eerily magenta in the rising sun‟s first light.
It was one hell of a sight. Callahan was right, there was poetry here.
The three-year-old was to become a lot more important than either Callahan or I realized then. His
name was Disaway. And on this particular morning, he wanted to run.
“He is hill of it,” Callahan said. “A real Thoroughbred feeling frisky. Is that a sight?”
I allowed as how it was a sight.
“Thoroughbreds are trained to breakfast out of the gate and open up and run quickly and flat away to
the finish line, save up a little extra and put it on hard near the end, like a swimmer doing the two
twenty,” Callahan said. “This horse wants to go, so they have to calm him down a bit. Otherwise he
will be too brash and spooky when the rider is up.
So they were not running hard and instead were trotting in and out of the cotton wads of fog, working
out the early morning kinks. When they brought him in, he made one more half-hearted effort to bite
the outrider and then, hopping slightly sideways, he kicked his heels a couple of times and settled
down. The trainer led him to the tie-up to be saddled.
Disaway was a fine-looking animal with very strong front legs and a sweat-shiny chest, hard as
concrete. The muscles were quivering and ready. Callahan walked close and stroked first one foreleg,
then the other, then strolled ba.ck to the rail.
No comment.
The owner was a short, heavy man in a polo shirt with a stopwatch clutched in a fat fist and binoculars
dangling around his neck. His name was Thibideau. He stood with his back to the jockey, chewing his
lip. When he spoke, his voice was harsh and sounded like it was trapped deep in his throat.
“Okay,” he said, without turning around or looking at the rider, “let‟s see what he can do. You open
him up at the three-quarter post.”
The exercise rider looked a little surprised and then said, “The three-quarter, yes, sir.”
They threw the saddle over the gelding‟s back, all the time talking to him and gentling him, and got
ready to let him out.
“All these characters are interested now,” Callahan said. “The track handicappers, the owners, the
trainers, the railbirds—all standing by to see just how much horse he is today.”
The exercise rider led the gelding out onto the track, lined him up, and then, standing straight up in
the stirrups and leaning far over the horse‟s mane, egged him on until he stretched out his long legs
and took off down the track into the fog. Half a dozen stopwatches clicked in unison somewhere in
the mist.
I could hear him coming long before he burst through the haze, snorting like an engine, his hoofs
shaking the earth underfoot. Then, pow! he came out of it and thundered past us, his head up and his
mane waving like a flag. The watches clicked again. Callahan looked at the chronograph on his wrist.
Still no comment.
“Let‟s get some breakfast,” he said. “The jockeys‟ll be showing up about now.”
I watched Disaway as they led him out to be hosed and squeegeed down and fed. His nostrils were
flared open, his ears standing straight up and slightly forward, and there was a look of defiant
madness in his eyes. I was beginning to understand why Pancho had a thing about Thoroughbreds.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked as we walked down the shedrows.
“About what?”
“What was all that about, feeling the horse‟s legs, the stop-watches, all the inside track stuff?”
“Well, he‟s not a bad kid,” Callahan said as we walked through the dissipating fog. “He‟s strong,
good bloodlines, has good legs, but he‟s a mudder. He just does okay on the fast track. If I were a
betting man I‟d put my money on him to show. He‟s about half a length short of a champion.”
“You got all that from feeling his forelegs?”
“I got all that from reading the racing form.”
As we walked past the shed rows and headed across a dirt road toward the jockeys‟ cafeteria, I saw a
dark blue Mercedes, parked near the stables. It was empty. I looked around, trying not to be obvious,
but the fog was still too heavy to see anybody farther away than twenty feet.
“Old Dracula‟s here,” Callahan said.
“Dracula?”
“Raines. The commissioner.”
“You don‟t like him?” I found myself hoping Callahan would say no.
“Runs a tight operation. Like him a lot better if he had blood in his veins. One cold piece of work.
That‟s his wife right over there.”
It caught me by surprise. I turned quickly, getting a glimpse of Doe through the fog, talking nose to
nose with a horse in one of the stables. Then the mist swirled back around her and she vanished.
“Let‟s mosey to the commissary,” Callahan said. “Grab some groceries. Listen to the jocks and
trainers.”
I didn‟t know Callahan well, but he was acting like a man who‟s on to something.
The fog had lifted enough for me to see the contours of the cafeteria, a long, low clapboard building.
The dining room was a very pleasant, bright room that smelled of fresh coffee and breakfast. It was
about half-filled with track people: jocks, trainers, owners, handicappers, exercise riders, stewards.
The talk was all horses. Mention Tagliani to this group, they‟d want to know what race he was in and
who was riding him.
I stayed close to Callahan, ordered a breakfast that would have satisfied a stevedore, and listened.
Callahan was as tight with these people as a fat man‟s hand in a small glove. He talked to the track
people from one side of his mouth and me from the other:
“The little guy with the hawk nose arid no eyes, that‟s Johnny Gavilan. Very promising jock until he
took a bad spill at Delray a couple years ago. Turned trainer..
Or:
“The little box in the coat and cap is Willie the Clock, the track handicapper. He works for the track
and sets the beginning odds for each race. Knows more about horses than God and he‟s just as honest.
Or:
“The guy in the red sweater, no hair, that‟s Charlie Entwhistle. A great horse breeder. Started out as a
trainer, then won this horse called Justabout in a poker game. At first it was a joke because old
Justabout was just about the ugliest animal God ever created. He had no teeth. He‟d stand around the
paddock munching away on his gums and from the front he looked bowlegged. People would come
down to the paddock, stick their tongues out at him, throw things at him, laugh at him. The Toothless
Terror they called him, and he didn‟t look like he could beat a fat man around the track.
“Everybody was laughing at Charlie Entwhistle.
“But it turns out there‟s only one thing Justabout was any good for, and that was running. He not only
loved to run, he couldn‟t stand for anything to be in front of him. Brother, could that kid run. He was
home in bed before the rest of the field got to the wire. He rewrote the record books, made Sunday
school teachers out of a lot of horseplayers, and he made old Charlie Entwhistle rich.”
Callahan looked at me and smiled.
“And that‟s what horse racing‟s all about.”
We had finished breakfast, and he picked up his coffee. “Now let‟s go to work,” he said, and we
moved toward the other side of the room.
30
MAGIC HANDS
“Just listen,” Callahan said as we drew fresh cups of coffee, though I hadn‟t so much as cleared my
throat for the last thirty minutes.
“Every day of the season, Willie the Clock judges the top three horses in each race and sets the