Dale and Chester Treska came to the fall horse sale every year in their monogrammed shirts and fancy streamlined vans to pick up prospects for their hunters and jumpers enterprise. They were always complimenting me, saying, Sonia, you need to get off the track, come work with us, so when I left Cantor’s ranch I bought a bus ticket to Wilton, Wisconsin, but when I changed buses my luggage got lost. That was a sign. There I was — mucking stalls in Wisconsin in my nice clothes because I didn’t have anything else.

Treskas liked horses with bad racing records. If a racehorse is sound, it can’t run hard enough to hurt itself. If a horse can’t run hard it’s no good to us racetrackers. We always hoped the hunter and jumper people would get them so they’d have a better life.

Treskas would buy a racehorse for eight hundred bucks, teach him to go over a few jumps, then sell him six weeks later for eight thousand. Bracing Bill — they got ten grand for him.

They had the big name, the perfect setup. Wealthy families came to them for horses and for riding lessons, too — little rich kids at thirty-five dollars an hour. The rich people would be so happy — they’d say, Wow, my daughter’s an equestrian! But Treskas didn’t put none of that money in my pocket. I was working for room and board, living in their house. They treated me like a servant. I lasted two and a half months.

They liked to badmouth racetrack people, say what a bunch of crooks we were, but their horses would get crippled up and Treskas would hop and block them worse than racetrackers ever did.

TEN

I WAS GIVEN A CHOICE

A few months later I was back at the track, riding a horse to the gate for a race. Another horse bolted with the jockey on it and T-boned the horse I was on. The collision sounded like a shotgun blast. We all went down. I was at the bottom of the pile.

It happened in front of the grandstands. The crowd was traumatized. The medics did CPR, they used the shockers. It was a death experience.

They brought me back, but I was in a coma. I could hear every word but I couldn’t respond. Racetrackers were coming in and out, talking with the doctors and nurses — Is she going to make it? They say your hearing’s the last to go. I thought they would bury me alive.

I was given a choice to live or die. When I decided to live, I woke up. Then I was in a lot of pain. I had a lot of injuries, a lot of internal bleeding. I had all but two ribs broken, a punctured lung. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t walk.