Winning Odds Trilogy Read online

  She smiled, admiring horse after horse, shaking her head at the antics of one, to then just gape in awe at another, and wondered how she could put this into writing. How could she describe the magic? The speed? The raw power and drive of a Thoroughbred. The same horse jogging on and playfully tossing his head, who would then turn and run as hard and fast as he could. How could she describe the special something Ben said set one horse apart from another? How could she describe the feeling? The sense of being swept along in the dreams of every horseman on the racetrack. The gamble. The hope...

  “Good morning!”

  Dawn jumped, startled. “Oh, Ben!” she said, catching her breath. “I was looking for you earlier. I stopped by your barn.”

  Ben smiled. “You’d better be careful. I saw that look in your eyes. I think this racetrack is getting to you.”

  “What?” Dawn frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You.” Ben took hold of her hand gently, turned her wrist up, and pointed to the veins in her arm. “It’s getting in there. It gets in your blood, you know.”

  Dawn shook her head and laughed. “No, it’s not. I’m a writer and this is just a story. One that fascinates me, I’ll admit. But a story nonetheless.”

  Ben smiled rather smugly, nodding, and turned to watch a horse being galloped on the inside rail. Dawn was taken by the intensity of his gaze, the caring, such a kind old man, and dreaded asking, “What happened to Beau Born? He wasn’t at the barn when I stopped by. Did you? Is he...?”

  Ben silenced her, touching her lightly on the arm and looking into her eyes as if he were searching for something. “He’s fine. We’re going to scratch him though, just to be safe.” He paused, glancing to see how his horse pulled up. “We were probably at the wash rack when you came by.”

  Dawn looked away, overcome with a sudden rush of emotion. “I’m glad,” she said, her voice cracking. “I was afraid...”

  Ben stood quietly for a moment, observing her out of the corner of his eye, then motioned to a horse in the middle of the racetrack. He commented on it being sore, and Dawn turned to look at him, swallowing the lump in her throat.

  “How can you tell?”

  Ben smiled faintly. “Watch him.”

  Dawn studied the horse for a few seconds and did notice something unusual, though at a gallop it was impossible to tell if it was limping. “Tell me what to look for,” she said.

  Ben’s smile faded, watching her. “It’s in his eyes,” he told her, and when she glanced at him, he looked at the horse and said it again. “His eyes gave him away.”

  Dawn nodded and focused back on the horse for a long, long time.

  “You want a cup of coffee?” Ben asked.

  “Sure.” She picked up her purse and walked with him to the track kitchen, which also had a different feel to it than yesterday. Much different. She didn’t know if it was just her or because she was there with Ben. But the reason why didn’t really matter. What was important was that it felt right. Her being there felt right.

  “So...” Ben eased into a chair across from her and took a sip of his coffee. “How’s the story coming?”

  “Good. I have an appointment with the track’s general manager later this morning, then I’m going to talk to the track chaplain. I talked to the stable guard yesterday. He was really helpful. And I thought I should try to speak to a few of the jockeys. Then I guess I’m done.”

  “It sounds like you’re doing a thorough job,” Ben said. “I like that. You’re getting a side of everyone.”

  Dawn blushed a little. “Thanks,” she said, and sipped her coffee. For some reason, his opinion meant a great deal to her, and it felt good that he was pleased.

  “Are you sure you’ve given it enough time?”

  “I think so.” Dawn paused, then smiled. “And even though what you say about my veins isn’t true, I would like to come back when Beau races.”

  “I’ll save you a place in the winner’s circle.”

  Dawn laughed. “I’ll be there.”

  Early Saturday morning, wide awake, Dawn looked at the clock. Six thirty-three. Only ten minutes later than the last time she’d looked. “Wonderful.” She turned the radio on low, hoping it would lull her back to sleep. But it didn’t.

  She’d handed her article in yesterday and her editor liked it. Yes, it would be featured in the Sunday magazine section. So why think about the racetrack now? Beau Born wasn’t running. She’d checked the paper yesterday for the entries. Still...

  She got out of bed and got dressed. She wanted to go and that’s all there was to it. Halfway there, however, she almost changed her mind and turned back. This is ridiculous, she thought. Utterly ridiculous. Yet she drove on, and arriving, started wondering again. What was she doing here?

  Which is exactly what Charlie, the stable guard, wanted to know. “I thought you had your story.”

  “I do. I mean, I did.”

  “Got a pass?”

  Dawn sighed. “No, I’ll go get one.”

  Charlie nodded, and glanced at his watch. “It’s gonna take a while. They’re just now opening up.”

  Dawn stared in the direction of the secretary’s office, remembering how long it took the first time, and reconsidered. “This is crazy,” she said, thinking out loud. “I might as well just go home.”

  That’s when Charlie got this big grin on his face. “Ben said you’d be back.” He reached into his shirt pocket and handed her a visitor’s pass. “Here. He left this for you.”

  Dawn shook her head and smiled, thanking him, and headed for the barn. Ben was standing outside, watching Beau Born on the walking machine, with his back to her as she approached. She hesitated for a moment, drew a deep breath, and walked up beside him.

  “Ben, what am I doing here?”

  He smiled as he turned and looked at her. “Why, you’re here to write a story about race people. Isn’t that what you said?”

  Dawn stared. Her saying that seemed so long ago. Maybe she’d worked on the article too long, she told herself. Maybe she’d read it one too many times. Maybe she’d made it sound too good.

  Or maybe, just maybe, she was running. Hiding...

  “This was supposed to be just another story. Ben, I’m a writer.”

  “So,” he said, “why don’t you write a book?” And that was that. If she was hiding, this was the perfect place. He tipped his hat back, crossed his arms, and started planning ahead. “First thing, we’ll have to get you a license. You know anything about horses?”

  “Yes, riding horses. Nothing about racehorses though.”

  “No problem,” Ben said. “That we can teach you.”

  “We...?”

  “Me’n my partner, Tom.” He tapped her on the shoulder. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  Chapter Two

  Sometimes accidents just happen. In Dawn’s case however, Ben would point out, they happened usually because she wasn’t paying attention. At least in the beginning. “I’m okay. I’m okay,” she’d always say. But he really wondered.

  Fancy Pat finished an unimpressive, start-to-finish, trailing-the-field tenth out of ten. In her nine lifetime starts, she’d never once hit the board. In fact, she never even got close. Her talent seemed to lie in sensing the day she was to run, so she could stall-walk for hours, and leave most of what was needed for the race, back in the barn. They tried fooling her; giving her hay that morning, no bath, sending her to the track, you name it. But somehow she always knew. By the time she reached the paddock, what little energy she had left, washed-out completely in a frantic sweat. The gate crew dreaded loading her. And to keep her standing on all fours until the start proved even more of a challenge. She would either try to sit down or climb her way out, both seemingly at the same time on occasion. The latch would spring and out she’d come, for a lackluster run. Then it was back to the barn.

  Dawn gathered up the Absorbine and leg wraps, and ducked under the webbing of the horse’s stall before reaching for her. A big mistak
e. Fancy Pat was crankier than usual and lunged at her with ears pinned and mouth open. Taken by surprise, Dawn jumped back, and in doing so, bounced hard against the wall. The sound of the thud sent the mare into a mild fit, and in an instant, the situation had turned dangerous.

  Dawn found herself staring at the mare’s quivering, coiled, and well-muscled hind end. Doorway blocked.

  “Oh Lord.”

  How she could’ve been so stupid as to enter the stall without tying her up first didn’t seem important just then, though the thought crossed her mind. What mattered now, was that there was no way out.

  Sensing the advantage, the mare, in a gesture of aggressiveness, started pawing the ground like a raging bull, scattering her bedding and exciting herself even more. When Dawn made a move, the mare cow-kicked and struck the wall, ripping a piece of hide off her hock. This seemed to only darken her mood. She began to swing her head back and forth like a pendulum, gnawing the wall with her teeth at the end of each pass, and was building momentum, when suddenly Tom appeared from out of nowhere.

  “What the...?”

  He’d snuck down the shedrow to check on Dawn, hoping she wouldn’t see him, but now stood openly concerned in the stall doorway.

  “Don’t move.”

  Right... Dawn’s expression said. What else?

  Tom motioned for her to be quiet. The mare had stopped for a moment, but now started up again, gnashing her teeth on her feed tub with each swing. He’d have to time it just right, going with the offside of the swing. No one knew more than Tom how this bitch liked to bite.

  He waited, waited, and waited...then lunging, reached for her, just as the mare lunged for him. He almost got hold of her halter too. In fact, he just missed. “Shit.” He darted his eyes toward Dawn.

  She needn’t utter, “What now?” It was in her face.

  Tom motioned again for her to be still, and glanced up and down the shedrow. Nothing. No shank. No rope. Nothing. He took off his belt in slow motion. It would have to do.

  He nodded to Dawn, a nod that implied, “When I say when.” She nodded back. And with that, he slowly raised the belt over his head, counted to himself, nodded again to Dawn, and let it rip.

  Smack! He hit the mare high on the shoulder, which sent her flying to the back of the stall. “Quick!” Unsnapping the webbing then, he reached for Dawn, who for some reason just stood there. Next thing she knew, she was being yanked out of the stall and into the shedrow with such force, she landed in the ditch on the other side.

  A ditch of fresh morning rain and old runoff urine from the muck bin.

  Dawn sat trembling for a few seconds, trying to catch her breath, and looked up to thank Tom, but he was standing with his hands on his hips, bobbing his head in that way of his, and she declined.

  “Well, I’m sure you’d of figured something out,” he said. “But we thought we’d better check on you anyway.”

  Dawn waved her hand in front of her face, as if she were fanning herself and shook her head. She could picture the two of them, him and Ben, waiting up by the guard shack and flipping a coin to see who would go check on her. Though admittedly, she was actually glad they mother-henned her this time.

  She managed a feeble, “Thanks.”

  Tom smiled with a sideward glance, like only he could, and threaded his belt back through his jeans as he motioned to the stall. “Don’t bother doing the bitch up. Ben decided while we were waiting, to quit on her. He’s calling Big Mouth tomorrow.” Big Mouth was Tom’s nickname for Fancy Pat’s owner.

  Dawn nodded, gazing down at her muddy jeans.

  “Throw her a bran mash and call it a day.” He walked down the shedrow, smiling now, and waited until he was almost at the end to look back. “Oh, and Dawn...”

  She looked up with a reluctant sigh, and sure enough, that was all it took to start him laughing, quietly at first and somewhat restrained, then building to his customary roar. He couldn’t even finish what he was about to say. “Never mind,” he sputtered. And she could’ve sworn she heard him laughing all the way to the stable gate. Then Ben.

  Terrific. “What’s the point of a shedrow anyway? She’d asked Ben one day, one pouring-down rainy day. That conversation returned now as she pictured herself sitting in the ditch.

  “Aside from their being the cheapest barn to build, more importantly,” he said, “horses need fresh air and something else to look at besides a barn wall.” Thus a shedrow. Stalls in a row, with a shed roof to allow for plenty of that fresh air. And whenever the subject of the plan for enclosed barns was brought up, he scoffed at the idea, as adamantly as he objected to the proposed year-round racing season.

  “Why do they call the barn area the backside?” You had to drive past the barns to get to the grandstand, they were in front. So where did the term come from? It didn’t make sense, not to her at least.

  “It’s because we’re all horses’ asses,” Tom had said, coming down the shedrow that first morning to be introduced. “Ain’t it so, old man?”

  Ben laughed. “There’s only one horse’s ass around here, Tom, and that’s you.”

  Dawn smiled. So this was Tom. The partner; as good-looking a cowboy as she’d ever seen: tanned, smiling eyes, toothpick dangling from his mouth, and nowhere near Ben’s age. She guessed him to be somewhere around forty-five. She was off by a year.

  “We’re called the backside,” Ben explained, “because we put on the show. We’re the backside of the production. But keep in mind, we’re the stars. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  Dawn locked the tack room and walked down to see if Fancy Pat was eating, which she was, and left to go home. Thinking about it, she probably drove Ben crazy those first couple of weeks, always asking questions. Always wanting to know something. Always occupying her mind.

  “Why do some horses stay sound and others go sore?”

  Ben told her it had a lot to do with the trainer. Although in many instances, he said it was out of his or her hands. “The way a horse is put together is often the biggest factor. That, and the amount of trips around the track. Still,” he said, “a good trainer can hold a horse longer than most, for that reason alone.”

  “Why? What’s the most important thing?”

  “What? About being a trainer?”

  She nodded.

  “Well...” He paused for a moment, as if he had to think about it. “You going to put this in your book?”

  Dawn laughed. He loved asking her that. She could see it in his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Well then,” he said. “What’s important is to treat each horse as an individual, because there’s no two horses alike. One’ll take to training hard, where another’ll fall apart. They’re different. Each one. And if a trainer thinks he can do it any other way, he might as well just quit.” Ben thought most trainers should’ve quit before they ever got started, his pet peeve being ex-jockeys turned horse trainer. He could go on for hours about that. “You understand?”

  Dawn nodded.

  Ben was from the old school, and ran his stable on a tight schedule. The horses were fed a scoop of oats at six a.m., and allowed a half hour to eat. The feed tubs were pulled then and hung outside the stall. This was done, he explained, to encourage them to eat up. Morning was no time for lollygagging. They were athletes, he said. When training was over, they could rest and eat at their leisure. But the morning belonged to their trainer, and the business of being a racehorse.

  Routinely, the horses not scheduled for training on a particular day, were always hung on the walking machine first, and their stalls cleaned during this time. Ben liked to see a horse feeling good and “on-the-muscle,” but always had them yanked off if they acted up too much. He’d seen too many horses injured, some severely enough to end their careers, from walking machine accidents. He preferred to hand-walk a horse, and in fact, still insisted on it the morning of a race. But even he had to admit, a walking machine was almost a necessity for a large stable. So consequently he used them, but begrudgingly, and w
ith quick releases on both tops and bottoms of the shanks.

  Once the walkers were done, training got underway. Beau, on scheduled days, always tracked first, and more often than not before sunrise, when the track was least congested. As a rule, horses weren’t allowed to ship in and out during training hours. Nevertheless, right after Beau came off the track, Ben was paged to the stable gate to authorize an arrival.

  Nothing made Ben madder than a glitch in his routine. Nothing. And to make matters worse, when he got back to the barn with this new horse, it was just in time for him to see Majorama’s exercise boy getting a leg-up at the next barn.

  Gone were the days when trainers had his or her own exercise rider. It was done mostly by freelancers now; exercise riders for the going rate, or jockeys for the mount in a race, and they all had routines of their own. If a horse was tacked and ready to go when they got there, they’d get on it. If it wasn’t, occasionally they’d wait. Some would even tack their own if they were familiar enough with the horse. But usually, they just moved on. And if you were lucky, they’d make it back around in time before the track closed.

  “Shit!”

  Every horse in the barn decided to welcome the new arrival, as was customary, any horseman will tell you. Racehorses, standing around, sniff the air for anything to get them going. They buck and kick and squeal in their stalls then, charging their webbings and getting the horses on the walking machine going; leaping and kicking, rearing, and yanking the machine arms up and down with their antics…then running round and round…the pulley clanging and slipping, dirt clumps flying from the horses’ hooves and landing on the metal roof of the barn, which only gets the horses in the barn acting up even more then.