The Bookwoman's Last Fling (25 page)

“Hey, that's a start.”

We staked out a table in the kitchen and began to eat. He asked if I'd be coming back and I said I'd try.

“You won't, though. I got a feeling this is it.”

“This is what, Rick?”

“Just one more case of somebody drifting away.”

“It won't be. I promise I'll be back.”

Back in the tack room we sat up talking until his words slurred and became repetitive. I stayed with him until he was sound asleep. I turned off his lights and left him there, but the images of his lost life and the feeling of his quiet desperation followed me back to my own shedrow.

In the morning I hit the tow ring and walked horses for five hours with only one short break for coffee. I was feeling good: No aches, no pains, as normal as a madman ever gets. I decided that this afternoon I would go for a run if I could find a stretch of trail or a gym. I needed about five miles to work the kinks out and I still had a few things to do here. I wanted to make at least one more walk through the stable area in case I had missed somebody, and I had to talk to Sandy and see where we stood. He hadn't spoken to me since Barbara pushed him into a corner but I knew he didn't like it much.

They watched from the rail as North Hills breezed half a mile, and afterward Barbara sat in the shedrow while I cooled her horse out. No one approached her: even Bob, who apparently would be her lady's ginney, was cutting her some wide slack. She was a formidable figure with her jacket drawn up around her cheeks and her eagle eyes watching. This morning I kept my distance as well: I didn't try to draw her into any innocuous chatter like last time, and for a while she gave no sign that she even remembered who I was. Sandy stayed occupied at the track while Obie brought his horses up one after another. They huddled at the gap and I could imagine the last-minute advice going back and forth between them. Sandy might well be uneasy about leaving his horses with anyone, but he had made the decision and that was that.

I didn't want to let him get away again, so at one point I said, “Could I talk to you before you leave?” But Barbara was up and coming toward us, and the moment was lost. “I'll catch you later,” he said, and almost in the same breath, Barbara said, “What's the story, Cliff?”

“Of course he's coming with us,” Sandy said lightly. “Right, Cliff?”

She looked at me and I said, “Of course I am.”

“Of course you are,” she said, and we all laughed.

Barbara left around eleven and Sandy motioned me to follow him. We walked along the road toward the edge of the stable area and he sat down under a tree. I sat on the grass facing him and said, “First of all, I want to apologize for hemming you in like that. I know you're not thrilled about this.”

“It's not your fault. But yeah, I almost quit her there on the spot, before I even got started.”

“I'm glad you didn't.”

“Barbara's a good woman, but apparently we still have certain things to get straight between us. And I need to do it now, before I move body and soul four hundred miles south.”

“You need her to know that you intend to hire the hands yourself.”

“Among other things.”

“I could go with another stable if I'm causing you any grief.”

“Have you had an offer?”

“Bax Geiger offered me a job if I need one.”

“That'll be an education on many fronts.” He said this sarcastically, pointedly so. “Is he going south too?”

“Looks like it.”

“What'd you tell him?”

“Nothing yet. He knows I'm working for you. But even without Bax, I think I can get a job now. I don't need much, nothing really. The main thing is to get on someone's list and get my license stamped so I'll have access to the racetrack.”

“So just that quick you've become a racetracker,” he said with a trace of amusement. “You don't need any of us anymore.”

“It doesn't take long, does it? But it's been good having a situation like this one, where I'm free to come and go. And I want to thank you for that, and I'm sorry if I've caused you problems.”

“Then let's leave it this way,” he said. “You stay with me, at least till you get settled at Santa Anita. You know Barbara likes you, and the thing about walking hots is the freedom it gives you.”

We sat in the cool breeze a while longer, making civilized and irrelevant talk about the upcoming race meet, rich people with fine horses, all the things he had shown no inclination to discuss earlier with any of us. “Barbara's an unusual owner,” he said. “She's been doing this for so many years she actually does know horses better than a lot of trainers.”

“Does that make it easier or harder to work for her?”

“Good question. We'll have to see.”

“Still, I know it's got to be clear who the trainer is, who makes the decisions.”

“I never would have taken it if she hadn't agreed to that. Even then it wasn't easy. Always been my own boss, always ran my own stable. But she's got some killer horses; a man would be out of his mind to let them get past him.”

“That filly sure is a nice one.”

“She's just one of 'em. Barbara's got a colt that's also undefeated, just about to turn three, might go all the way this spring.”

All the way to Louisville, he said.

We're not running for peanuts anymore, Toto.

Peanuts, I thought.

“Life is strange. Barbara could have her pick of trainers but somehow she wants me.”

He didn't say anything else for a few moments. Then: “I hope you will stick around, Cliff. I need people I can trust to tell me things.”

Now he trusts me. Now he wants me here. How quickly the worm turns.

“I know you're a greenhorn,” he said, “but I've been thinking about it, and I think your judgment is sound. That'll carry you a long way. The other stuff you can pick up, but judgment's not something you can learn.”

“Just don't forget the real reason I'm here.”

“I'm not forgetting anything. But it occurred to me yesterday how much I'm gonna miss Obie when we head south. He's been my other eyes and ears for a long time.”

“I can't be Obie, Sandy. Even if I could…”

“I
know
that,” he said with a touch of his old testiness. Then, softly: “I know that. I don't expect you to be Obie. But if it wouldn't crimp your style too much, maybe you could keep your eyes open and let me know if you see anything unusual.”

I didn't ask what he expected me to see. He cleared his throat and said, “Do you even know what you're hunting for? Do you have any idea?”

“I know exactly what I'm hunting for,” I said. “I just don't know who yet.”

“What, then?”

“I'm hunting a vicious killer, Sandy.”

A sober moment passed. “A fellow who bashed Cameron Geiger's brains in and tried to do the same to me,” I said. “And there may be other things for him to answer to.”

“Any idea how long it might take you to find him?”

“If I knew that I'd already have him, wouldn't I?”

He nodded as if that slightly abrasive comment made perfect sense and we sat there a few minutes saying nothing. At some point I said, “The stakes are too high not to find him.”

“When you do find him, what'll you do about it?”

“Whatever I have to do.”

“Well,” he said, breaking another silence, “let's walk back. I'm meeting Barbara for lunch. We'll get some things ironed out.”

We got up and headed back into the stable area together. I could hear the announcer calling the horses for the first race. Off to my right the procession began, the horses being led around the track toward the saddling paddock by the grandstand. It brought the warm afternoon to life. But Sandy poked along, as if he still had things to say before we got swallowed up in the crowd, and didn't know how. Once or twice I had to stop and wait for him. Whatever it was, he never got to it. We turned into his row and I saw people I knew, either by names or faces, and I thought no, it doesn't take long to be absorbed into this life when you live and breathe it.

Now, for example, there was suddenly a man I knew in the next barn. I had to blink to be sure, but in that brief moment he looked at me furiously out of the dark, without wavering. It was Junior. He backed around the shedrow and hustled down the other side.

I sat in the chair outside my tack room and watched the horses coming and going. I watched the people leading them and the ginneys in the barn across the way. I watched two birds fluttering and the muck truck scooping out the manure bin. And so I saw the day grow older.

I heard the call of the first race and I knew the horses were charging up the backstretch. Other than that, the stable area looked deserted.

Junior didn't return.

Sandy was gone two hours.

Barbara was with him when he returned. She smiled affably and said, “Hiya, Cliff,” but Sandy only nodded as they went by. We had nothing going that afternoon, so Sandy had chosen today to make his announcement. “An early dinner, boys, on me, in a real restaurant,” he said, I thought a bit smugly. Whatever had happened at lunch, he looked pleased about it. And so, just after feeding and hot showers, we all piled into three cars and drove to a restaurant called Tigris, specializing in foods of the Middle East. Barbara had raved about it and hoped we'd like it, though I suspected none of the racetrackers had ever had anything like what they were about to eat. Barbara had them seat us in a small private room, where we were set up at an oblong table. The food began coming: excellent, I thought, wishing Erin could be here. The boys ate cautiously at first, then with greater appetite, and Barbara watched us eat with growing satisfaction. But there was an air of unease at the table, a feeling of something too long in the wind finally coming to pass.

Dessert. Coffee. Uneasy laughter.

I paid the first compliment to them both, toasting them with a glass of white wine. “This is really superb, Barbara. Just great, Sandy.”

The others quickly said you bet, right you are, hear-hear, wowie.

At last Sandy got to the point. He stood at the head of the table and said, “This won't come as a surprise to any of you, but I'm going to train some horses for Barbara down south this winter. Obie will be in charge of my own stable, and I know you-all will work as diligently for him as you have for me.”

Barbara smiled broadly and said nothing.

“Bob and Cliff will go with us.” Sandy looked at me rather than Bob and said, “I'd like you to go down ahead of us and check us in; bed down a dozen stalls and get us ready. We'll be along shortly.” I asked when he'd want us to leave and he said, “Tomorrow morning.”

This was annoying but I'd have to work with it. A strange evening, I thought as we left the restaurant, a strange situation, but that, I was learning, was life on the racetrack. If the man said to be ready at dawn, you got ready. It was assumed you were free when you signed on, and many lived out their lives that way. Some of them saw the outside world only when they had to move between race meets.

One last bit of business at Golden Gate: That night I hunted Rick down and gave him his money back. He was upset at the news. “I thought we'd be together for a while,” he said. He looked hurt, betrayed if I had to put a name to it. “You're never coming back,” he said, and there was something heartbreaking in his face and in his voice. “I promise, Rick. You just keep your chin up and stick with Cappy, I'll get back here as soon as I can and we'll decide what to do next.” I clutched his hand and told it all to him again, but suddenly I knew that I was just another in a long line of his personal disasters, and finally there was nothing to do but to walk away. I took that picture of him with me as I looked back down the dark shedrow and waved.

I called Erin from the phone booth, a short call. I told her to turn in her rental car and be ready to leave at daybreak. But I had a hard time sleeping that night: The vision of Rick stayed with me.

Bob and I were out at five o'clock, just before dawn. He put our two folding Army cots in my trunk, along with our bags and some blankets, and I drove us down the freeway into town. I told him we had a passenger and Erin was waiting for us in the hotel lobby. She stashed her bag in the trunk, crawled into the backseat, and we were off.

“Erin, Bob: Bob, Erin,” I said, and they shook hands across the seat.

“So where did Janeway find you?” Bob said.

“Won me in a poker game in Reno. I do laundry and other occasional jobs.”

They got on famously from the first few minutes.

We were taking the fast inland route, east to Interstate 5, south across the great plain, over the Grapevine to Los Angeles, then east again through Glendale and Pasadena to Arcadia. “Old-time ginneys say this trip used to take all day,” Bob told us. Now we would do it in less than five hours, plenty of time for gregarious strangers to become chummy. An hour out of Golden Gate, Erin and Bob were old friends. They joshed each other and there was an air of easy camaraderie that we all found contagious. But there was also a cautious threshold still uncrossed. We were somewhere in the middle of the state when I stepped gingerly over it.

“So how long've you been with Sandy, Bob?”

“Four years next month.”

“He seems to be a good guy to work for.”

“Yeah, you can learn a lot from him…if that's what you mean.”

“So how'd you guys meet?”

“I was passing through, had no idea of doing anything with horses, and a guy I met knew a guy, you know how that goes. Next day there I was, muckin' out stalls at Golden Gate.”

“And found it such fascinating work you've never looked back.”

“Something like that. Of course there's more to it than just mucking and shoveling, as you know. I'm looking to buy my own horses, somewhere down the road.”

“That's what I heard. Got one picked out yet?”

“Only about a dozen times is all. The trick is to get the right horse for the right money.”

“And then have a lot of luck.”

“Yeah, there's that. But I'm still young and patient. That's the other thing you've got to have. Patience.” He smiled and took his own stab in the dark. “Why do you ask, kemo sabe?”

“I was just wondering if there'd be any honest work here for Erin.”

“Now there's an idea.” Erin leaned over Bob's shoulder. “Cliff wants to get me off the streets and out of hotel rooms, and that would probably do it.”

Tentatively, he asked, “What do you do besides follow Cliff around the country?”

“That's about it. He runs a white slavery racket.”

Bob laughed politely and said, “There's almost always room for somebody when you move into a new race meet. We'll have to ask Sandy.”

“I would be a very raw somebody,” Erin said. “I don't even know which end of a horse the hay goes in and which end you muck up after.”

“Sandy will actually like that. It means he can show you how he wants things done and he won't have to pay you much to start. Maybe you could do what Cliff does, walk hots.” He looked at me as if he couldn't make up his mind what to say next; then he said it anyway. “Cliff's not around half the time, he works strange hours, so if you're looking for something to keep from going stir-crazy, that might be it. I hope you're not scared of horses.”

“She's not scared of anything,” I said.

Erin reached over and gave my ear a playful twist. “So, Robert. Do you think he'd hire me?”

“Hey, I'm just a working stiff myself. But maybe we can figure something out for you by the time we get to the racetrack.”

I asked him what he thought of Sandy's arrangement with Barbara.

“It's a pretty unusual deal,” he said. “Great break for Obie.”

“Barbara sure seems like a sport,” I prompted.

He took five seconds to respond to that; then he said, “Yeah, I'd say so.”

“I could cut a steak on that edge in your voice.”

“She is a sport,” he said, quickly now. “Why, did you hear otherwise?”

“Tell you the truth, I haven't heard anything about her.”

“You will. But yeah, she plays it pretty close to the vest unless she likes you. She does like you, Cliff, so stay on her good side.”

A long minute passed. “Sounds like she keeps everybody on a short leash,” I said.

“What
ever
makes you say that?” he said with a smile.

“Suddenly I've got a hunch Sandy's gonna have a helluva time getting the space he needs to work with these horses his way.”

“Just remember, I didn't say that.” Another stretch of time passed. Surprisingly, he said, “But I guess I'd be lying if I said I didn't have some of those same thoughts myself.”

“Why would that be?” I said in an innocent voice.

Then, like a shaded window briefly opened on a lighted room, he said, “Barbara can be short when you rub her wrong. She fired one crew just like that.” He snapped his fingers five times. “Trainer, ginneys, bug boy, everybody.”

“Obie said the trainer was incompetent.”

“I'm talking about the one she had before that, who was not incompetent, but it was the same kinda deal anyway. One day you think you're doing great, the next day you're all out on your butt.” He grinned. “Butts.”

“That would make for an uneasy shedrow.”

“If you're Sandy, it probably does. Me, I can always go back to rubbing his horses, so I should be fine. Let me give you a tip, old buddy. Stay way the hell over on her good side. Talk nicely about her horses, and when she's in one of those quiet moods, give her plenty of space, don't say anything. And don't ever cross Charlie. Her husband.”

“What's he got to do with it, he's never around.”

“But when he is around he's always watching. He's got eyes like a hawk, hell, he
is
her eyes. I heard he's the one who had that first trainer axed. Some silly thing somebody said got his back up.”

“All I've ever seen him do is get out of her car and go off by himself. I've never even heard the man speak.”

“Don't worry, he speaks plenty when he has to. Last month he was just full of opinions, you couldn't pay him to shut up. And Barbara listens is what I heard.”

We arrived in Arcadia three hours later. The racetrack was beautiful in the warm noonday sunshine: the seafoam-green grandstand stretched out beyond an enormous empty parking lot, giving the illusion that racing was alive and well everywhere. I knew how the rise of easy gambling had taken its toll on this colorful old way of life. Centennial, Longacres, Ak-Sar-Ben; these were just a few of the casualties on the roster of lost racetracks around the country, but Santa Anita looked well and eternal. There was a man in the stable gate, though racing wouldn't begin here for three weeks. Bob showed his license and said we were with Sandy Standish, and we all got in without a hitch. The stable area looked half-empty. We had been assigned to Barn 107, over in a far corner near a thick hedge that overlooked Baldwin Avenue. Sandy had called ahead and had a full bin of straw and hay delivered, and we set to work, bedding our stalls and getting ready for the horses. I brought up the straw and cut the bales open with a knife; Bob and Erin spread the stuff around with pitchforks, about eight inches deep, and slowly it began to look and smell like a living shedrow.

This went quickly and we finished before three o'clock. We set up folding chairs in the shedrow, and Bob went out and got us another Army cot and some more blankets. “Looks like we're in business,” I said, and we sat in the yellow afternoon sun with the eerie quiet everywhere around us.

At some point I asked, “Will I get us in trouble if I jog around the racetrack?”

“Give it a shot,” Bob said. “If anybody stops you, we'll say we never saw you before.”

“Before what?”

“Before I saw you hopping that horse over in Barn 98.”

I ran five brisk laps. My feet made solid thumping sounds on the fast track, which echoed flatly as I came past the enormous empty grandstand. I looked up at the thousands of vacant seats and felt strangely like I'd made a right turn and had come to the place I needed to be. No rhyme or reason: it just felt right. Sometimes you do things like that.

Bob and Erin stood at the rail and watched me go past. Bob cupped his hands over his face and shouted down the track.
“It's Janeway by two lengths, Cliffie J. is second by a length and one half, Brokedown Ginney is third, and moving up fast on the inside is Lop-Eared Hossman! And now with only a sixteenth of a mile to go, the crowd goes wild. It's Don't Gotta Prayer passing everything on the outside!”
I heard them laughing as I went past, I pulled up a quarter-mile east and doubled over. I gave them a gesture, not quite obscene, not quite decent, and I walked past the stands cooling out. I skirted the jockeys' room, the paddock, and walking ring, went past the statues of Seabiscuit and Georgie Woolf, turned and came slowly back to the rail where they still waited.

We took showers in the rustic bathrooms and congregated in the shedrow as night fell over the San Gabriel Mountains.