Tab picked Carl up early the next morning. Carl had Big Zip on the track for a workout around sunrise. Henry Forrest asked Carl to have Big Zip gallop for a mile then run hard for an eighth of a mile—a one-furlong drill, “just to see how fast you can get him to go.” Carl wanted to know this himself. The one-mile gallop went smoothly and nearing the eighth pole Carl shrunk himself in the saddle, rattled the reins. Big Zip catapulted forward and when Carl brought the whip out to the horse’s periphery it felt like the horse was going to vaporize, it moved so fast. He brought his hand back to better control the reins, saw he still had the whip. Past the finish line, the horse eased itself, galloped out with its head down as Carl stood up straight in the saddle. Back at the barn the trainer didn’t say anything about the workout; anybody could see it had been an excellent one.
Tab walked Carl up to a brick, ranch-style house next to the track kitchen that housed offices for the chaplain, the head of the horsemen’s union, and the track stewards. Carl and Tab strolled down a hallway to see about getting Carl a California jockey’s license. Much of the work had already been done. A secretary handed Carl a folder with a printout listing the previous licenses he’d held, the suspensions he had served, the fines he had paid—nearly every jockey had a similar history. Carl felt Tab watching as he looked over the file.
Tab held over a ballpoint and said, “Want to change something?”
“Signing off on it.” Carl signed and gave the pen back to Tab, then stood and walked the folder over to the secretary. “Good to go,” he said.
“We just need to take a photo,” she said. “We’ll have the card delivered to the jockeys’ room this afternoon. Pick it up then.” She was nice-looking. Middle thirties, short brown hair, breasts like cantaloupes. “Just walk down that hallway.”
Carl pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “My assistant will take me.” He hoped she could see that he was joking. Carl turned and said in Tab’s direction, “I got this.” Tab grinned about something.
The secretary said, “Through there. You’ll see.”
The photographer was already set up and seemed to be waiting for him. She pointed to an empty stool in front of a royal-blue curtain. She too was nice looking. Carl wondered if anyone ever got tired of all this. She said, “Smile, please.”
Back at the hotel Carl donned the white robe and picked up the phone to call room service. He could order a huge entree, then just vomit it back into the nice clean toilet an hour later. Carl, at one time in his life, had been a smoker, and when he’d been a smoker he hadn’t minded flipping a meal as much because there was the cigarette he could smoke afterward. He’d quit smoking because of the coughing and the sickness he felt after a coughing spell. Once he’d stopped smoking, the practice of flipping a big meal became more complicated. The taste of vomit made him feel worse than sick; it made him feel despair. He decided instead to accept that he was a jockey, that the job never stopped, and that he should be grateful for that.
Carl lifted up the phone from its cradle. He asked room service if they had swordfish on the lunch menu and when the voice on the other end said yes, Carl ordered a child’s portion, broiled, with lemons on the side, a shaker of pepper, a bowl of grapes, and a pitcher of chilled tap water. He supposed the hotel received a lot of picky orders like this because the person on the other end offered no objection. Carl hung up, sat on the edge of the bed and ran his hands through his hair. He didn’t want to think about anything else so he thought about how Big Zip felt going full tilt just a short time ago. If Carl rode horses like Big Zip on a frequent basis, the glorious speed it possessed would not feel so unearthly. He thought of something he’d once read in a book about the history of horse racing, that the great jockey Eddie Arcaro once rode a horse that ran so fast it scared him. Carl thought the horse was Citation or Whirlaway or Coaltown, and he tried to recall the photos of each of these horses in the book. Everything was in black and white—that’s what Carl was able to recall.
Arcaro had come and gone as a jockey generations before Carl even arrived. Every story Carl had ever heard about Arcaro suggested he was a vicious bastard. He’d grown up poor and hungry in some godforsaken river town in Kentucky. He’d survived because he turned to riding when he was still a kid. He got out of his bullshit hometown, made a huge name for himself. He had been the most famous jockey in America, and after he retired he put on a yellow sports coat and did color commentary on races for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Arcaro’s face had hard lines to it. When he talked about a race he didn’t swear on camera, but he looked like he wanted to. He had been dead for more than a decade now and Carl was glad Arcaro had come along when he had because it would have made him sick to see the great jockey all shined up and sitting inside an ESPN studio. Carl would have liked to talk with Arcaro about the horse who’d run so fast it had scared him. Carl wanted to know if, just for a second, Arcaro had a taste of the afterlife on this holy-fast horse.
There came two taps on the door.
Carl was hungry, and he wanted to make everything about the meal last for as long as he possibly could. He carried the plate with the swordfish over to the bed and sat there and watched the activity at the pool. The fish had an amazing flavor; every bite seemed like a full meal. He’d ordered a child’s portion, but he couldn’t finish it. He set the plate by his hip and knew that if he sat there long enough he would grow hungry again.