C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

The second horse, Major General, running hard at the lead’s shoulder, didn’t go down on the curve, where he bore along under the eightfold drag of centrifugal force, straining the tiny, countless fractures he’d sustained from running too much as a juvenile, unable to heal because the heart heals first, then striated muscle, then bone, and bone only if the training regimen allows. Instead, he went down on the straightaway when, with an arrow’s unerring attack, he began to stretch out of the pack, his nose edging toward the distant wire, his mane a flag snapping in his jock’s joyous face. When he had barely gained a head, his cannon bone fractured through the flesh with a resounding snap! , his right hoof flopping suddenly behind in a gruesome, dismissive backhand to the field. His bulk toppled hideously onto his outstretched neck, which broke without a snap! , tossing his jock forward like a child from a bike, too stunned to protect himself as the two horses directly behind tripped on the fallen horse and went down themselves, one with a fractured skull, one with a shattered shoulder, the latter screaming for the four minutes before all three could be euthanized with a syringe to the jugular.

“Oh!” cried the man beside Henrietta, his beer sloshing over the lip of its cup. “They totaled the car! It’s a fucking smashup!”

A fourth colt careened wildly to the outside and pulled up in front of the whitened faces of the shocked railbirds, who only now, as the full meaning of the snap! registered, began to groan as if they and not the horses had sustained the injuries. Seconds Flat, sixth at the turn and still accelerating where her peers stumbled or veered over the prone, stunned bodies of the fallen, simply used her natural, instinctive chop to leap over them — horses and jockeys all — more like a champion jumper than Secretariat’s get.

Still accelerating, she passed second under the wire.

“It’s nothing short of a miracle these three jockeys are alive,” Henrietta heard the announcer cry. With broken arms and ribs and concussions, they crawled like toddlers back to their mounts, one of which had now sprung up on three legs to hobble frantically about, head jerking manically, so saliva was slung around its neck like a necklace, but two of which could not move at all save the stunned thumping of a tail. Two of the jocks sat in the mess of churned mud, crying like children over their broken horses where they lay, listening as the colt with the injured shoulder screamed.

Henrietta watched with her hand over her mouth as a screen was erected around the horses.

The track ambulance spun up, followed shortly by the vet’s truck with its mobile clinic, and three horse ambulances. A hundred thousand strong and mostly drunk, the grandstand waited in muted, tipply shock as one entered willingly, confused, and white-eyed into the ambulance, the other two euthanized and winched even before the weeping owners could say — still out of breath from racing down from their air-conditioned boxes—“Do the right thing.”

Only when a door slammed for the third time did Henrietta turn abruptly away from the rail. She had to find her father, who had surely left the box by now to find Seconds Flat. He would be furious, she knew; a second-place finish was a deep disappointment under the best of conditions, but with the best in the field down, it amounted to nothing at all. It added not one letter to the family name. Where was her father? Hands clutching his skull, no doubt, and cursing his fate.

* * *

“Slow down, Henrietta.”

He felt like an invalid with his daughter on his arm this way, all but held upright as they walked from the barn on the backstretch, where Seconds Flat, uninjured but to Henry’s eye a wasted thing, was now being washed and hotwalked, and where the jockey had gripped his arm, saying, “She just flew, Mr. Forge! She flew over them like an eagle!” and where their trainer met them with not the proper solemnity but smiles of relief that they’d been spared — and second place! — though the man soon fell into a faltering silence when confronted with Henry, who looked out at the horseflesh all around them and, for one gaping moment, could not determine what he looked upon, or his place in it. His hopes were dashed, and his accrued wealth amounted to nothing. He gazed in wonder at his daughter beside him, at that chilly mantle she assumed at all times. She wore it so well, like some kind of birthright, cold in any weather. It was a strange thing to admire in your own child, to watch her perfect what you could not, that regal indifference.

Henrietta was guiding him past the stiles that demarcated the backstretch when he caught sight of a man he had been introduced to once. Akers, or Akins, his blasted mind could not remember which, but this man, this charlatan with what looked like a prostitute at his side, made his money from electronics stores and chicken restaurants, this man had a Derby winner in his stable. This man’s stallion covered every game mare in North America for six months and then was flown south in late summer to cover the other half of the known world. It was ludicrous, preposterous, proof that life favored idiot strivers. It sickened him what stupid men could achieve in this life.

“Mr. Forge, hold up a minute.”

They were in the parking lot now, trying to find both their Mercedes in a lot of silver Mercedes. He was slow to turn, though he recognized the voice immediately. Mack Snyder. He’d seen him a hundred times on television, and occasionally in person from a distance. On any other day, he would have drawn himself up to his fullest, most self-assured height. Today, he looked like a man peering out from beneath a cowl.

The man came on, smiling slightly in a pinched way, but the smile didn’t suit, like too-tight Sunday clothes on a roughneck. His shirt was damped through the armpits with sweat, and a bolo tie swung with an orange Zuni cabochon. He was a stocky man with a perpetually sunburned neck and hard, unkind hands pinched by two signet rings. When he held out one hand, Henry noted they were hard and calloused, but his nails were evenly clipped and perfectly clean.

“Mack Snyder,” the man said. Or the Hillbilly Horseman, as Bob Costas had dubbed him during his first Derby — and the sobriquet had stuck. If he’d shed some of the Letcher County syntax, his vowels were still broad enough to swim in. That roughcut voice rose and fell like the head of a rocking horse.

Henrietta touched her hand to Henry’s upper arm, a protective gesture.

“Good to meet you,” said Henry.

“You’re just the man I want to talk to,” Mack said, and for a moment he set his thin lips together, hard, as if he was hesitating, as if he was the kind of man who hesitated. “Listen,” he said, “I would congratulate you, but I’d bet you aren’t the type who takes kindly to congratulations on a second-place finish.”

“Ha,” said Henry tiredly. Mack held up his hand as if to forestall further response. “Let me just say this: your filly ran a good race against the boys, and that’s in spite of a hard bump and a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Always interesting when a girl doesn’t know her place.”

Henry stood there listening, but he was beginning to focus with as much energy as absolute fatigue allowed. He waited.

Mack said: “She spends her energy, though. She’s missing that smart gait her dam had, but you can see the resemblance once she settles in.” He nodded once, hard, agreeing with himself.

Henry cocked his head to one side. “You remember Hellcat?”

“Damn right, I don’t ever forget a horse. Not a bad choice for Secretariat. Unconventional, sure, but not bad.”

“That’s what I always said.”