The following morning, Carl arrived at the Summit Park back-stretch at five thirty a.m. and his first mount of the morning was one of his favorite horses on the grounds, a seven-year-old gelding named A Letter to Harry. The sky was still cloaked in late-night purple as Carl worked the horse over a heavy track and galloped him out another quarter of a mile. The horse’s trainer had asked for a four-furlong work in forty-eight seconds, but they had gone much slower than that, fifty-one or even fifty-two. The horse felt good under Carl, but at this age it wasn’t going to go any faster. Following the workout, Carl rode the horse at a walk along the outside rail of the homestretch, headed in the opposite direction of horses striding out for the finish line. Carl sat peacefully in the saddle. The cell phone inside Carl’s down vest began to vibrate. He held the reins in his left hand and used his right to unzip his pocket. He held the phone so he could see the number.
“Yes?”
“I’m here,” Christine said.
Carl turned in the direction of the glassed-in grandstand. There were no lights on inside, no human silhouettes on the asphalt apron between the grandstand and the racing oval. Two horses working side by side churned their way down the homestretch, and from behind Carl, coming down the outside rail, a rider and horse neared. They moved on by. A gruff voice, a female’s, said, “Off the road, you old bitch!” Carl thought he knew the voice—Becky Hiltz—and what she was saying was to get off the phone. Early morning hours were busy at the track, schedules getting turned upside down on a regular basis. You needed to check your calls, but not on horseback—not even if you were on a reliable creature like A Letter to Harry.
“I don’t see you,” Carl said.
“I am waiting for you in the track kitchen,” she said. “Right now.”
“I’ll be right there.” Carl closed the phone, dropped it into his pocket. He wanted to touch his heels to the horse’s ribs, get him going faster, but this horse liked being on the track. A Letter to Harry was not a fast horse, but he was something of an unusual one. Carl leaned forward, said, “Walk faster. One time, for me.” He was not going to do anything more than plead. There were certain horses that earned this type of treatment. Horses that liked their jobs and were at home on the track. These were the horses that made Carl feel even better about his own work, and this was the most important thing, even more than what any woman could do for him.
When he was young, Carl hadn’t dreamed of being a jockey. He couldn’t remember much of that time now. All he knew was that he’d wanted to leave his hometown forever. He knew that and could still feel that part of his youth: the feeling that as long as he got away, whatever was going to happen could happen. He’d been sixteen years old and in the middle of his sophomore year of high school when he dropped out to work at Waterford Park with a former Marine Corps staff sergeant and recovering alcoholic, a trainer named Sherman Ingram. Carl spent his first year at the track shoveling out stalls—ten a day—and walking hots. He slept in a tackroom at the barn and lost his virginity there to a big, forty-one-year-old assistant trainer, Beverly Motion. He hung around with career grooms and card players and two-dollar gamblers, and he began to learn what he needed to know. Ingram had an old pony named Lips that he let Carl ride around the barn area after training hours. By the time Carl began exercising horses on the track, he’d felt the rest of his life was more or less laid out for him. Early in his riding career, Carl had loved horses—but his winning, or lack thereof, began to color his love in the time that followed. But he understood they had given him control, some say in his own life. By his early twenties, Carl’s relationship with horses had become less than glorious. Already a struggling journeyman rider changed by consistent losing, he had to fight with too many horses to get them to run their best. In the mornings, a horse would try to buck him from its back or run off while he battled to rein it in. These were rebellious acts and he became more aggressive with his use of the whip. A horse no longer represented freedom, it reflected a misguided ambition. He’d heard that horses were not such rogues on the major circuits in New York and Miami, that getting on the back of a runner there was like test-driving a Porsche. After he divorced his first wife, Kelly, Carl decided to try his luck on the big circuit and he spent one winter and spring galloping horses in Miami. He freelanced, went from barn to barn each morning looking for work. Towards the end of the meeting at Tropical Park, a trainer promised him mounts on a couple of horses. The horses didn’t belong in the majors and they were badly outrun in their races. The end of spring saw Carl demoralized and flat broke. The track chaplain gave him bus fare, and like that he was off to Pennsylvania to try and build his business at Penn National in Harrisburg. He met a woman at a grocery store, Alycia Pettit. He eventually married her. He began to win races again. Carl felt his relationship with horses shifting at Penn National. Once in a while, a horse and Carl Arvo had the same thing in mind: victory. All that mattered, all he knew for certain, was that riding made him brave. Riding gave him a manageable life. He knew things about the world because of his work. Without it, he might have been scared of everything. He told himself that he was fortunate. It was good to be alive and be a part of something. What he had learned was that it didn’t matter where this happened to be.
When Carl returned A Letter to Harry to the barn, he dismounted in an expedient way, then disconnected the overgirth and the girth and pulled away the saddle. Carl handed the big tangle of equipment over to the groom and said, “Tell the boss this is the smartest horse I’ve ever been on.”
The groom was a young guy with bushy hair, and in the darkness this was all Carl could really see. “Okee dokee,” he said.
A horse had already been saddled up for him at Denny Roster’s barn. Carl walked over, nodded to Denny and a man in a tweed cap and hunting jacket and said, “Look, something has come up and I have to take care of it right now. I’ll get on two horses for you tomorrow, free of charge.” Carl put out his hand to shake with Denny. “Yes? It’s personal.”
“You all right?” Denny said, shaking Carl’s hand.
“Fine,” Carl said. “Thank you.” He nodded again to both men and began walking in the direction of the track kitchen. He supposed they watched him. Imagine that little prick. Denny was a man who trained a string of two dozen horses. He was used to making a hundred decisions every morning, and he would have instantly decided whether to use Carl tomorrow. The best trainer made educated guesses about how to find the best in his horses. The unpredictability of human lives could not be part of this equation. Anyone who failed to understand this—or even forgot it momentarily—might not be welcome for long at any barn.
Carl did not turn back. He had made a mistake, an unusual one for a man of his years and experience, but Denny might cut him some slack. These years of experience should this one time count for something.
Carl supposed that if he had hired him, Ilya would be over at Denny’s barn right now, smoothing things over, rearranging schedules, making promises. Carl tried to imagine a life with a lawyer, an accountant, a personal trainer, agents—he wouldn’t have to think about a thing. He imagined himself in a dark blue robe, seated out on a lounge near a crystal clear swimming pool. He might get into philanthropy, create something. An Unknown Jockeys Foundation.
A six-foot-high stretch of hurricane fence separated the track kitchen from the barn area and a security guard with long white hair—a tall man perched high on his stool—watched over the one spot where the fence sections were disconnected. He sat with his arms crossed and he nodded in a solemn way as Carl walked through the opening. Carl strolled to the kitchen and pulled open a glass door. Inside, he took in the familiar aromatic combination of bacon/coffee/manure/hay/Absorbine. Christine sat at one end of a cafeteria table. Four dark-haired men in deep gray jumpsuits occupied the other half of it. These men worked in janitorial, or were with track maintenance. At the far end of the room one of the pool tables sat empty and the game at the other apparently had been abandoned. Pool balls and two sticks were left on the felt. Two grooms, caught slacking by a boss. One of the jumpsuit men talked to Christine as Carl approached and Christine began to nod to her head. A cantaloupe rind along with a twice-bitten biscuit sat on the plate in front of her.
He took the seat across from her, noticed the glassiness of her eyes. She wore a long-sleeve t-shirt with a gray sweater vest over it. Her hair was tied in a ponytail behind her head. “Carl,” she said, “I am pretty tired of losing.” She held her hands flat on the table. The track workers at Carl and Christine’s table all smoked cigarettes. “It’s bright in here,” she said. Carl started to speak, but Christine continued, “I think you’re a nice man,” she said. “I like it that you are feeling so optimistic about your future.” Her eyes, pink at the edges, went to his. He did not think she had been crying. “I would like to make some money,” she said. “Do you really think I can?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve seen a lot of riders walk in and out of here this morning. It’s different. My ex-husband is a gambler.”
“You said that,” he said.
“He’s still around,” she said. “Trying to stay in the picture. Have you met him?”
“Maybe at the bar,” Carl said. “Tall guy. Blond hair. You didn’t introduce him or anything like that.”
“How do you know it was my ex?”
“He looked at you different,” Carl said. “I thought he was somebody to you. Let’s put it that way.”
She said, “You have exes call you at all hours?”
“No.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, my ex is the one who started taking me to the racetrack. We had our honeymoon in New Orleans, went to the Fair Grounds every day.” I always wanted to ride there. Carl could have said this. He thought, Probably would have starved. “When we moved up here, he wanted to live close to the track. So that’s how I wound up taking the job at the Seven Seas. All he did, all he does, is lose. Stripped bare our bank accounts.” Carl looked to the men seated at the other half of the table and the eyebrows on one of them went up. Christine said, “After he left, I started to make friends with some of the riders. When you know the right people, horse racing is not as difficult to figure out, is it, Carl?”
“It’s still pretty difficult,” he said.
“Yeah, well,” she said.
Carl looked to the table top, the space between them, and then he glanced at Christine again. “I want to live with you,” he said. “I think I know what you are doing here.”
“Man, maybe you can tell me.”
They watched one another. In a quiet way, he said, “You are trying to tell me that you are an angry bitch.”
“No.” She shook her head slightly, touched her right index finger to the table top. “I am telling you I haven’t made up my mind completely as yet. I will soon, though.”
He said, “You are telling me that you will not abide a man who makes you unhappy.”
Christine looked at her plate. “I guess in so many words that is what I am trying to tell you. Also, there is no way I will agree to six months. Absolutely not.”
“Just the Summit meeting,” Carl said.
“No.”
“Okay. All right.”
Carl didn’t think he had ever seen her looking quite this way. He wanted to say something to the men listening from the other half of the table. “I will be good to you,” Carl said. “You can count on that.”
“I’m going back to my apartment now,” she said. “Call me this afternoon. We can agree to something.” She smiled in a tired-looking manner then. “Something unambitious, okay? Maybe something that might last a day or two.”
Carl waved his hand in front of his chest. “I’ll take it.”