Epigraph
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Thursday, June 1, 1995
Debi ran across the parking lot towards the barns. Once again, she was late for work. As she passed the mountain of manure steaming in the pre-dawn light, she pushed back the sleeve of her lumberjack shirt and glanced at the luminous dial of her wristwatch: 6:12. Shorty would be furious. There were just the two of them, and Shorty expected her to be in the barn by 5:45 to lead the horses out to the walking machine before she started mucking out their stalls.
Debi rehearsed her excuse as she rushed along: I’m real sorry, Shorty. I got Jamal to the sitter’s in plenty of time, but the traffic across the 401 was impossible. No. The traffic across the 401 was insane. That sounded better.
As she hurried from the outside darkness into the brightly lit entrance of Barn 7, a familiar mixture of aromas greeted her: sweetness of hay, reek of manure, pungency of liniment. The morning sounds were there, too: rattling of buckets, pawing of hooves, the grooms’ animated chatter as they went about their chores.
When she reached Shorty’s shedrow, she stopped short. Each trainer or groom was expected to turn on the lights for his or her section of the barn, but the lights for Shorty’s section weren’t on yet. Not only was she late, but so, it seemed, was Shorty. She flipped on the lights and listened. While everyone else’s horses were snorting and whinnying in their stalls, her horses—Shorty’s and hers—were moving about restlessly.
She looked in the first stall. The roan filly, Software, was banging her forehead against her empty water bucket. In the next stall the new horse, Prince, was walking in tight circles, and he cast a resentful glance Debi’s way as she looked in. Next to Prince, crazy Gig was weaving, swinging his head left and right as he faced Debi. Gig was a cribber—he would clamp his teeth to the bars of his stall door and suck air—and the leather cribbing strap Shorty used to keep the colt from doing so was still in place. One of the first things Shorty did each morning was remove Gig’s cribbing strap. Where was he? He was never late. And traffic can’t be the excuse, she thought, because he sleeps right here in the barn. “What’s going on, Gig?” she said. “What have you done with Shorty?”
She jogged towards the bunkroom at the end of the shedrow where Shorty lived during the long summer meet at Caledonia Downs. If he’s slept in, she thought, I’ll really give him the gears. And—she smiled at the thought—he’ll never know I was late.
“Heads up!” a voice called, and Debi looked up in time to avoid smacking into the rearing Doll House, Tom Wright’s huge chestnut mare, Tom himself desperately hanging onto the shank. “Whoa, missy, what’s the hurry?”
“Sorry, Tom, I can’t—”
“You know better than to run in the barn.”
“I can’t find Shorty, have you seen him? The horses haven’t been tended to, and I can’t find him.”
“No, I ain’t seen him.” Tom settled the mare and stroked her nose. “You made her all jittery.”
“I said I was sorry. It’s not like Shorty to—”
“I told you I ain’t seen him, and you know better than to run in the barn.”
Debi ran off down the shedrow to the end of the barn and knocked at the door of Shorty’s bunkroom. She knocked again and tried the knob. The door swung inward. Debi leaned into the darkness of the room. “You in here?”
There was no answer.
She reached around the door jamb and flipped on the light. The room was empty. The blankets on the single bed were rumpled, but that didn’t mean anything: Shorty never made his bed. The card table was littered with fast food wrappers, copies of the Daily Racing Form, and a nearly full mickey of Lamb’s Navy Rum, but this, too, was nothing new. Although Debi had never known Shorty to be a neat man in the five years she’d worked for him, recently he’d been getting worse. His gambling. His drinking. In a few short years, he had fallen from being one of the best public trainers at Caledonia—with a foreman, six grooms, eight owners, and two dozen horses—to being an also-ran, a has-been with one groom, three owners, and five horses. Debi corrected herself: four horses. She kept forgetting—or maybe it was some kind of mental block—that Download, an expensive three-year-old colt, had died in his stall two months ago, only days after his owner, an Internet millionaire, had hired Shorty to be his trainer. Debi shook her head. As soon as a small piece of good luck rolled Shorty’s way, a big piece of bad luck followed. She turned out the light, closed the door, and started back towards the stalls. Where the hell’s he got to? she wondered.
As she walked back along the shedrow, it occurred to her that there was one stall she hadn’t checked: Bing Crosby’s. She stopped at the door to Bing’s stall and peered through the bars. The horse was standing in the shadows at the back of the stall, his head in one corner. When she clucked to him, he didn’t move. That’s odd, Debi thought. Old Bing always comes when I call him. “Come here, baby,” she said, but the horse didn’t move. Debi looked at him more closely, squinting into the gloom, and that was when she saw his shoulder twitching, his hindquarters shaking. She ran her eyes down his trembling forelegs. And there, on his face, half-buried in the straw, lay Shorty Rogers.
Campbell Young reached for the phone on the floor beside his bed. His fingertips were orange and greasy from the bag of cheesies he’d eaten the night before, and the receiver slipped out of his grip and clattered on the floor. “Fuck,” he said, and picked it up. “What?”
“Daddy!”
“Debi?” he said, instantly alert and struggling with his sheets. “What is it? Are you all right? Is it Jamal?”
“Daddy,” the voice sobbed, “it’s Shorty.”
“Shorty? What about him?”
The clock radio on the bedside table said 6:25. Young had been dreaming. His dream had changed from a chase down a back lane—not a police chase; instead of guns there was a girl with long blonde hair wearing green knee socks and a short plaid skirt who kept disappearing down alleyways and around the corners of garages, her laughter leading him on—to a dream about the racetrack. He was in line at the betting window, and the old man ahead of him was taking forever to place his bet, and Young was becoming impatient because it was already post time and he had a sure thing. Finally Young peered over the old man’s shoulder to see what the holdup was, and instead of money or tickets lying on the counter between the old man and the cashier there was a bloody handkerchief with three teeth on it, and the old man, turning his face towards Young—like the little girl in The Exorcist—was weeping. Young had become aware of a ringing in his head, and at first he’d mistaken the ringing for the bell at the racetrack when the starting gate opens and the horses charge out, but then it dawned on him that the ringing he was hearing was a telephone, and that was when he had awakened.
“He’s dead. He’s been murdered.”
“Murdered? Go slow, Debi. What happened?”
“I found him in a stall. Ten minutes ago. I phoned 911, then I phoned you.”
“I’ll be right there, sweetie. Forty minutes. You still in the same barn?”
“Yes,” his daughter said, the tremolo still in her voice. “Barn 7.”
Caledonia Downs was not in Young’s precinct—he was downtown, and the track was out in the monster home suburbs—but there was no doubt where he was going. Firstly, his daughter was in distress; secondly, he knew a thing or two about horse racing, so if he needed a rationale for treading on someone else’s turf, that was it; and thirdly, he was close enough to retirement that he no longer paid any attention to protocol or procedure. He just did what needed to be done.
But