If Wishes Were Horses, Heading South

Written by John R. Perrotta; art by Jen Ferguson
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Ham thought it was a funny thing, the way those horsemen at Belmont acted when that first frost hit and right away they all started talking about Florida. 
Since he came from a place where everybody’s favorite joke was that Vermont is nine months of winter and three months of bad skiing, he was fine with cold weather, but apparently at Belmont it was considered a sign from God to pack up and head south.
They were at the rail watching Avalanche breeze and it was chilly enough that they could see their breath when Mr. Evans announced:
“Hialeah barn area’s open now, but we’ll give them another week to break that track in, then you and Willie go on the first van.”
 
Willie wasn’t a bit surprised to hear that, and seemed more than a little pleased that they’d be going early this year, saying that the boss usually waited until after Thanksgiving before shipping south, but he’s getting some miles on him, too, and maybe he wants some warm Florida sunshine on those achy, old bones.
“Best place for a horse I ’ever been.  Sometimes you take one to Hialeah sore, and pretty soon he’s sound. Prettiest place, too, except I never been to Santa Anita, but I hear that’s top class, too.”
 
He said Mr. Evans liked to drop off some of the horses at a farm in Camden, S.C. for the winter off, ones that were tired from racing hard all year and needed some time to unwind, and he’d take the others to run a time or two at Tropical Park and prep for their stakes races before the big meet started at Hialeah in January. 
Willie said you could always see some of the great runners there at Hialeah, like Bald Eagle and Citation and Bold Ruler and Nashua and great trainers, too, like Woody Stephens and “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons and Jimmy Jones, everybody beating the cold winter up north and it don’t get any better than that on this earth.

Miguel laughed when Ham gave him the $20 bill, and he folded it twice and kissed it before stashing the cash in his hatband. 
“Doesn’t seem right to take your money,” he said, “but it’s better you give it to me than some stranger.”
“I guess you don’t want to double-or-nothing next time,” said Ham, and Miguel just shook his head and laughed some more.
“I don’t think anybody ever beats that big, red horse again,” said Miguel, “We’re going to chase him for second money one more time down in Maryland, then take a vacation. There’s always next year and plenty of races he won’t be in.”

Willie was heading to the washroom when Mr. Evans waved him over and motioned toward Mighty’s stall where the big, bay stood quietly, hanging his head out over the webbing and picking at some alfalfa as he appraised the two men. 
“That’s the best horse I’ve ever had the privilege of laying my hands on, Will.”
“That’s two of us, sir,” said Willie.
“He might be what we waited for, all these years.”
“The two of us, sir, yes sir, that’s right.”
 
It was just two weeks later when Willie had the little black-and-white television working pretty well in the boss’ office, tin foil squeezed on the rabbit-ear antennas and a box ready nearby for it to travel south with them the next morning.
“Ten minutes to post,” said Willie as on the screen tiny horses and riders broke from the post parade.
“We should have bet,” said Ham, making a lame joke since Secretariat was going in the gate as a 1-to-9 favorite.
The other grooms and anyone else around the barn on that Saturday afternoon were jammed into the room and they all whistled and cheered when “Big Red” looped the field and splashed home eight in front on a sloppy track at Laurel Park. Miguel’s colt ran a clear second again, and Willie said that Stop the Music sure is a nice colt but too bad he came along the same year as the one bound for greatness.

Their van pulled into the farm in South Carolina late in the night, and they unloaded the horses and turned them out in small paddocks for a while to let them loosen up from the standing they’d been doing for the last dozen or so hours since they crossed the George Washington Bridge and rolled down the New Jersey Turnpike.
The air had a smell of sulphur, and Ham said he thought that was some awful loud crickets chirping, but Willie said those were frogs in the wetlands and set your alarm, son, ’cause we ain’t getting much sleep tonight.  
 
Ham checked his grandpa’s pocket watch as they led their six horses and two others back onto the same van and it read a quarter to five, the time they needed to be going for the driver to make it to Hialeah before dark.  
Ham stood on a bucket at the side window, watching the cars and the countryside go by as the sun came up in swampy north Georgia, and he told Willie that was some creepy stuff hanging on those trees and were there any alligators out there. 
“Spanish moss,” said Willie, “and that what’s up top there, that’s mistletoe, the same stuff you kiss your girlfriends under at Christmas time and believe me, that alligator meat tastes just like chicken if you fry it up in some butter and bread crumbs.” 

The two vans turned into the Hialeah barn area just as the pile of fluffy clouds in the western sky turned a bright pink, backlit by the setting sun. 
And Jake, the foreman, was there at the barn waiting for them along with Penn, the feed man, who was making sure his help had done a good job of bedding the stalls, and he called out Willie’s name as he led Mighty into the shedrow.
“About time you showed up,” he said, “Now we can get the winter started.”
“You ain’t kidding nobody, boss, you just been waiting on my shrimp gumbo,” said Willie, laughing.
“Damn,” said Penn, “You always see right through me, Willie.” 
He told Ham that Willie made the best southern-style cooking he’d ever tasted, but Ham had never seen Willie cook anything except canned soup and wondered how many other things about him he didn’t know.
 
They took the rest of their traps from the van and put their belongings in the tack room, and when they were done, Willie told Ham to wash up, they were going out to dinner for a change.
“Easy’s taking us down to the Cuban place on Palm Ave. Always better when you got somebody can speak the language,” he said.
“Easy” was what they called Isidro, the night watchman, who was probably older than Willie, and while most of his black hair was touched with snowy white, his eyes sparkled like those of a young man going out on the town, but they turned serious when he told his friends how glad he was to see them show up, not only because he’d missed them, but also since it meant the good racing was about to begin.
 
Easy was a chatty guy and it seemed as if he never stopped talking long enough for a deep breath as they walked down Palm Ave. to the little restaurant with the white and blue shutters and red awnings, and the whole time Ham nodded to be polite, since he couldn’t understand a word the old Cuban said, so fractured was his English, mixed with Spanish words. 
The dark-haired girl at the door kissed Easy and Willie on the cheek and hugged both of them, and when she held out her hand to meet Ham, he felt himself flush but he tried to shrug it off when they got to the table and the two old men teased him.
They let Easy do the ordering and the food looked strange to Ham, especially the things Willie told him were a kind of bananas, but he never had tasted pork with onions and rice and black beans like that before and would have thought it was the best place he’d ever eaten even if that dark-haired girl didn’t smile at him every time their eyes met.

While they were in New York, Mr. Evans’ daughter Mary had been his assistant, but in the winter she’d go to South Carolina to be with the 2-year-olds, where she’d watch to see which ones took to early training and she could judge which of those would be first to come to the track in the spring. 
Mr. Evans didn’t trust airplanes, so he’d take a few days to drive down, and on the way he’d stop by to check with Mary, so every winter at Hialeah he put an old horseman called Bogie in charge until he got there.
The assistant trainer’s real name was Edgar Alexander and he was from Chicago, but when he spoke lots of folks thought he sounded like the movie star, and that racetrack name had hung on him for the past 40 years. 
Willie told Bogie that Ham was a smart kid and even if he was a new hand, you could trust him with a nice horse, and Bogie just nodded and said nothing, like he was taking that under consideration. A couple of days later, he had Jake move Chester the pony to another groom and gave Ham a lanky filly named Suzie’s Song that didn’t look like much but must have been a runner since Willie said she had won a stakes race last year at Hialeah.
“Better watch that chestnut hussy,” said Willie, “She thinks she’s the toughest thing in town, and when she’s horsin’ she might try to eat you.”
“Horsin’?” asked Ham.
“Means when they come in season, like a dog when it’s in heat, needing to get bred, and sometimes when you think they’re going to run good, they run bad and that’s the reason why.” 
“Mr. Evans must have told Bogie you’re a ladies’ man, giving you all them fillies,” said Easy, and Ham got a kick out of the way the old guys kidded him, thinking maybe they were halfway imagining he was a young version of them, back when they still chased the girls.

There were only two ways to take the horses to the Hialeah track for training, either through the parking lot to the quarter pole gap, which was the shorter way from the Evans barn, or down the horse path that bordered the back of the barns and felt like a broad colonnade of tall Australian pines. The pines had long needles that made a soft, swishing sound when even the mildest breeze blew and it seemed like that relaxed the horses, even the nervous ones that would drop their heads and let out a deep breath. 
Whichever way they went out, they returned the other, and Bogie would let Ham come along whenever one of his horses would go to breeze.
As they walked through the paddock, Bogie told him about the famous track in France that the building was modeled after and that the coral it was built from was cut from the reefs and came out of the ocean right there off Miami, back in the days when you could do that, but now it’s protected so you’ll never see anything like this again. 
Ham would often head back to those stands in the afternoon to sit alone and eat a sandwich while he watched the flock of pink flamingos that a guy in a canoe roused each day as they circled over the track a couple of times before landing on an island in the center of the lake to have their own lunch.
 
A week or so passed and still Mr. Evans hadn’t shown up, but Bogie’s style was to train in a similar fashion, and he liked to get all the horses out to the track early, not wanting any of them to train in the heat of the day or the “thick air,” which was what he called the south Florida humidity. 
But if a front from Canada with some cool air should sweep through for a few days, he would do just the opposite and take them all out late in order to avoid those horses that felt so good that they dumped their riders and ran loose until the outriders could catch them.
And, he liked to take the horses out in sets of four or five, all the riders lining up at the outside fence and sitting still for a few minutes before they urged their mounts on, Bogie saying that they’d get more out of their training if they were relaxed and well behaved.
The old man had a lot of tricks like that and rarely gave an explanation of what he was doing when he was doing it, but that was part of what made the work so interesting for Ham, that he could watch and try and figure it out for himself before he asked.  And when he did come by the office, Bogie had all the time in the world for him, happy to teach, and Ham happy to listen, as he imagined he was in a Hollywood movie about the racetrack, talking with the movie star. 

Suzy’s Song had been at the farm in South Carolina for the past six months, and Willie said the boss liked to do that with some horses, give them a break so they’d be fresh at a track where they’d run good before, what he called “horses for courses.”  The farm trainer would get them galloping along and maybe breeze them a few times, and Bogie said they’d just tune them up, kind of like tightening the strings on a guitar.
When a jock from the Windy City named Earlie Fires showed up at dawn to get on Suzie’s Song, he and Bogie seemed to know each other so well they finished each other’s sentences. Ham just listened while they made small talk as they walked the filly from the barn, through the parking lot, out to the quarter pole gap and onto the track.
Bogie and Ham climbed the grandstand steps to the box seats where the clockers sat, and Bogie pulled out his stopwatch and handed Ham his spare as the jockey jogged Suzie’s Song clockwise to the finish line, what everybody called the “wrong way,” because when they race they go counter-clockwise and that’s the “right way.”  Fires turned the filly around and let her stand for a moment to catch her breath before he eased her along down the backstretch and picked up speed as they dropped to the rail.
“Click the top button when she passes the half-mile pole and the side one when she passes the three-eighths.  You need to click it a stride before she gets there, kind of lead her,” said the old man. 
“OK,” said Ham, and when he heard Bogie’s click he knew he was late for the first pole, not leading the filly enough.
“Might take a few times to get it,” said Bogie, but when Suzie zipped by the next pole, their watches clicked in unison and the old man just nodded and smiled.
 
“Thirty-five and one, she went,” Ham told Willie when they got back to the barn.
“She gets ready quick, always do,” said Willie.
Willie told Ham he figured Bogie and the boss were getting Suzie’s Song ready for a race when he arrived on Thanksgiving, and sure enough, the next morning Bogie leaned in the stall doorway and told Ham just that. 
“Big day coming up, young man,” said Willie. “Your first stakes race.”
 
Bogie sent Ham to the racing office to turn in the horses’ foal papers and a bundle of silks for ones that were ready to run at Tropical. The foal papers looked like stock certificates, edged with fancy engraving and pressed with an official looking seal from The Jockey Club, and he held them up in the light to see the watermark. 
As he left the office, Ham asked a clerk for some old condition books to use when he packed Avalanche’s feet and he grabbed a current one from the counter on the way out so he could try and guess where Mr. Evans and Bogie would enter his horses. 
There in the parking lot was Spider, leaning on a new Camaro Super Sport.
“Hey,” said Ham.
“Hey,” said Spider.
“Still with Layne?” said Ham. Spider shook his head.
“He worked my ass off and then shipped back to Oklahoma and stiffed me,” said Spider.
Ham asked who he was working for and Spider gave him a cold stare as an older man got in the passenger side.
“I’m working for me,” said Spider, sliding into the car.
“See ya,” said Ham.
 
The week before Thanksgiving, Ham still hadn’t run a horse, nor had Willie, but everything was galloping sound and their workouts couldn’t have been any better. 
On a couple of occasions, they took the bus, once to Miami Beach just to see the Atlantic Ocean, which Ham had never seen, but they didn’t stay long since Ham was fair and just wanted to jump in once so he could say he did. Another time, Easy took them to Calle Ocho where a lot of his Cuban friends lived, and Ham watched as his two old men smoked cigars at the park while they watched a lot of other old men play dominoes.  
At the far end of the stable area where the maintenance crew kept the tractors and the harrows and the trucks for watering the racetrack, there was a basketball court like the one at Belmont. Most evenings, Ham and Willie would walk down to shoot some hoops before the sun went down.
Willie told Ham about how he’d been pretty good at that game when he was a kid, played on a team in high school and even thought it might get him into college, but that never happened. Ham said he almost joined the team at his school until he overheard the coach make a remark about his mother and punched the jerk in the mouth, and that was part of why he’d left home.
 
On Sunday evenings, Easy and Ham would help Willie set up his kitchen outside the barn, just a couple of propane burners and a long table, but that was where he’d cook his famous shrimp gumbo from a recipe he said an old Cajun lady gave him the winter he worked at the Fair Grounds track in New Orleans. They put it over white rice and never was there ever a single bite left over. 
And once in a while, Penn, the feed man, brought the corn bread to go with Willie’s fried chicken and hush puppies and collard greens and breaded okra that came from a slave recipe he said his mama got from her mama. After they ate, Toady and his brother played guitar and sang some country ballads their daddy taught them when they were kids back in Tennessee.  
 
Ham was thinking that Bogie might be holding back the horses, waiting for Mr. Evans to arrive when Bogie told him he was entering Avalanche for Saturday in an allowance race, six furlongs. 
Tropical Park was a ways south of Hialeah, so the horses all had to van over on the morning of the race.  Willie said he liked it well enough at the little track, but word was this would be the last season they ran there, closing up for good to become a county park, a picnic spot for families. 
Willie rode with Ham and Avalanche, and even though she was in the seventh race, they took the early van. When the gray mare was settled in, they went over to the grandstand to watch a few races.  
Ham said the track was cute, which made Willie laugh, and he agreed that it was modest compared to Saratoga and Hialeah, with their broad open spaces and rows and rows of seats, and it felt downright tiny next to the behemoth Belmont that would hold 50,000 people without feeling crowded, and he said Tropical would have been called a “bull-ring” had it not been a mile track.
It did feel more like a county fair than the other places Ham had seen, and Willie said lots of folks thought it was just a story that the horses once had to jump an alligator when it wandered out of the infield lake onto the track right in the middle of a race, but Easy told him he had been there and seen it happen.
Ham made a couple of $2 bets on horses he knew from up north that he thought looked like easy winners, but none of them even hit the board, and Willie said that’s because they’re only here practicing, getting ready for the big money at the next meet and if it isn’t a money race they don’t try too hard.
There were so many jockeys at Tropical that most of them hardly got one or two mounts, except for maybe Jacinto Vasquez, who was leading rider, mainly off all the stakes races he won and even he only had half-a-dozen rides every day.
 
It seemed like the gray mare was five in front as soon as the gate opened, and Willie said that jock Fires might be the best he’d ever seen at putting one on the lead. As they passed the quarter pole, he still hadn’t moved his hands, and Avalanche no doubt appreciated the fact that he never touched her with his whip.
Willie went back to the grandstand to cash their tickets while Ham took Avalanche to the spit barn for her winner’s test. Willie said that was a sign of respect for trainers like Evans and Bogie that they only got 5-to-1, that the punters would back a horse that hadn’t been out in a month and moving up in class, besides running first time for a new barn.
 
It’s a feel-good thing for a barn when they get their first win at a new meet, portending good luck to come, and it brings huge relief from the prospect of getting shut out, which they fear more than anything, what Willie called getting the rubber duck.  
Bogie got all the barn help to come to dinner at the Cuban restaurant that night, telling them they had to because it was family suppertime. Most everyone came, including Jake, the foreman, and all the hotwalkers and grooms and Ivan, who was the only exercise rider who lived at the barn in a tack room. 
When it was time to pay for the feast of pork and chicken and beans and rice and plantains, Bogie grabbed the check and made a little speech, saying how much he liked them all and that he thought they were as good a team as the Miami Dolphins, the team he said was going to win the Super Bowl in a couple of months. 
 
Secretariat won his final race of the season in the Futurity at Garden State Park that Saturday and earned himself a trip home to Virginia for a vacation, taking along the winner’s share of the biggest purse of the year. 
Ham said it was a shame they missed it on television, but taking care of the home team was more important and, like Bogie had said, they were a strong team at the Evans barn, and when Mighty got to running, there was no telling what kind of year they’d have.
And when he laid his head on the pillow that night, Ham barely moved, dreaming of a white horse, running away from the pack.

Next: Growing Up ...
© 2015  John R. Perrotta