‘Make sure they eat it all up,’ Charlie said.
I took the buckets back to the appropriate stalls, gave the feed to the horses and waited while they ate it. I then checked they all had fresh water before returning the equipment to the appropriate store. My first evening’s work as a groom was done, and I hadn’t messed up.
Raworth’s six grooms plus Maria and the yard boy went together to the track kitchen for supper.
‘Food good,’ Rafael said to me on the way. ‘Plenty.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Maria said. ‘It is garbage. Always full of chilli. Mexicans will eat anything.’
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘Puerto Rico,’ she said.
Hell, I thought. I hope I hadn’t turned down the chance to share a room with her.
‘Are there many Puerto Ricans here?’ I asked.
‘Lots,’ she said. ‘Diego, my cousin.’
She indicated towards one of the others in our group. I smiled at him but it wasn’t reciprocated. He simply glared back at me with cold black eyes.
The eight of us did not eat together as a single unit. Having individually swapped a meal token for food with Bert Squab at the service counter, most went off to sit on their own or with grooms from other barns. Maria, however, sat down right opposite me.
Cousin Diego clearly wasn’t happy.
He moved to our table, taking the chair right next to Maria. He continued to stare at me, eating his supper without ever looking at it once. I found it rather disconcerting, and Maria wasn’t happy with him either.
‘Go away,’ she shouted at him in English.
He didn’t like that.
‘Habla Español,’ he shouted back at her. ‘Mantente alejado de este gringo.’
‘Púdrete!’ She stood up and raised her hand as if to strike him but stopped short. She sat down again. ‘Por favor vete.’
Diego reluctantly moved away across the gangway, but still he continued to stare.
‘I sorry,’ Maria said, looking down at the table. ‘Diego speak very good English, much better than me, but he still act like he in San Juan. All his friends here from Puerto Rico. They like control of women. He not like me speak to men not from Puerto Rico.’
‘Do you speak to men not from Puerto Rico often?’ I asked.
She looked up at me and smiled broadly. ‘Only every day.’
I smiled back at her and sensed Diego getting agitated to my left.
We ate for a while in silence. Maybe the food was a little too hot for Maria’s taste, but I liked things spicy and, as Rafael had said, there was plenty of it.
Attached to the track kitchen was a recreation hall and Maria and I went through there after eating. Diego followed. In the hall were some casual seating, a jukebox, two pool tables and five computer workstations. There was also a large TV currently showing a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Kansas City Royals.
‘Where’s the bar?’ I asked.
‘No here,’ said Maria. ‘Sometime boys go out to bar but drinking not allowed on backside, although some still do.’ She smiled as if implying that she was one of those.
‘Is there much else to do?’ I asked.
‘We have classes. English most, but also reading and math.’
‘Hey, Maria,’ shouted one of the young men watching the baseball, ‘come and give us a kiss and a cuddle.’
She raised her middle finger to him but she wandered over to join them nevertheless. Maria clearly enjoyed being the centre of attention.
If possible, Diego looked even less happy.
I, meanwhile, went over to another group of eight grooms gathered at the far end of the hall.
‘May I join you?’ I asked in my best Cork accent.
None of them said anything but two shifted along a bench to make some room. I sat down.
‘I’m new here,’ I said. ‘Name’s Paddy. I’m Irish. I started today, on Raworth’s crew.’
All I received was a few nods.
‘I’ve come from working the barns at Santa Anita,’ I went on, ‘in California.’
I received a couple more nods.
‘How about you?’ I asked, turning to the boy sitting right next to me. ‘Been here long?’
‘A while,’ he said nervously, glancing across at an older man.
‘Where do you come from?’ I asked him.
‘Why do you want to know?’ the older man said sharply. He was probably in his early forties, with slicked-back black hair and a matching goatee, and was clearly the group’s leader.
‘I’m only being conversational,’ I said.
‘Well, don’t be,’ the man said abruptly. ‘We don’t like people asking questions. Especially about who we are and where we come from. Too many of us are trying to forget.’
I could see that finding any of Adam Mitchell’s previous grooms was going to be difficult, if not impossible.
This was not the first time I’d come across those with such a sentiment.
I thought of them as victims of a ‘here-and-now’ syndrome — people that exist only for the here and now, without any consideration of their future, and without learning any lessons from their past.
Many habitual criminals have it. It is not that they enjoy going to jail, they just persistently ignore previous experience and mistakenly believe that it will not happen to them again this time. The notion that long prison sentences act as a deterrent against criminal behaviour simply does not apply to such people.
In many respects, steeplechase jockeys have exactly the same here-and-now mentality. History should have taught them that future mounts will fall and they will be seriously injured, but they live only for the here and now, for the thrill of the race, not contemplating for one second the inevitable agony of broken bones or dislocated shoulders. Once they do, it is time to retire.
I stood up and went outside to find a quiet corner to call Tony Andretti.
16
‘Equine viral arteritis,’ Tony said. ‘EVA.’
‘What is that?’
‘It’s a disease caused by a virus. The three horses at Churchill have tested positive for antibodies in their blood. There’s no doubt. It seems it is quite common in some breeds but less so in Thoroughbreds.’
I’d never heard of it
‘How did they get it?’ I asked.
‘Strictly speaking, according to one of the veterinarians I spoke to, EVA is contagious rather than infectious,’ Tony said. ‘It is a respiratory disease but horses have to have their noses in contact to pass it on, as the virus exists in their nasal discharges — snot to you and me — rather than in the air. But it can also be transmitted via any nasal droplets left on shared tack or feed bowls, anything that is moved from one animal to another, as long as it is done immediately.’
‘How long is the incubation period?’
‘Anywhere from three to fourteen days depending on the strain of the virus and the amount transmitted.’
‘That means that one of them couldn’t have given it to the other two because all three went down with it on the same day. So where did it come from initially?’
‘Maybe there was another horse with a mild case of the disease,’ Tony said. ‘It seems that some horses don’t show any clinical symptoms when infected but they still shed the virus and so can infect others.’
‘Can you find out when those three horses arrived at Churchill Downs and where they stayed when they were there? If you can, find it out for all the Derby runners. See if any were together in a Stakes Barn.’
‘I’ll contact the Churchill backside manager,’ Tony said. ‘He must have had a list of where each horse was housed to know where to detail the sheriff’s deputies.’