146 The Meadow The Training of Zebras Forest Arthur Ormes I take my voice to the high note and hold it. I lower the next line a notch, then another. Now I take my voice notch by notch to the highest note—“The Land of the Free”—and smoothly without a pause between words so the audience hardly realizes the change, I lower my voice just enough so that the lyrics remain connected in spite of the shift: “And the Home of the Brave.” The crowd of patrons in the grandstand remains frozen, staring in my direction. Then the spell dissolves and the crowd breaks into an uneven buzz similar to the buzz I remember hearing that time my mother’s boyfriend treated me to a night of inter-city golden gloves matches. I can hear the familiar comments dropping from their tongues and out their mouths as I walk past. “The kid needs an agent,” says an older jockey’s agent. “Why in God’s name is he singing here?” a girl says to her boyfriend as I head for the exit. An old man sits in the same high stool he has sat upon for as long as I can remember, his eyes fixed on the racing form, slightly crooked as if frozen in this position for the past hundred years. Which is exactly how long Hickory Downs has been around. Al Capone used to attend races here. That of course was long before Hickory Downs had become the rundown track it is today. The hotwalkers, grooms and exercise riders on the track call me, “Pajarito,” Little Bird in English. Sometimes they tease how I talk through my nose. Now and then they joke how my face resembles a fish. I don’t mind—not too much. I begin thinking about Mary’s Child, and how the freezing wind is blowing over his exposed ears and open eyes. He used
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