The Ghost Horse Read online

  Tebbutt would get no argument on that assessment from Tim, who by his own admission “kinda went nuts.” He had gotten up before dawn one morning, while the house was still dark, tossed his clothes into a suitcase, jumped into his truck (he left the horse trailer behind), and pointed the nose west.

  “Drove straight across the country,” Tim said. “Didn’t sleep at all. Shit, I didn’t sleep much for the next six months. I don’t remember much about the trip, except that I stopped somewhere in Indiana to call my sister. Told her I was coming to California.”

  Cheryl was neither surprised to get the phone call nor reluctant to open her home; she had provided an oasis for her little brother before, and she would willingly do it again. As with most encounters in Tim’s life, there were no parameters to define this one, no timetable for arriving or leaving. He would show up one day, stay as long as he liked, and then move on. Same as always.

  “He was completely lost when he got out here,” Cheryl said. “I think he was depressed and in a terrible emotional state for at least two or three years. I mean, he stayed here for two years, then left, but he still wasn’t right. And he was sick a lot of the time, too. He hadn’t been taking care of himself and his stomach was all bloated and distended. I was worried about him. Timmy had a life, a business, a partner. He and Lisa did hard work, and they did it together. Suddenly his partner was gone and he had to start all over again. By himself.”

  By himself.

  That’s the part that baffled and wounded the Calley family. Why did he have to do anything on his own? Weren’t they still part of his life, his family?

  “There were a lot of hard feelings among them after Tim left,” observed Cheryl. “They were all under such tremendous stress during those last few months, when Lisa was so sick. That can happen in any family. But after she died, and Tim just took off … well, they weren’t too happy about that. He came out here and he didn’t go back, which really hurt Carol. She and Tim have a very special relationship. It’s unique. Totally platonic, but not like a normal mother-in-law and son-in-law relationship. It’s wonderful and special, and he betrayed that by leaving. But you have to understand—that’s what Tim does, because that’s the behavior that was modeled for him when he was growing up. He doesn’t know any other way.”

  For the first month or so he did nothing, just sat around and licked his wounds. He stared at the walls, watched a lot of television, avoided sleep for fear of the dreams that he’d have, dreams in which Lisa would appear to him, which was at once reassuring and gut-wrenching, for eventually the dream would end and he’d wake up, bathed in sweat, wanting to cry.

  “I guess you’d call it a breakdown,” Tim said. “It was like I was living a bad goddamn movie that wouldn’t end. It played over and over. I kept waiting for it to stop. A lot of crazy shit went through my mind—sometimes I thought about killing myself.”

  Tim said his drinking was only sporadic, but what the episodes lacked in frequency, they more than made up for with intensity.

  “I went off a few times,” he acknowledged. “Crack-ups, tantrums—whatever you want to call them. I almost tore my sister’s house apart a couple times. But she let me stay, of course, even if it meant she had to get out for a while. I thought her husband was a lazy-ass shit, didn’t work, and yet he used to bully my sister around. One day I just had enough of his shit, so I took a cane and broke his nose, told him I’d kill him if he ever hurt my sister again. She was mad at both of us, so she left for a while. Came back eventually, though. Told me I needed to get some help. She was probably right, but I never did see a psychiatrist. I’m not big on that stuff. Not big on doctors, either.”

  Inertia, he told himself. That would do the trick. If only he could keep moving, stay busy, occupy his body with so much work that he’d be too exhausted to think about the past. That was the key: get up every morning, put both feet on the floor, and go to work.

  He started out doing odd jobs on his sister’s house, helping to fix things up. Then he bought some equipment and began power-washing houses. He detailed cars. It was simple, mindless work. Drudgery, really, but at least it filled the days with a sense of productivity. At least it put some change in his pocket, which, given the fact that Tim was basically broke, wasn’t such a bad thing. For a while he had no interest in resurrecting any sort of career that revolved around horses, despite the fact that horses were all he really knew. Being around them would be too painful; they would remind him of Lisa, and of a better time.

  One day, though, he drove over to Del Mar Racetrack. He watched a couple races, dropped a few bucks, and by the end of the day felt something stirring in his belly. Not long after that he stopped by the track again, and this time he roamed the backstretch. Tim had been away from the business for a while, and it had been many years since he’d worked in California, but he still had contacts, he still had experience, and he figured maybe it was time to put those things to work.

  “I started driving a horse van again,” Tim said. “Easy money. I could do it in my sleep.”

  He paused, chuckled.

  “Practically did, a few times.”

  One of the good things about driving a truck is that you have plenty of time to think, and to get things straight in your head. Of course, that’s the bad thing, as well. There was, for example, the day that Tim was driving a van filled with six-figure show horses from Los Angeles International Airport to an event in Indio, California, when his mind began to drift.

  “I was going down the interstate, and I just started thinking about Lisa,” he remembered. “Next thing I knew, the brakes are locked up and I’m sliding off the road with six horses in the back. That was a damn close call. Could have been killed because I wasn’t paying attention. So I finished the trip, unloaded the horses, got my check, parked the van, and I quit. For a while, anyway. I still wasn’t mentally right to drive a horse van.”

  He went back to power washing and detailing cars, did what he could to make ends meet, so that he wouldn’t have to depend on his sister. A car accident resulted in a modest cash settlement that temporarily boosted his savings account and allowed him to pay off some debt. Slowly, over time, he began to emerge from the darkness of depression. In the late winter of 2006, tired of California and itching to get back into the racing game, Tim packed up the used BMW he’d bought with his settlement money (his truck had died with a couple hundred thousand miles on the odometer), and headed for home.

  But where exactly was that?

  Tim had no answer, so he did what he’d always done: he drifted. From California to Arizona, then north to Oregon and Washington, stopping to see one of his brothers along the way. One morning, after sleeping in his car near the border of Montana and Wyoming, he stopped at a convenience store to use a pay phone. His first and only call was to Carol Calley, with whom he had not spoken in two years.

  “I’m dead-flat broke,” Tim told her. “I’ve been siphoning gas to run the car. And you know what? There’s too many prisons around here. I keep this up, I’m gonna end up in one of them.”

  He paused.

  “Can you send me some money? I’m on my way to see you.”

  Carol thought for a moment, letting silence fill the line.

  Do I really want to do this?

  Truth be told, she was still angry with him, still hurt and offended by the way he had run off. Nevertheless, this was her son-in-law on the other end of the phone. Lisa’s husband, the man to whom she’d been married for nearly nine years. He needed help. He wanted to come home.

  How could she say no?

  The next day Tim picked up a wire transfer in Wyoming. He filled the car with gas, got himself something to eat, and started driving. It took him a while to get there, as he meandered around the country, driving south through Louisiana and Florida before heading back up the Eastern Seaboard. Along the way he would check in periodically with Carol and Frank, just to see how they were doing and to assure them that he was on his way.

  Then, o
ne day, he simply showed up on the doorstep of their house in Camillus; the very same house where he and Lisa had lived, and where Lisa had died. He and Carol talked for a while, the conversation at first stilted and then gradually more comfortable. Carol asked if he needed a place to stay. Tim said that he did. Maybe they could work something out? Tim had always been handy. The Calleys had an older home, a fair amount of property that needed tending. Tim could help them. In return, they would give him a room.

  It seemed to make sense.

  “He moved right back in,” Carol said. “I know some people think that’s kind of odd, but we were glad to see him. We missed him. And he had nowhere else to go.”

  Before settling in, Tim wanted to take care of something important. He had left abruptly in the winter months more than two years earlier, before the headstone had been placed on Lisa’s burial site. He’d heard from Carol that it was beautiful, the image of Lisa with one of her winning horses, culled from a photo taken in the winner’s circle at Finger Lakes some years earlier. He wanted to see it for himself, so he drove to Sacred Heart and knelt near the stone. He whispered to Lisa, told her how much he missed her, and how he had come back home. He hoped she would understand.

  “I needed some closure on the cemetery and the grave,” Tim explained. “That’s part of the reason I came back. And I wanted to see my family. What can I tell you? I left on the run, and it took me some time to get my shit together.”

  Chapter Nine

  OCALA, FLORIDA

  JANUARY 8, 2010

  At some point in the previous few days he’d already made up his mind. He had two thousand dollars to his name, every wrinkled bill stuffed into his boot to prevent anyone from stealing it, and now he was about to give it up willingly in exchange for a horse of modest pedigree and questionable ability. If anyone had suggested to Tim Snyder that he was out of his mind, they wouldn’t have gotten much of an argument—not even from Snyder himself.

  Tim had spent the better part of three years trying to put his life back together, but he had precious little to show for it. He had worked primarily for his buddy John Tebbutt, galloping horses and assisting with training duties at Tebbutt’s barn at Finger Lakes Racetrack, but it was sporadic work made even less lucrative by the fact that Tim would sometimes disappear for days or weeks on end. Whenever he came around, though, there was a job waiting, and that, combined with the fact that he had a roof over his head in Camillus, thanks to the generosity of the Calley family, lent some stability to Tim’s otherwise chaotic life.

  Tebbutt had decided in December 2009 that he would spend the winter in Florida, setting up a small operation (approximately a half dozen horses) at a training center in Delray Beach and shipping horses to Gulfstream on race days. He offered Tim a job for the duration.

  “John is a friend,” Tim said. “We’ve had our differences over the years, but he’s always had work for me. He’s a good guy. He’d always wanted to spend the winter in Florida, and this seemed like a good time to do it. I was his main man, galloping horses, getting them ready to race. It was an all-day job.”

  Tebbutt knew that money was a significant problem for Tim; he also knew that while his friend was a highly competent horseman who would never have trouble getting backstretch work, Tim missed both the excitement and opportunity that came with being an owner. He was fifty-six years old, virtually broke, and had nothing to show for his nearly four decades in the business. He had a home, but no house; he had an empty bank account. His assets, beyond the two grand in cash, were limited to a beat-up station wagon and a feisty little Jack Russell terrier named T-Bone.

  “He was in a tough situation,” Tebbutt recalled. “I told him the best way to get out of debt and get a leg up on the whole situation was to get himself a horse, get back in the game, start churning them again.”

  It wasn’t like Tim required much in the way of persuasion. He wanted a horse of his own, even if his plan was simply to sell the nag for a small profit shortly after it came into his possession. He and Lisa had made a living doing precisely that; why couldn’t he do it again … on his own?

  So Tim began poking around, making phone calls, looking for a horse that would fit into his meager budget. Tebbutt made inquiries on his behalf, as well, eventually leading to a conversation with Don Hunt, an owner and broker who had a farm in Ocala. Hunt had plenty of stock, some of it in Snyder’s price range. He also had something of a history with Tim, the two having done business on numerous occasions over the years, some of it collegial, some of it acrimonious.

  The most noteworthy transaction was actually one of the smallest, but resulted in a significant amount of confusion and a whopping inconvenience for Tim. It happened in 2003, while Lisa was battling cancer and Tim was trying to pay bills by hauling horses up and down the East Coast. According to Tim, Hunt had authorized Snyder to take permanent possession of a horse that he was transporting to another owner, an acquaintance of Hunt’s. Tim had the horse for only a short time before selling it. The horse, Halo’s Wish, went on to hit the board a few times, resulting in a dispute over ownership. Since Snyder had taken possession through informal channels, he had no documentation on the horse and thus no proof of ownership. In the summer of 2003 a ruling of indefinite suspension was handed down by stewards at Finger Lakes. The sanction would effectively prevent Tim from owning or training horses at any track in North America for nearly four years, until the suspension was lifted in May 2007.

  “It was ridiculous. I didn’t steal a horse,” Tim said. “The horse was given to me, but then it wins some money and suddenly everybody wants a piece of it. I didn’t even care at the time. My wife was dying. But that cost me four years. Eventually Don called the stewards and got everything straightened out.”

  While not addressing the specifics of the incident, Hunt did offer this assessment of Snyder:

  “Tim is different, that’s for sure. I like him, we’re friends, and I’ve sold him a number of horses over the years. But he will say things he should not say at times. And he’s got a little bit of larceny in him.”

  Regardless of any ill feelings the two may have had toward one another, they were prepared to do business once again in early 2010. During the course of a phone conversation, Hunt told Tim about a horse he might like, a big bay filly, three years old, that had the lines and musculature of a serious racehorse, but had thus far been disinclined to run so much as a step. Maybe Timmy could take a look at her. After all, he needed a project.

  Details of the initial offer are steeped in murkiness, and vary by small degrees depending on the source. According to Snyder, Hunt wanted $4,500 for the unnamed filly. Snyder told him he had only two thousand dollars to his name. Would Hunt consider accepting the two grand as a down payment, with the remaining $2,500 to be paid out of the horse’s winnings?

  “Don said she was a maiden filly out of a stakes-winning mare,” Tim explained. “A real good-looking horse, but she was blind in one eye and there had been some trouble with her feet. Other than that, she was in good shape. I didn’t care. I was used to working with horses like that. I know Donny got insulted later because he thought I claimed that he sold me a bad horse, or that the horse wasn’t taken care of. I didn’t mean to imply that. She was a great horse. If she had any problems, she was born with them. I said I wanted to take a look at the horse, and if I liked what I saw, I’d give him whatever money I had.”

  Hunt would later intimate that the agreed-upon sale price was in excess of $4,500, but added, “If that’s what Timmy wants to say, let him stick with it. Timmy has said a lot of things to make this story better than it really is. I’ll go along with whatever Tim wants to say, except the part about the horse being crippled and a piece of crap when he picked her up. That is absolutely not true. The horse weas drop-dead gorgeous.”

  Around this same time, the horse broker John Shaw got a telephone call from Hunt, alerting him to the possibility of a buyer for that filly they had exchanged a couple months earlier, the one slo
w enough to be timed with a sundial. The numbers were small, but that didn’t concern Shaw. Any return on the investment was acceptable at this point.

  “Don told me he had a guy at Finger Lakes who wanted to buy the horse,” Shaw recalled. “That guy was Snyder. I’d get twelve hundred dollars now, and twelve hundred when the horse won its first race. I guess Don was going to give me half, and he would take the other half. I didn’t care. He asked if I was happy with the deal and I said, ‘Sure, it’s fine. But trust me, there won’t ever be any more money, because this horse is never going to win a race.’”

  The deal would not close until Tim arrived in Ocala and got the opportunity to run his hands over the horse himself, and to look her dead in the eye (both the good one and the bad one); or so he said, anyway. In reality, he’d already come to a decision by the time he got behind the wheel of the Dodge pickup truck that he’d he borrowed from Tebbutt. (He’d also borrowed Tebbutt’s credit card, since he had no cash beyond that which was stuffed into his boot, and the truck would need gas, and both the driver and its cargo would need food.)

  “I knew Timmy was talking with Don about buying a horse,” Tebbutt said. “One day he walked into the barn and said, ‘I need to pick up my horse.’ I said, ‘Okay, take the truck and trailer. Spend the night down there. Relax. Take your time with it.’”

  Tebbutt laughed.

  “He left at two in the afternoon, got back by two in the morning. Twelve hours, round trip. Made it to work the next morning with a new horse. A big, new horse, kind of crooked, but pretty.”

  It was a whirlwind of a trip because Tim, impulsive by nature, saw no reason to extend the process beyond a single day. He liked the horse and wanted to get to work with her.

  “Took me five hours to drive up,” he said, recounting the itinerary. “When I got there, Don was waiting. Basically he said, ‘This is the horse. You want her, she’s yours. Just make it quick. I gotta get out of town.’ I had intentions of taking her regardless, but I never pulled the money out of my boot till I got a good look at her. She was seventeen hands high, just beautiful, and based on that alone I wanted her. I saw the spot on her eye, and she was a little off, structurally. I didn’t care. Shit, I’m not thinking then that I’ll ever take her to Saratoga. I’m thinking I’ll take her to Finger Lakes, where maybe she can win a race or two. Cheap track, cheap races. I don’t think she’s nothing special, just a big horse that’ll get me started. So I gave Don two thousand in cash, he gave me the papers, we shook hands, and off I went. Stopped at the Waffle House for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, then drove straight back to Delray.”