Lean on Pete (25 page)

I spent the rest of the day walking around and that evening I went to the mission for dinner and sat next to three men. They all wore the same shirts that read “Green Grass We Cut It Fast.” They were talking in Mexican but one of them spoke English alright.

“You guys mow lawns?” I asked him.

Two of the men just looked at me.

The other one nodded.

“You think they’re hiring?”

“He always hires,” the one man said and grinned. “But you won’t like him.”

I asked him where the place was and he told me the address. I got a pen from another guy and wrote it on a napkin. When I finished eating I thanked them and left. I went back to the office building and got my blanket and started walking.

There was a lady who worked at a donut shop and she was standing outside it smoking a cigarette. I showed her the address and she told me where to go. It was five miles away and it took me most of the evening to find it because I kept having to stop and rest due to the pain in my ribs.

The lawn-mowing company was a warehouse door among a sea of others. I waited there for a while, then walked around to the end of the complex where hundreds of wood pallets were stacked in tall rows. There was a space between them and a chain-link fence and I sat down there and fell asleep.

When I woke it was cold and still dark, but dawn was coming. My ribs hurt worse and I was pretty sure they were broken. I hid my blanket, then got up and left and walked until I came to a row of houses. I snuck up on the front lawn of one of them and found an outdoor faucet. I turned it on and drank as much water as I could, then kept walking until the sun was up. I went back and waited outside the warehouse door and a bald-headed man dressed in shorts and a “Green Grass We Cut It Fast” T-shirt got out of a car.

“What do you want?” he said. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking from a liter bottle of Dr. Pepper. He was tall and lanky and had the skinniest legs I’d ever seen on a man.

“Are you hiring?”

“Have you ever done lawn maintenance?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What have you done?”

“I know how to mow lawns. My dad’s friend let me borrow his mower and I’d walk around the neighborhood and get jobs.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” I told him.

“Are you a drug addict?”

“No.”

“You ever been in jail?”

“No,” I told him.

“Well I’m three guys short. I’ll try you,” he said. “When can you start?”

“Right now.”

“Alright,” he said.

“My name is Sid,” he said and we shook hands.

He led me inside and I filled out an application. I lied about everything. I told him my name was Del Montgomery. I gave him a false phone number, address, and social security number. He gave me a company T-shirt and told me to change, but my ribs hurt so bad that I couldn’t lift my arms and I asked him if he had a bathroom and I went in there and locked the door. I took my other shirt off alright because it had snap buttons, but it took me a long while to put the new T-shirt on. I broke out in sweat and I almost cried out a couple times but I got it on and walked back out to the room.

He told me I’d make seven dollars and twenty-eight cents an hour, then he had me sit down and wait in a chair by his desk. Twenty minutes later men started arriving and Sid got up from his desk and opened two warehouse doors. Inside were three pickup trucks and three trailers full of lawn mowers, trimmers, blowers, rakes, and shovels. Sid introduced me to a Mexican named Santiago and told me I was in his crew and I got in the truck with him and another man named Bob and we left.

Santiago drove and I sat in the middle. Bob sat in the passenger seat and ate two Milky Way candy bars and drank coffee while we drove to the first job. No one talked at all.

We mowed lawns until noon. Santiago showed me what to do and it didn’t hurt too bad because I didn’t have to lift my arms over my head very often. On lunch break we stopped at Burger King. Bob went inside but Santiago took a cooler from the bed of the truck and carried it underneath a tree in the parking lot and ate by himself. I went inside to the bathroom and drank as much water as I could from the sink and went back out and waited by the truck.

That afternoon we mowed and weeded a huge fancy house and then we mowed five businesses and drove back to the warehouse at three. Sid was there at his desk smoking a cigarette and doing paperwork. He looked up at me and said, “Tomorrow at seven,” then he went back to his papers and I left.

I walked to the mission but it was too early and they were closed. I sat there for a while, then walked to a park down the road. There was a girl playing Frisbee with her boyfriend. They were around my age. They played for a long time, then they sat next to each other on the grass and started kissing. I couldn’t stop staring at them. It made me think of Ruby, and I sat there for a long time and wondered about her in Arizona.

When I went back to the mission it was open for dinner. There were guys sitting all around me who wouldn’t eat this or that and I’d ask them for it and most of the time they’d give it to me. I asked one of the ladies working there if I could get lunch for tomorrow, but she said I couldn’t.

I didn’t go down Colfax that night because I was worried I’d run into Silver. I took side streets and walked the five miles back to the warehouse and sat behind the pallets, found my blanket, wrapped it around me, and waited.

That night I had a dream where my dad and I were in a laundromat. He was sitting next to me reading a magazine and then he looked over and told me a story about a coyote that wandered into the warehouse where he was loading freight. It was small, it was a female, and she was really scared and no one knew what to do.

“Did someone catch her?” I asked.

“Hold your horses, I’m getting to that.”

“Maybe we could keep her if she needs a home.”

“Keep the coyote?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You can’t have a coyote as a pet. They’re wild.”

“Maybe we could.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” my dad said. “Anyway, so what happened was a guy threw a roll of paper towels at it. You would think the coyote would run off after that, but she didn’t. She just moved towards me, looking at me in a strange way. She was a tiny thing. She wasn’t mad – I don’t know what she was – and then she ran off.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and then he went back to reading his magazine. When the washer ended I put our things in the dryer and when I did the Samoan walked into the laundromat carrying a basket of clothes. I tried to warn my dad but my voice didn’t work and I was suddenly stuck. No matter what I did I couldn’t move. Then my dad got up to go outside and smoke a cigarette and when he did the Samoan saw him and began yelling at him. He tackled my dad into a dryer that had a glass door and the door broke and my dad fell inside and the Samoan wouldn’t stop hitting him. There was blood everywhere and the Samoan kept hitting him harder and harder and it was so awful it woke me up and after that I couldn’t sleep at all.

I rode again with Santiago and Bob that next day. We mowed a lawn in front of a huge office building, then we drove to a different job and while we were in the truck Bob told me he’d just been let out of jail for beating up his brother in-law. He said he hit him so hard that he shattered the man’s eye socket. He and his wife were living in an apartment out in the suburbs. He was older and had tattoos running up and down his arms. He talked about the fight for a bit, then about a TV show he’d seen the night before, then about a jet ski his neighbor was going to sell him. He didn’t talk to Santiago at all and I could tell he didn’t like him. We mowed two more lawns that morning and at lunch we stopped at a Burger King and I did the same thing I did the day before. After that we mowed more office buildings and then went back to the warehouse.

That evening I went to the mission for dinner, then I walked back to the warehouse and hid behind the pallets and waited. I did that for the rest of the week and then on Friday Sid gave us our checks and told me to be there on Monday. I put the check in my pocket and ran down to where Santiago was getting into a pickup truck and I asked him how to cash it. I told him the truth, that I didn’t have any ID. He just shook his head but let me get in his truck and we drove to a bank that would cash the boss’s checks. I waited in line with him and when it was our turn he waited until there was a clerk he knew. They spoke in Mexican and she cashed his and then mine.

“I can give you some money for gas,” I told him when we were in the parking lot.

“Don’t worry, I was coming here anyway.”

“This is the most money I’ve had in a long time,” I said and smiled. “Thank you.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll see you on Monday.” He got into his truck and drove off. The bank was even farther out, but it didn’t matter because I had a hundred and three dollars.

I walked back into town and ate at a place called Pete’s Kitchen. They had a fried chicken special with mashed potatoes and collard greens and I ate the whole thing and drank two Cokes. I decided I’d find a movie theater and spend the rest of the night there. I stopped at a donut shop and got two glazed and I ate them while I walked down the street.

I passed a bar called the Satire Lounge, and when I did I saw Silver and another man walking towards me. I tried to keep my head down but I couldn’t help it: I looked up at him and he looked at me, but it was like he didn’t even recognize me.

After that I didn’t go to the movies, I just went to the bushes by the office building and hid. But I didn’t have my blanket so I froze most of the night and didn’t sleep much. That morning I went to the mission for breakfast and after I went to a thrift store and bought a coat, a couple pairs of underwear, a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, three pairs of socks, and a pair of swimming trunks. There was a public swimming pool named La Alma and I went there. It only cost two dollars to get in and I showered and cleaned up in the men’s locker room.

There were a group of kids with a dad and they got in the shower room to wash off before they went to the pool and they all saw the bruises around my ribs and chest, but none of them said anything. When I got out I changed into my new clothes and left. I walked around for a while, then went to a laundromat and washed my work shirt and the rest of the clothes I had.

On Sunday evening I bought a loaf of bread, a package of cheese slices, and a six pack of soda and went to the warehouse and slept behind the pallets. Just after sunrise I put on my work shirt and made three sandwiches out of the bread and cheese. I put them and two sodas in a plastic sack and sat by the warehouse door until Sid showed up.

The week went along alright. One day at Burger King Santiago asked me to sit with him in the shade of some trees that ran alongside the edge of the parking lot.

“How come your mother makes you eat cheese and white bread every day?” he asked while we ate.

“I make my own lunch.”

“You’re not very good at it,” he said and smiled.

“I’m trying to save money,” I said.

“Why?”

“I have to go to Wyoming.”

“Wyoming?”

“Yeah,” I said.

He nodded and we kept eating for a while.

“What’s wrong with your arms?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Every time you lift the grass bag I can see your face in pain.”

“I got beat up.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Who did it?”

“Just some guy,” I said.

Santiago just nodded and we finished eating.

On Thursday night when I was sleeping behind the pallets a car pulled up. Four guys got out. I could see them by the street light. They left the radio playing and drank beer and stayed there for a long time. Once in a while they’d throw a beer bottle against a concrete wall and it would break. A couple times they wandered over near where I was, and when they did I could see they were young, maybe a little older than me. I began to get nervous that they’d find me, and I was ready to run but in the end they just got back in their car and drove away.

On Friday morning Bob didn’t show up and we worked with an old man named Cliff. He was retired but his daughter and grandkid had just moved back in with him so he didn’t have enough money. He had to go back to work. He seemed like an alright guy. When he was young he was in the military and lived in Guam and at lunch he told us about it there. When the day was done Santiago let me ride with him to the bank and again he helped me cash my check. I had almost three hundred dollars in my pocket. We said goodbye and I began walking down the street when he pulled up beside me and stopped. He got out of his truck.

“Do you need a ride home?” he asked.

“I don’t live far from here. I’m pretty close,” I told him.

“Close to what?” he said. “There’s nothing out here. Where do you live?”

“Not far.”

“What’s your address?”

I just stood there. “My address?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

He shook his head, then asked if I wanted to have dinner at his house. I nodded and he wrote down his address and the directions on the back of an envelope, gave it to me, and drove off.

I walked back to the pallets and put all the money I had except for twenty in my left shoe and changed into my jeans and my clean blue shirt. I walked down to a grocery store and washed my face and hands in their bathroom and bought a carton of cake donuts and left.

It took me nearly an hour to walk to Santiago’s house. It was a small brick home set off from the sidewalk. It had a front yard with grass. There were two kids playing on it and there was an old man sitting in a chair watching them. I went to him and asked him if Santiago lived there but I don’t think he understood what I was saying. Then one of the kids ran into the house and came out with Santiago. He was dressed in tan pants and a white buttondown short-sleeved shirt. He wore a baseball hat and flip-flops.

“I didn’t think you would come,” he said.

I walked up to him and handed him the donuts.

“What are these for?”