The Ghost Horse Page 5

  While Dale looked on, all hell was breaking loose inside the van—animals being torn loose from their chains and tossed against the walls, and crashing into one another. Some were killed instantly, their spines snapped by the impact. Others had their throats slit by the chains. Still others survived the initial crash, only to panic and trample each other.

  And in the middle of it all was Tim Snyder.

  “I never lost consciousness,” Tim said. “I didn’t even really get hurt. Don’t ask me how. When we got hit my lounge chair folded up and I was stuck inside. Then the horses started falling around me, crying and wailing and trying to get out. I ended up on the floor of the van, with a horse right on top of me, kind of half hanging by the chain around its neck. There was blood everywhere and the doors of the van were blown right off.”

  Dale Thirtyacre ran from his car to the back of the van. Along with the driver and several bystanders, they rushed into the stable area and began looking for Tim, pushing through the carnage and the stink.

  “I figured he was dead,” said Dale. “I mean … it was horrible. There was just no way he could have survived.”

  Except he did. The horse that had fallen on Tim had somehow not crushed him, and the animal’s body had served as a shield from the impact of the collision, and from the careening horses that followed. Tim was pulled from the wreckage, dazed and covered in gore, but without a scratch on him.

  “I think he was in shock,” Dale observed. “I was, too.”

  Cops and paramedics were soon on the scene, along with a veterinarian and a new van to transport the handful of surviving horses for the remainder of the trip. According to Snyder, the trainer of the fatally injured horses later tried to sue the van company in order to help recoup losses from the accident. He also tried to recruit the van’s passenger in his efforts.

  “I’m pretty sure he had borrowed money from the mob, and he was in big trouble,” Tim said. “He needed those horses to pay off his debts. In the end he didn’t get much from the van company, so he tried to get me to say that I was injured, so that he’d have a better lawsuit.”

  Tim thought about going along with the trainer, until one day he ran into a hard-looking man on the shedrow.

  “I heard your back’s bothering you,” the man said.

  Tim shrugged, not sure what to make of him. He knew the guy was not a regular on the backstretch. “Maybe a little.”

  The man smiled.

  “Yeah? Well, tomorrow it might hurt a lot more.”

  Tim said nothing in response, but he got the message. Loud and clear. He packed his bags and left Arlington Park that night.

  And never went back.

  * * *

  Dale’s 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner 383 took them from Chicago to Southern California, where the two boys picked up work for the trainer Richard Mulhall at Del Mar Racetrack. They were young and tireless, had good hands and an easy way with horses, could gallop just about anything, and were sufficiently connected in the backstretch world, so it wasn’t hard for them to find jobs.

  There wasn’t much not to like about Del Mar—with its seaside setting and cool ocean breezes, it remains even today widely regarded as one of the world’s most breathtaking tracks. Like Saratoga, there was a brevity to the summer meeting that infused the entire season with a sense of urgency. The top trainers and riders and owners descended on the place each summer, traveling down the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Anita to the outskirts of San Diego, for something that amounted to a hardworking vacation.

  Timmy and Dale burned the candle at both ends, rising at five each morning; sometimes rising wasn’t even necessary, for they’d never gone to sleep.

  “For a long time I hated alcohol, because of my dad,” Tim said. “I had seen what it did to people and wanted no part of it. I didn’t drink at all until I was close to twenty years old, and then I started hitting it pretty hard. I thought it was cool, and I liked the way it felt—except for the hangovers, of course. Must be in my blood, because I got into the habit pretty quickly. That turned out to be a mistake. I found after a while that when I drink, the shades go down. I black out, don’t remember a thing. That’s bad; it’s dangerous.”

  For a while, though, when he was young and healthy, the drinking caused only minor inconveniences and embarrassment. The “truth serum,” as his father-in-law would later call it, was a social lubricant that made it easy for him to talk with people, to gain their confidence and trust. Timmy could be temperamental and distant, perfectly understandable given his background and upbringing, but give him a couple drinks and he’d tell you his life story. And he’d listen to yours, which was even more important if you were seeking companionship from a young woman you’d just met.

  “Timmy generally always had women around him,” noted Cheryl Hall. “In fact, he had a string of nice, pretty girlfriends over the years. Some of them became my friends, and remain my friends even today. These weren’t one-night stands. These were smart, attractive women from good familes. And they usually had money; and ad people who own horses tend to have money. They met Tim through the horse racing industry. I’d say to him, ‘Timmy, how do you get these ladies?’ And he’d say, ‘Cheryl, women love horses. It’s a given.’ But I don’t mean to imply that he was a womanizer, or that he flitted from flower to flower. He didn’t. For as long as each relationship lasted, he would treat them well and with respect. That was his MO.”

  Timmy and Dale took regular trips across the border to party in Tijuana, where ten bucks would get you a night’s worth of drinking, a big meal, and maybe even a pretty girl on your arm. During one such visit, the timing chain on the Roadrunner snapped, leaving the boys stranded for nearly three weeks while they waited for a local repair shop to acquire parts and get the job done. They passed the time hanging out at the beach and the local racetrack, drinking tequila and beer, and baking in the sun. By the time the car was repaired, they were practically broke and had no job prospects, since the Del Mar meeting had come to a close. They drove back into California, meandering through the southern reaches of the Inland Empire, eventually landing near Temecula, which at the time was less developed and home to a number of horse farms. They worked as ranch hands for a while before hopping into the Plymouth and driving back across the country to Florida.

  Within a year, though, Tim had hit the road again. Alone.

  “Timmy kind of has a way of disappearing on you,” Dale Thirtyacre said. “We were like brothers, the best of friends. And then one day he was just … gone.”

  * * *

  It was not the first time that Tim had shown up unannounced at his sister’s door, and it would not be the last.

  He had tracked her to Encinitas, a tony suburb of San Diego not far from Del Mar. Funny, Tim thought. The whole time he’d been working at the track, his sister had been just a few miles away, and he hadn’t even known it. Back then, though, he wasn’t really interested in finding her; now he was. He couldn’t explain it, really.

  “I was just hungry to find her,” Tim said. “I started thinking about my family, trying to locate them, and Cheryl was the only one I could find. I didn’t even call ahead, just marched up to the front door, rang the bell, and waited for her to answer.”

  Cheryl was stunned when she saw her brother. She stood speechless, letting the pages of the mental calendar fall away as she hugged him.

  “I’m home,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  Cheryl had built a life of her own. Like Tim, she had no idea what had become of her parents, although she did keep in touch with her two other younger brothers. Cheryl was industrious and not prone to self-pity. With two kids, she couldn’t afford to indulge any wanderlust that might have been handed down from her parents (Tim had certainly inherited some of that). Instead she tried to provide a stable household for her family. In addition to her day job, she bought an ice cream truck and worked nights and weekends driving around the neighborhood, setting up shop near baseball fields and soccer pitches and p
laygrounds. She socked enough money to buy her own house, in the hope of giving her kids something she did not have while growing up: a sense of place; a home.

  For a while it became Tim’s home, as well.

  “My sister is a very generous person,” Tim said. “She used to give away almost as much ice cream as she sold. She didn’t expect to have little brother move in, but she didn’t complain. We shared expenses and I helped out as best I could.”

  Tim worked mostly at private training centers, galloping horses and breaking yearlings, which was an art unto itself.

  “Nothing quite like catching them from scratch, when they haven’t been handled at all,” Tim said. “And they do it a lot different out there in the West. The horses are pretty wild; you gotta be careful. You have to know what you’re doing, show them the right amount of respect, but also let them know you’re in control. I’d tack them, drive them, jib rope them, get all the bucks out of them in the bullpen, in deep sand. Sometimes I’d try to overpower them, sometimes I’d try to befriend them. They’re all different. Some will nuzzle right up to you; others will stomp around and try to kick the shit out of you.”

  Tim would know, having suffered more injuries over the years than he can recount: broken legs, nose, pelvis, separated shoulder, just to name a few.

  “It’s part of the game,” he said. “You work with horses for a living, you’re going to get busted up every once in a while.”

  * * *

  He was living in Ocala, Florida, in the fall of 1977, breaking yearlings for a handful of private clients, when he found out that his mother had died. The news came one afternoon, shortly after Tim, using a heavy dose of tough love, had finished breaking a colt that had seemed all but unbreakable. He was standing with the horse, stroking its forehead, when the owner’s son approached the stable.

  “Hey, Tim,” he said. “Mom wants to see you up at the house.”

  Tim nodded, tried to conceal his anxiety.

  Here we go … I’m gonna lose my job over this damn horse.

  They walked in silence. Inside the house, the woman greeted Tim warmly. She invited him to sit down, opened up a bottle of scotch, and poured them each a drink. By this point Tim realized that the meeting had nothing to do with the way he had handled or mishandled any of the woman’s horses.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  Tim drained his glass. He didn’t often drink scotch, not the good kind, anyway, and he wasn’t about to let it go to waste, regardless of the circumstances.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  The woman nodded.

  “You mother has passed away.”

  Tim said nothing, just sat there silently fumbling with his empty glass. Whatever he was supposed to feel—grief, anger, sadness—wasn’t there.

  “Do you understand, Tim?” the woman asked.

  He nodded. “Where did it happen?”

  “Houston,” the woman said. “The funeral is tomorrow. I bought you a plane ticket.”

  Tim thanked the woman, returned to his apartment, and packed some clothes for the trip.

  In Houston Tim was reunited with his siblings, as well as the stepfather he hadn’t seen since the day he’d busted a milk bottle over the man’s head some seven years earlier.

  “They all treated me like I was back from the dead,” Tim remembered. “At first I was kind of disappointed they hadn’t tried to contact me when they found out Mom was sick, but I was invisible, really, and it turned out my mom didn’t want any of us to see her that way. She and my stepfather had been living pretty well, too, until her health went bad. She had opened up a restaurant and bar in Corpus Christi, owned a couple liquor stores and two or three Laundromats. Even bought a church one time. My mom could touch anything and it would turn to gold; she could step in shit and have it turn to gold. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until she died, and the FBI tracked me down in Florida.”

  He wasn’t the only one who had lost touch with Virginia Snyder. In fact, she had become a ghost to her entire family.

  “I kept the same number for four years, hoping she would call,” said Cheryl Hall. “But she never did. She was sick in the hospital for more than a year and didn’t call. She didn’t want to see us or speak to us, and supposedly told everyone around her, ‘Don’t call my family until I’m gone.’

  “But it wasn’t that she didn’t love us. It’s just that through the years, she’d established a condition of … leaving things … and never looking back. Whether it was a houseful of furniture or friends and relatives. Whatever. I remember she hocked her earrings once. She had a beautiful diamond ring; hocked that, too. I asked her about them once, and she just sort of laughed and waved her hand. ‘Oh, I was glad to see them go.’ That was the life she and my father led: feast or famine. Steak one day, canned soup the next. That’s the racetrack life. You don’t get too attached to things.”

  Tim never saw his stepfather again. They were cordial at the funeral, and afterward went their separate ways. According to Tim and Cheryl, he sold off their mother’s various business interests and moved to Puerto Rico.

  “He was kind of a cold-hearted bastard,” Tim said matter-of-factly. “I never cared for him at all, never trusted him. He was a bad guy, far as I’m concerned. Only out for himself. I still don’t know what my mother saw in him.”

  What she saw, Cheryl believes, was an escape from the racetrack life. Ironically, though, she swapped one insecure existence for another, and one unreliable partner for another.

  “In the end, he was just as abusive and drunk as my father was,” Cheryl observed. “And my mother died an alcoholic. I don’t think she drank much at all until she was in her twenties, but then I guess over time she just felt like, If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. In many ways she was a wonderful woman, but that’s the truth of the situation.”

  * * *

  Horse sense Tim inherited from his father; the running and leaving, the inability to stay in one place for any length of time, or to commit fully to a job or a person or a lifestyle? That trait could be found on both sides of the family tree.

  Tim bounced all over the continent in the 1980s—from California to Florida, from New England to Canada, before finally settling in Central New York, where he found consistent backstretch work for the trainer Bill Strange. It was Strange who encouraged Tim to take the test required to become a licensed trainer himself, which he did in 1986.

  By the end of the decade he had fathered two children. The first, a daughter named Sierra, was born in California in 1980. Tim had split with the girl’s mother before she was born, and insists he did not even know at the time that the woman was pregnant. Sierra’s family lived not far from Cheryl, and through his sister Tim was able to maintain a tenuous long-distance relationship with Sierra. They met for the first time when the little girl was two years old, when Tim went to California for a visit.

  “Finding out I had a daughter blew me away,” he said. “My sister is the one who actually has kept us together. She developed a relationship with Sierra’s family, and they see each other practically every week. It’s been a little challenging. There was another guy involved; he ended up raising my daughter, and I don’t think he really ever wanted me involved. I can’t blame him, and I’ve got no problem with him. He and Sierra’s mom have done a beautiful job with her. She’s a great girl.”

  From a different relationship, Tim also has a son several years younger than Sierra.

  “We don’t have any contact,” he said matter-of-factly. “His mother was a gold digger, been married five or six times. Last I heard she was married to a multimillionaire.”

  Tim shrugged.

  “I’m not impressed by money. I’ve been around some people with a lot of it. I trained horses for them, I worked for them. I’ve had bosses who’ve lied and cheated. I’ve worked for people who’ve embezzled money and gone to jail. There’s a lot of bad actors in horse racing, and I’ve seen all types. I’m not perfect
, but I try to keep myself on a fairly straight line, because when you step over that line, you can get in big trouble. I ain’t saying I never stole anything, but I never stole to buy drugs or to line my pocket. I did steal to put food in my belly. I admit that. I stole to survive.”

  An elliptical, energetic talker and storyteller, Tim paused momentarily before circling back.

  “My son? I heard he’s okay. I hope so.”

  Chapter Four

  OCALA, FLORIDA

  APRIL 11, 2007

  The horse that dropped that morning was one of scores foaled in 2007 at Ocala Stud, a venerable facility with a half-century record of breeding quality thoroughbred racehorses. With a training track, starting gate and more than five hundred acres of land spread out over three different farms, Ocala Stud is one of the largest and most comprehensive breeding and training operations in the United States. The farm has produced more than one hundred stakes winners, the majority of whom were also sired by Ocala stallions. In short, it is a self-contained and self-sufficient business.

  There is an established and traditional blueprint for bringing racehorses from the farm to the racetrack, and Ocala Stud has long utilized a variation on this theme. Mares are bred to stallions, and the resulting offspring are put into training roughly halfway through their yearling year (at approximately one and a half years of age). Those that adequately handle the training are sold as two-year-olds, either through private transactions or at the Ocala Spring Sales. Of the approximately seventy horses foaled at Ocala in 2007, all but a few would successfully navigate this course. Whether they would actually make it to the starting line of a race was another matter altogether, for horse racing is among the most unpredictable of sports, and thoroughbreds among the most temperamental and fragile of athletes. At Ocala Stud, though, the babies typically grow up to be racehorses, or at least racehorses-in-training.