If Wishes Were Horses, Time to Think

Written by John R. Perrotta; art by Jen Ferguson
Author’s note to our readers ...
The following three chapters will comprise the conclusion of Part I of “If Wishes Were Horses,” published courtesy of America’s Best Racing.
These, in addition to the previous chapters that you have previewed on ABR, are part of the “writer’s draft” of the novel, which is expected to be published in its entirety sometime in early fall of 2015. Please be aware that certain elements of the story may differ.
I hope you have enjoyed meeting Hamilton Greer, Willie and the rest of the characters and invite you to purchase a signed, discounted edition of the novel by visiting my author page at Amazon.com and contacting me directly.
All the best, 
John Perrotta
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When the racing meet ended and the action moved over to Gulfstream Park, about 20 miles away, Bogie kept the horses at Hialeah and shipped them over when they had a race. As more and more outfits shipped out, the place got quiet as a church. 
Ham started walking around the track on the afternoons that he didn’t have a horse to run, just to burn off some of his restless energy — of which he had an endless supply.

If Wishes Were Horses, Chapter 1
If Wishes Were Horses, Chapter 2
If Wishes Were Horses, Chapter 3
If Wishes Were Horses, Chapter 4
If Wishes Were Horses, Chapter 5
If Wishes Were Horses, Chapter 6

It seemed like he was always at the barn, first person up in the morning to have one of those strong, sweet little Cuban coffees that Easy made, and he was the last to finish work in the afternoon although, in fact, he never did actually leave.
If he wasn’t in the shedrow raking or cleaning or in the stalls with his horses or helping the vet or the blacksmith or the horse dentist, he was likely in the tack room he shared with Willie, reading a book or studying the Morning Telegraph or listening to the radio, but he was still there.    
Ham read more and more and not just the racing pages and the “Ainsle’s Guide to Thoroughbred Racing” that Willie had given him, saying it was the bible of those serious about studying the “art” of horse handicapping, and he’d nearly committed that volume to memory. 
He found a leather-bound copy of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” in a second-hand shop and a dusty edition of “Hamlet” and daydreamed of the English countryside.  When he said he’d like to someday visit Stratford-on-Avon, Willie teased him that he’d probably had both books in school and never cracked either, but now he was quoting the Bard.
So the walks, which eventually turned into jogs and finally into long-distance runs, were the only time Ham left the barn area during the day, save the rare trip that he and Willie took to the Seaquarium or Parrot Jungle or the Serpentarium or if he went to downtown Miami or Calle Ocho with Carla when she wanted to shop.  
Most evenings when he hung out with Willie, they shot hoops until it got too dark or, if Carla wasn’t working, he’d take her to a movie and twice they went to a concert at her college. 
One night she asked him if he had I.D. so they could go to a bar and have a drink and dance.  She knew his birthday was the 17th of August, but she never asked what year and he lied and told her he’d had an I.D. but he’d lost it. She said her brother knew someone who’d get him another one.   
Willie was the only person who actually knew how old Ham was since he was the one who’d taken him to get his track license, but because he was a taller than average kid and mature for his age and one who would get a five o’clock shadow real quick, no one else suspected he was still only 16.

Occasionally, his thoughts would drift back to Vermont, not exactly reminiscing but musing on the past versus the present and where he might be heading in the future, thinking about those he’d known there and what might have become of them. The day he left, he swore he’d never return, but as time passed he knew he’d recant after he’d had some accomplishments and he could go back as a man of the world.
 
Back in high school, other guys would ask him to go across the border to New York where the legal age was 18, and he’d buy the beer for a party because some places there wouldn’t check I.D and it was easy enough for him to pass for legal.
But Hamilton had seen his dad drink a lot, seen how the man would change so much, how he turned so angry and argued endlessly with his mother, but he thought it might be the liquor. Ham drank as much as anyone at parties but the hangovers were brutal so he stayed away from it otherwise. 
He had a girlfriend named Diana that lived with her single mom, and Ham called her “Moonbeam.” She wore tie-dyed clothes and her blonde hair in long braids, and he wore bell-bottom jeans and chambray work shirts and Frye boots.   
They kept to themselves and didn’t bother much with the preppies or the jocks or even go to the junior prom and they gravitated to the folk singers like Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and once they even went to see Peter, Paul and Mary in a concert at the college in Middlebury.
But when his mother started to bug him about reading the beats instead of his school assignments, Ham just sought them out more and he and Diana talked about hitchhiking across the country to San Francisco. She was a year older than Ham, and after her graduation they had an argument. When she took off to follow the Grateful Dead, it was only about a month until when he hit the road himself.
 
After his parents’ divorce, Ham felt that he and his mom were pretty close until she met a guy named Steve and all of a sudden decided Hamilton had to shape up.  Steve was from Manchester as well, and he’d been a Ranger in Vietnam, pretty rough duty for a guy who said he started out wanting to be a teacher or a social worker. 
When Steve got out of the service, he’d headed home to the Green Mountains. When they met at a church social, Ham’s mom was enchanted to find a person she liked with whom she had so much in common, each feeling deserted and left with kids to raise on their own.   
She kidded that it was going to be like “The Brady Bunch,” and how funny it was that Hamilton would be the only boy with four girls to deal with. 
And the girls did get along pretty well for teenagers, leaving the rebellion to their brother and him the one castigated while they took joy in emulating their TV counterparts. 
When Ham felt the walls closing in, he’d go out behind the old barn and smoke a little pot with Anna, who was Steve’s oldest daughter and the only one he felt the least bit close with. 
Anna said she was going to go to Castelton State and study political science and Ham was right, the people running things didn’t know what the hell they were doing and maybe someday she’d get herself elected president and straighten things out.
 
Ham went to a few parties with Carla. When they danced and he held her in his arms, he thought she smelled good and it was lucky for him she didn’t have a wild streak or he’d have been in trouble, sure to do anything she wanted him to. 
One night after the movies, they stopped in the middle of the footbridge over the canal to have a look at some water birds that were diving after a school of mullet, the sides of the fish flashing silver as they turned this way and that and the moonlight hit them. 
He had his arm around her shoulder and she turned to face him with her eyes closed and they kissed and he was almost dizzy, overcome with the sweetness of her breath and the smell of her soft hair brushing his face.
 
Willie teased him the next day when he kept dropping things, and once when he walked out of Starlight’s stall without snapping the cross-tie. It was a good thing the mare didn’t follow him right out into the shedrow. 
If they didn’t have plans to see each other, Ham called Carla three or four times a day from the pay phone by the kitchen, using change from a mason jar he kept on the shelf in the tack room, and he used his pocket knife to carve her initials with his inside a heart on the big Australian pine outside the barn. He didn’t care if anyone teased him about it, and for a while he considered having her name tattooed on his arm but that never happened.
 
At one of the parties, someone passed a joint around and Carla took a toke and handed it to him. He pretty much faked his inhale, afraid he’d get loaded and do something stupid, and it was a good thing he didn’t get high that night because later in the evening she told him that she had been accepted at a college in California and she’d be moving soon and how much she was going to miss him.
It took his breath away, hearing that, and Ham did his best to act cool, wishing her luck and saying how much he’d miss her, but inside he was crushed because somehow he might have thought that they’d be together forever. 

Those walks that had turned into runs gave Ham plenty of time to think about what it was he wanted to do, not necessarily with his life, which was too big a question right then, but at least what he’d do after the Florida season ended. He’d given a thought or two to maybe staying at Calder just because of Carla, but now that she was leaving he just wanted to move on.
 
After he said his goodbyes, Mr. Evans had shipped Chester to his daughter in South Carolina, so most of the horses still in their barn belonged to Mr. Russo; Mighty and the three maidens that he had bred that had yet to race and Willie rubbed all of those. 
Ham still had Starlight, but Suzie and Avalanche were gone, moved by their owners to the big-name trainers, and he still had Passport, the cheap claimer that Carlos left behind when he packed it in and went home to Argentina.
His other two were geldings that belonged to Bogie and his son, the lawyer from Miami, and those were sure to stay at Calder for the summer so the son could bring his kids out on Saturday mornings to feed them carrots with their grandpa.
 
Ham and Willie took the shuttle van to Gulfstream a couple of times a week to run horses, but Hialeah was starting to get a little too quiet for Ham. Some of the outfits had shipped out already, and he knew everyone was going to scatter in less than a month. 
At least when the races were right there, he could walk over and watch from his spot high in the grandstand, but with no racing there it felt like a ghost town, and besides, it was getting warmer as spring approached and the afternoons began to drag.
 
One night Ham was weighing his options:
“How many years do you have to go to school to be a vet,” he said.
“Is that what you want to do?” Willie asked.
Ham told him he didn’t know if he should keep rubbing horses or do something else, but the one thing he was pretty sure of was that he wanted to stay around the track, make that his life, and Willie seemed pleased at that, saying:
“You can look at things simple or you can make everything complicated. But simple is easier and you’ll sleep better. Wait ’til we get back to Saratoga and then decide what’s next. Maybe you’ll want to keep rubbing horses or maybe be a trainer or a vet, or maybe even go home to your momma, but that’s probably not what you’ll do.”

Every year after the end of the meet, Hialeah had an auction of young horses, 2-year-olds that were already saddle broke and trained and could be ready to run by the late spring or early summer.
The sales arena was on the other side of the track from the barn area, and no one ever went back there until about a week or so before the sale when consignors began to bring their horses in to gallop on the track and they began to show them to the bloodstock agents and prospective buyers.
One morning, Doc Barnett was going over Starlight to try and figure out why she had run so poorly the day before at Gulfstream and he mentioned the sales to Ham.
“We could use some help over there if you want to make a few extra bucks,” he said.
“Sounds good,” said Ham and Willie told him good for you, boy, learn something new and you never know what can come of it.
 
The sales grounds were bustling and the vet taught Ham the fundamentals of horse trading, how the sales agents would shine up their stock and the little tricks they used to make their horses look as good as they possibly could since, after all, they were trying to sell them. He showed Ham how the clever outfits knew all the ways to take an edge, like rubbing a little oil into the coats of those young colts and fillies that had been training up north in Virginia and Kentucky and had to be clipped of their winter coats. 
And how they touched up their feet and the way they taught those horses to behave in the walking ring when the buyers studied them going back and forth, and how the best sellers used savvy riders in the morning, making them gallop along with their necks bowed and how the few who did breeze would wear blinkers to keep their mind on business. 
 
“Line him up and make sure his head isn’t down, and those hind legs, get them lined up too,” said the vet.
“A good showman can’t make a crooked one straight, but a bad showman can sure make a straight one look crooked.” 
They went from barn to barn, taking care of horses that might be sore from shipping or from so much moving in and out of their stalls, but most of the consignors were Doc Barnett’s clients from previous years, and he did what he could to make the iffy ones sound with a shot of bute if they were a little “off” or some penicillin if they had the snots.
The auction took place on Monday and Tuesday nights, on the days that there was no racing at Gulfstream, and it started in the evening and felt more like a party than a horse sale, which was what Doc said the people running the show wanted it to seem, getting them what he called “lubricated” with free drinks.
Well-dressed people holding cocktails wandered outside the arena where the horses were assembled before they went in to get auctioned off, the women glamorous in evening dresses and lots of jewelry, and some of the men even in tuxedos but nearly all of them in jacket and tie, and the chauffeurs lined up their limousines at the entrance to the arena. 
 
When Doc told him he was done for the day, Ham wandered around the grounds, watching the trainers as they tried to convince their owners to spend amounts that Ham couldn’t conceive of, buying horses that had yet to run. 
Willie told him that’s just another way of gambling, and those people either have a lot of money they got doing something else or they’re using somebody else’s money to buy those horses.
Either way, he said, it’s like shooting craps with a horse until you put them in the gate for a race and find out if they can really run.  He figured Mighty was worth more than any of those unraced 2-year-olds and said again how he hoped Mr. Russo would resist the temptation to sell.
 
The sales started at seven in the evening, and on the second night Ham brought a catalog the vet gave him and found himself an out-of-the-way spot at the back of the room, where he could get a good view. 
The horses were led into the arena by their grooms and handed off to a small man in the roped-off area in front of the auctioneer’s podium who got them to stand straight while the folks in the seats did their bidding. There were a few hundred of those folks in the round building, seated as to surround the auctioneer and the announcer and the small man in the ring with the horse, and down in one of the front rows, Ham saw Spider and his old man and the two guys they’d been with in the track kitchen.
Ham’s eyes were wide as the bids flew over one horse after another, with some going for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the crowd applauding when the auctioneer dropped his gavel on the highest-priced ones.
When the bidding was finished on a smallish bay filly at $90,000, the auctioneer pointed at the man he knew as Spider’s father, saying: “Sold to Arlen Quinn ... ”  
After he signed his name they all got up and left the room. Ham read the filly’s page in the sales catalog and the pedigree had plenty of that black type that Willie told him could make a racehorse valuable.     

Ham and Willie took two of the horses that hadn’t run yet to Gulfstream for maiden claiming races, and the first one, which belonged to Bogie, finished dead last, and the other was Mr. Russo’s and that finished up the track, too. Bogie seemed relieved when his got claimed and went off to the racing office right away when Mr. Russo’s was taken, wanting to call the old man and give him the good news that he wouldn’t have to pay to feed a horse that was that slow anymore.
“Down to six and a pony,” said Bogie as he drove them back to Hialeah, since there was no point in their riding the horse van with no horses. He told them he was going to run Mighty in a stakes race, and if he ran as well as they expected, he’d take whatever he had left to Keeneland pretty soon. 
He said Willie could take care of Mighty and the two maidens belonging to Mr. Russo, and Ham could rub whatever was left and do the hotwalking, but he could have the title of shedrow foreman instead of any more money, and they both agreed to that.  
  
Easy came by the barn to visit that afternoon and brought some media noches, those Cuban ham and pork and Swiss cheese and pickle sandwiches that he knew they liked. 
Ham and Easy set up a card table and chairs under one of the pine trees and they were ready to have a picnic when from inside the barn Mighty gave a loud cough. Willie jumped out of his seat to go and investigate and before he got there the horse did it again.
 
“Barking like a dog. Happens this time every year when they get to bringing in those babies,” said Willie, “babies” meaning the early 2-year olds that were arriving from the farms where they’d had their preliminary training and now were in to get cranked up for the races. 
They ate their sandwiches in near silence, knowing that cough was enough to keep Mighty on the shelf for a while.
“What I tell you, son? Get a good one and trouble’s right around the corner.  May be lucky in the end, we don’t try to chase those Derby horses anyway.”

Ham and Willie watched Secretariat win the Bay Shore Stakes at Aqueduct on the color TV in the Hialeah rec room along with a lot of the other grooms, everyone knowing the Derby was only six weeks away and it was getting down to the survival of the fittest who would get to go to Kentucky.
Big Red won by 4 1/2 lengths, running away from the other five horses on a sloppy track. Once again, he ducked in and had to sweat another objection, but the result stood and Willie said that jock better be careful, leaning on the bit so much with a free-running horse like that, maybe he doesn’t run straight ’cause he feels it too much in his mouth.

Monday morning Bogie came to the barn and right away told Willie and Ham to come to his office. His eyes welled with tears as he told them that Mr. Russo had a heart attack and passed away over the weekend and that he knew his kids wouldn’t keep the horses, none of them caring about racing like their old man did, and it was a sure thing they’d be selling Mighty.
He said it had been a nice dream they had, him and Willie and Ham, of going on the road with a good horse, one that would win a lot of stakes races, but it wasn’t going to happen and he was sorry for that.  He said he’d keep training until all the horses were sold and he’d take care of them both with some money when he got his commission for Mighty, but they should both look after themselves and find another job real soon. 

Even though they were running Passport in a late race, Ham and Willie took the first van to Gulfstream so they could walk around and let a few folks know they’d soon be looking for work. Most every trainer they spoke to already knew Willie and all of them told him he could start as soon as they had an opening, but Willie made sure they all knew it was a package deal and the kid had to come along, too. 
Passport went off as the favorite in a $5,000 claiming sprint and finished second and got claimed, which was what Bogie said was the next best thing that could have happened if he didn’t win. When Ham and Willie went back to the receiving barn to get their things, a young girl was waiting with a note.
“My dad asked me to give this to Willie,” she said, and Willie said thanks and took the note and handed it to Ham.
After the girl left, Ham read the note out loud:
“Please call me at home, I need you to be my new assistant trainer. And bring your kid, we’re going to Kentucky.”
The note was signed “J.B.” and there was a phone number.
Willie laughed and told Ham that J.B. was from Kansas but he raced all over the country, and that he’d known him since he was a kid and that his father and grandfather had both been trainers and damn good ones, too.  He said they should both be going to work for that man, and that they could help Bogie until they went up to Keeneland with J.B. and then back to Belmont. 
“Things always work out,” said Willie.

Most of the barns at Hialeah were empty since their former occupants succumbed to the same itinerant instinct that brought them there, splitting town to head back north to the same barns they came from last fall. 
“Too hot, too muggy,” they said, the guys who’d broke and run south when the first frost hit back at Belmont, and with the end of Gulfstream still a few weeks away, Ham and Willie’s barn was the only one left with horses in it.
 
Bogie dropped them off back at Hialeah and there was a little white car parked at the end of the barn. Lizzie was at the card table reading a paperback, some romance novel.
“Hello, fellas,” she said.
“Hi,” said Ham as she first gave him a hug, then Willie.
“You make me dizzy Miss Lizzie,” said Willie, and she giggled.
She’d given up the masquerade, lost the dark hair for her natural blonde. 
“You still evading the long arm of the law?” said Willie. Lizzie shook her head.
“Got a sponsor. Buys me a little time to try for a green card.  I was thinking maybe handsome there might want to get married and make me an honest woman.”
Willie laughed and so did Ham, but he was blushing and maybe his palms were damp as he wasn’t sure if she was serious or not, the way she was looking at him.  There were a couple of white paper bags on the card table.
“I brought you boys a gourmet dinner,” said Lizzie, and she started to unpack the Chinese food. They took their time with the egg rolls and the spare ribs and orange chicken and white rice and talked about Saratoga and it was nearly dark when Ham began to clean up.
Lizzie said she was making enough working freelance, but she wanted to go back to New York after Gulfstream finished, and did Willie know anyone that could use a good gallop girl.
“Sure, do you know one?” said Willie, and she threw her fortune cookie at him.
He told her after they came back to Belmont from Keeneland, she should come on up and he’d introduce her to J.B. Willie said he hadn’t decided if he would take the offer of the job as assistant trainer, but he and Ham would be working for that stable for sure since the horses were good and the pay steady, and most important, J.B. was a real horseman who knew what he was doing, not like these 90-day wonders, getting a trainer’s license when they don’t know how to pick out a horse’s foot.
“Perfect,” said Lizzie. “I can be a June bride.”
She gave them each a peck on the cheek when she left and told Ham to save his money, ’cause she didn’t want a puny, little ring, it had better be a proper rock.
 
Ham and Willie caught a ride to Gulfstream and watched Royal and Regal win the Florida Derby, and Willie said he’s a nice horse but that gelding Forego that finished second is the real thing and mark my words they’re going to hear plenty from him before it’s all over.
Waiting to catch a ride back to Hialeah on one of the shuttle vans gave them time to watch the last race, and there it was on the track program, Spider’s name: “Kevin Quinn” with three asterisks next to it meaning he was a bug boy who hadn’t yet won five races. As far as Ham and Willie knew, he might not have won any.
The horse was a 6-year-old South American gelding and, by the charts in the Morning Telegraph, it hadn’t come close to the winner’s circle in two years, so the 30-to-1 odds in the program probably were flattering.
Ham and Willie went to the paddock and watched Spider, surrounded by a heavy-set man in a white guyabera and a couple of other well-fed gents wearing linen suits.  Spider nodded a lot while the trainer spoke, and when the assistant gave him a leg up, the trainer lit a cigar and they could hear him say, “Suerte, Arana.”
“Guess we’re not the only ones calling him Spider,” said Willie.
The race was a cheap claimer for non-winners of two ever at a mile and an eighth. When the horses were loading in the gate, Ham watched the odds board as Spider’s horse dropped from 40-to-1 to 22 on the last flash. 
By the time the field was halfway down the backstretch, the horse was at least a dozen lengths in front and as he passed Ham and Willie at the sixteenth pole, Spider snuck a peek back between his legs, saw the race was over and turned down his whip.
“He posed nice for the photo-finish camera,” said Willie, and when the track photographer took the winner’s circle picture, only the groom and the hotwalker were there, with the trainer and his entourage nowhere to be seen.                                                                   

The following Monday a vet came by and took X-rays of Mighty’s knees and ankles and pulled off his shoes so they could do his feet, too. Willie shook his head and said it’s just like Bogie said would happen, Mr. Russo’s kids are selling my big horse for a pile of money. 
The next day Bogie told Willie to do the colt up in shipping bandages because he’d be taking the night flight out to the West Coast and not to worry, they were all going to get a piece of the commission, but by the day Willie and Ham were set to ship to Keeneland with J.B.’s horses neither one had seen a dime.
Willie said not to be surprised whenever that happens since lots of folks make promises about money, but when it gets in their pocket and it’s their money they forget about you, and that’s the reason you can’t take promises to the bank.

Next: My Old Kentucky Home ...
© 2015  John R. Perrotta