from the pen of icarus blake

The horns sounded on the track, and on the back stretch Aggie pulled the syringe out of Sunny Red’s vein. He capped the needle and leaned against the stall to watch the bay filly in the tense seconds as the cocktail took hold. Sunny’s haunches twitched, her jaw fell open and long strings of drool dripped on the hay as the cocktail hit her heart. Aggie rubbed the taut muscles of her neck until she gave a great shake and stamped her hooves on the matted hay. She turned back over her shoulder and lipped at his hand. Aggie tucked the capped syringe into his pocket and moved along.

He tossed the spent syringe in the men’s bathroom sharp box, mixing it with Joe’s insulin sticks and every other needle that saw the inside of a horse that day. Aggie washed his hands while a hot walker pissed hard in the urinal, then made for the bar across the street and figured he’d grab a drink and be back in time to see Sunny run.

The boys and Missy sat at the booth tucked in the back corner, watching the ponies on the flat screen behind the bar. The light of the TV cast the place in a flickering glow, the volume turned way down low and subtitles tripping over themselves to keep pace with the mumbled commentary. Aggie shoved in beside Missy, who threw her arm wide around the back of the booth in a way that made him feel like a girl on a date.

“How’s Sunny?” she asked, shifting her toothpick from one side of her mouth to the other.

“Hot as she ever was,” Aggie replied, grabbing the spare pint from Joe across the table.

“Think she’s gonna run good?” Missy’s eyes fixed on a gray colt pulling ahead by one length then two on screen. He passed the wire.

Aggie slugged back some beer. The back stretch was hot as hell, and the AC in the bar cooled his system. One of the boys flagged down the bar girl and asked for a round of tequila.

“Ya’ll hear Eight Belles broke down in Cali?” Joe said.

“On track?” Aggie watched the screen at the far end of the bar where another race was running. A dark colt won by a length.

“Poor thing. She win at least?” Missy wondered, her words morphed around the unlit cigarette between her lips.

“Second,” Joe grunted, “hit the wire too hard and threw her jock.”

Missy rolled her head aside and clicked her tongue. “Went the way of Shutter Ride, bless her heart.”

The boys sat in solemn silence, hats off and heads bowed in memory of a good horse until someone crumpled a losing bet in their fist and broke trance. The bar girl returned with a tray of tequila shots and Aggie helped pass them around.

Joe raised his, “to Eight Belles,” and threw it back.

“And here’s to Ol’ Shudders,” Missy responded, holding her cigarette between two knuckles to throw back the tequila with a wince.

The boys went around like that, each naming a broke down horse until it turned around to Aggie.

“To all of ‘em,” Aggie mumbled before taking his shot and stifling the cough the burn brought on.

“Dunno why you’d toast to Shutter,” Joe scoffed once the moment had passed, “ain’t no worse horse that ever was.”

Missy rolled her eyes. “Appeasing the dead so they stay dead, Joey,” she glanced over at Aggie, whose face was still red from not coughing, “you heard of Shutter Ride, Aggie?”

Aggie shook his head.

“I’m surprised,” she said.

Joe laughed. “You’d think someone would tell you whose stall you’re choking the chicken in.” He made a tugging motion with his fist and laughed when Missy kicked him under the table.

“Now’s as good a time as any to know, baby,” Missy leaned in, her voice taking on the roughness of campfire storytelling, “first you gotta know something: way back when, in the early days when they built the first tracks, they said that the first horse that dies in the dirt stays there.”

“I know that,” Aggie protested.

Missy held up her finger. “Well yeah, baby, of course you do, but ain’t no one told you about ours. Ours goes by the name Shutter Ride, he ran that first christenin’ race in the forties when the track opened — Nasty old bay that bit every hand that ever came near and made a habit of bucking his jock just past the wire. He was a mean, mean bastard, but he hated losing so you’d just take the nips as they came.

“Well, Ol’ Shudders gets bounced track to track ‘cause no one liked handling him much, until he finally finds his way here. One of the first horses on an untested track, running just a little claims race. Nothing fancy, nothing you’re pushing hard for… Unless you’re Shutter Ride. Made four colts stagger, then fought for lead with a pretty brown they wanted for the Derby, but Ol’ Shudder won’t stand losing to a pretty boy. So Ol’ Shudder pushes and pushes and just before he hits the wire at second, his fetlocks go. Screams, shoved himself off, and — God forbid — boy’s hocks go right after. Now he’s all flailing and boneless just past the wire and still driving for the brown that beat him with teeth a-snappin’.

“No one could get close enough for all the teeth, like the devil doesn’t feel pain, so they shot him from the stands. Right in the head. Through the eye. Still bit off his groom’s finger ‘fore he went down.”

“Never heard of the hocks going,” Aggie said.

Missy leaned back. “Me neither. Never before, and never since.”

“And that empty stall you’re livin’ in, Aguilar,” Joe added, “that’s Shutter Ride’s stall. Can’t keep horses in there no more, ‘cause Shudder nips at their tails and makes ‘em break on track.”

“So they put stall boys in there instead.” Missy elbowed him in the ribs.

After a couple more drinks and a couple more runs on the track, the party losing and gaining every so often as folks went to tend their horses or came back again, Aggie found it was his turn to leave. He said goodbye to Missy, who’d just come back from running her boys some feed, and trotted across the street between cars as they geared up for Sunny Red’s race.

Aggie found himself a vantage with the other grooms waiting to hot walk their horses from the wire. A screen mounted on the inside of a little room showed the horses at the gates. Sunny Red champed at the bit, trotting in place in anticipation of the shot.

And then she was gone, fast as lightning past the others. His girl liked her head starts, but Aggie willed her to slow, turning his eyes to the track in front as they rounded the bend. Sunny kept pace with the pack, losing her early lead and riding in the middle with the bulk of the fillies. Aggie cheered her on for her next surge.

Then he lost her in the crowd as they approached the wire. The pack parted around Sunny as she staggered. Aggie’s heart lumped. He rushed out to meet her and her jock on the dirt, but he already knew she was done by the kink in her fetlock. Another groom followed behind with a tarp as Aggie cradled Sunny’s big head in his arms. Her eye turned up to him, big and wet and terrified, and he held her as the vet pushed the salt mix euthanasia into her veins. Not long after, his girl was loaded on the ambulance and gone. His tears stuck the settling dust to his face, so he staggered back to the bar to drink himself stupid.

Missy walked him home after more shots of tequila, odes to Sunny Ride, and a thousand fuck you-s to her owner who never loved her like Aggie did. She delivered him to his cot in the cold stall at the end of the stables and tucked him into bed, told him tomorrow was another day, and shut the stall door.
Aggie slept fitfully, dreaming of his ankles turned at the angle of Sunny’s fetlock and his bones in pieces. He woke in a stupor and stared up at the dark ceiling. A horse snorted softly close by, and he turned over bleary-eyed so see a black shape huddled by his duffel bag. A wet black eye watched him.

“Sunny?” he murmured, reaching for his girl.

He pulled his hand away when teeth flashed white. The animal struggled, but couldn’t get its legs under it. Aggie rubbed his eyes. The mass congealed into the mound of feed bags piled against the wall. He went out for a smoke.

Aggie stared at the track, his cigarette hanging limp between his fingers. He’d taken a drag, but now it just burned down until he crushed it beneath his boot. He ducked under the posts and onto the dirt. The last pass of the tender smoothed the track so it looked like he was the first to ever walk it, his footsteps trailing along behind him until he found their start and walked over them again and again in the dim moonlight. He stopped beneath the wire on his third lap and turned to look at the place where Sunny fell.

A horse lay there on its side, barrel chest heaving. Aggie took a step towards it, and its long head swiveled, eye gleaming and dark wet streaks down its cheeks. He waited for it to vanish, like the dream. Its legs wheeled, hooves lolling like flails at the end of shattered fetlocks. Aggie backed up over his own footprints as a dust cloud rose from the thrashing.

The black shape staggered, crouching with a sound like wet pebbles. Hot breath misted like fog on the empty track. Aggie’s boots sunk deep in the loose dirt, and the mangled horse writhed toward him with a snap of its rigid spine.

Aggie passed the wire. His boots filled with sand. No sound but both of their ragged breathing and the awful popping and muffled thump in the dirt as Aggie approached the first bend. He slipped, catching himself. Behind him, the black mass of Shutter Ride loomed with crashing ferocity as it hurled the bulk of itself into the air.

Dirt washed over Aggie, kicked up by his own heels and the crashing thing behind him. Teeth snapped at his nape. His lungs burned and he screamed, screamed for the midnight lingerers on the back stretch to help him. Waves of dust rippled outward. Aggie’s ankle cracked beneath him.

Missy and Joe smoked one cigarette after another as they watched the ambulance, lights flashing silent in the early morning dark. The cops stood about scratching their balding heads, useless for the body dirtying the clean dirt track. His footprints wound round and round and round the nicely leveled dirt until he fell, and thrashed, and his bone broke the skin and marred that pretty track with blood. The cops told them to stay a hundred yards back, but they knew a breakdown when they saw it — and anyway, Joe’d already and seen it all.

“Crawled,” Joe said, halfway through his fourth cigarette, “crawled a whole track length.”

“Like Ol’ Shudder himself was on his heels,” Missy agreed.

Joe glared at her. “You never shoulda told him, Miss. Dumb old superstition, and this ain’t joking.”

“I know,” Missy said.

“Aggie’s fuckin’ dead, Miss.”

“I know.”

“Dead like Sunny, a man dead like a horse. It ain’t fuckin’ right.” Joe’s voice cracked and he exhaled a trembling cloud of smoke.

Missy stamped her cigarette out beneath her boot. “I ain’t joking.”

She walked away. Stalls to muck, horses to feed, meds to pass around to the stablehands according to the trainers and owners and all the rest. She left Joe on watch, his face still dead pale and older than she’d ever seen. She barely paused at Shutter Ride’s stall — Aggie’s stall — to pay them both a quiet prayer. Not that she thought God would do all that much on the track.