The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway [72]
When I’d sit watching him working out in the hot sun I sure felt fond of him. He sure was fun and he done his work so hard and he’d finish up with a regular whirring that’d drive the sweat out on his face like water and then sling the rope at the tree and come over and sit down with me and lean back against the tree with the towel and a sweater wrapped around his neck.
“Sure is hell keeping it down, Joe,” he’d say and lean back and shut his eyes and breathe long and deep, “it ain’t like when you’re a kid.” Then he’d get up and before he started to cool we’d jog along back to the stables. That’s the way it was keeping down to weight. He was worried all the time. Most jocks can just about ride off all they want to. A jock loses about a kilo every time he rides, but my old man was sort of dried out and he couldn’t keep down his kilos without all that running.
I remember once at San Siro, Regoli, a little wop, that was riding for Buzoni, came out across the paddock going to the bar for something cool; and flicking his boots with his whip, after he’d just weighed in and my old man had just weighed in too, and came out with the saddle under his arm looking red-faced and tired and too big for his silks and he stood there looking at young Regoli standing up to the outdoors bar, cool and kid-looking, and I said, “What’s the matter, Dad?” cause I thought maybe Regoli had bumped him or something and he just looked at Regoli and said, “Oh, to hell with it,” and went on to the dressing room.
Well, it would have been all right, maybe, if we’d stayed in Milan and ridden at Milan and Torino/cause if there ever were any easy courses, it’s those two. “Pianola, Joe,” my old man said when he dismounted in the winning stall after what the wops thought was a hell of a steeplechase. I asked him once. “This course rides itself. It’s the pace you’re going at, that makes riding the jumps dangerous, Joe. We ain’t going any pace here, and they ain’t really bad jumps either. But it’s the pace always—not the jumps—that makes the trouble.”
San Siro was the swellest course I’d ever seen but the old man said it was a dog’s life. Going back and forth between Mirafiore and San Siro and riding just about every day in the week with a train ride every other night.
I was nuts about the horses, too. There’s something about it, when they come out and go up the track to the post. Sort of dancy and tight looking with the jock keeping a tight hold on them and maybe easing off a little and letting them run a little going up. Then once they were at the barrier it got me worse than anything. Especially at San Siro with that big green infield and the mountains way off and the fat wop starter with his big whip and the jocks fiddling them around and then the barrier snapping up and that bell going off and them all getting off in a bunch and then commencing to string out. You know the way a bunch of skins gets off. If you’re up in the stand with a pair of glasses all you see is them plunging off and then that bell goes off and it seems like it rings for a thousand years and then they come sweeping round the turn. There wasn’t ever anything like it for me.
But my old man said one day, in the dressing room, when he was getting into his street clothes, “None of these things are horses, Joe. They’d kill that bunch of skates for their hides and hoofs up at Paris.” That was the day he’d won the Premio Commercio with Lantorna shooting her out of the field the last hundred meters like pulling a cork out of a bottle.
It was right after the Premio Commercio that we pulled out and left Italy. My old man and Holbrook and a fat wop in a straw hat that kept wiping his face with a handkerchief