2nd Series Chronicles of a broke horse trainer "Charlie and Beaner"

was living on whatever Charlie ate. For the last few days, it had been a pot of pinto beans and a box of saltine crackers. Thus, the kitten was forever stuck with the name of Beaner.

I gave Charlie a job primarily to keep me from making all of the frozen water trips to the barn and bought him enough groceries to keep him and Beaner from totally starving for the near future. Over the next few days, I came to realize that once you got past Charlie’s surliness and general grumpiness, he was one of the better horsemen I had ever encountered. I took care of him and Beaner through the winter and he joined me on the main track on Fairmont as my lead groom. He proved to be quite an asset, but I quickly learned that he could get me in more trouble in 10 minutes than I could get out of in a week if I allowed him to interact with clients or with officials in the racing office. He willingly accepted these terms, and we developed a friendship and a working relationship which was to last for the next eight years. For the first three years of the relationship, I thought I had learned a lot about Charlie until I found out that the last name which he had been using for those three years wasn’t even his. It seems as if he had gotten into a “minor” altercation at a racetrack in Florida about three and a half years before which resulted in him being charged with attempted murder for running a man out of his shed row with a pitchfork after the man had insulted his dog. In true fashion of a nomad groom, he simply loaded his gear in his old station wagon and headed for different parts of the country under a different name. Charlie was his real first name. His last name came from who knows where and his social security number belonged to a deceased brother who had lived in Oklahoma. After a little research I found out that the charges had actually been dropped in Florida and it was a mere formality to get his name cleared and allow him to go back to using his real name and social security number. There were a few questions about the three years when he didn’t seem to exist but probably due to his fairly low status in life everyone simply seemed to accept the fact that he was back to his real name. Charlie had a couple of idiosyncrasies that you had to accept if you were going to work with him. One was that the only place he would sleep was in a tack room in the shed row with the horses. We made a trip to Kentucky shortly after we began working together and I mentioned to him that there was a nice little motel just outside the gate of the racetrack and I would be more than happy to get him a room since we were only going to be there for two