Authors: Willy Vlautin
I didn’t know where I was. I walked down one street and then another and then I was running. The thoughts in my head were swirling. I’d seen a lot of things. I’d seen my dad do things. I’d seen him having sex with women. I’d seen him bending women over our couch and ramming into them and I’d seen them in the kitchen sitting on top of him saying things to him. I’d seen him puking his guts out in the sink and snorting cocaine and smoking weed. I saw a woman passed out in the back of our car in nothing but a bra. I saw her pee on the seat. I saw a guy get a broken beer bottle pushed in his face while we were at a daytime barbecue. I’d seen my dad hit my aunt in the face and call her names when all she did was tell him to come back when he wasn’t so drunk and mean. I’d seen him wreck her car and then abandon it. I’d seen him talk to the police. I saw a kid get hit so hard that he began to foam at the mouth and go into seizures and I’d seen a kid shoot a dog in the head with a .
22
. I’d seen another kid tear the pajamas off his sister just so he could see her down there. She was screaming and crying. And I’d seen Del punch a horse as hard as he could and I’d seen a horse break his leg and wobble around on three while the broke one was held on by only skin.
I kept running and running until I was so tired I couldn’t think about anything like that. It took a long time. It always takes a long time, but it always works.
A couple days later I met a guy named Johnny Billson who had been a jockey at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields. After that he started riding at Portland Meadows before he quit altogether. He told me he hated horses more than anything, he told me that if never saw another horse in his whole life he’d be happy. Even so he said he was still drawn to being a jockey, that he still couldn’t completely shake it.
He was a swing-shift cook at the Shari’s Restaurant down the street from Portland Meadows. He knew Del and I guess Del told him about me and Johnny hired me one morning to help him move from one apartment to another. His old place was on the second floor and his new place was across town on the third floor. So we carried all his things down to a pickup truck, drove to the new place, then carried them back up three flights of stairs. He had a lot of stuff and we had to move his record collection, which was really heavy.
When we were done I had to ask him for the twenty dollars he said he’d pay me. He looked through his wallet, but I could see he didn’t have any money in it. He just stood there and lit a cigarette. He told me he thought he had the dough but he guessed he didn’t. He said he’d give Del the money later that week.
“I got to buy food today,” I told him.
“I can’t get the cash today,” he said.
“Please,” I said.
He looked at me, then finally said he’d feed me if I went to the back door of Shari’s during the dinner shift from Sunday to Thursday. All I had to do was ask for him. He said he’d give me three free dinners instead of the twenty. I told him okay and made him shake hands on it.
I went to the restaurant that evening and knocked on the back door and a man answered and led me in. Johnny Billson was standing over the grill and he smiled when he saw me. He got me a Coke and made me a cheeseburger and fries. He told me to sit in the corner next to the employees’ lockers and eat. When I was done he let me have a bowl of soup and made me a sandwich to go. All in all I must have eaten there ten times and he never seemed sore about it.
It was late July by then and football practice was to start in less than a month. I stopped by the high school and it was three times the size of my last school. It was called Jefferson High, the Democrats were their mascot. I wanted to go to school, but I knew they wouldn’t let me live on my own, I knew they’d put me in some sort of home. I decided if I couldn’t figure anything out by the start of football practice I’d ask Del if I could move in with him.
I used my spare money to call the M. Thompsons from the list I’d written down. There was a payphone in the main grandstands at the track and I called all the numbers I had for that name in Wyoming but I never had any luck. I tried the place my aunt had worked again, Scottish Sam’s Auto Parts, but the same girl answered and told me the same thing she had before. I got on the library computer again to try and find her that way but I couldn’t. For a few nights I just lay in my sleeping bag and bawled about it. People say crying makes you feel better but it didn’t, it didn’t change anything, it just made me tired and embarrassed.
I began buying my food at a mini-mart that was maybe a mile away. There was an Asian girl my age who worked behind the counter. She would always smile at me, and a couple times we talked and she said she was going to Jefferson High, the same school I was supposed to go. She was really good-looking and she always had her nails painted fluorescent green and when she talked she always said my name. One time she said it five times and we only talked for a couple of minutes.
That week Del had four horses racing. Mr. High Pockets, Go Buster Go, Easter Sonny Boy, and Lean on Pete. He was in a horrible mood when he began talking about the upcoming races. It was early in the morning, the sun had barely come up and he was eating a candy bar and drinking a can of Coke. He stood there wearing jeans that were falling down and an old red flannel shirt that was stained with dried white paint.
“All I know is with all the bullshit happening you can’t even call this a track anymore. Back in the seventies this place was at least a real track. People don’t give a shit anymore. They’d rather sit in front of a goddamn box with lights and sound effects and shove their money into it. No one wants to go to the track. They’d rather go to the fucking mall. That’s all casinos are. Longacres, that was a track. The seventies were a hell of a lot better than this. Shit, even the eighties were alright. I had some real horses back then and I had jockeys I could trust. You can’t trust anyone now. You can’t even trust the
Daily Racing Form
. And you can’t tell me that the Beyer number is worth a shit at this dump. I’ve spent hours trying to teach you the form and it’s like I’m pouring water onto a rock. It just bounces off and never takes. Every goddamn kid nowadays is like that. The world’s a mess, a real mess if guys like you end up running things. Did I tell you I saw that kid Luis looking through my truck the other day? And a couple weeks ago I caught Hopper siphoning gas out of it with a garden hose. I ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing and all he says is, ‘Del, is this your truck?’ Well he knows its my fucking truck. I let him have it. I’m an inch away from murdering his ass. Then all he says is, ‘Jesus, I swear I didn’t know this was your truck, honest.’ But he doesn’t apologize, he just walks away with five gallons of my gas and let me tell you gas ain’t cheap anymore. Nothing’s cheap. The goddamn farrier goes up, feed goes up, medicine goes up, and the purses go down. You tell me what to do.”
“Me?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “All you ever do is ask for money and eat and I’ve never seen anyone make eating seem so goddamn unappealing. What can you tell me? I’ll tell you what you can tell me, nothing. I got an ulcer and I can’t feel my toes and I haven’t taken a decent shit in a year and all my horses are pigs.”
I just stood there and he stared right at me and went on. He talked about how the vet was charging him too much and that the caf used expired food, and how since computers started you couldn’t win anything on horses and how his ex-wife owes him two thousand dollars and how the hot-water heater in his house was broken and how he paid a guy to fix it and how the guy took the hot-water heater back to his shop and went on vacation without fixing it. He didn’t have hot water for two weeks. He put in a chew and told me how he had to buy a brand-new one, and how they don’t make anything that lasts anymore. Then he started talking about a woman he lived with who used to get so drunk she’d throw up in bed in her sleep. Then he told me about a brake job he got where they said they’d changed the pads but hadn’t. They said they turned the rotors but they hadn’t done that either.
“They didn’t do a goddamn thing but I caught those lousy fuckers and what do I get? Nothing, that’s what.”
Del kept going on like this until an old man came up to him and they started talking so I went back to cleaning stalls.
Pete came in sixth that day, beating only one horse. Mr. High Pockets was last, Go Buster Go got fourth, and Del’s best horse, Easter Sonny Boy, came in second but got claimed.
That night I gave Pete two apples and he ate those and kept nudging me, looking for more. He wasn’t lame but he hardly moved at all in his stall. He just stood there almost lifeless. Del had raced him three weeks in a row, plus the match races before that, and his times were getting slower each week.
The next morning I went to Bonnie’s tack room to ask her about him. I knocked on the door and waited until she came out.
“What time is it?” she yawned.
“Almost six.”
Her hair was messed up and you could see her legs. She wasn’t wearing anything but a black T-shirt. She told me to hold on and closed the door, and I could hear her in there getting dressed, then she came out in a different shirt wearing jeans and boots. We walked over to the caf and she ordered breakfast, and I sat there and watched her eat part of it, then push it away. She let the plate sit there and drank coffee and watched the TV they had going.
“Are you done eating?”
“Yeah,” she said.
I looked at her.
“What?” she said.
“Would it be alright if I ate the rest of your breakfast?”
She smiled and nodded so I took the plate and her fork and finished it. We sat there for a while longer while she drank coffee and then on the way out I bought two maple bars with my last dollar and gave one to her. We walked over to Del’s stalls and she went in and looked at Pete. She bent down and ran her hands up and down his legs.
“There’s a lot of heat.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s not good.”
She told me to put a halter on him.
“What time does Del get here?”
“He’ll be here in an hour or so,” I told her.
“Then let’s put him on the hotwalker right now,” she said and led him out. She stood back and watched him.
“He’s sore alright. Just look at the way he walks. How old is he?”
“Five, I think.”
“How often has Del been racing him?”
“Five weeks in a row. I’m not sure before that.”
She just stood there.
“Will he be alright?”
“I don’t know. If Del keeps racing him all the time he won’t be.”
“Del says he thinks he might be navicular.”
“That’s bad if that’s the case,” she said.
“What’s gonna happen to him?”
“It depends,” she said. “Quarter horses are pretty tough. They can take a lot more than thoroughbreds, but look, Charley, don’t worry too much about one horse, okay? You can’t think of these guys as pets. They aren’t. They’re here for racing, not for anything else. If they lose too much they get fired. When I had horses as a kid we had winter pastures and summer pastures. We wouldn’t even begin breaking them until they were four. These guys get broke and rode hard at two and are stuck in a stall for twenty-three hours a day for months at a time. You can make a nice horse fucked-up as hell in no time at all. So be careful, alright.”
“It seems like Pete’s in prison.”
“I guess that’s what I’d call being stuck in a cell for twenty-three hours a day, then taken out and run and put right back. The thing that gets me is that there’s over a thousand horses here and not one of them is good enough to race at a real track like Santa Anita.”
“What happens if he keeps losing?”
“Del will sell him to whoever will buy him. Maybe he’ll get claimed, but don’t think about that,” she said and smiled. It was the first time I’d really seen her smile. Her teeth were brown and they were crooked but she had a nice smile.
“What if no one wants him?”
“You mean if he really is navicular?”
I nodded.
“Nothing good, Charley. There used to be a slaughterhouse outside of Salem. Most of the horses went there, but they’ve outlawed slaughtering horses in the U.S. now so they ship them down in stock trailers to Mexico and kill them there.”
“They ship them to Mexico and kill them?”
“Don’t think about it,” Bonnie said and put her hand on my shoulder.
The next Sunday, Del’s horse Go Buster Go was in third place coming around the stretch when the other two horses in front began to fade. He moved past them on the outside and suddenly he was in first.
“Don’t let him lug out,” Del screamed. We were watching the race from a TV near the main floor bar. “Goddamn it, don’t let him lug out.” The jockey was whipping the horse and trying to hold him in. The number three horse came up next to Buster, but Buster pinned his ears back and held him off and won the race and Del’s share of a $
3
,
500
purse. Del smiled in relief and finished his beer and we both went outside and got in the win picture. We stood with two people I didn’t know and Maxine, the girl who helped feed his horses. Del put his arm around her while the picture was taken and told me he’d get me a copy of the photo.
I helped him walk Go Buster Go to the backside and we brought him to the test barn to be drug tested. They had a hotwalker there and we put Buster on it and waited for him to piss and Del smiled and talked to anyone who would talk to him.
Later that afternoon his horse Dash’s Dart ran a six-furlong stakes race and came in second and won over $
2
,
000
. The odds on her were
23
-
1
and Del whispered to me that he had her second in a hundred-dollar exacta and won that as well.
“Miracles sometimes happen,” he said and I’d never seen him so happy. When we went out to the track to get Dash’s Dart Del wasn’t walking slow like an old man, he was nearly skipping.
That evening I found Del in the back room of the caf playing cards. He hadn’t paid me yet and I’d already asked him twice. He was drunk. I stood there for a long time just watching him and waiting.