Lean on Pete (5 page)

I looked around. “I’ll sleep in the bed,” I said. He nodded, then went into his truck and lay down on the bench seat. He didn’t even put a blanket over him or take off his boots. He just set his glasses on the dashboard and turned off the inside light. I got into the back of the truck and untied my sleeping bag and rolled it out. I took off my shoes and got in. I lay there for a long time before I fell asleep. For a while I thought of Tumbling Through and where he was and what would happen to him. Then I thought of Lean on Pete and the race he’d won and then I thought about the money Del gave me. It was the most money I’d ever had at one time in my whole life. I lay there and thought if he would remember he gave me that much, and if he’d want it back. Then I thought about what I’d do with it if I got to keep it and that made me relax, and when I relaxed I was suddenly tired and I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke to the sound of Del starting the truck. It turned over five or six times before it finally coughed and rumbled and took. He sat there warming it for ten minutes. It was still dark out. I just lay there unsure of what to do, then Del got out of the truck and walked back to me.

“Are you up yet?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You can stay back here if you want, but I got to get the hell out of here.”

“I’ll sit up front.”

“Then get up and help me catch Pete,” he said and walked off into the darkness.

I put on my shoes and rolled up the sleeping bag. I jumped out of the truck and started walking in the direction of Del. The light coming off the house helped but I couldn’t see him and started calling out his name.

He turned on the flashlight and pointed it at me.

“I’m over here,” he whispered.

I went over to him.

“Keep it down or you’ll wake her up.”

“Wake up who?”

“My brother’s wife. She’d shoot me if she could.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“You don’t want to know,” he said and handed me the halter and a flashlight. “Go get him, but they got four other horses in there so be careful.”

“Alright,” I told him. I went into the pasture and walked around until I came to the horses gathered near an old bathtub. I saw Pete and I went to him but every time I got near he moved away from me.

I went back to Del.

“He won’t let me catch him,” I said.

Del shook his head and said something I couldn’t make out, then grabbed the halter from me and started walking out towards the horses.

“Do you need the flashlight?”

“Don’t talk anymore and get in the truck,” he said.

Five minutes later he had the horse in the trailer. He got in the cab of the truck and put it in gear and we got on the road. He drove like he was having a hard time seeing. He held on to the steering wheel tightly with his good hand and only looked off the road to spit into his chew cup.

“That crazy bitch stabbed me,” he said finally.

I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. I just looked out the window. The sun was beginning to rise. You couldn’t see it yet but it was starting to get light out.

“Did you hear me or are you already out?”

“I heard you,” I said. “Where did she stab you?”

“In the arm with a pair of scissors.”

“Did it hurt?”

“What do you think?”

“Why would she do that?”

“’Cause I came in her,” he said and beat on the steering wheel and laughed.

I wasn’t sure what he meant. After a while I said, “Was she your girlfriend?”

“Do you listen? She’s my brother’s wife and he’s as sterile as a castrated dog.” He shook his head like I was the dumbest guy he’d ever met.

I didn’t know what to say after that so I just leaned against the window glass. We rode silent for a while, then he put on the radio and I fell asleep. The next thing I knew we were driving into Portland.

I yawned and sat up in the seat.

“You’re awake.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I stopped and had breakfast in The Dalles and filled the truck. You didn’t even move the entire time.” He was leaned back now. The radio was still going and he had his window half rolled down.

“I’m sorry.”

“What do I care?”

“Del,” I asked him, “I’ve been thinking. Can I work for you?”

“What?”

“Do you need help this summer?”

“I’m broke. I don’t pay much.”

“I just need enough so I can eat.”

“What about your folks, they feed you, don’t they?”

“I guess,” I said. He sat there and spit into his cup a few times.

“There’s probably a few things you could do for me.”

“Alright,” I said.

“I’ll pick you up a groom’s license if you’re serious.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s so you can get on the backside and work. You need a license to do that. They only cost twenty bucks. I’ll take it out of your pay.”

“Thanks,” I said, but he didn’t say anything back and we fell quiet again. He kept driving and took us to the track, where he parked the trailer and we unloaded Pete and put him in his stall. Then he told me to show up the next morning at six if I wanted to work.

“And look,” he said and spit on the ground, “I can’t remember, did I pay you?”

“Yeah,” I told him.

“What did I give you, forty dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright,” he said and walked across the backside lot and disappeared into the caf. I almost followed him in to tell him the truth, that first he told me he’d pay me twenty-five, and now he thought it was forty, but that yesterday he gave me a hundred. I wanted to tell him all that, tell him that he was wrong, that he’d made a mistake. I wanted to give the extra money back, but really, in the end I just couldn’t.

Chapter 7

My dad wasn’t there when I got home. I looked through the fridge and the cupboards but I’d eaten most everything except a can of pork and beans and a can of pears. I put the beans on the stove and ate the pears while I waited. When I was done I walked all the way to Fred Meyer and got a cart and started filling it with things. I bought cereal, bacon, potatoes, spaghetti, canned sauce, bread, milk, a six pack of Coke, TV dinners, cookies, carrots, canned fruit, Hamburger Helper, frozen hamburger, macaroni and cheese, onions, tortillas, cheese, lunch meat, potato chips, canned beans, ice cream, a dozen cans of soup, and a few candy bars.

I went up to the checker and set all the stuff on the belt and the lady rang me up and I figured it out alright. I spent seventy-eight dollars, which left me with sixteen. I kneeled down and took the money out of my shoe and gave it to her. She put everything in bags and put them back in the cart and I rolled it out of the store and pushed it over a mile back to the house.

When I got home I unloaded the bags and made myself a sandwich, then changed into my running clothes. I pushed the cart back to the store and then I ran as hard as I could down to the river and jogged along it until I got tired. I rested for a while on the banks and after that I got up and did my push-ups and sit-ups and headed back to the house.

That night I made a package of Hamburger Helper and spent the rest of the evening eating off it and watching a movie on TV about a hockey player who gets too many concussions and they make him quit so he ends up as a bartender but even so he still skates and then he meets this girl who’s a famous skater and they become skate partners. It was a pretty bad movie but the girl was beautiful and she falls in love with the hockey player and then they win a gold medal.

When I went to sleep that night I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl skater. I just lay in my bed and thought about how good-looking she was and how at the end she turned out to be nice and then finally around eleven or so I fell asleep. At five o’clock my alarm went off. I lay there for a while, then I heard noises coming from the main room. I got up and looked out the window and saw my dad’s truck and so I got dressed and walked out into the kitchen where he was making bacon and eggs. He was dressed in his work clothes and standing over the stove.

“What the hell are doing up so early?”

“What about you?” I asked him.

“I just got home.”

“I got a job,” I told him.

“You got a job?”

“I work for a guy named Del at the horse track.”

“Is that who you went off with?”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I told him about the match race and the jockey falling and Tumbling Through getting hurt and being left out there. I told him about sleeping in the bed of the truck and about Pete and how he won, and how Del gave me a hundred dollars.

“And the guy seems alright?” my dad asked.

“I guess. He paid me.”

“Congratulations. You hungry?”

“I’m always hungry.”

“Sit down,” he said, and then he went to the fridge and took a can of frozen orange juice and put it in a pitcher and filled it with hot water and stirred it until it thawed. He set the pitcher on the table and went back to the stove and put in two more eggs.

“You didn’t steal all these groceries, did you?”

“No,” I said. “I went to the store and paid for them.”

“Jesus, you’re something,” he said. He went to the fridge and took a beer from it and opened it. He flipped the eggs over and let them sit for a minute, then put them on a plate with some bacon and sat down across from me.

“I’m not so sure about Portland,” he said. “How about you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I ain’t done anything yet. I hear the football team at Jefferson High is pretty good. I’m just waiting for that and hoping I make the team.”

“You’ll make the team. Spokane ain’t that much smaller than Portland.”

“Maybe.”

“When do practices start?”

“August
12
th.”

“I’ll make sure we stick it out for the whole season, alright?”

“We could always go back to Spokane.”

“We ain’t going back there.”

“We could go back to Green River, then.”

“There ain’t any work there and I hate it there. We’ll stay here for a while. Sooner or later I’ll get dayshift. I’m just too old for graveyard, that’s all. I’m just complaining. Alright?”

“Alright.”

“You want to hear something?” he said.

I nodded and began eating.

“There’s this new kid at work. He’s on parole, he was in prison in Pendleton. He’d gotten three DUIs, then got busted driving without a license and he was drunk with an eight-ball of cocaine on him so they sent him off. He’s only been out a couple months, but his uncle is the head dock supervisor so that’s how he got the job. Anyway, he and I get paired off together. It’s only his fourth or fifth day and he’s drunk, and not just sorta drunk but fucked-up drunk. This operation is so big that you never really talk that much or have to be in a closed room with anyone so no one noticed. Plus he’s always got about five pieces of gum in his mouth and with all the forklift exhaust nobody smells anything on him. But me, hell, I’m in a trailer with him and he can’t stop talking and his eyes are glossed over and I know he’s drunk; I can smell it. He starts talking about prison and about how he doesn’t drink anymore and how moving freight was worse than being in the can. In prison he said all he had to do was drop acid and do heroin and play cards and watch TV.

“So we keep loading boxes, and pretty soon we get to these chairs. These wood chairs that aren’t in boxes but wrapped in cardboard and plastic. He starts throwing them into the back of the trailer and breaking them. I ask him what the hell he’s doing and he just starts laughing. So we finish the load and then we move into another trailer and this time he’s on the forklift. I’m just marking off the freight bill and he loads in a pallet of spices and sets it down, then backs up and raises his forks and starts ramming holes into the boxes. Spices cost a lot and he’s ramming the hell out of them with the forks. No one notices ’cause the place is a madhouse. Then he loads in another pallet and does the same thing.”

My dad started laughing.

“Did you stop him?” I asked.

“What?”

“Did you get him to stop?”

“His uncle’s a boss. Anyway, I’m too low on the pole to do much but try and get paired up with someone else.”

“Will he get you in trouble?”

“No. I made him sign the freight bill. They’ll know he loaded it. My name’s nowhere on there. He’ll be done in a week or two. You worry too much. I know how to work these situations out in my sleep. I just thought it was pretty damn funny, a guy killing freight like that. I got to say this is a real different layout than Spokane.”

“Then maybe we can go back to Spokane,” I said and looked at him. “We could probably get our old place again and I could go back to the same school.”

“Shit, I can’t go back there. I’m lucky I got the hell out of there when I did.”

“We could try.”

“It’s not going to happen. How’s breakfast?”

“I didn’t know you knew how to cook.”

“I was a cook for three years when I got out of high school.”

“Really?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

“I was,” he said. “But it’s no way to live. Getting up at four in the morning and getting hit with grease all day. People complaining to you, orders backing up. It ain’t much of a life.”

“But you get free food, right?”

“You get free food but you end up hating food, let me tell you. But there’s waitresses. You like waitresses, don’t you?”

“I guess,” I said.

“All the best women have been waitresses at one point.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” he said and finished his beer. He went to the fridge and got another and opened it.

“So what have you learned?”

“Don’t be a cook, and go out with waitresses,” I said and smiled.

“See, besides being a star athlete you’re smart too.”

Chapter 8

I left the house at five forty-five and walked down the street to the track and stood outside the gate until the guard came out of his office. I told him I had just started working for Del Montgomery and he let me through. I went over to the caf but Del wasn’t there so I went looking for him, but I couldn’t remember where his horses were. All the shedrows looked the same, and there were so many of them it was confusing. I asked a man walking by if they knew him and he pointed me to a distant corner of a shedrow and I found Del bent down on his knees trying to put leg wraps on a horse.