Lean on Pete (7 page)

I went back out to the waiting room and watched TV until I fell asleep in the chair. When I woke it was hours later and I stood up and got a drink from a water fountain, then went to the bathroom and washed my face. I went back to his room and looked in on him, but he was still asleep so I went to the cafeteria and ate. Then finally, in the afternoon, a nurse came out to where I was watching TV and told me he was awake and led me in to him.

“Are you okay?” he said softly when he saw me. “Did he hurt you?” His lips were chapped and his face was swollen and pale. He had sweat on his brow. He looked bad off.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Nothing happened. Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not yet, they got me pretty doped up.”

“But you’ll be alright?”

“I hope so.”

“Do you think the guy will be back?”

“Which guy?”

“The guy that threw you through the window?”

“No, I’ll tell the police about him. He’s a big fucker, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then, just like that, I started bawling.

“Don’t worry about him, okay?”

“What am I going to say to the police? They’ll take me away if they know no one else is in the house.”

“If you see cops just go the other way until I can get my head together, alright?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry that guy threw you through the window.”

“Me too,” he said. “You don’t have to stay here with me. You can go back to the house if you want.”

“The house scares me.”

He nodded.

“I nailed a sleeping bag over the window.”

“That’s good thinking. It’ll be alright, Charley. It’ll take a bit but I’ll be alright. My clothes should be here somewhere. Get my wallet if it’s still here. Take the money out of it. I might be stuck here for a while. I’m having a hard time staying awake, alright?”

“Okay,” I said and then he closed his eyes.

I got up and went through the drawers and found his wallet and his car keys. He had seven dollars and I put that in my pants pocket and shut the drawer. I sat there for most of the day and into the night and then they made me leave. It was late by then and I walked miles before I found my way back to the house. I put the TV in my bedroom and locked myself in. I hammered nails into the floor by the door to keep it shut and I slept in my clothes.

When I woke up it was four-thirty in the morning. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I wanted to go back to the hospital and see if my dad was alright, but I had less than twenty dollars and I knew I’d have to try and keep the job with Del. So instead of going to the hospital I went to the track.

Chapter 10

It was still dark out when I got there and Del’s horses were in their stalls and hardly anyone was around. I looked in on Pete and pet him and whenever I’d stop he’d move towards me and stomp and shake his head. I turned on the light in his stall and went in. It was the same as all the others. The floor was covered in straw and there were no windows, just three walls of painted brick that was worn and covered in dust, and a gate keeping him in. There was a bulb hanging from the roof rafters, and an automatic drinking fountain for him to get water. I scratched his neck and when I did his lips quivered. There were scars on his face and long scars on his rear. I’d asked Del what they were from and he said most were from when Pete was laid off and put back in a herd. Horses are always arguing, Del said. But the scars around his leg were from when he’d reared back in a starting gate and threw the jockey and got himself cut up. Del said Pete used to be full of it, that he used to be a handful, but now he was tired out and had thrown in the towel.

I stayed in there with him and kept petting him, then I turned off the stall light and sat down on the ground. I told him about the Samoan and my dad in the hospital and about what had happened. I told him how there was blood and glass everywhere and how in the hospital there were tubes running in and out of my dad and how I didn’t know what I was going to do if he wasn’t alright. How I wished he and I could just disappear. We could live in a place where there was no one else around and it would be warm with miles of grass for him to eat and no one would ever make him run. There would be a barn and a house and the house would be lined with food from floor to ceiling and there would be a TV and a huge swimming pool.

It was almost six o’clock when Del showed up. I saw him walking down the shedrow. “What are you doing here?” he said.

“Getting ready to work.”

“You weren’t here yesterday.”

“I couldn’t work yesterday,” I said.

“You can’t choose the days you work for me. I tell you when to work, you don’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I got enough problems.”

“I couldn’t work yesterday. I wanted to.”

“Just go home,” he said.

“My dad’s in the hospital.”

“No shit?” He smiled and gave me a look.

“And I don’t have your phone number or I would have called you. I’ve asked you for it. Remember that day in the truck? You told me I didn’t need it.”

“Your dad isn’t in the hospital. That’s a load of shit.”

“You can call down there if you want.”

He took his fingers and pulled the chew from his mouth and threw it on the ground.

“What hospital?”

“Good Samaritan.”

“I’m gonna call down there,” he said and paused. “Here’s the deal. You can work for me but I ain’t paying you for this week. I’ll pay you next week same as usual but you got to learn a lesson. Take it or leave it.”

“I want to keep working,” I said, but I was really mad at him. I began to hate him. “I need your phone number though. My dad really is in the hospital so I’ll call you the night before in case I can’t come in.”

“I guess that’s fair enough,” Del said and shook his head. He reached for a pen in his shirt pocket and took an old receipt from his wallet and wrote his number on it.

“I’m going to put three on the hotwalker so you’ll have three stalls to clean right off.” He took a can of Copenhagen from his pants and put in a fresh chew and began getting the horses out and we hardly talked the rest of the day.

When I got off work I went back to the house but even in the daylight it made me nervous. I went up the drive where my dad’s truck sat parked, and unlocked the door.

“Is there anyone in here?” I asked and stuck my head in. “Hello?”

I stood there for a minute but I didn’t hear anything so I went inside. I walked through each room and checked the windows to make sure they were still locked and I checked that the sleeping bag still covered the broken window alright. Then I locked myself in the bathroom and took a shower. After that I left. I took the bus downtown and went to the library and found a Wyoming phone book. I looked in the white pages under the city of Rock Springs for my aunt’s name, Margy Thompson. There were a couple M. Thompsons but there were no Margys. I wrote down all the numbers that were near it and then I wrote down all the Thompsons in the whole state, dividing it up by the city.

I remembered one of the jobs she had at an auto parts store in Rock Springs. It was a place called Scottish Sam’s and I got the number for that as well. I put the list in my pocket and decided I’d try to find somebody’s phone that had long distance and if I couldn’t I’d wait until I got paid and use a payphone. After that I used one of the library computers and put in her name and the state of Wyoming but nothing came of it.

Five years before that we were living in Green River and she was living in Rock Springs, and we used to visit her and she would visit us. But after a while my dad and her didn’t like each other. Then when we moved to Spokane he told me she had moved as well but he wasn’t sure where. Before that she’d always sent me cards and things like that but it stopped. I knew she didn’t know where we were ’cause when we moved to Spokane we didn’t leave a forwarding address, we just snuck out. We didn’t even have a phone for the first year.

When I left the library I walked to the hospital but my dad was asleep and he wouldn’t wake up. I stayed with him for a couple hours, then the nurse came and she told me he wasn’t doing very well. She said a doctor would be by to talk to me, but I never saw one. I just sat there and got more and more worried. It was midnight when I was told to leave and I walked all the way back to the house.

Everything was the same when I got there but just being inside made me so nervous that I changed into my work clothes, rolled up my sleeping bag, and took it and my alarm clock and headed towards the track.

The backside was shut down and dark except for a few overhead lights shining off the buildings. The main guard was there sitting in his shack so I walked along the chain link until I couldn’t see him and found a place to crawl under. When I got to the other side I went as fast as I could to the shedrows and in near darkness went past the horses in their stalls until I came to the end and Del’s horses.

His tack room sat next to Pete’s stall and was shut with a padlock that I had the combination to. I opened it and went inside in the dark, closed the doors behind me, and turned on the light. I plugged in my alarm and set it for
5
a.m. and laid my sleeping bag down on the floor and turned off the light. It was completely black in the room and every once in a while I could hear a horse move or kick or make a noise but it all eased my mind more than worried it and before I knew it I had conked out and the alarm was going off.

When I got up I hid my things behind a metal filing cabinet. The morning wasn’t cold and I walked out into the shedrow. I locked the tack room and visited Pete and said good morning to him. I pet him for a long time and he just stood there calm and still and I told him that I was living next door to him now and that I’d visit him every night. When I’d woken up enough I walked over to the caf. I went inside to the bathroom and washed my face and combed my hair with my hand. I went to the counter and ordered breakfast.

It was just past five thirty when I went back to Del’s horses. I put a halter on Pete and led him out to the hotwalker and cleaned his stall. I did the same for all the horses and by the time Del showed up at six forty-five I was almost done.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said in a huff when he saw me. He was wearing jeans and there was a wet spot around his crotch like he’d pissed in his pants.

“I’m cleaning out the stalls,” I told him.

“Don’t ever start before me getting here.”

“Okay,” I said.

“What are you doing tonight and tomorrow morning?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m heading to a place near Richland, Washington. I’m leaving in a couple hours. They don’t start the race until five. I can’t drive long distances at night or I’d come back. We’ll get up in the morning and be back here by ten. You want to go?”

“Do I get paid if I go?”

“I’ll pay you.”

I didn’t want to go with him, I really didn’t. I wanted to go back to the hospital but I didn’t know what else to do because I needed the money to get by on.

“Okay,” I told him.

“Finish cleaning out the stalls and then be ready to go. We’re taking Lean on Pete and Broken Blue. We’ll load them in an hour or so.” I nodded and Del turned around and walked away. I finished working, then I called the hospital from the caf phone, but my dad wasn’t awake and they didn’t say anything different about how he was so I just left a message with his nurse telling him I would be gone for a day if he woke up and wondered where I was.

We loaded the horses and drove to a trailer park. We pulled to the side of the road and Del shut off the engine. He turned on the radio and found a station and we sat there for a while until a guy came up to the passenger side door and knocked on the glass.

“Let him in,” Del said, and so I opened the door.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“I was down the street,” the man said and threw a duffel bag in the bed of the truck. I moved to the center of the seat, next to Del, and the man got in and set a paper sack on the floor.

“This is Charley,” Del said and looked at me.

“Hey, Charley,” the man said, and he put out his hand and we shook. “My name is Harry Durand.”

“He’s too fat to be a real jockey anymore,” Del said and laughed.

“That’s the only reason I’d work with you,” Harry said back. He was short and thin and dressed like a cowboy with boots and jeans and a Western shirt. He wore a baseball cap and I’d guess he was probably in his thirties. He had a long scar on his chin and a missing side tooth.

“Are you related to Del?”

“No,” I said. The truck and trailer lurched forward.

“I can smell you already,” Del said. “If you get too drunk to ride I’ll leave you out there.”

“I ain’t drunk. I spilled a beer on myself. I was eating a bag of chips and reading the paper and I reached for my can without looking and it went all over my lap.”

“What the hell are you eating chips for?”

“A guy’s got to eat.”

“Where were you?”

“The Chinese Village.”

“What time did you go there?”

“I was already done working, if that’s what you’re asking. You’re like an old lady.”

We got on the highway and stayed in the right lane and Del turned up the radio. Harry looked out the window and everyone was quiet. Then after a while Del took a can of Copenhagen off the dash and opened it.

“I’ve never seen a guy chew as much as you.”

“Well,” Del said, shook his head, and paused. “Look, I ain’t gonna have this conversation with you. I’m tired of it.”

Harry laughed. “Then I’m gonna have a beer. You want a chew and I want a beer. You want a can of beer, Del?”

“Might as well,” he said.

“What about the kid?”

“He’s under age,” Del said.

Harry handed a beer to Del, then knocked me on the side. “How about it?”

“No thanks,” I said.

They both drank their beer and then they had another and I fell asleep. It wasn’t until we were in Umatilla that I woke up. We were parked at a gas station. Both Del and Harry were gone. I got out of the truck and could hear banging coming from the horse trailer. I walked behind it but I couldn’t see anything really. It rang out and the trailer rocked and everyone around the station noticed.