Homestretch (3 page)

I wasn't about to ask
them
or anybody else.

It was closing in on dinnertime and I was still stranded in that park, twenty yards from Nacho and his brothers, like there was an invisible string tied between us.

My stomach was grumbling, so I broke down and bought myself an ice cream sundae and a soda off a white truck with jingling bells. That left me with just three lousy bucks to my name. But I enjoyed every bit of that food in front of those starving beaners, who'd been sucking water from a fountain and eating shriveled figs off a tree.

A few joggers showed up, along with some parents bringing their young kids to the park's playground after work.

Most of them were staring at us.

“For Christ's sake! You all gonna pitch a tent and live here?” barked a man walking a big German shepherd. “This ain't a refugee camp!”

I knew it was a matter of time before somebody called the cops.

Then, just as the sun was sinking low, a rusted horse trailer pulled up to the curb, and those beaners shot up at attention like they'd been drafted into the Mexican army.

The man who got out was tall, and as thin as a whip, leaning off to one side. He had on mirrored sunglasses, with a toothpick rolling around in his mouth, and there was a small alligator over his shirt pocket.

“There's supposed to be
four
of you!” he yelled. “
Four!
Can't you fucking count, muchachos?”

Nacho called out to me in a panicked voice, “Come!
Trabajo!
Work—money!”

I didn't know what
work
those beaners had waiting—the kind that was worth crossing the border and riding all this way surrounded by stinking chickens. But it was probably better than what was waiting for me if I had to go crawling back home, or if the cops dragged me there.

Besides, I was going to need money to survive, to put a roof over my head. And just like Dad, I was unemployed.

So I walked over and let that man grill me up and down through those mirrored glasses, like I was a week-old burrito at a 7-Eleven he was thinking about stomaching.

I just stood in front of him with my mouth shut tight.

When he finally nodded his chin, I climbed into the back of that empty horse trailer behind Nacho and his brothers. It was almost pitch-black in there, and I stood up the entire ride, with my eyes peering out between the wooden slats of a window.

I needed to see every sign along the highway and know
exactly
where I was.

WE ROCKETED UP INTERSTATE
30 past Texarkana, with that whip of a man hitting the horn and riding up on the bumper of every car that didn't move out of his way fast enough.

I stood at the window the whole time, with those Mexican jumping beans sitting at my feet, bouncing around at every bump.

Right before we hit Hot Springs, Arkansas, that man got off the highway and snaked down the side roads about a mile.

The huge sign over a high chain-link fence read,
PENNINGTON RACETRACK
.

There was a painting of a racehorse with its jockey on that sign. And I guess the dark lines sweeping straight back off the two of them were supposed to make you believe how fast they were going.

We passed through the racetrack's gates, and the driver
stopped in front of a security station. Then he hustled us out of the trailer into a small brick building where a fat sergeant sat behind a desk with his feet up, watching
America's Funniest Home Videos
.

“Newbies? This time of night, Dag?” the sergeant asked him, annoyed.

I didn't know what kind of name Dag was, but the more I watched the sharp point of that toothpick rolling around in his mouth, the more it seemed to fit him.

“Emergency—had a whole family of Mex grooms quit me for a track in Oklahoma,” Dag answered, slipping him a twenty. “I had to go pick these boys up myself. So just
express
them for me. Will ya?”

The sergeant handed each of us a yellow card to fill out and pointed to the lines on them with a stubby finger.

“Name—here. Birth date—here,” he said slow and steady, like we were retards.

Then Dag took the cards to write his name in the space that read “Employer.”

I looked up at the TV to see some father lob a baseball to his little son, who was waiting there with a bat on his shoulder. The kid smacked a line drive right back into his father's nut sack.

The sergeant howled over that, and so did I.

But those beaners never smiled, and just winced at the replay.

“GAS-TON GI-AM-BANC-O!” Dag roared after reading my card. “WHAT THE HELL'S THIS?”

“That's me,” I answered. “It's my name.”

“You're not a groom from Mexico?” he asked, with the sergeant laughing more at Dag now than that TV show.

“I know lots about horses. Really. My dad worked at a riding stable,” I answered.

“Oh, did he. Well, la-di-fucking-da.” Dag smirked. “Do you know the family of
these
boys have groomed racehorses for generations? That their father's father's father probably came to this country to take care of horses? It's in their blood. It's what they dream about. Your
dad
worked at a riding stable. Doing what—shoveling horse shit?”

I saw my reflection in his mirrored glasses, and I never looked so small.

“
Boy
, you're lucky I need a hot walker,” Dag said, crossing out one of the lines on my card and writing in something new. “But they make a hundred and forty dollars less a week than grooms do. So live with it.”

I didn't even know what a hot walker did.

I'd seen a guy walk barefoot over hot coals once at a carnival. Dad swore the guy had probably made some kind of deal with the devil to do it. But I never believed that.

Anyway, I had a job now.

A hundred and forty less a week meant I'd be getting paid something, even if it wasn't as much as those beaners.

I knew I was twice as smart as them and would probably be their boss inside of a week.

The sergeant took Polaroids of us. Then he pasted our pictures on those ID cards, and I saw white spots in front of my eyes from the flash of that camera for close to five minutes.

“These cards—
muy im-por-tante
. Wear them all the time—on your outside clothes,” the sergeant said, tugging at the tin badge pinned to his shirt. “With them you're
legal
on the racetrack. Without them you're an
illegal
. Understand?”

Nacho and his brothers nodded their heads in excitement, like they'd just been made U.S. citizens.

I looked at my card and saw that Dag had changed my date of birth. I wasn't thinking and had put down my real one.

On the walk out Dag asked me, “What's your name again, kid?”

“Gas,” I answered, cautious.

“Well, genius Gas, you need to be eighteen to live and work on the racetrack. Remember that.”

At the time I believed he was doing
me
the favor.

Dag drove us to his barn on the racetrack's backstretch—where
the rows of stables, the dorms, and the cantina were. But it was closing in on ten o'clock that night, and most everything there was stone quiet.

The sign on the side of his cinder-block barn read in big black letters,
DAMON DAGGET—PUBLIC RACING STABLE
.

The horses whinnied loud—
whhhaaa
—at the sound of his trailer pulling up.

Then Dag cut the engine and everything fell silent again.

We ducked under a waist-high wooden latch, following Dag inside his barn, past the night watchman. There was a long row of fourteen stalls, with a powerful Thoroughbred standing tall in each one. There were another fourteen horses in the stalls behind them, and a curve on each end of the barn, which was laid out in a tight oval.

“This way—
venga
,” said Dag, showing Nacho and his brothers the horses they'd be grooming.

Each of them got two Thoroughbreds to take care of.

“Ah, sí,”
those beaners said, back and forth.
“Bueno.”

They walked up to the stall doors, kissing and stroking their horses on the nose, looking them over from head to toe. I would have sworn those stupid beaners were in love. But if it had been up to me, I wouldn't have given them a jackass to look after in this country.

I glanced over Nacho's shoulder as he moved to the next stall. The gold nameplate on the leather-strapped halter around that horse's head and powerful jaw read,
BAD BOY RISING
.

There was fire in that horse's eyes and a long blaze of white hairs running down his dark brown face. Something made me reach out to pet him, and Bad Boy Rising tried to take a vicious bite out of my hand.

“If that one had as much speed as he does attitude, he wouldn't be one step away from the slaughterhouse. From the stable to the dinner table, that's what's waiting for this one if he don't win soon,” said Dag. “As for you,
you'll
be walking horses in circles after they come back from training every morning. You'll pick ‘em up hot and walk till they've cooled down. Forty minutes each you'll walk ‘em. Then we'll see how much
gas
you got in your tank.”

Dag said it was too late that night to get registered for a dorm room. So he walked us past his office, which had a comfy-looking leather sofa and chairs, and into a stuffy equipment room without windows that was maybe half the size. It was filled with dusty horse blankets, bridles, whips, riding helmets, and worn-out saddles.

“They'll all sleep in here tonight,” Dag told the night watchman, who had some Spanish in him. “I'm heading home for some shut-eye.”

Then Dag's wiry frame dipped under the wooden latch and he was gone.

That night the four of us slept shoulder-to-shoulder on the dirt floor, under horse blankets. And before the light got turned out, I looked at the yellow ID card hanging over Nacho's heart and saw that his name was really Ignacio.

From near the end of my sophomore year until the week before she died, Mom drove me down to the stables on Fridays, just before Dad knocked off work.

In the beginning I was happy with my horse just walking the trail—its nose following the tail of the one in front of it. But Mom kept pushing me to gallop with her.

“Come on, Gas. You wanna feel those four legs flying beneath you,” she'd say. “Think about the poor horse. He was born to run, not be bored out of his mind playing follow the leader in slow motion.”

Only, I wouldn't budge.

Then one day Dad sneaked up from behind, without Mom seeing, and whispered to me, “Hold on tight.”

He slapped my horse hard on the backside.

That horse took off running and I lost my balance.

I had both arms locked tight around its long neck, fighting
to hang on. I could hear Mom's horse chasing after me, and her yelling, “Pull on the reins!”

But I couldn't. And after fifty or sixty yards I lost my grip, tumbling to the gravel-covered ground.

Once Mom saw I was all right, she rode past me, running down the loose horse. Dad walked over to where I was, and his boss came charging out of the office.

“This isn't some damn rodeo! What's goin' on here?” he hollered, staring Dad down.

Dad cleared his throat, kicking away the rocks at his feet.

Before he said a word, I answered, “It's
my
fault, sir. I got a big head, thinking I could really ride. That's all.”

I took the blame because I didn't want Dad to get into any kind of argument and maybe get fired again. Mom was so happy with him working there, and I figured he was better off around those horses than spreading hot tar across somebody's roof.

Mom brought the horse back by the bridle, and Dad checked him over.

“No worse for the wear,” he told his boss.

“Gas, I fell plenty of times. You just gotta climb right back on,” Mom said. “It's the only way.”

“She's right,” echoed Dad. “Let's go.”

Then he cupped his hand and gave me a boost into the saddle.

“More important, you gotta learn to listen, son,” Dad said harsh, before he apologized to his boss for what
I'd
done.

That really got me pissed. Dad made it sound like he'd warned me a hundred times. And maybe even
he
believed it was my fault now.

Dad never thanked me for taking the heat. He never even mentioned it, and Mom never found out what really happened.

By the next week I was hell-bent on galloping that same horse, just to show up Dad. And I did.

It was like flying on the wind, and it made me forget for a while about how being so small had me weighed down.

I hadn't been on a horse in five months now.

Not since Mom was killed.

I got woken up that next morning just after five o'clock, when the beaners who worked at Dag's barn came into the equipment room and saw Nacho and his brothers. They all began hugging one another and
“mi familia”
was on nearly everyone's lips as they moved around me like I was invisible.

That's when I realized
all
of Dag's workers, except for me, were Mexican.

They all started pulling out the horses' feed tubs and
hayracks. I stumbled around lost in that mix for more than a half hour. Then I spotted a big copper pot by Dag's office and spooned myself some oatmeal.

Dag was busy inside on the phone. But some heavyweight beaner was barking out orders at everyone in Spanish.

“Breakfast finished,” he snapped through a thick accent, pushing a rake into my hands. “You clean up outside. Horses ready to walk later.”

It didn't take me long to figure out that he was Dag's assistant, and what Dad always called the HMIC—Head Mexican in Charge.

Then I heard somebody call him Paolo, before he snapped at me a second time, “Go work,
gringo
!”