Authors: Jane Smiley
But the animal was no fun, no fun at all. Biting, pawing, and trying to strike, arching his neck and whinnying at any and all females. The first step was to set him up with his tough guys—Wayne, his cowboy groom, former rodeo clown, former polo-player, former stud groom in Kentucky, who’d already had a finger bitten off by a horse because he’d been just a hair too slow. He wasn’t too slow any longer. Dick meant to have him walk the horse when he was hot, too, since he didn’t really trust any of the regular hot walkers to stay out of trouble. Then there was Frankie, an exercise rider who sometimes worked for him, who was of normal human size, about five eleven, 165, and lifted weights to boot. He rode big bad horses all over the track, and the owner paid extra. Then there were the mares. Dick had four older mares running this year, two five-year-olds, a big four-year-old, and a six-year-old. They were tough girls, on progesterone so they never went into season. They had a serious interest in manners on the part of any male in their vicinity. Dick thought he would just try stabling Epic Steam among the mares, and see if they could communicate their standards of behavior to the youngster.
The real danger, of course, was chaos on the track. You could solve that by working either before or after most of the other horses, which meant before dawn or after 10:00 a.m. Since there was a meet at Belmont right now, it was hard to find a spot, but he chose to try late rather than early, in the heat rather than before it. There were always the possibilities of taxing the guy, tempting exhaustion. Often they behaved better when they got more exercise. The catch in this one was that they got fitter and fitter and needed more and more, and you risked working them to death, but this colt had no apparent flaws that a lot of work would uncover.
When he had seen enough, he went to Wayne and told him to move the mares, then went back to his office, where he fell into a reverie about legends. The colt was already a legend, or at least a figure. In the space of about a minute, Dick had concocted a wonderful fantasy, in which he himself was the star, and the colt the co-star. The Stations of the Cross were all the big three-year-old
races, and heaven was himself, talking to a reporter fifteen months from now, self-effacingly discounting his own legendary horsemanship, I knew he had something, I saw it there, blah blah blah. There was a knock on the door, and the vet came in. He put something on the desk. Dick said, “What’s that?”
“Progesterone implant. It’s for cattle.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I took it out of that colt’s neck. It was lodged up under the mane.”
“I never heard of that before.”
“Some guys have tried it. Quarterhorse guys showing stallions sometimes use it to cool a stallion’s jets. The racing authorities would never look for progesterone in a colt’s urine, so it never tests. It could test.”
“So, now that you’ve got it out, does that mean he’s going to be worse?”
“I don’t know. There’s no evidence that progesterone has any effect on testosterone-related behavior. Might. Might also screw him up in the breeding shed. Don’t know. I’m going to make my futile plea.”
“Cut him.”
“Cut him.”
“The owner has one-point-two million into him.”
“He’s talented.”
“On the other hand, he could break down tomorrow. One-point-two million down the drain, no future as a stallion, probably no future as a riding horse. If you cut him and he couldn’t race, you’d probably have to put him down. What if they had cut Mr. Prospector? He hardly raced, and he’s made more money in the breeding shed than any horse in history.”
“The American Thoroughbred would be sounder, straighter, and less inbred if Mr. Prospector had been cut. That’s my opinion, not a scientific finding. Cut him.”
“I want to try a few things first. We’ve had bad actors before. We’ve handled them.”
“Yes, you have, and no accidents or injuries, and you’re lucky you’ve got Wayne and Frankie, because horses pay attention to them. So I’ll say the other thing I came to say.”
“What?”
“Good luck. His heart beats about twice a minute. It must be the size of a Volkswagen. Think you can ride the tiger?”
“Don’t know.”
And he didn’t. After the vet left, he looked at the implant, about the size and shape of a thick, headless nail, lying on his desk. There was an idea, wasn’t there? How about two?
Late in the morning, Frankie took the horse out for a jog around the main track, the vast main track. Dick watched his every step, which wasn’t easy, because he curvetted and pranced and bucked and reared and squealed. He was a good bucker. Athletic horses generally were. Frankie came back laughing. That was Frankie for you. Dick sent them around again, just to start on the exhaustion idea. When they came back this time, Dick called out, “How much do I have to pay you to ride this guy all day?”
“Who’s the owner?”
“He just sold Toys Galore for seventeen trillion dollars to the Chinese.”
“I think an annual wage of a hundred thousand dollars would cover it.”
“You got it, baby.”
The horse put his nose on his knees and bucked. Frankie hauled his head up and laughed, then he said, “My girlfriend, she rides event horses. She got on a guy like this in Ireland, and when he bolted, she let him run right into a tree. He never bolted again. Now she rides him in a twisted-wire snaffle.”
“I’ll think about bitting options.”
“She’s got this old English book about the sorts of bits and things they used back in the old days. You could have something made.”
“You could get some sense and stop riding these kinds of horses.”
“I got expenses, man.”
They laughed again, and Dick went back to his office.
T
HE NEXT DAY
, the horse was a tad quieter, and so Dick actually saw his way of going. It was rhythmic but not fluid, which was surprising, given the stories about his speed. But they were still jogging. He had a big walk, and that was usually more telling in a Thoroughbred than the trot. Once again, Frankie came back laughing. That was something, anyway. The horse was fit and ready to run. The Belmont Futurity was coming up—nominations hadn’t closed yet, and the owner would certainly like the idea of turning his investment around as quickly as possible. Again, it took maybe a second for Dick to do the thing he was usually well guarded against—construct that fantasy walk into the winner’s circle, followed by that fantasy slide down those greased skids to the Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, blah blah blah.
There were, of course, other horses in the barn. Before Epic Steam, Dick had been favoring a few, calculating as coolly as possible what races to put them in, how to profit from their individual abilities. He no longer tossed the coin, anyway. In that, he was back to normal. And he was known as a good race-picker—fully versed in the adage “A trainer keeps the best company he can find and a horse keeps the worst.” The handicapper’s job was to prevent
your good horse from stealing money from horses of lesser talents. Your job was to outwit the handicapper. Dick was good at that, and he had a barnful of profitable horses whose winnings made it up to sensible owners that they weren’t getting their names and pictures in the papers for big races. But Epic Steam threatened to blast all of that away. It seemed like you could put him in any race and he had a chance. It
seemed
like that. That would be an illusion. Dick recognized it as an illusion. But that didn’t mean he didn’t believe it.
On the third day, Dick thought the horse could stand a gallop, and maybe the rider could control a gallop. A very long trot the day before had tired the horse, so, when they were tacking him up and walking him out to the track, he looked for all intents and purposes to be within the normal range of bad behavior for a two-year-old. Frankie was happy going out. Wayne said, “I think I’ve got this guy figured out. He’s not all that bad. Touchy around the left ear. You know Rosalba Somebody, she walks hots for Gomez?”
“No.”
“She twists their ears sometimes. I’ve seen her do it.”
“No telling what this guy has been through.”
“That’s for sure, boss.”
But they made a happy group, walking out to train, everyone thinking that this was easier than they had expected after all, and taking personal credit for that.
And the horse galloped very nicely. Went off straight, behaved himself, showed off a beautiful big stride, galloped about twice the usual distance, and came back to the trot quietly. Of course, that was where he stumbled. That was where he went to his knees and then got himself back up, and trotted off uneven, and instead of coming right when whatever it was that happened sorted itself out, the horse stayed uneven, so mildly uneven that you almost couldn’t see it, and Dick didn’t want to see it, and he told himself that he didn’t know the horse’s way of going at all well, and maybe this was just him—there were sound horses that looked awkward all over the place. But Epic Steam was, of all things, not awkward. He was uneven. He was lame.
And Dick, who hadn’t seen the horse four days ago, felt his heart breaking inside his chest.
There was always this little space, after you saw something wrong with a horse and before the vet examined the animal, when you made up your mind not to cross bridges, borrow trouble, look on the dark side. When you hummed along with a sense of hope. But it was no use. Your heart, which knew the truth, had already broken. When the vet sat down in your office to give you the bad news, he wasn’t lowering the boom, he was picking up a piece of your heart and offering it to you—this is what’s wrong. It’s specific.
What was wrong with Epic Steam was a chip in the fetlock joint of the right foreleg. Almost undetectable on the X-ray. Almost not there. But there. Then the vet answered all the futile questions. Why?
“Maybe the run-off I heard about. But he’s been shipped since then. Could have had it before, too. Sometimes it chips and then breaks off later.”
How long?
“Oh, four months should be plenty of time. Thirty days in a stall, then ninety days at the farm. Back into training beginning of January, say. I think there’s all kinds of hope for this. But you’ve got to give it time.”
Full recovery?
“If you give him the time.”
They looked at each other. Bad news had been passed across this desk so many times, Dick didn’t think that the vet really understood that this was unusually bad, somehow. The vet said, “Listen. You remember the story of John Henry?”
“Yeah.”
“He was a dud and a bastard. They thought he was worthless and gelded him and turned him out. Then they picked a sucker and passed him off for twenty-some thousand bucks.”
“Greatest last-laugh story in racing, but—”
“He came back mentally able to run, and he ran for six years.”
“He was a great horse. No breeding, but—”
“They cut him and turned him out. I can cut him while he’s standing there eating his dinner. He came back a different horse.”
“Can’t do it. Have to tell the owner.”
“Tell the owner. He’s never had a horse before. Tell him what he should know and what he should do.”
“The horse was behaving pretty well.”
“You’re not listening and you’re not seeing.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“Why not?”
“He’s not John Henry. You can’t extrapolate from one horse to another, though people always try to. Every flip of the coin is new, the odds are the same no matter how many times it’s come up heads. Your evidence isn’t evidence, it’s just a way of saying the same thing all over again. The horse can be handled. We’ve had three days with him before this happened. He was starting to be handled.”
“You are starting to be very stubborn.”
“Am I?”
The vet shook his head as he went out.
Well, maybe he was starting to be very stubborn, but maybe he just had a vision. You didn’t know ahead of time whether something was a fantasy, a plan, or a vision. But you didn’t limit your options up front just because you didn’t know.
He picked up the phone. The owner didn’t have a farm himself, of course. Epic Steam was his only horse. The man picked up on the second ring. “Hi, this is Herman Newman.” Dick said, “Hi, Mr. Newman. This is Dick Winterson out at the racetrack.”
“Hey, Dick! We all set for tomorrow? Sir Michael’s coming along. He didn’t want to, but I said—”
“Well, Mr. Newman, the horse isn’t quite right. I’ve just had the vet in here—”
“I thought the horse was vetted in California. Sir Michael told me he had the best vet in the state look at him.”
“I know he did, sir. But when the horse galloped the first time, he stumbled to his knees, and when he got up, he didn’t come right after a bit, so I got my vet to examine him. He’s got a tiny little chip in his right front fetlock joint. That’s the joint below the knee. It’s like your knuckle joint. It would be hard for Sir Michael’s friend to see it if the horse hadn’t alerted him by traveling in some unusual way. It’s very subtle.”
“He’s got a broken leg? Have we got to put the horse to sleep?” The man sounded completely floored.
“It’s not like
Black Beauty
, sir. The horse can hardly feel it. It’s a tiny piece of bone that’s broken off the joint. The horse’s life is not in danger from this.”
“They sold me an unsound horse?”
The evidence was inconclusive. He said, “The horse is unsound now. You bought him six weeks ago. He hadn’t galloped or stressed himself after he ran off that time, and so you might say there could have been an undetected condition. Or he could have done it today, when he fell to his knees. The horse is a handful, sir. He’s big and strong and full of energy. He could have done it in his stall one night.”
“So now what?”
“The horse needs to go to a lay-up farm for about three, four months. They’ll put him in a stall for a month, then a paddock.”
“He can come back in November?”
“More like end of December.”
“What about the Derby? That’s the first Saturday in May.”
“Well—” But Dick couldn’t say it, either to Newman or to himself. So he said, “Iffy, but not out of the question. Depends on how he heals, how he trains. Time would be short.”