Lean on Pete
a novel
Willy Vlautin
Dedication
For Lee
Epigraph
It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
John Steinbeck
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
About the Book
Read On
Praise for Lean on Pete
Also by Willy Vlautin
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
When I woke up that morning it was still pretty early. Summer had just begun and from where I lay in my sleeping bag I could see out the window. There were hardly any clouds and the sky was clear and blue. I looked at the Polaroid I had taped to the wall next to where I slept. It shows my aunt and me sitting by a river; she has on a swimsuit. She’s my dad’s sister and she looks like him, with black hair and blue eyes and she’s really thin. In the photo she’s holding a can of soda and smiling as I sit next to her. She has her arm around me. My hair’s wet and I’m smiling. That was when we all lived in Wyoming. But it had been four years since I’d seen her, and I didn’t even know where she lived anymore.
My dad and I had just moved to Portland, Oregon, and we’d been there for a week. We didn’t know anybody. Two days before my school year was done we packed the truck and moved out from Spokane. We brought our kitchen table and four chairs, dishes and pots and pans, our clothes and TV, and my dad’s bed. We left all the rest.
Neither of us had been to Portland before. My dad just knew a guy who told him of a job opening as a forklift driver for Willig Freight Lines. He applied for it and got it. They interviewed him on the phone and gave him the job right then because at the time he was a forklift driver for TNT Freight Lines in Rock Springs and he’d done that sort of work for years. We lived in a motel for a few days, then he rented us a house a mile from where he worked. I’m not sure why he wanted to leave Spokane. I told him I didn’t want to go, I begged him that I didn’t want to go, but he said he’d rather go to prison and get the shit kicked out of him every day than spend any more time in a dump like Spokane.
The house we rented had two bedrooms. There was a kitchen with an electric stove and a fridge, and there was another room that was empty except for a TV we set on a chair. There was a bathroom that had a tub, sink, and toilet, and there was a back room where you could store things and where there was plumbing and electricity so you could put in a washer and dryer if you had them.
Our place was in a neighborhood of small, rundown houses next to a trailer park. The houses were built in the forties. It was called Delta Park. The streets had trees lining them and we had a backyard. Since it was a real house my dad promised we’d get a barbecue and then a dog. I didn’t care about the barbecue but I really wanted a dog and hoped this time I would get one.
I lay there for a while longer and tried to go back to sleep but I couldn’t so I got up. I put on a pair of shorts and a flannel shirt and my running shoes. It was Saturday and most of the cars in the neighborhood were still parked in front of their houses when I left and started jogging down the street.
Instead of turning left by the mini-mart like I had done every other day I turned right and ran underneath a railroad bridge. I made my way along the road and passed a series of warehouses, a machine shop, a wrecking yard, and an auto parts store. I kept going and went under another bridge and when I came to the other side I saw, in the distance, a horse track. I’d never seen one before and really the only horses I’d ever seen besides on TV were when I once went to a rodeo with my dad and some friends of his. But I always liked horses. Besides dogs, they’re my favorite.
It wasn’t even 7 a.m., but the backside of the track was already going. The whole area was fenced off in chain link and topped with barbed wire. There were at least a dozen huge buildings that housed the horses. I could see it all from the road. The place went on for acres and people and horses were coming and going out of everywhere.
I ran alongside the fence on a two-lane road. I passed a maintenance shop where two water trucks sat with “Portland Meadows” painted on them. I saw two men welding and a mechanic working on a truck. I passed the main dirt track and saw horses running on it. Then I came to the main grandstand. In front of the building was a huge empty parking lot. The building itself was old and white and green. On the front of it read “Portland Meadows” in huge red neon letters. Next to it was a galloping neon race horse.
I stopped and went up to the building, to the entrance where big glass doors were, but I didn’t go in. I just rested for a minute, then did forty push-ups and started running again.
I went for a couple miles before I stopped near a huge river. Off the banks were docks, and the docks held boats and rows of floating homes. I sat there and watched a tug boat push cargo and then I saw a speedboat and a red sailboat and then a few jet skis went racing by, chasing each other around.
I stretched out, then ran easy and slow back to the house. Even so I was dead tired by the time I got there. I went in the front door and to the kitchen to get a glass of water and saw a woman I’d never seen. She was cooking eggs and bacon and she was wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.
“Who are you?” I asked her.
She turned around and smiled. “Who are you?” she said back. She was old, maybe in her forties. There was a cigarette going in a tray on the kitchen table, and she went over to it.
“I’m Charley Thompson.”
“You’re Ray’s kid?” she said, and smoked from the cigarette.
“Yeah,” I said. You could see her nipples coming through the shirt she was wearing. Her underwear was black, and it was almost see through. She had red hair and her face had freckles all over it. She wasn’t good-looking.
“You look just like him,” she said.
“But I’m gonna be taller,” I said.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m almost as tall as him already.”
“I’m cooking breakfast,” she said. “Do you want some?”
“Where did you get the food?”
“I made your dad go to the grocery store. All you guys had in the fridge was beer, milk, and Cap’n Crunch. I bet the cereal is yours.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You don’t have to keep cereal in the fridge, you know.”
“There’s cockroaches here.”
She nodded, then went back to the stove.
“I’m going to get a glass of water, okay?”
“It’s your house, isn’t it?” she said, and looked back again and smiled.
I didn’t know what to think but I was hungry. I got a glass of water and sat at the table and waited. After
a while my dad came out of the bathroom in his underwear and walked into the kitchen and took a beer from the fridge and sat down. He took a pack of cigarettes off the table and lit one.
“You meet Lynn?” he said, and yawned.
I nodded.
Lynn looked around and smiled at him.
“She’s a secretary in the front office where I work.” He opened his beer and drank from it. “How far did you go running?”
“Pretty far. Did you know there’s a horse track down the street?”
“I’ve driven past it,” he said.
“They were working out when I ran by. I saw maybe fifty horses.”
My dad sat back in his chair and didn’t say anything. He was looking at the woman and smoking. He was six feet or so and he was skinny and had black hair. His hair was combed back and wet. His chest had this sort of caved-in look to it, and he had a big scar on his leg from burning himself on a motorcycle. But he had a good face, it was kind and he had dark blue eyes and he smiled a lot. Everyone said he was good-looking.
Lynn stood there with her back to us. Her ass was hanging out of her underwear and I looked down at her legs and on her ankle was a tattoo of a flower, and coming out of the flower was some sort of snake.
We all ate breakfast sitting around the table. I kept looking at her and thinking about her underwear and her nipples pressing through her shirt and when I did she seemed pretty nice, she seemed alright.
When breakfast was over they went into his room to get dressed. My dad came out a few minutes later and sat across from me at the table and put on his boots.
“Is she your new girlfriend?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
“Is she gonna be?”
“I don’t know.”
“I like her better than Marlene.”
“Marlene was alright.”
“She was mean,” I said. “She couldn’t cook either.”
“Lynn and I just work together. Plus she’s married.”
“She’s married?”
“Well, she’s separated from her husband. Supposedly he’s a Samoan.” He leaned over and whispered, “He’ll probably chop my head off with a machete.”
“What’s a Samoan?” I asked.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Don’t they teach you anything in school?”
“They teach me some things,” I said.
“Samoans are big fuckers. They play football sometimes. You should know that. There’s a few pro ones here and there. They’re tough and they love to fight. They come from the island of Samoa in the Pacific. They’re the size of mountains.”
“Is he that big?”
“She says he is, but I’ve never seen him. She says he’s fucking nuts. This guy at work said the same thing.”
“Is he gonna be mad?”
“She said he moved in with a stripper, so who knows.”
“Will he come here?”
“You mean to get me?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Hell, I’m just talking, Charley. He doesn’t know where we live. Don’t worry about him. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“What did you do last night?”
“Watched TV.”
“Was there anything good on?” He finished his beer and lit another cigarette.
“Not really.”
He took his wallet out and gave me ten dollars.
“Sorry I can’t give you any more.”
“I don’t need any more.”
“You gonna be okay on your own today?”
As I nodded Lynn walked back out into the main room dressed in jeans and a black shirt. She had put her hair back in a pony tail and was wearing dark red lipstick. She went up to my dad and he ran his hand across her ass and then they left.
Chapter 2
I moved the TV into my room and lay on my sleeping bag and watched it until late afternoon. Then I walked to a main road and stayed on it until I came to a lady and a man walking down the street. I asked them if they knew where a movie theater was and the guy told me to walk two miles down the same road and so I did.
The theater was in a part of town called St. Johns. It was lined with stores and bars, and there were a couple of taquerias and a pharmacy that had an old-fashioned diner in it. There was a bike shop, a dollar store, and a workingman’s clothing store. I went into a used bookstore and a Salvation Army thrift store, then I bought a couple tacos and sat down against the wall of a closed-down office and ate.
When the time came for the seven o’clock showing I went inside and sat through two movies. One was about an undercover spy who gets chased all around Europe and the other was about a group of women who get trapped in a cave. The women were good-looking but it was a horror movie and I can never sleep after horror movies.
It was dark out when I left the theater. I walked around for another half-hour or so, then sat back down where I had eaten earlier. I saw a group of girls my age walk by, but they didn’t notice me. One of the girls had long blonde hair and she was really good-looking. They were all laughing and having a good time. It wasn’t much after that when I saw a fight across the street. Two men came out of a bar called Dad’s and started hitting each other. They were near a street light. One man was young, maybe in his twenties, and the other looked old. He had gray hair and a big bald spot on the top of his head. The younger man hit the old man so hard he fell to the ground. Both of them were dressed in work clothes. They had on the same orange-colored T-shirts with the same writing on the back. Then the younger guy kicked the old man in the head and he was about to do it again when people from inside the bar came out and stopped him.
They pushed him against the window of the bar and held him. The old man didn’t move from the ground. He just lay there still. An older woman came out of the bar and went to him and kneeled down. You could hear her crying and screaming. I just sat there across the street and watched. A police car pulled up and after that an ambulance. I watched the medics work on the old man and then put him in the ambulance and drive away. The young guy was still there but by then they had handcuffs on him and they were putting him in the back of the police car. I watched until they drove off, then I got up and left. I started off walking, but everything I’d seen that night had made me nervous and before I knew it I was running.
Back at the house I made sure all the windows and doors were locked. I turned on all the lights and got in my sleeping bag and watched TV with the sound down low. Around three or so I got up and ate a couple bowls of Cap’n Crunch before I finally knocked off around dawn.
When I woke up again it was past noon. I looked in my dad’s room but he wasn’t there, and his truck wasn’t in the driveway. I drank a glass of water and did a hundred sit-ups, then I put on my running clothes and left. I turned right like I did the day before and went under the railroad bridge and when I came out the other side I could see Portland Meadows in the distance.
I ran to the grandstand parking lot and did four laps around it before I stopped. I sprinted the last one and by the end I was so tired I could hardly stand. Then I went inside the big glass doors and saw a bar and a food stand and a souvenir shop. There were rows and rows of tables with people sitting at them watching huge TVs with races showing on them. I went outside but there were no horses on the track and I asked an old man why, and he said they only worked out in the mornings and that the real races started in a month or so. I went back inside and stayed there until the food stand closed and the bar closed and the TVs were shut down and I was told to leave.
After that I went to the big shopping center that was next to the track. It had a sporting goods place, a pet shop, and a home improvement store. For a couple hours I walked up and down the aisles of those places, then I went to a mini-mart and bought a can of chili and a can of SpaghettiOs and walked back to the house.
It was night by the time I got there and my dad still wasn’t home. I moved the TV into the kitchen and opened the
can of SpaghettiOs and heated it on the stove and watched Sunday night TV until I got tired. I moved the TV back to my bedroom and watched from my sleeping bag but the same thing happened that night that happened every night I was alone. I began hearing things, and I got nervous and made myself get up and check the windows and the locks on the door. I turned all the lights off and looked outside. Then I turned them back on and looked in every room. After that I wasn’t even tired anymore. I lay back down and watched TV and finally fell asleep around 5 a.m.
The next day I got up and finished unpacking. I had three boxes and a plastic garbage bag full of clothes. I took the clothes out and laid them on my sleeping bag and folded them. I had two pairs of Levi’s, a couple long-sleeve shirts, four T-shirts, five pairs of underwear, and a half dozen pairs of socks, a sweater, and two jackets. One was a down parka for when it was really cold and the other was an old canvas work coat my dad had given me.
Two of the boxes had books in them, and in the last one was a clock my dad had gotten me from San Francisco. It was red and sparkly and had a picture of a cable car in the center of it. There were also two football trophies wrapped in T-shirts. One was an award for the best freshman defensive back from my high school in Spokane and the other was older, from Pop Warner football. It was just a normal team trophy that everyone got but I liked it just the same. I cleaned them both off and put them on the window sill.
I broke down the boxes and stuck them in my closet and watched TV for the rest of the day. I left the house in the afternoon and walked towards St. Johns. It was near dusk when I got there and I spent my last four dollars there on a burrito from a taqueria. I sat against the wall of the same closed-down office I had before and ate.
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