Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley

Author:Jane Smiley [Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780375412660
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2000-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

SEPTEMBER

42 / A DREAM

WHEN DICK WINTERSON got back to Belmont Park from Saratoga in September, he realized that maybe he should have spoken to Dagoberto Gomez about this Epic Steam colt before shipping him out from California, but, then, what difference would it have made anyway? The animal could run, he was bred to the max, he was a monster of equine beauty, he might win the Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont, the Travers, the Withers, the Ascot Gold Cup, the St. Leger, the Grand Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, the Dubai World Cup, any, all. So he had bolted at Hollywood Park. A bolter was a bolter. There were bolters all over the world. And a little studdish, that was obvious. But he was a Land of Magic colt. Land of Magic colts littered the landscape. You got tough with them, they backed down most of the time. As he looked at the horse in his stall, ears pinned, lips wrinkled, the color of mink, shining like stainless steel, hooves counting out a tattoo in the straw, he found himself thinking that he had been training horses for, what, twenty-five, thirty years? If he played this out right, it could be the culmination. Maybe a little bit of a challenge was what he needed to get him out of the doldrums. So, after all, it was a good thing he hadn’t spoken to Dagoberto. Dagoberto would have warned him off, started him thinking about why not rather than how. The only way forward into the future was how. Why, why not, those were questions he couldn’t answer anyway, better to leave off trying.

And anyway, what experienced horseman had he ever known, in racing, jumping, dressage, cutting, you name it, who looked at a horse at the beginning and said, “Won’t even try”? Out west there were guys in the rodeo who climbed on different bucking horses over and over, and hoped to hell the new horse would give them a jolt no horse had ever given them before. You could almost understand that if you didn’t think about it very much. “I can do it” was something a horse brought out in a guy, something Epic Steam brought out in Dick Winterson. So what if he couldn’t do it with his wife, couldn’t do it with his mistress, couldn’t do it with himself. At least he could do it with a horse, whatever it was. The day after he got home, he had the vet tranq the animal and give him a going-over. When nothing turned up, he sent him out for a jog. It was about two months since the now famous bolting incident, reported in both The Blood-Horse and the Thoroughbred Times. What Dick took away from the article, other than the fact that the exercise riders had botched things, was that the filly was a speedball, but that the colt had nearly caught her even though he was fighting his rider the whole way.

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