We all nodded our okays. “I see that on TV sometimes,” Rose said. Not surprising, she’d been the perfect hostess, even trying her version of Texas cuisine. “This is called ranch chicken,” she said, placing the main course between the guacamole and the jalapeño cornbread.
Jake breathed in the aroma and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “What you don’t see on TV is what happens before the competition. Owners, or sometimes stable boys, ride the horse around a warm-up arena, with one or two fences. During warm-up there are two people, one on each end of the jump. Maybe they’re coaches, maybe grooms, with a final chance to tell you ‘get your shoulders back,’ or something, you know.” Jake pointed to the salt and pepper ends of the steak knife. “What they do is, when the horse is just about over the jump, they raise the top pole ever so slightly, so it scrapes the horse’s ankle.”
“Ouch,” Rose said, taking her seat and starting the serving bowls in a counterclockwise direction.
“Ouch, exactly. Because during the next few jumps—which would be in the competition—the horse will go higher over the pole so as not to get hurt again.” Jake sat back, his story finished.
We sat in silence, except for a hmm, from Rose.
“I’ll bite,” Frank said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It’s illegal,” MC said. “Tell them why, Jake. I know it’s called poling, but I’m not sure I get it myself, why it’s illegal.”
“Essentially, you’ve enhanced the horse’s performance. You’re not supposed to do anything to affect the performance, you know, except practice, practice, practice. Same with horse racing, dog racing. You can’t even give the animal bute.”
Crumbs of jalapeño cornbread caught in my throat, and I coughed embarrassingly loud and long. I glanced at MC to see if she’d noticed it—the word Alex Simpson had used in his email. She seemed to give a start, and I guessed she had, but thanks to her habit of taking nanoparticle-size bites of food, she did not end up choking.
“What’s bute?” MC asked Jake, casually, long before I physically could have. She looked at him intently. Foolishly, I wished I were sitting next to her so we could pass notes.
“Phenylbutazone, an oral painkiller-slash-antiinflammatory, which is perfectly okay to give a horse outside of competition, for normal aches and pains.”
I was amazed there were people who could tell if a horse had sciatica or a crick in its knee. How did the horse signify it had a headache when it couldn’t put a hoof up to its forehead? Or maybe it could, if it was lying down?
My own headache was developing as I fought the urge to leave the table and go to MC’s apartment and check her email from Alex Simpson again. I tried to recall the sentence or phrase he’d written about bute, and at the same time pay attention to Jake in case there was more to learn.
“Bute is one of the best meds you can give to improve a horse’s ability to perform. It’s entirely against the rules for competition, however, as governed by USA Equestrian and by the FEI in the international arena. FEI is the Federation Equestre Internationale,” he said, with a French flair.
“Jake’s been to Olympic equestrian shows all over the world,” MC said. Her tone was informational and automatic and I could tell by her concentrated frown that she was also trying to remember the exact words of her email.
“How do you give a horse a pill?” Frank asked. The anatomist, interested in bodies, human or animal, dead or alive.
Jake laughed, thinking city folk, I supposed. “You crush the tablets and mix them into grain, or you make a paste with molasses or honey and you put it on the horse’s tongue.”
“Does it take a veterinarian to give the medicine?” I asked Jake. I thought I’d zeroed in on Dr. Schofield’s part in this … this what? Just because his name showed up as a grant consultant didn’t make him part of anything but normal, legal research.
Jake shook his head. “No, no, the vet distributes it, but anyone can give it to the horse.” Not anyone. I cringed at the thought of my fingers being in a horse’s mouth.
“There must be a way to test whether the horse has been given something illegal, the way they do with athletes,” Frank said. I wondered if Frank knew as much about horse anatomy as he did about humans. Were horses embalmed? And where would you bury a dead horse? These were questions that also came to my mind.
Jake nodded. “Sure, it would come out in a urine test, but those are random. So either you’d take a chance that your horse wouldn’t be singled out, or there’s always …” Jake rubbed his thumb and fingers together in the international gesture for money. “ … paying off the testers.”