.”

The pony gave an eloquent grunt.

She came to, bucking.

The groom kept firm hold of her and followed her backward, sideways, forward, sideways again, backward again. She bucked as if born to do it, twisting her head from side to side, kicking forward and backward, rearing, humping her back. The three other yearlings and their handlers had scattered at the first buck, and now watched her from the barn entrances, as did the trainer. The groom, he thought, was handling her nicely. He was a young Mexican boy, about twenty-five. He was utterly impassive, as if the bucking were not even taking place. That was just the sort of attitude the trainer liked to see in a horseman. Horses, especially young horses, were exquisite receivers of emotional signals. A good horseman had to have feet of lead, hands of silk, and the temperament of a sandbag, in the trainer’s opinion. He didn’t even like to see the handler talk soothingly to a horse in a state. If you talked soothingly to a horse in a state, then the horse concluded that his state was justified.

At last, the filly came down on all four trembling legs and stayed there. She was still in a funny posture, shrunk in on herself as if she could make a space between her skin and the saddle, but she was standing still, maybe too tired to move. The groom stepped toward her and stood by her head. After a moment, he began stroking her around the eyes. She was covered with sweat. The groom looked at the trainer, who nodded and made a gesture that he should lead her forward, which he did. She took a step or two, stopped, humped her back, then took another step and another step and another step. After about ten steps, she relaxed her back, shivered once, and then walked forward more agreeably. As soon as she had done so for maybe a minute, the trainer held up his hand, the groom stopped the filly, and between the three of them, with the pony standing right there, quickly ungirthed and removed the offending slip of leather. The groom took the filly off and gave her a bath.

I
T WAS WELL AFTER DARK
the same day, and Joy Gorham was driving Elizabeth Zada to the ranch. Elizabeth Zada was the largest woman Joy had ever known—six feet tall, anyway, and 175 pounds for sure. It was reassuring for Joy to be in Elizabeth’s orbit, because of her Paul Bunyan quality. Large objects, Joy thought, like renegade space stations, could fall from the sky, and Elizabeth would deflect them without stanching her conversational flow. Elizabeth’s
conversational flow was prodigious. Elizabeth was sixty years old. Right now she was discoursing about her sexuality.

“You see, when you have an orgasm, it’s an outward flow of energy. Just dissipated, gone. You can’t afford that. I realized years ago, even before I began my studies of this, that after a certain age, which turns out to be twenty-four, actually, you dissipate that energy and you have less. You have to keep that energy within yourself, so that it builds up.”

Joy, who was driving her truck, shifted on her seat cushion, thinking of a pressure cooker, its little gauge rattling and knocking.

“And then it goes out through your head.”

“Pardon me?”

“Well, it goes out through your head. The top of your head. You see, there’s an energy space there, where spiritual energy shoots upward toward the Godhead. Personally, I always think of a baby’s fontanel. You want that fontanel back. It closes over in the first year as the baby separates from the Godhead, but later on, through meditation, you open it. But that’s my own thought. There’s nothing about that in any of the teachings that I’ve read. All this other stuff, though, it’s well attested.”

Joy, a trained scientist, knew better than to ask by whom.

“At any rate, here you have this sexual energy in your lower self. You contain it, move it upward through your spine—there’s a pathway there, you know, a narrow channel—then it blossoms in your head, you might say, and then, whoosh, out it goes. Lovely feeling, I must say.” She cleared her throat. “My goodness, I haven’t been around a horse in so long. Five years anyway. But thank you.”

How it happened that she and Elizabeth Zada were driving to the ranch after dark was that Joy had been at her dentist’s office having a filling replaced, and the hygienist had brought this loud woman into the room and had said to Joy, “Elizabeth here is looking to read some horses’ minds. No kidding. I saw that you work out at the ranch.” And before she knew it, Elizabeth had overwhelmed her reserve and taken her out to dinner, and started talking and kept talking, and here they were.

Joy said, “I feel like I haven’t been around anything else. When I think of the people, they seem like they’re on TV or something, even Mr. Tompkins, especially Mr. Tompkins, but when I think of the horses, they seem like they’re all in the room. The thing about horses is, they’re always right there with you.” Joy made the last turn to the back entrance of the farm. It was nearly eight. She said, “There’s about a mile to go.”

“Men are
not
responsible for your orgasm. That’s a trap we fall into, especially
in marriage. I know I did. For years I complained to Nathan Zada that his technique was off. You know, touch me higher, touch me lower, be more tender, be more masterful, be someone else, for God’s sake! Who am I, the princess Elizabeth, to be stuck with you, Nathan Zada, a mere furrier? Poor Nathan, may he rest in peace.”

“Is your husband dead?”

“Oh, my goodness, no. He left me for a florist. They live in Arizona now.”

“Oh.”

“I meant, may he rest in peace after he dies in that burning car crash on the highway.” Elizabeth laughed a big laugh, and they pulled through the back gate of the farm and turned toward the stallion area, where Mr. T. now resided. One of the stallions had been sold, and so Mr. T. got an eyeful every day, an eyeful of mares walking by, to the breeding shed, an eyeful of stallions capering and prancing and showing off. Even though he was a gelding, he did a little capering and showing off himself. Joy wasn’t sure it was the best place for him, but the paddock he lived in had good, expensively irrigated grass all year round, and he had improved his condition in only a few weeks. He still needed about a hundred pounds, but he was a different horse from the one he had been in Texas. Everyone who saw him thought he was one of the stallions—proximity fooled them—but to Joy he was the absolute model of that most useful of equines, a gelding. The difference was in his neck. Testosterone always thickened a stallion’s neck, made it heavy and cresty. Mr. T.’s neck was refined, so that when he was too thin he looked ewe-necked. But when she put him together, or when of himself he trotted around his paddock with his ears up and his neck arched, it made just the right curve, tapering upward out of his shoulders, tucking delicately into his throatlatch. He was light and athletic, the sort of pure working organism that only a horse without reproductive urges could be.

Joy parked the truck and she could see him, a white blur in the darkness. He lifted his head from the grass and walked over to the gate, ears pricked. The other paddocks were empty, because the stallions got put in for the night. As soon as she got out of the truck, he greeted her and she heard the gate creak as he pressed his weight against it. He drew her toward him, that’s what it always felt like, whether out of friendship or beauty or something more basic. She loved the old guy. She bragged about him until the others she worked with rolled their eyes at her, but look at him, she thought. She had investigated his pedigree, for example, and discovered that he was inbred to St. Simon, the greatest horse of the nineteenth century, about whom the book she read claimed, “Having no faults, he passed none on.” When she looked at the
painting of St. Simon, there was Mr. T., his head black instead of white, staring back at her. Joy was as proud of that classic head as if it were her own. She was proud of his tendons, too. They had tried a pasture buddy, a pony from the track who was laid up, but on the second day, he had bitten Mr. T. below the hock. When the vet ultrasounded Mr. T.’s tendon, she said, “How many starts did you say this guy had?”

“Fifty-two.”

“Amazing,” said the vet. “What does he do now?”

“A little hacking out so far.”

The vet shook her head. “Normally, I don’t see tendons like this on a racehorse after they’re about three years old.” She might as well have said, “Your child is a genius and we know that the DNA comes directly from you.”

“This,” said Joy to Elizabeth, who had been talking the whole time Joy was contemplating Mr. T., but whom Joy had not heard, “is the horse I was telling you about. You could start here.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mr. T.”

“Hmmm,” said Elizabeth.

This is what Joy had brought Elizabeth out to the farm for, and late, too, in the dark, after all the others were gone. Elizabeth had explained to Joy at dinner that her ability to communicate with animals was tied to her awakened sexuality, and both had come on late in life, after menopause, but, after hearing the words “animal communicator,” Joy had lost the thread of the argument, as she lost the thread of arguments about sexuality. Elizabeth was not to be denied, however, and here they were.

“Now,” said Elizabeth, “I’m more accustomed to communicating with predators, whose thought patterns and sensory patterns are more or less similar to ours. But there are so few of them. I thought I would try horses because it’s a larger sample population.”

Mr. T. stood between them, thoroughly alert. First he looked at Joy, then he looked at Elizabeth. Actually, thought Joy, if I believed in this, I would think that he looks ready to talk. She patted him on the neck, but he moved away from her hand. “Hmmm,” said Elizabeth. “Let’s go inside. Can we do that?”

Joy opened the gate and followed Elizabeth into the enclosure. Mr. T. placed himself between them. After a moment, he bumped Elizabeth on the chest. Joy thought that was interesting, because normally he wasn’t a very physical horse and he liked his personal space. Then he bumped Joy on the chest. Elizabeth said, “He’s streaming.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a flow of images. I don’t really understand what they mean, because I don’t know anything about horses, frankly.”

She squatted down, her hand on the fence for balance. Mr. T. lowered his head toward her. Joy said, “Does he want anything?”

“He wants something large and red. Like a brick, a big brick.”

“That would be a mineral lick. He has one of those.”

“Well, maybe he wants another one.”

“Is he cold? Does he want a blanket? The other horses get to go in at night.”

“No, he likes it. The cold is refreshing.”

“How does he say that?”

“He streams me an image of rolling in the mud and jumping up and kicking his heels up.”

“He does like to roll.”

“I don’t think he’s cold.”

“Who does he like? Does he like any of the other horses?”

“He likes you.”

Joy flushed. It was amazing how this thrilled her, especially since she knew that he liked her already, from his attachment behaviors.

“Is there another gray horse around, one he can see?”

“There’s a gray stallion, two paddocks over. He’s only a four-year-old. He came off the track in December.”

“Is he injured?”

“He bowed a tendon. They’re going to breed him a little bit, then try sending him back to the races in the fall.”

“Right front?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. T. says this is a very fine animal in his opinion. He has a big heart.”

“Like he’s loving, or like he literally has a large heart?”

“I don’t know, it’s the image of a large hot thing inside the horse’s chest.”

“He is a wonderfully bred horse. He’s got Mahmoud and Blue Larkspur and War Admiral on his bottom side.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means he probably has an extra-large heart for a horse.”

“Mr. T. likes him. The others he can take or leave. He doesn’t like one very dark-colored horse with a bright-white stripe on his face from about the eye to about halfway down the nose.”

“That’s Halo Highlights. He bit off his groom’s finger two years ago. But he isn’t that bad.”

“Mr. T. says he would like to be.”

“How does he say that?”

“I just see a dark horse making his head shake and doing something with his ears. Mr. T. says that he is sneaky and he wants you to stay away from the horse.”

“I do.”

“Mr. T. knows that if something happened to you he would go to a place.”

“What place?”

“I see a flat, hot arena or something like that, with lots of horses packed together and no shade. A man with a whip keeps coming in the gate.”

“Bucky Lord.”

“Who?”

“Mr. T.’s former owner. He starved them.”

“He also beat them, Mr. T. says.”

Joy, who had intended to remain skeptical, believed every word, even though she had been to fortune-tellers before, and knew that they gave you what you wanted right away so you would lower your defenses. She said, “Does he have any aches and pains?”

Elizabeth was silent for a moment, then said, “No.”

“Does he want anything?”

“He wants to open the paddock gate and go out and walk around the farm and look at everything.”

“I’ve seen him working at his gate latch, actually.” Joy was beginning to feel that it was too much, that the inside of the horse’s mind was overwhelming her, even making her faint. Elizabeth spoke contemplatively. She said, “Now, remember, I haven’t done horses at all, so I don’t know how sensitive I am to them, but Mr. T. seems very cerebral. He looks around and watches things. He feels anxious a lot of the time, because he fears what might happen. He gave me an image of a mare walking toward the breeding shed. He said that her mind was blank, as if she were in shock. It made him afraid.”