If Wishes Were Horses, Chapter I

written by John R. Perrotta; art by Jen Ferguson
The corner of Broadway and Caroline Street in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. is just about the center of town, the spot where you can see most everything there is to see. And in early August of 1972, when the races were running, the town was filled with carloads of tourists either down from their little log cabins on the shores of Lake George or up from the stifling city, taking a couple of weeks respite as they camp out in the Adirondacks on inflatable mattresses in pop-up tents. 
And those day-trippers, hoping to spot a top-class racehorse over at the track on Union Avenue, maybe a Kentucky Derby prospect for next year, so they can say they had a couple of bucks on him when they saw him break his maiden.
 
From where Hamilton Greer stood on that corner, he could see everyone and their uncle in both directions, some ready to picnic at the races, lugging those huge wicker baskets full of sandwiches and deviled eggs and soda pop, and of course, cake. As a smart man once observed, “cake is what holds a family together.” But Hamilton hadn’t had cake for a long time ...
 
He was just as happy to leave that family behind, his mom and a new step-dad badgering him to cut his hair and go out for a team, any team, or go get a job at the ski resort and bring home some money. He’d turned 16 last week when he stuffed his duffel bag with an extra pair of jeans and a couple of T-shirts and a sweater, went down to the bus station and bought a ticket on the first Greyhound going wherever he could get to for 12 bucks, hoping he might find gainful employment before he went through the rest of the cash he’d scratched up. 
He took it all in, barely awake after what felt like a long night sleeping on the slats of a hard wooden bench in Congress Park next to the Canfield Casino, the place where the guy on the bus said “Diamond” Jim Brady and “Bet-a-Million” Gates used to gamble all night before the city fathers decided to make such behavior illegal. Now, he said, they just use the gambling hall for parties, and nobody ever bothers you in that park.
 
A kid passing with an armful of newspapers looked about his age.
“You selling those?” Hamilton asked.
“Nah,” said the kid. “Tellys for my old man and his pals, so they can pick another bunch of losers to throw their money away on.”
Hamilton wasn’t sure what that meant.
“Tellys?”
“Morning Telegraph, the racing paper. So they can handicap the horses.”
Hamilton nodded, trying to act like he didn’t think the kid was speaking Greek.
“You run away?” said the kid.
Hamilton just shrugged, but the kid knew he was right.
“Looking for a job,” said Hamilton.
“There’s always work over at the track,” said the kid. “Go there first thing at dawn, the stable gate on Union Avenue, you can get a job walking hots.”
That drew another blank from Hamilton. He didn’t want to but he asked anyway,
“What’re hots?”
“Horses, stupid, the ones that gallop around the track and come back hot and sweaty.  Sheesh.” Then the kid smiled just so Hamilton wouldn’t feel too foolish.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Good luck,” said the kid.

Hamilton glanced at the pocket watch his old man had given him before he split, a silver Elgin, telling him it had belonged to his grandfather. Dawn was barely breaking and the watch read a quarter to five as he stashed his duffel bag behind a marble statue of a naked Greek or Roman woman and headed up the hill to Union Avenue to look for the stable gate for “Oklahoma,” which is the name they call the training area across the street from the main track.
He was sitting on a bench with a rag-tag bunch of hopefuls by that gate when a shiny Cadillac sedan rolled up.
“You, c’mon,” said the trainer, motioning to him to hop in the front seat and two other guys to get in the back.
“Anybody walked hots before?”
Silence until the half-a-hipster looking kid wearing a black hasty-brim cracked,
“Just hold on and keep turning left.”
“And don’t let go whatever you do,” laughed the trainer.
 
Hamilton watched the other guys grab the long, leather shanks from the grooms as they led their horses inside the barn, into the shedrow, one after another as the riders dismounted and went to dunk their bridles in a bucket of water. He figured he’d do what the other guys do, like the hipster said, keep turning left. 
“Thirty minutes,” said the groom, pointing to a clock on the wall, handing Hamilton a shank connected to the biggest animal he’d ever been that close to.
“Don’t worry, he’s only half-fit and pretty tired, won’t give you no trouble,” said the groom.
“Just keep turning left,” said Hamilton, and the groom smiled.
 
The rest of that first day went by quickly, even though it was pretty uneventful, walking half-a-dozen horses and holding them while they got a bath, but Hamilton felt like he’d passed some rite of passage when one of the horses reared up and looked for sure like it was going to take off, but he hung on, giving the horse some slack and a chance to calm down.    
He finished hosing down the asphalt and raking the shedrow and suddenly everyone was gone, most off to the track kitchen to get lunch and others went to the tack rooms they lived in and where the foreman told him there’d be a cot for him.
He retrieved his duffel bag from the park and stopped at Sadie’s Chicken Shack, thinking that he was a working man now and it might be OK to splurge for a couple of bucks, filling his belly with fried chicken and sweet potatoes before he went back to what could be his new home. 
The sky got black like it does around there late summer afternoons when one of those Adirondack thunderstorms rolls through, with lightning crackling and gusts of chill wind beginning to blow through the damp summer heat to signal it’s about to hit, so Hamilton hustled to get back to the barn, and sure enough, just when he did, a gully-washer tore through. 
He marveled at how few of the horses got upset by the thunder, so close it rattled the barns, and the wind that blew the bandages and saddlecloths off the clotheslines where they’d been hung out to dry. The grooms made haste to dig a channel so the water wouldn’t run inside the shedrow, and instead, when it poured down hard for 10 minutes straight, the puddles connected to make a huge lake in the space between that barn and the next, covering the walking ring where Hamilton had guided a few hots that morning. 
Then the sun appeared in the western sky and the air was cool.

The next couple of days Hamilton got bit or stepped on a half a dozen times but counted himself lucky that he never got kicked while he was learning which side of the horses to walk on, which everybody called the ‘right’ side but was really the left. 
Only one of the other hotwalkers that came on board when did Hamilton was still around, a kid they called Spider, who was even shorter than the jockeys. That wasn’t the name he came with, but he walked light on his feet and that was the racetrack name one of the grooms hung on him the first day.
Hamilton was thinking Spider might be a runaway, too, since they slept in the same tack room the first week and Spider had even less stuff with him, but when he tried to talk with the little guy, he usually wouldn’t give an answer, not even look him in the eye if he did. But since he behaved pretty much that same way with everybody, Hamilton didn’t take it personally, just figured everybody had to deal with their own problems and that was how Spider got by. 

He’d only been at Barn 43 for a couple of weeks, but Hamilton finally felt settled in, comfortable with his surroundings, when the trainer gave him a place to stay in a tack room, sharing the space with Willie, one of the grooms who looked like he might be old enough to be a grandpa and said he’d been on the track for 50 years. Hamilton liked that better than bunking with Spider, who had already started to get on his nerves.  
Some folks found Willie a little cranky, but he took to Hamilton right away, christening him with a racetrack name, “Ham and Eggs,” or just “Ham.” Pretty soon, everybody around the barn was calling him that.   
He had a sense that life there might be different from back home, where everybody wanted him to act the way they wanted. Here, they left him alone if he did his job and they all seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say. Ham had only just finished his junior year, with good grades, and thought he was pretty smart until one day Jake, the shedrow foreman, told him he was from Vermont, too, and had a degree in history from Middlebury College. He had white hair and wore those wire-rimmed glasses and sort of did look like a teacher.
Then Lizzie, the exercise girl from England, let it slip that she’d given up her career as an accountant to be near the horses, “because horses don’t let you down like people do.”  She was blonde and pretty, and Ham didn’t know why but he usually felt extra shy around her, so he let her do most all the talking.
And even Carlos the groom, who had a family back in South America and sent all of his money home, had a university degree but said he, too, thought it was a better life here outdoors, taking care of beautiful animals, instead of staying stuck inside an office like he was before, being a clerk in a government office.
So it was, kind of like a family for Hamilton, there in the Evans stable where they treated him like the kid brother, pulling pranks on the rookie, sending him to the farthest barn in the stable area to ask old lady Madigan for a bucket of steam and her yelling at him to get the hell out of there or she’d give him a bucket of something all over his dumb ass. Or when Jake told him to they were going to work the big mare and to hurry up and go get the key to the quarter pole, and he fell for that one, too.

Willie was from Kentucky, where he’d grown up on a horse farm, and he seemed content with his life at the track, rarely leaving the barn area except maybe once a week when he went to the grocery store after some canned soup to heat up on his hot-plate in the tack room for those times when he didn’t feel like going to the track kitchen.  
Unless, of course, one of his horses was running, then he’d put on his game face and the best shirt he could find, start brushing and polishing that horse until its butt shined like a mirror with not a speck of dust on it. He was a tall man, the only one in the barn taller than Ham, and had big, strong hands and meaty forearms and always dressed in khaki work clothes and a straw hat, and on his face he wore a permanent look of concern, thick eyebrows furrowed over those dark eyes.
It was Willie who took Ham over to the security office to get his racetrack license. Luckily, he had gotten himself a driver’s license before he left home in Vermont, even though he never got to drive. It did prove he was over 16, and that’s the minimum age to work on the track.
Ham could tell Willie enjoyed having a pupil, someone to whom he could pass on his years of experience. He taught him how to use a hoof-pick to clean the horses’ feet, and how to roll the night bandages so they’d go on even, and how to comb the straw out of their tails, and how to rub them shiny with a rag, and how to give them a bath and a hundred other things, but most importantly, how to keep them happy.
And he realized that Willie was one of those people who felt more comfortable around animals than he did around other people, almost like he was tuned in on the horses’ wavelength and didn’t really care about the people, maybe accounting for a slightly standoffish manner.
He knew his roommate was the best groom in the barn but it didn’t take Ham long to figure out that Willie couldn’t hardly read or write, and he considered how to deal with that. He didn’t want to embarrass him, but he did want to help Willie if Willie wanted help. Somehow the old man had figured out on his own how to understand the past performance charts in the racing paper, but those were mostly numbers and he for sure couldn’t read the articles.
                                 
Ham especially liked when they took a horse over to run in a race. He’d carry the bucket with a sponge and a brush and a girth channel and a rub-rag in it and walk alongside as the old man led his pride across Union Avenue to the open area among those tall oak trees that each had a number nailed to them. 
He’d never been to a track before, but Willie told him Saratoga was the only track where they let the trainers saddle their horses under a tree and not in a fenced-in paddock. It did seem odd that fans could walk right up to the horses, and sure enough once in a while a frisky colt or filly would rear up and scatter everyone, and some folks would say they need to put a rail around here so nobody gets hurt and some others would say, nah, leave it like it is. 
 
It was a sunny Wednesday afternoon and Hamilton was raking the shedrow in the neat crisscross pattern the way Mr. Evans liked it, and he liked it, too, keeping the barn neat like a showplace, with potted plants hanging from the awnings and the stone jockey painted in the red and yellow stable colors outside standing sentinel. 
The blacksmith had just finished shoeing a couple of horses when Willie whistled and motioned to Ham to come along. 
“Gonna see yourself something special today, boy,” said Willie. 
 
The horses were already saddled and the jockeys just getting a leg up when Ham and Willie got there. From 50 yards away though, above the heads of the crowd they could see the copper shine of the big chestnut colt topped with his rider in the blue and white block silks. 
“Secretariat,” said Willie.
“Wow,” said Ham.
“Win as far as you can throw a rock,” said Willie as Ham followed him to the betting windows.
“You ever make a wager, son?” Willie asked.
“Uh-uh,” said Ham.
They got in the queue and he took out two bucks. He’d had a few paychecks, been starting to save some money and he couldn’t see how much Willie was going to bet, but they were in a line marked “$2 WPS.”
“Tell the man, ‘two dollars to win on number two,’ ” said Willie. “Last time you ever going to see him not be favorite.”
“Okay,” said Ham, but when he got to the window he was nervous and just held out his two dollars and told the ticket seller “Secretariat,” but the man knew what he meant and punched out a yellow ticket with a black number two on it.
 
The announcer’s call echoed through the stands and across the track they could see the other horses rush away from the gate, Secretariat’s silks in last. In about a quarter-mile, though, that big chestnut cruised around the others, drawing off in the end to win by three easy lengths.
They crowded near the fence to watch a tall blonde lady and a little white-haired man, waiting by the chalk circle on the track where the winning horse gets his picture taken.
“Best horse since Man o’ War,” said Willie. “ You’ll see.”
Before they went back to the barn they stopped at the cashier’s window to collect their winnings, and Ham was happy to get the five bucks back for the two he’d bet, but he realized there sure was a lot of money flying around the place. He peeked back and watched as Willie scooped a pile of twenties off the counter and stuffed them in his pocket.

Ten days later, they made a point of getting to the frontside early so they could see Secretariat’s trainer put on the saddle and have a few words with his jockey before he tossed him up, way up there on the big colt’s back. They were so close they could hear the men talk, but they were speaking in French, and neither Ham nor Willie could understand a word they said.
Willie was moving faster than usual and Ham had to hustle to keep up as they climbed the stairs to the second floor, passing right by the ticket sellers.
“We have to bet, don’t we?” said Ham.
“Listen ’what I say, boy,” said Willie, pointing to the odds board. “Ain’t a horse alive worth 2-to-5, not even this one. He should win for fun, but we just here to watch today.”
And watch they did, from a perfect spot at the top of the grandstand where one of Willie’s friends was an usher. Secretariat took his time again, strolling out of the gate last and charging past the other horses like they weren’t there, and the crowd roared, knowing they were seeing history in the making. 
“See, we should have bet,” said Ham.
“Costs too much for what you do get, if you don’t get nothing when you’re wrong,” said Willie, “just be glad to see a good horse run, boy, there’s gonna be plenty ’times to bet when you get the right odds.”
  
Willie always carried a soft woven cloth in his back pocket, called it his “rub-rag” and that’s what he used it for, to rub on his three horses until they shined and shined ... and shined. 
The gray mare was named Delilah, and she was big and good-looking and good-natured, even playful, and she’d swish her tail and shake all over, quivering, when Willie rubbed on her. He’d sing to her like Tom Jones when he gave her a bath …
“My — my — my — De-li-lah …” and he’d laugh and laugh.
They only took her across to run that one time and she closed some ground in the stretch to finish third, wasn’t ever much of a threat to the winner, but Willie seemed happy enough and he said the turns were too tight for her there but she’d win one for sure when they got back down to “Big Sandy,” which was what he called Belmont Park.     
Willie said that old, hard-knocking bay gelding Momma’s Boy was his “bread-and-butter” horse, because even though he ran in cheap claiming races, he always seemed to hit the board, even if he didn’t win, and that got Willie extra commission money, what they called “barn stakes.” He ran two seconds and a third in the past month, did his job well, and even though Willie didn’t have a win at Saratoga, those ‘extras’ added up. 
The other horse Willie took care of was a 2-year-old called Mighty, who had a stripe of white trickling down the front of his handsome, bay face and was just a baby compared to the others, but he was named right, big and strong and full of youthful energy. Willie said he thought Mighty could be any kind, maybe even a stakes horse, but no doubt he’d be ready for a maiden race soon, and if Mr. Evans let him run with blinkers on, they’d be betting their money and he’d win the first time out. 
Ham liked how the horses all had different personalities and he liked how Willie treated them, as if they were kids on a team he was coaching. And how he talked to them like they were kids, gentle and never cross or mean, but firm and serious when they needed it, kind and playful when they needed that, too.

By the last weekend of the Saratoga race meet, Ham was feeling restless, ready to move on and excited to see the next place they’d be living. The track finished up on a Sunday and the following morning the horse vans lined up like a great caravan, waiting to use the loading ramps as the barn area emptied out. Most of the stables were heading to Belmont and some to Aqueduct and a few to New Jersey or Kentucky, and soon the training area would be deserted. The whole crew would be moving on except Spider, who’d gone missing, and everyone assumed he’d hit the road again, since on the racetrack people came and went all the time.
Ham lugged a duffel bag with his possessions and tossed it in the bay of the van in which he would ride with Willie and his three horses from their stable as well as half a dozen from another barn.   
The groom with the other horses was a kid he knew named Miguel, who looked older but probably wasn’t more than 18. He spent most of the ride fussing over a big, bay colt, and when Ham started talking about Secretariat, he scoffed.
“My champion,” said Miguel, “beats that big red horse next time.”
“No way,” said Ham.
“Five bucks he does,” said Miguel.
“What’s his name?” said Ham, shaking his hand and taking the bet.
“Stop the Music,” said Miguel.
Next: Belmont Park
© 2014  John R. Perrotta