Horse Heaven (84 page)

It was by now about seven-thirty, and all would have been fine if it hadn’t been Sunday morning, when Ellen’s feed girl gave herself an extra half-hour in the sack. She was asleep in the apartment above the barn, with the windows closed and the air conditioner on high. Just as she turned over, glanced at the clock, and decided to allow herself another fifteen minutes, Epic Steam was deciding to try that jumping thing again, and within seconds he was just where he had wanted to be for so very long, in a paddock with four mares. Something this exciting for the four mares hadn’t happened in years, so they stood stock-still, ears pricked, tails up, staring at him. He took this as encouragement, and
lifted his own tail, arched his neck, and progressed in a beautiful
passage
around the perimeter of the pasture, picking his feet up as quick and high as if the ground were strewn with hot coals. All the horses in every other pasture looked on and occasionally whinnied encouragement. After displaying himself to his own satisfaction, Epic Steam lowered his head and snaked it toward one of the mares, a little bay. He approached her. She moved away, toward the other mares, and he paused, but then approached again. Manners do not come naturally to a young stallion, and did not come naturally to Epic Steam in any event. Her retreat aroused some of his inherent aggression, and he went after her. He thought he might bite her. Intent upon this thought, he did not pay attention to his position relative to the other mares, and so did not realize until it was already happening that they were kicking the stuffing out of him.

At this point, the feed girl got up, yawned, went into the bathroom, peed, and brushed her teeth. Then she found her jeans and paddock boots, a T-shirt, and a Diet Coke. She put on her baseball cap that was hanging by the door, and went down the stairs. First she went into the barn, and noticed that the stalled horses seemed a little restless. She fed them, which took about fifteen minutes. Then she loaded up the feed and hay into the bed of the farm pickup, pulled it out of the feed shed, and headed toward the back of the property, past the arenas and the first turnout. She stepped instinctively on the gas when she saw that almost all of the pastured horses were trotting around. Her first thought was that a pack of dogs had gotten into one of the paddocks, which had happened once, and she felt that adrenaline rush of fear. But there was no barking. Only over where those mares were—

And there he was, the great Epic Steam, his intuition having failed him, standing in the corner of the pasture by the gate, his head down. The mares were grazing peacefully, having seen the threat and dealt with it. The feed girl didn’t know whether to call Ellen first or to try to get the horse out first—he was a dangerous animal, she knew. But then she went up to the gate, and he looked so forlorn that she took one of the halters hanging there and went inside. He put his head in the halter, and, with the mares looking on with interest, she led him, limping, out of the gate and down the path, back to his own peaceful spot on the other side of the woods. She spoke to him kindly and pityingly, and he didn’t mind it.

W
ILLAM
V
ANCE DECIDED
to give up on finding Justa Bob. The Jockey Club gave out information only on who had owned a horse for his last start, and that was William himself. The new owner hadn’t started him again
in six months. That was a bad sign—all William could think that that meant was that the evidence of lameness that he remembered was pretty bad—a bowed tendon most likely. What he imagined was that the new owner had him at a farm somewhere, rehabbing him. If it had been six months, then the horse could come back anytime, so he could turn up, but the national racing magazines only gave the results of stakes races, and Justa Bob was a claimer. William began to lose hope, to pay less attention to the whole deal, but his conscience still ached every time he walked into his office and saw those eight photofinish win pics, sometimes with Justa Bob on the outside, sometimes with Justa Bob on the inside, always with his head down and stretched, his nostril flared. Short of going down there and asking around, he had done his best, he thought. Probably he should just put it out of his mind.

A
UDREY OPENED THE DOOR
of her closet, took out her suitcase, and laid it on the floor of her room. Then she went over to the dresser and reached into the top drawer, took out a pair of pink underpants, and unrolled them. Inside them was the key to her suitcase. She unlocked the suitcase. Out of that she took a ratty teddy bear, Arnold. His back seam was open. She stuck two of her fingers into the bear’s stuffing and felt the edges of the money, a nice wad, the three thousand dollars she had won hitting a twenty-to-one long shot that Deirdre had told her had no breeding, no record, no speed, and no hope when they’d gone to Pimlico for the last day of the meet. On the other hand, he was gray, so she bet him anyway, and now she had enough money to buy a horse, and, more than that, her mother’s permission. She pushed the money back into the teddy bear, locked the teddy bear in the suitcase, hid the suitcase in the closet and the key in her underwear. She was thirteen and going into ninth grade, old enough to put her money in the bank, as her mother had pointed out, but having the money in her room felt like having the horse, whoever he or she was, very close at hand.

A car horn beeped, and Audrey looked out the window of her bedroom. It was Deirdre’s sedan. Audrey grabbed her helmet off the bed and ran for the front door, not forgetting to shout good-bye to her mother as she slammed out. As soon as she was in the car, Deirdre began. “Now, Audrey,” she said, “I have been shamed into taking you on this jaunt on the score that I have nothing better to do, which is not exactly true, but true enough. My own purpose is to make sure that you don’t get on anything your own grandmother couldn’t ride and to talk you out of every animal either on the grounds of conformation or on the grounds of temperament.”

“Thank you.” Audrey was serene in the assurance that they would find something at either the first or the second barn.

“Have you ever haggled for anything, darlin?”

“You mean, tried to talk the price down?”

“I do indeed.”

“No.”

“Well, I hate to lay this curse upon you, Audrey, but you are a natural horsewoman, who can read the
Form
, place a bet, pull a shoe, and jump a triple combination. If that is your fate, then you’re bound to be broke unless you can buy them cheap and sell them dear.”

“I don’t want to sell him. I want to buy him.”

“Your horse is not your boyfriend, Audrey. If you want to learn what they have to teach you, then you must let them come and go, and always make a profit out of the back end.”

“Okay,” said Audrey, a little deflated. She saw that they were almost to the turn of Marshville Road. That was where the first two prospects were. She put on her helmet. They turned down the gravel road, and Audrey thought, This is it. We are almost there. I am going to see him very soon. She saw that every fencepost and telephone pole and flying bird was very significant. They went over a hill and there was the barn, red and white, and he was in there, probably already standing in the crossties. She bounced up and down in her seat. They turned into the parking lot and pulled up to a sign that said “Riders Park Here.” Here he had been living. These were familiar scenes to him. Every day, he would walk out of the barn and across this very parking lot to the jumping ring. He was thirteen years old (both of the geldings they were planning to see here were thirteen years old).

But in fact he wasn’t here. The horses shown to her were heavy and dull, just horses. One was brown and one was chestnut. She tried to be enthusiastic about the chestnut, but when she got on him, his gaits were choppy and hard to ride. The brown didn’t even jog sound, and Deirdre said to the owner, “This one needs a vet, darlin. He’s got heat in his foot and a digital pulse,” and that was that.

That was that all day. They looked at ten, she rode six. In addition to the one with choppy gaits, there was one with only one eye, one who couldn’t switch leads behind at the canter, one who bucked and spun when he passed other horses in the arena, one with an ugly head, and one who was very big and jerked her right out of the saddle about every three minutes.

As they drove away from the last barn, Audrey said to Deirdre, “You guys made a plan to teach me a lesson.”

“Did we, now?”

“Yes. You took me out to see all these horses because you knew I wouldn’t want to buy any one of them.”

“I suspected, yes. But, Audrey, these are horses in your price range. The unfortunate circumstance here is that you don’t ride in your own price range.”

“That one was okay. He just had an ugly head. He had nice gaits and he jumped well.”

“Yes, he did. But, you know, you want to be glad to see that face every morning, not be saying, ‘He’s fine enough but he’s got a head like a coffin without handles.’ Believe it or not, someone is going to come along who thinks that’s a pretty head, or a handsome head, or a head with character. That’s the one who should own that fellow.”

“I need to win some more money.”

“That’s when you don’t win it, when you need to. You keep that cash in your sock or wherever you’ve got it, and your horse will turn up.”

“How about a horse off the track?”

“We’ll see.”

That night, Audrey wrote a letter to Miss Joy Gorham, at the Tompkins Ranch. It read,

She enclosed a picture of herself on Moses, taking a very flowery three-foot-six oxer at an A show. That pony was for sale. Ellen expected to get forty thousand dollars for him. She sealed the envelope, gave it a little kiss, and put
it in the mailbox. Then she did what her mother was always telling her to do, she tried to forget about it.

W
HAT WITH THE TRIP
to Kauai and going through the galleys of the first volume of her three-volume
Spiritual Housework: An Astrolabe for the Next Millennium
, and overseeing her investment experiment, which meant being in constant communication with Mr. T. (so far, the return on her investment in the commodities market was running at about 23 percent annually, while the return on her investment in the Hollywood Park market was running at about 22 percent), Elizabeth was rather overextended. Even so, she had time to notice that someone was falling in love with her, and that someone was Mr. Kyle Tompkins, owner of Tompkins Racing and everything else in the entire world. One of the things that Elizabeth had discussed at length in her work was the future of monogamy. Monogamy, she pointed out, had a very checkered past, and at the beginning of the present millennium was purely a property arrangement. Whatever one’s theory of male sexuality, she went on to say, it only seemed to fit intermittently and with unease into monogamous marriage. When women were not tied down by pregnancy and child-rearing, there was much evidence to support the notion that they were not monogamous, either. Her own experience, which she related in detail, demonstrated that developing one’s sexuality took discipline, focus, money, and time, and should not be considered the recourse of mere idleness. Thus it was that she had an entire theoretical framework in which to fit the fact that Kyle Tompkins was married, and not only married, but California married, which meant that impulsive or passionate actions on his part would have many tedious legal ramifications and could dislocate a significant number of innocent members of the working class, shifting the wealth that was now filtering down to them in an orderly fashion into the coffers of the parasitic legal class, who were, even in quiet times, always circling the Tompkins fortune like moths about a lightbulb.

Which was not to say that Elizabeth was unaware of the fact that Kyle Tompkins’ wife was forty-two years old, whereas she, Elizabeth Zada, was sixty-two years old, that Mrs. Tompkins was and had been all her life a beauty, whereas she, Elizabeth Zada, had graduated from a plain childhood to a gawky adolescence and thence, to the outspoken relief of her mother, to the best wifehood that she had been able to manage at the time, to Nathan-may-he-rest-in-peace-in-spite-of-all-those-animals-he-murdered-as-a-furrier Zada, no prize himself. Her passion with Plato was a project joyously conceived and carried out with relish, but the fact was that never had she aroused actual longing in
any man until now, and it had a potent effect upon her. When she opened her e-mail every day to the compositions of Kyle Tompkins, it was with anticipation rather than disapproval. Nor had she as yet shown them to Plato, though he would have plenty to say about them, for he was always eager to exploit his interpretive skills.

Plato was ready for marriage and fatherhood. Elizabeth had been telling him this for several months now. He was thirty-three and secure in his vocation. Though his tendency to theorize at length might not be every woman’s cup of tea, he had plenty of money, plenty of self-knowledge, lively convictions, habits of kindness and patience. If he was not as well prepared for domestic life as any man in America, Elizabeth couldn’t imagine who was, and Plato was inclined to agree. They had done well together, but a change was in the wind, and Elizabeth was preparing to add a chapter to volume two
(Twin Suns: Relationships in the New World)
called “So Let Us Melt Us: How to Choose to Flow Apart.”