Sid Gustafson
Novelist and Veterinarian

Age

A short story first published in Inkwell Magazine, and later republished in Big Sky Journal as Time, a story with many lives...


As he aged I would pick him up and drive him around the countryside to wherever he wished. Backroads, backwaters of the Montana we once traveled together. He would make me stop if we saw action along the road, say we happened upon someone digging postholes or moving cattle horseback. And of course we always pulled over if someone looked like they needed help. The stop often became long and talkative, and frequently we ended up at the person’s home on what was left of the 21st century prairie—eating, drinking coffee, exploring the past, lost lives and almost-lost memories, rural Montana memories, exploring our own lives, really, the leftovers at least. This daily travel became his interest, such goings on beyond the pale of an electronic world. His adventures quickly became mine.
And he was my father.

I, having failed the world I set out to conquer, became his caretaker at the turn of the century. My life had broken down and the family—my sister mostly—appointed me his caretaker while she took over my maligned financial and legal affairs. She freed me to take care of him, covering my debts, cleaning up the mess I’d made of my life, a life I’d become quite tired of, a life too bleary to talk about here.
It is the eldest daughter who does such things, takes care of the aging parent, the strayed brother—in Montana it is anyway. I was more than happy to oblige her request to be his keeper. In my youth my father and I had seldom seen eye to eye. I thought being his caretaker might be a good and even necessary opportunity to excavate the experiences of the man who produced me. Maybe it would help me merge with the world with which I’d become such a stranger.
So we drove the country of my childhood, the countryside of his prime. We drove a long Caddy, one of those boats with fins, an ancient Coupe deVille that often carried too low for the roads of our ventures. I don’t remember its year, but the radio had a ‘Wonder Bar’ that automatically found Canadian AM stations that played real music. I had to maintain a good supply of chewing gum in the jockey box to repair gas tank leaks caused by the unforgiven roads we preferred. Fresh-chewed Juicy Fruit worked best.
In his day Dad was a veterinarian, the only veterinarian around. We’d traveled this landscape together many years before and both knew it well, he of course better than I. And in these new travels we were able to—for once, at last—think together. I would see something, a broke down shed or barn, and he, he would reminisce about the building; how a heifer had jumped through its window. A window to small to seem possible for her to escape through. A window she indeed somehow scrambled through after she had arisen from a caesarian surgery he’d performed. I, silent witness to this all back then as his meticulous and underappreciated assistant, remained silent once again as he recapitulated it all.
I remember how the farmer had no horse to go get the heifer, and how my father (and I) lured the cow back into the barnyard with her calf, preying on the maternal instincts we knew would soon overcome her fear, her fear of surgery, a normal fear for a young cow. Now only the barn remains, its window still small and impossible. The house where we were served hot apple pie, homemade cheese, and cocoa afterwards is flattened. A tilted stovepipe remains. With the right ears you can hear it humming better times in the wind, its music a pleasant remnant of that meal; farmer gone, livestock gone, everyone gone but the wind that sweeps time through its world… . On we’d go, coming upon another memory, another flash of recollected landscape. The wind urged us on. Even as the land wears out and its people get old and die, the wind knows no rest.
I liked driving my father thus, mainly because he now allowed me to dream freely. Recent others have not been so kind. He never chastised me for my thoughts or dreams, and I still clung to a hope that someday I might begin my life over. A hope he never disputed or criticized. This was a different situation than when I was his child, when he in his all-knowing stance that comes upon fathers of teenage children, told me repeatedly what would be best for me, for my life. But he was over that now and nearly over his own life, didn’t tell me anymore what he thought or what he knew to be best for me. He gave that up. Finally. And it pleased me immensely. Every mile a different dream.
Of course back then I never followed his advice. I never became the banker he suggested I become, nor the cattle buyer. No, against his advice I became a musician. Jazz. I still think my failure was at least a noble failure, somehow better than my father’s unrewarded success. Yes, music was perhaps a mistake, and in a way it was a huge mistake, but after all, it eventually landed me here, where I’m sure I presently belong, driving him over the stouthearted life I somehow tried to create for myself but never could manage, no more blowing saxophone smoke. No, time took care of that life, time without money.
We did a different peregrination routine most every day. My sister had made arrangements for purchasing gas and the only rule was that neither of us drink alcohol or take drugs, pastimes at which we had both become quite accomplished. One day we drove over a rise, one of many rises. In the middle of a bleak landscape, a place where shortgrass prairie had somehow missed the plow, an old cowboy fixed fence. He led a horse by the rein tucked in his back pocket. The horse grazed, and when cowboy moved down the line, faithfully followed. Each time the cowboy stopped to mend the fence the horse foraged the last of the summer dried grass. The man seemed surprised we stopped. He later remarked it didn’t happen often. What happened is one of those stories I must tell you:
“Hello,” the cowboy says.
“Lo,” my father responds as he struggles out of the deep leather seat, grabbing the top of the door to tug himself up and into the fresh air. He manages his left elbow to the roof and levers himself fully upright, wavering a bit before catching his breath and moving away from our automobile. I shut down her engine. A welcome gust delivers us both from of the car, a breezy world. The horse pricks his ears, he too, amazed we stopped.
“Need any help?” Dad asks.
“Help?” the last rancher in the county answers, no cattle in sight. He looks to me as if I might be in charge of my decrepit father’s words, as if my aging dad couldn’t help if he tried.
“He wants to talk, that’s all,” I offer, throwing an arm in the air, as if to send my father his way. My dad hobbles across the barrow pit, a precarious effort in the wind.
Ol’ dad did pretty good physically until he hit 80 and the physical wasting began. Each month he gets thinner and drier, I witness to the steady demise. Despite the progression of this frailty, he uses the wind to balance rather than let it hinder, a balance a lifetime spent in this wind bestows. I wander to the other side of the road and do some stretching exercises while my father does his old-timey thing with the cowboy. It used to embarrass me, his forthrightness with strangers, but at this age I welcome his practice of conviviality. It keeps his mind sharp, helps anyway. Others his age, old cronies of his stranded by the empty prairie of their ancestors, rot in their television Barca-loungers, ensconced in the smell of old age, piss and sour milk. Forays into the wind, however ill-conceived, keep my father from smelling that way. And his thinking, his thinking is clearer than theirs. This roadwork keeps it so.
The Sweetgrass Hills are to the north, the near north. Did I tell you the wind here rinses the mountains as well as life? We are somewhere north of Galata, MT, a squalid ghost town along the HiLine. Most of the country is farmed. No one, hardly anyone, unlike the good ol’ days of the 20th century, keeps cows anymore. The old cowhand my father approaches seems an exception, despite no cows in sight. If he doesn’t really have cattle—if he isn’t really a cowboy with cows—at least he’s still out pretending, and I can relate to that. We seldom stop to visit farmers. We tried, but they did not cotton to my old man disparaging the narrowness of their grain growing. Dad never liked monocultures. A veterinarian wouldn’t, you know. A wheatfield wiped out everything. He witnessed a lot of diversity plowed under, a lot of cows sent down the road to turn Mother Earth insideout and end it all.
I gaze through the wind to the Hills, sacred Hills to the Indians, today apparent just how sacred, the only wildness remaining. The wind somehow magnifies them. They are green and blue and silver. Their diversity floats upon a magical mirage of waviness, color rising above the brownish farmland, exalted jewels of wilderness. Three huge hills—mountains by any standards other than Montana’s. Cattle and elk and deer and swift foxes abound, unlike the wasteland about us, wasteland but for the unfarmable coulee the make-believe cowboy fences off from the rest of the world.
A wire is down, broken. Dad wobbles along the fenceline to gather the broken end from the dirt. The cowboy retrieves the other end and they lean toward each other trying to bridge the gap the broken wire has left. They do not talk, strenuously attending the mending task at hand. My father amazes me. He deliberately wraps a piece of splicing wire to his end while the cowboy retrieves the fence stretcher from his horse. Cowboy hooks the stretcher to his end, my dad has added wire to his. The cowboy opens the clamp, my father drops the extension in and the ratcheting begins. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Two ends come together. The wire slowly lifts its length out of the grass and dirt. When taut enough to hold cattle, my dad weaves a splice and the cowboy pops the stretcher off. A few staples pounded into the weakened fencepost wood. A mended fence.
The rancher sights down the fenceline. He wiggles an aging post. The rusted wire creaks and moans. Their splice holds true.
I look to the sun balancing in the southern sky, not quite to the top of the day. “What time is it?” I ask. The cowboy looks at me, expressionless. “The time, you know,” I gesture to my wrist and then to the sun.
“Time? I don’t believe in time,” he says.
My dad chuckles and starts walking down the barrow pit along the fence. The cowboy mounts and rides on the inside of the fence. I hop in the deVille and drag slowly down the road, get ahead a ways to stop and wait and look and dream about starting another life when Dad doesn’t need me anymore. Sun chafes the sky. I monitor the two fencers as they approach, marionettes in the rearview mirror. I watch them talk and gesture, my hobbling dad afoot, the cowboy atop his horse, pointing to the sky, to the earth, nodding in a communal knowing of the land, how it was. They catch up. I check on my father. Is he winded? No, not terminally anyway. We repeat this to and fro process. Occasionally they stop and mend the fence, but it seems after awhile they just walk and talk, the fence good enough. Secure my father is in good shape, and in good hands, I drive way ahead. Next time I look back dad is riding the horse! Did I tell you he’s also a cowboy? Yeah, quite a cowboy in his time, quite a horsemen all around.
The next spurt I come upon a missile silo cordoned off in a wheat field that borders the last shortgrass prairie. It is surrounded by a ten-foot-high cyclone fence festooned with coils of concertina wire. I step out to inspect the eyesore. Yellow and red warning signs poke up everywhere. Serious talk. These missiles went in when I was little, during the moo-cow heydays. Nuclear warheads. As far as I know, one still points over the world from here. We meet at the missile fence.
“What do you think will happen if we were to touch the wires?” the rancher asks in abeyance of all the nasty warnings. He almost seems riled up, as if this is a new development, this missile silo; but it is not. He speaks to neither me nor my father, but to the wind, his most constant companion. The wind answers with a little dust devil. We contemplate the trespassing signs. Government Property it says. Keep Out Under penalty of Law. Stay Away! DANGER.
“It used to be my land,” Ike says. My dad introduced me earlier to him as Ike, a patriotic name I thought.
“Nice fence,” I say as I look up to the gyration of razor blades. The two look at me like I’m a child. My father struggles down from the horse. He limps to the nuclear fence and begins clipping the wires with his fencing tool. It takes all of his strength and he is only able to clip a few strands.
“Enough,” I say. Being the well-behaved obedient father he is, as I once was as his son, he stops.
Stranded with nothing more to do, feeling foolish, Ike invites us to his house. He unsaddles and turns his horse loose in the field where they just fixed the fence. I throw his saddle in our spacious dust-riddled trunk and we detour around the hydrogen bomb launch site to the yonder ranch house where Ike boils some cowboy coffee. About the time we start sipping an Air Force surveillance van pulls in the yard with its gumball flashing. A Military Policeman enters unannounced and asks, “Who cut the hole in the missile fence?”
No one speaks but the wind, which howls. The officer storms out and brings back two baby-faced airmen. They handcuff us, all three. Dad sneaks me a smile, a leer with twinkle, an eye I’d not noticed sparkle recently. They lead us outside and put us in their vehicle and drive us to Great Falls. A nice trip after I convinced them, because of their age, to let Ike and Dad be handcuffed with their hands in front (and, of course, myself as well as long as they had the keys out). The trouble gets a little taller when they strip search us and put us in jail at Malmstrom Air Force Base. I finagle a phone call to my sister who lives in town. She’s a lawyer.
She springs us after a few hours. By the time we are released it’s dark outside.
“Were you drinking?” she asks.
“No,” I say. My father nods that I am honest, his eyes twinkling like quasars.
Sis drives us back across midnight Montana to our car parked at Ike’s ranch and drops us off in the middle of nowhere where we belong. We stand outside and watch her taillights fade into the nothingness of the Big Open. We look up. My dad takes us through the stars. Deneb, Vega, and Altair highlight the Milky Way.
“Pathway of souls,” he says, waving his frail arm across the universe.
We stay overnight.
The wind blows.
Ike lives alone, all hat and no cattle.
The next morning we drive south after the sun rises.

Following are stories told in a variety of media, some by the novelist Sid, songs by little brother Wylie, other storytelling by their artistic influences

Hard Stories are Hard to Write





Whistle


I’m back there often—those days, those nights. We met during that lonely time of year when the light began to tighten up, everything tight, everybody half-tired of summer. She tended a half-lit bar, a bar full of half-lit regulars, she the barmaid. ‘I’m not a barmaid,’ she insisted, ‘I’m the beverage manager.’ Well okay, whatever, I stayed on and drank anyway, knowing I shouldn’t, knowing it would take me far away, make me all alone. Again.
I watched her. She roved behind the bar handcrafting drinks tonguing a thin whistle; a gauche, imperceptible melody. When I finally caught on to the music—it took some time—her mistral strain had worked its spell, I couldn’t stop. She treasured disguising her subtle trillings, I know she did, ventriloquist she, lips undetectably pursed, lips telling things they couldn’t say. I figured her method by watching the mouth, catching an occasional flash behind her teeth. She impelled the siren with her tongue, a tongue wrapping and bending artful exhalations into the smoky air. Her subtle song numbed me into a surreal mood of detention; vexing, inscrutable. Before I could do anything about it, my internal reality became irretrievable. No one else seemed to hear her music, making me wonder if it ever was really there. Her song didn’t stop others from spilling out their life, not like it did me. Widowed three years by then, I hadn’t much of a life to spill. Life had ceased to exist for me. Pour me another drink, whistler, pour me another, whistle my drear away, whistle it all away.
So there I sat, an assembly of paper tigers gloating about, lust in their eyes, hitches in their hearts, hitches not unlike mine or anyone else’s; a paper tiger myself, I suppose. I listened intently as they blustered their lives to her, loves gone wrong, money gone wrong, their worlds all wronged. Softer souls mumbled behind, the back-bar crowd, college students unfamiliar with midlife rigor, the recently weaned, weaned and in need of a mother to nurture their adolescent senselessness, a need my whistler readily fulfilled, she a great fulfiller.
By sundown on those late summer nights oxygen ran low for me. I left the spillage to walk under the fragrance of early blooming stars. I’d stopped shooting drugs by then, and was down to alcohol, three—maybe four—of her well-tended mixes a night. I unconsciously memorized her schedule. Her four nights each week became mine. And then the summer ended, unresolved as any summer.
“Tanqueray martini?” she chirped before I’d made it through her door some thirty dry-drunk days later. She’d iced the gin by the time I sat down, giving me no chance to order anything less, spruce she knew my last drink. She set me up, set me up quickly, oh yes, very quickly, anxious to be of service, happy to harvest the crumple of bills she knew I’d leave, happy I’d returned. She loved cash, untaxable cash, her hips soft with tips, larceny in her eye as she fingered bills from the bar to her pants, larceny she needed. There I was, back for more, back again, her song in my heart, her drink in my hand. The same young men laughed at the deep end of the bar, me wanting their younger days, not wanting to know all I knew, not wanting to feel all I felt, waiting for her martini to part me from my life.
She talked as usual, no coaxing needed on my part. From the first night I drank with her she talked. I was back for more. I’d hit the wall with existence. I was on a search, an escape, forbidden drinking the only form of exploration I could muster, or so I told myself as I waited for her gin to mud my mind. I never brought myself to tell her about the lost wife. She hadn’t asked.
“North Dakota,” she replied, when I asked where she was from. “And you?”
“North Montana,” I said. “HiLine.”
“I knew it,” she said, as if the HiLine was where I should be from—the HiLine, that dapple of gloom that ribbons the upper reach of Montana, named for the Great Northern railroad, the HiLine of America, a HiLine traversing the great expanse of honyocker nothingness, my origins, places and towns where people aren’t born anymore, the places of my people. Then she began moving her olive and cherry chores to my end of the bar each night after I arrived. I figured she preferred my fellowship to the others. She worked around my drinking, wanting to hear what I had to say, which wasn’t much. Maybe that’s what she wanted, to hear nothing from nobody, nothing from me, my virtual silence. I sat and said nothing and watched her façade of smiles repel the others, saving herself for me, my silence hers.
“I knew it,” she said.
“Knew what?”
“Knew you were HiLine.”
“And them?” I asked, nodding back at the others.
“No. None,” she said. “You’re the only one.”
“But this is Montana.”
“Not here it isn’t.”
Which in a way was true, it really wasn’t Montana. It was Bozeman, a Bozeman lounge, a lounge trying for Montana but not quite there, not quite anywhere—no dead elk on the walls, no Oly in cans, no juke box. Microbrew on tap, single malt scotch—a gin mill, an everywhere gin mill, a nowhere gin mill—her gin mill. Mine.
As chilled nights drew leaves off the trees she drew me into her childhood, a place everyone goes when things aren’t right in later life, me listening along as ever, internalizing her plight, unwilling to share mine, too pained to share—a muteness fine for her, fine for the time being. I fell into a wino role-reversal I suppose; barmaid she spilling to gin-soaked me, except I didn’t give advice, couldn’t. Each night after I left the others spilled to her, I know they did, spilled profusely. And she, she tended them all.
Somewhere in the hypotenuse of her whistle and the story of her childhood and my inebriated strolls under autumn stars, I fell. I fell for her. I wanted to be her friend, well you know, perhaps more than her friend, the first inkling of desire I had felt since I lost my wife, lost her to cancer, a wicked unGodly death, a long death, a long thin dead death that tethered me to graveyard oblivion.
One night she told me she was married, unhappily married.
Despite that I kept coming back, the gin working, she building life back into me a story at a time, stories told, stories retold. I never found the words to story her, but she loved me anyway, such a good listener me. As nights lengthened, I stayed longer, drank more, more than I should, much more, knowing full well liquor would, sooner or later, bring trouble.
Sooner.
The more I drank the more she shared the desolate childhood farm life with deranged parents. Several gins into one night she shared a disturbing childhood misfortune—a long walk under blurry stars that night. Then she shared her marriage troubles, somehow connected? She sensed, or maybe wished, for a commonality with my untold upbringing. She nurtured me, but I couldn’t nurture her. I—along with every other disoriented bozo in town—made her bar my drowning hole. Drinking came nightly, as I was warned it would during my last stint in rehab, and then daily. Her nights off—together, drinking together, me on course for another trip to the spin-dry. I’d quit for spells, but each attempt faded my hope for a clean existence. Her whistle pulled me, pulled me back, back into a sea in which we began swimming together. She underwrote my drinking. I underwrote her telling. A mind-altered passion arose, time and darkness—gin-twisted couplings. Another trip to rehab. Yet another
I never interpreted her song until later, but by then we were married, hitched after she rid herself of her husband and I’d rid myself of her alcohol. What happened on our attempt at a honeymoon wasn’t her fault anymore than mine. I know better now, having had nothing but time to think it over—my journey into the illusion of safety in love, in marriage. I don’t know how else we could have brought it down. She’d pledged to get even with her father, for what he did to her when she was a child, for molesting her.
But we’re apart now. I imagine her whistle a little cleaner, a little clearer. Destiny is what goes down now. Reality. I understand things better, I think I do. The reality changes each time I rehearse it, memory working protective revisions. I relive the crime everyday, a crime filtered by love. I don’t know how else the trouble could have been resolved, the memory. She’d pledged to make things right with her father, for what whatever happened when she was a child, him doing her, doing again and again. She wasn’t vindictive or angry, didn’t seem to be, just wanted to go face the man, this father.
The day after we married we drove across Montana’s Big Open to find him, to fulfill her mission. We headed toward North Dakota, to the childhood home of her raising. When we left she’d asked if I had a gun. I did, a dust-stuck .38 lodged in the seat crease of my ‘65 GTO, the ‘goat’ with the retrograde back window. I showed her the spot, the gun tight and hidden, barely visible.
“Where’d you get it?” she asked, looking kind of empty.
“At the gettin’ place,” I said.
“The gettin’ place?”
“Yeah, you know, the gettin’ place.”
She didn’t know.
That night I dreamt bad dreams, dreams of a father I didn’t know, her suffering under him, his breath.
We made it to Ingomar Montana and spent last light drinking away childhood at the Jersey Lilly Bar, drinking one last time together (my last relapse), drinking to rectify the past, rectifying a molested past to reopen a future, to get reborn.
Some say all love stories are the same, but our story is not the same, was not the same, no stretch of sameness here.
We arrived at the father’s ranch, a big spread of nothingness in the middle of nothing, forever nothingness, nothingness save the roadside weeds that festooned our odyssey—roadside weeds scratching at the wind, wind the only remains in a farmland of childhood. Her brother ran the outfit, her Catholic brother, her Pope John Catholic brother—thirteen kids and a pregnant wife, a pregnancy difficult to discern from obesity, a smiling couple surrounded by farming and kids and nothingness. And within the nothingness: sheep. Silhouettes pasturing across the land in uneasy unison, a flow of sheep bleating, bleating to us, bleating sheep looked over by donkeys, donkeys to protect them from the coyotes that scoured the vast land of nothing, antelope nothing. Sheep bleating. Donkeys braying. Distant-waiting ‘yotes yipping.
Children surrounded me, watching and smiling, home-schooled smiles. Childhood surrounded her. Her father watched from the old house, the porched-white house. Alone he watched, framed in a picture window he watched, a window without drapes or shades.
The first day didn’t go off too bad. Whistle talked to her father, and he yelled back, but not the words she needed to hear. He talked as if childhoods didn’t exist once daughters grew up. But childhoods live inside people, they live forever, yes they do. I knew her inside by then, knew her wronged childhood all too well. I went along with the situation best I could, unaware of the rage building within me, a rage that must have begun when I first caught ear of her whistle. Their paths tripped under a spilt milk sky. I’d leave to roam with the sheep, especially when I thought she and he needed time alone, time over her father.
The sheep and sky incited memories of my abbreviated sheepherding days, days of long ago, HiLine childhood days, days without donkeys to protect sheep from predators, days without gin. Why did he have to ruin her? Ruin her forever? Ruin us?
This went on for a week, me and the sheep, she and Dad. Each day she tried to confront him, confrontation she needed. The day she did confront him he hit her, bloodied her nose, fatted her lip. I’m sorry this is not a happy story. I’m sorry it’s not fiction.
Next day Pope John found his dead father. By then we were gone, physically gone, metaphysically goner.
The crime lab determined the cause of death; a bullet from a .38 special, a bullet buried in Father’s brain. At the end of this story, my story now—a much-too-long story—I’m doing time, accessory to first degree manslaughter. My wife, the daughter, is doing time as well, murder-three reduced to manslaughter. At the trial Pope John testified for the DA that Sister shot Father. On cross-examination he wouldn’t fess up to what he knew happened long ago. Whistle told all, despite not wanting family ugliness in the open any more than Pope John. Looking me in the eye she admitted pulling the trigger that ended her father’s misery, his life. They never found any .38 special. She tossed it in a slough as I flew the retrograde ‘goat’ through the Black Hills of South Dakota that night, sacred Indian hills, the source of all life.
Each day her whistle resonates around my cell. Somewhere she tongues her song. I don’t know what song anymore, can’t even imagine, like I never really heard a song, perhaps a different tune, by now a different song.
Today they let us start writing letters to one another, letters read by someone in between. We can’t say much, we plan the honeymoon we want to redo, the honeymoon we’ll take the day we’re both free, perhaps a few more years, perhaps ten. Funny they never figured it was me who pulled the trigger. A good thing or I’d be looking at life, if not death. It took me a while to figure Whistle knew what she was doing all along.
I think of that honeymoon. I think of those dulcet late-summer days, those papier-mâché nights. I hope honeymoons matter.
I hope she’s happy now.

June 4, 2008, New York Times
Drugs and Racehorses
By SID GUSTAFSON
Phenylbutazone seemed a miracle drug when the stuff began entering the bloodstreams of racehorses in the 1960s. I was collecting the post-race urine that concentrated the metabolites of that drug during the ’60s, and as a teenager I became acutely aware of drugs and racehorses.

What a soothing anti-inflammatory effect bute brought to racehorses in those simpler days when its use first became widespread. The alleviation of certain lamenesses was dramatic. “Really sweet stuff,” I remember Wright Haggerty’s Kentucky groom telling me on the Shelby, Montana, backside in 1965 as he pestelled up tiny white 100-milligram dog pills he had received from my father, the attending and regulatory veterinarian (thus my job as urine catcher). The original medical plan, being that most racing jurisdictions back then prohibited the use of any and all drugs, was to use bute for training. The groom mixed the white powder into a mash, and fed his eager and waiting racehorse, who trained like Seabiscuit the next morning.

Bute cools hot joints and quiets inflamed tendons to desirable medical effect, allowing horses to return to training and racing sooner than otherwise, allowing them to maintain their conditioning. Tight, cool legs and hooves are necessary to continue conditioning the racehorse. If there is excess fluid in a joint, or swelling within a hoof, conditioning is generally counterproductive as further inflammation and damage follow exercise.

Bute was first used to facilitate continued training by quieting certain injuries or inflammations, and was especially effective when used conscientiously and conservatively. In a certain sense and in compassionate, knowing hands the drug provided humane relief to the rigors of racehorse life. The question quickly became: Could bute enhance performance? It was not a question for long. The answer was yes. Bute was and is the cleanest boost ever for a horse with mild inflammation in need of relief. The stuff could move a horse up, as they say, without a mental, or stimulant effect, but with an anti-inflammatory effect.

Two horses being equal, however, bute generally won’t make a horse with quieted inflammation run faster than a horse without joint, bone, or tendon inflammation. In a sense, bute restores normal overall biomechanical function. The nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug takes the heat out of mildly inflamed legs, feet, and joints, and this can be good in considerate hands.

Bute also became useful in the sense that it was diagnostic, or so the mind-set went at the time. If you administered bute and your horse went back to training and eating and being a sound horse after laming up a bit, then it was concluded that the condition was not significant enough to warrant rest, only to warrant bute. Bute, then, could be used to assess the severity of the lameness in racehorses. Some did not consider bute-responsive conditions serious, and this is one line of reasoning that eventually allowed the legalization of bute. There were medical arguments for its use in racing horses, medical arguments made by veterinarians and drug companies.

The conditions that bute administration does not resolve or effectively manage are considered problematic, and those conditions generally warrant rest, rather than more intensive treatment. Today, however, if bute does not manage the condition, more intense treatments are used, and more intense drugs are used.

Rest is the oldest and most effective treatment for lameness. In the history of horse doctoring, no treatment is more effective. The horse has a tremendous potential to heal musculoskeletal injuries if returned to natural pasture conditions, grazing the plains with herdmates. The problem is that it takes a full year of rest to cure many conditions racehorses develop, and at least months for others. No one has time to rest racehorses, to wait a year, and then take eight months to recondition the horse. With racehorses the clock is ticking, fast. If drugs can save time with racehorses, they are used for just that. And that is the case these days. The industry has transcended bute. The monthly veterinary bills at Belmont and Aqueduct often exceed the monthly training fee. Ask any owner.

If conditions are diagnosed accurately and thoroughly, and drugs are dosed properly and administered in a timely manner, doctors can reduce problematic inflammation in a given leg or joint, which in turn protects the rest of the horse by minimizing the risk of extra strain on other joints and limbs to compensate for the painful injured joint. However carefully dosed and administered, however, this brand of racehorse sports medicine puts more pressure on the weakened, and now treated joint, and herein lies the danger. In addition to systemic medication given intravenously to treat joint inflammation, cortisone is injected directly into joints and tendon sheaths to get a significant anti-inflammatory effect. Cortisone is in a different class of drugs called steroids, which can be used more specifically than bute to reduce the inflammation in a specific joint.

When there is swelling in a joint or tendon sheath, excess synovial fluid is secreted, distending the joint structures, and in some cases, deforming them, making for irregular movement. The reason for excess fluid in a joint is most often damage to the sensitive joint structures; damage to the synovial membranes, articular cartilages, ligaments, tendons, and underlying bone, any or all of the above. Damaged joints are weakened joints. They are inflamed joints, and in racehorses, many become cortisone-injected joints: weakened joints that are quieted down with cortisone. Why? Horse joints need to flow smoothly. Imagine an abraded joint surface, or a tendon that loses its lubrication as is passes over a running, moving joint, the resultant pain, swelling, inflammation, increased friction, and impaired function. If there is rough movement in one joint, the roughness is relayed throughout the horse’s musculoskeletal system, increasing the burden on the other legs and joints.

Intra-articular injection of a joint with cortisone is a potent treatment. In certain veterinarians hands it can be used beautifully. The most commonly injected joint is the fetlock, which is also the most commonly fractured joint. The reality is that most of fractured joints were cortisoned joints, although this information is inaccessible because of medical confidentiality. Bute is less intense, less potent, and a more conservative, safer remedy. The original idea was that legalized bute would replace joint injections, or that was part of the intent. That has not been the case.

Phenylbutazone, or bute, abbreviated from the early popular brand Butazolodin, is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug very similar to aspirin. Those who understand the pharmaceutical principles of aspirin understand phenylbutazone. Bute reduces inflammation, and subsequent to that, pain. That is the sequence, anti-inflammatory first, with subsequent pain relief. As a result of reduced inflammation, there is restoration of function accompanying relief of the joint pain.

If you consider aspirin a painkiller, then I suppose you can consider bute one, as well. Bute lasts longer, a day or two, while aspirin is more quickly metabolized in the horse, a matter of hours. The sustained anti-inflammatory effect of bute is especially therapeutic to horses. Prolonged anti-inflammatory relief allows the interdependent musculoskeletal system of the horse to redistribute weight appropriately. Lameness anywhere imbalances the horse. In a sense, bute can improve the balance by providing anti-inflammatory relief of the inflamed parts.

Initially, drugs for racehorses being illegal, bute was used to facilitate training and not so much enhance racing. That came next. The medication got to working pretty darn good, and in time trainers began administering bute to their horses closer and closer to racing, and soon the testing folk started picking it up. Matt Lytle was one trainer who taught me about bute, the smile it put on his face until Croff Lake, one of his horses, suffered a bad test after winning the Oilfield Handicap in Shelby, Montana, one of those years in the mid-’60s. Lost his purse and sort of soiled his reputation all because of a shade of bute in the urine.

Later, I heard him defend the drug, and his use of it: he gave it for the horses well-being, he claimed, and knowing Matt and his connection to his horses, I did not doubt his intent and compassion. Pain relief is compassionate, especially the sort of racehorse pain relief bute provided. The problem today is that a good thing, bute, or medication in general, has been taken too far. In the passion of competition and in a world of big money, horses have become victims of a misguided pharmaceutical culture.

My dad, having dispensed the bute, sampled Matt’s horse after it won the Oilfield Handicap. I was the one who caught Croff Lake’s urine, which tested positive. Then the next spring a winning horse tested positive in the Kentucky Derby. Rather than further restrict drug use to remedy the situation, the industry legalized drugs. From that time, horse racing shifted from a covert medication culture to an overt medication culture, which has been recently brought to its knees.

After hundreds of other doping incidents, there came a general consensus that if so many felt the need to use bute, maybe it should be O.K. to run on. After all, it was only a type of aspirin. And perhaps its legalization would eliminate the need for other more abrasive medications, such as opiates and amphetamines, and local anesthetics. Some even thought it would reduce the urge to administer intra-articular injections of cortisone. Not the case.

By the time I graduated from vet school and began practicing at Playfair Racecourse in the late ’70s, I could legally treat racehorses with nearly everything except stimulants, opiates or depressants. That left a lot of anti-inflammatory drugs, antihistamines, hormones, steroids and bleeding medications to administer to running racehorses, not to mention a multitude of vitamins, amino acids and minerals thought to help a horse endure the rigors of confinement training and racing.

Now virtually all racehorses run on bute and Lasix, and now with too many fractured fetlocks the medication has to be reduced. Bute wasn’t enough. No drug is. Legal bute engendered a drug culture. The ideology that more conservative use of potent medications would follow legalization of bute did not prove up. More intense drugs and medical treatments followed, rather than less. The pharmaceutical adaptability of the racehorse has been exceeded. Horse racing has to wean itself from its addiction to drugs that no longer help, but instead weaken horses. Racing jurisdictions are in the process of rolling back drug use. The trend should continue as a part of the remedy to reduce breakdowns. Foreign horse racing jurisdictions run without medication, and their safety records are better than the United States’. Horses running clean are less likely to break down than those running on medication.

Sid Gustafson is a novelist, social commentator, and former thoroughbred attending and examining veterinarian licensed in New York, Washington, and Montana, where he has had significant experience in the regulation of racehorses, especially as it pertains to soundness and breakdowns.