Lean on Pete

by Willy Vlautin

  I got dressed and went outside and visited Pete. I told him about Del’s house and his sick dog.

  “You should have seen the poor old dog,” I told Pete. “He was going bald in places and he stunk so bad it almost made me puke. Maybe his teeth are rotten, I don’t know. And Del’s place is the worst house I’ve ever been in. He’s never cleaned the toilet and he’s a pack rat and he doesn’t even have any pictures on the walls. I’d at least put up the win pictures, wouldn’t you? If it was our place, Pete, I’d paint the whole house inside and out and I’d pull out the carpet and give the dog a bath and buy a new shower curtain.”

  Pete just stood there. There was no one around, and the old man who guarded the track couldn’t see me from where he was, so I put a halter on Pete and led him out and walked him along the gravel road towards the edge of the backside where there’s a patch of grass. We stood out there and the night was clear and there were stars. He seemed to walk without any problem and I let him graze for a long time. When I took him back I still wasn’t tired so I walked up and down the shedrows. I did that until I passed an open tack room and saw a person inside watching TV.

  I looked in and the person saw me.

  “Who are you?” It was a woman. She was older, probably in her thirties. She had short brown hair and a man’s haircut. Her clothes were men’s clothes, too, but you could tell by her face and from her voice she was a woman.

  “Charley,” I told her.

  “I’m Bonnie Sparks,” she said and stood up. “Who do you work for?”

  “Del Montgomery.”

  “Del?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You related to him?”

  “No.”

  “How do you like him?”

  “He’s alright, I guess.”

  “You friends with him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t tell you, but he’s a pervert.”

  “A pervert?” I said.

  She nodded. “You’ve been staying in his tack room, haven’t you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m staying in this one right now,” she said.

  “You’re spending the night here?”

  She nodded.

  “Is it against the law?”

  “Sort of, but people do it. I’m not living here. I’m just spending the night.”

  I nodded.

  “Are you staying in Del’s?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “It’s alright if you are.”

  “You won’t tell Del?”

  “No,” she said, and then she asked me if I wanted to watch TV with her.

  I told her I did and I walked in and she unfolded a chair for me. There was a black and white TV sitting on a desk and there was a movie playing. It was an old one set in a prison in Africa and two guys were trying to escape but they got caught and tortured.

  When a commercial came on she told me to shut the door so I got up and shut it.

  “Do you smoke weed?”

  “No,” I told her.

  She lit a joint and smoked from it. She held the smoke in for a long time, then looked at me and blew the smoke in my face.

  “They say Del likes to watch women go to the toilet.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “What happened to your hand?”

  “I cut it mowing my dad’s lawn,” I told her.

  “How?”

  “How?”

  “You’re full of shit,” she said, and smiled.

  “I’m not lying.”

  “You’re not much of a liar,” she said. She went into another drawer and took out a package of cookies and set them next to the TV.

  “You can have some if you want.”

  I took two of the cookies and ate them.

  “Let me see the cut,” she said.

  “It’s not bad.”

  “I’ve seen enough cuts to know.” She looked at me again so I took the tape off, then the bandage, and she looked at it.

  “You should go to a doctor.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You can’t?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I just can’t,” I said.

  “Let me clean it out, at least,” she said. “Come here to the sink.”

  Her tack room had a sink with hot and cold water. She washed out the cut and put iodine on it and it really hurt. After that she wrapped it in a bandage and taped it. When she was done I told her about my leg. I pulled up my pant leg and showed her the bandage and she told me to take off my pants and so I did. She had me stand on a chair and put my hurt leg in the sink while she washed it out. It hurt pretty bad but I didn’t say anything. She put iodine on it and I let out a cry and she laughed, then re-bandaged and taped it. She told me it looked worse than my hand. She thought it looked pretty bad.

  Afterwards we sat back down and she kept smoking weed and we ate the whole package of cookies and watched the movie. In the end one of the convicts escapes by swimming away on a bag of coconuts and the other gives up and lives on an island and grows his own food. When it was over we left and walked about a mile to a Burger King.

  We ate inside and under the bright fluorescent lights you could see her eyes were bloodshot and you could see that she looked old. Her face was weather-beaten, wrinkled and leathery, and her hands and fingers were rough and they looked twice as old as the rest of her did. I knew I shouldn’t have spent the money, but I got two cheeseburgers and an order of fries.

  On the way back she told me she used to be a jockey. In high school she’d worked out horses at a track in Fresno. Then after she graduated she moved to Portland and worked out horses at Portland Meadows for a couple trainers in hopes that they’d put her in a race or two, but they hardly ever gave her rides. It was hard for a woman, she said. They all told her if she would keep galloping their horses she’d get her chance but when they assigned mounts each week her name was never called. She didn’t have an agent so she just had to wait until the worst of the horses came up. No real jockey would touch any of them, but she had to prove herself so she’d take anything. She’d broken her foot, her jaw, and her wrist on a couple of those horses. She ended up being a jockey on the Oregon fair circuit and rode a lot out there. She went to places all over the state.

  “I once raced in Union, which is way out in eastern Oregon, and I was in the gate and the horse reared up and flipped over backwards. I couldn’t get out and he landed on me. He got stuck, he was in a real panic. He was just a baby, a two-year-old. I didn’t know the trainer. I wouldn’t have ridden him if I knew what I know now but I was just an apprentice. I needed all the rides I could get. I broke my pelvis and punctured a lung. I healed up alright but it took a long time and the guy I was living with at the time wanted me to quit so I got a job as a cook. I worked at Red Lobster for almost seven years and then I started coming back. I couldn’t help it. I worked out horses for a while, then I started riding for a guy who makes Del seem like a good guy. He began putting me on horses and I did alright. Then there was another horse who spooked and threw me into the rail and I broke my back. The horse broke both its forelegs, which is something I’ve only seen a couple times. After that I quit trying to be a jock.”

  She kept talking about it and about all these horses that had tried to kill her or had broken down while she was working them. Then her voice changed and got sad and quiet and she told me how she got in a car wreck. How she was driving and her friend was sitting next to her and she lost control and the car flipped over and ended up in a bunch of blackberry bushes. When she woke her friend was gone. She had her seat belt on and got out alright but she couldn’t find her friend. She had to go to the road and flag someone down and then the police and fire trucks came but none of them could find her, and then finally they started cutting back the blackberries and found her dead.

  We walked past the backside until we came to the trailer park where her trailer sat. We stood the
re in the darkness and she looked at it but there wasn’t anyone in there and there wasn’t a car parked in front of it. I’m not sure why she wasn’t living there, she didn’t say anything about it. She just pointed to it and told me it was half hers, but most likely she wouldn’t see a dime out of it. After that we walked to the track and said goodbye and she went back to her tack room and I went back to Del’s.

  Chapter 13

  That night I lay awake for hours. It was almost four in the morning when I finally fell asleep. I woke to Del standing over me, kicking me. I looked at my alarm clock and the radio on it was playing, it was just after six.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  I tried to wake up but it was hard. I got out of my sleeping bag but I was hazy and I couldn’t find my pants.

  “What happened to your leg?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I told him. I found my pants and put them on.

  “Are you living here now?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “My dad’s still in the hospital and I heard some noises at the house last night. I thought someone was breaking in and I got scared and came down here.”

  “With a bag of clothes.”

  “I didn’t want to have to go back there. Our next-door neighbor, she got broken into last week.”

  “When’s your dad getting out of the hospital?”

  “Pretty soon, I think.”

  “Look, I don’t want you living here, and from now on you got to be ready at five thirty. The meet is starting this weekend. It’s Portland Meadows until Christmas. Get your shit together. I’ll be at the caf.”

  He turned around and left and I rolled my sleeping bag and set it and the rest of my things in the corner.

  After that day I found a different place to put my clothes and sleeping bag. There was a crawl space over an empty stall and I left my things there. Also I began to spend most of my time away from the track when I wasn’t working in case Del came around. Sometimes I’d sit by the river and try to sleep and other times I’d go to the library to look at magazines, or walk downtown and go in and out of shops all day. I never bought anything except once at a thrift store. I got a shirt, a pair of pants, a hotplate, and a pan. I showered in the shower room at the track and Bonnie let me wash my clothes in the washer and dryer in her tack room.

  I quit eating out altogether because I got paid less after that day Del caught me sleeping in his tack room. And then, to make things worse, one morning Del told me to put his horse Forestville on the hotwalker. He told me this while he was walking around with a fat old man he was trying to get as a client. I guess the fat man had a lot of money and wanted to buy race horses and Del was trying to convince him that he was the right guy to find and train the man’s horses. They went to the caf to talk and I finished cleaning, then I went to get Forestville. He was in his stall pacing around, and when I went in he tried to bite me. I bopped him on the nose and got the halter on but it took a while. Del said Forestville turned into one of the meanest horses he’d ever had. He said some horses just got meaner and meaner the longer they ran and the sorer they got. Forestville was like that.

  I had a hard time controlling him when I brought him out, but I thought I’d get him to the hotwalker alright. Across the way on the next shedrow two men were on the roof. They had pulled off the metal roofing and were replacing the rotten wood underneath, and as I brought the horse out I could see them trying to get a plywood sheet up there. One of the men was on the ground and the other was on the roof, but the man on the roof wasn’t strong enough to bring the sheet all the way up and he let go. The sheet fell on the ground and then the man lost his balance and dropped from the roof as well. It all made a loud crash and Forestville reared back. I held on to him the best I could but he spooked and tried to get away and I fell and let go of the rope and he sprinted off.

  When I got up I saw him running down the main gravel road and I chased after him. He nearly went into a man who was a pushing a wheelbarrow, then he turned the corner and I lost sight of him.

  Forestville stayed loose for more than five minutes. He ran onto the main track and a man who was galloping a horse finally caught him. I got Del out of the caf but by the time we got Forestville back he had a long cut on his leg and blood ran down it, pouring onto the dirt.

  Del brought him back to the stall and I followed him. Forestville was in a panic, he was lathered with sweat and breathing heavy. Del went to the tack room and came out with a syringe. He went into the stall and it took him a while but he injected Forestville with something, then came out and threw the syringe in the garbage and took his can of chew and banged it into his leg and opened it.

  “That’ll calm him down and then we can take a look at the cut.”

  He put the chew in his mouth.

  “I’m really sorry, Del.”

  He didn’t say anything at first. He just spit on the ground.

  “A guy over there fell off the roof with a big piece of plywood and Forestville spooked.”

  Del spit again.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  Then he looked at me. “You know how much this is going to cost? I’m gonna have to call the vet. It’s going to cost me more than the piece of shit is worth.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry,” Del said in a high whiny voice. “That old guy was going to sign up with me. Now he’s probably talking to Freeman or said fuck it and is driving up to Emerald Downs as we speak.”

  Del started breathing heavier. You could tell he was getting more upset.

  “I thought you were alright.” He spit on the ground again. “I took a chance on you and you paid me back by ruining one of my best quarter horses. I’ll probably have to put him down.”

  I began thinking about them killing Forestville and tears welled in my eyes. I’d caused the whole thing, I’d ruined Forestville’s life.

  Del looked over at me.

  “And now you’re gonna cry?”

  “No,” I said but I couldn’t help it and I started.

  “Stop crying,” he said.

  “I’m trying,” I said.

  We stood there silent for a long time watching as Forestville calmed down.

  “It’s alright,” Del said finally. “This shit happens. Why don’t you get out of here.”

  “Are you firing me?”

  “No,” he said. “I just don’t feel like being around you anymore today. You’re an alright kid. You just fucked up. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said, and then I left him alone.

  But at the end of that week Del only gave me twenty bucks, and when the meet started none of his horses won or were even in the money. The first race was Lean on Pete in a 350-yard claiming race. In a claiming race all the horses are for sale. They’re the horses that the owners don’t care about losing. Del said it was “like lining up a bunch fat guys to run a sprint race. It’s only fair because they’re all fat and worthless.”

  Del and I walked him from the backside to the track paddock. The paddock is inside the main grandstand building so people watching can see the horses before the race. They can see the horses come in, get saddled, and the jockey mount them. The only thing between the people and the horses is a chain-link fence. There are open stalls for each horse in the race, and a circle path so the horses can be paraded.

  Del told me to walk Pete around and I did and we fell in line with all the other horses. Then he called me back and we put a saddle on Pete and a bell rang and the jockeys came out of a room and Del talked to an old-man jockey and helped him up on Pete and guided him out of the paddock to the pony horses. After that we went inside and Del got a beer from the bar.

  Portland Meadows was a big old place. At one time it probably held twenty thousand people, but right then there were less than a thousand showing up. Del said a lot of tracks were falling apart, that no one was going anymore. Portland, Turf Paradise in Phoenix, Arapahoe Park in Denver .
. . Del had worked at all those and they were all struggling. He said Portland was the worst, though. The purses were too low, and it was hard to make any money betting when all they could come up with is five- and six-horse fields. Del said Portland was like a single-A baseball team on a never-ending slump. They were pro, but not by much.

  We went outside and stood by the rail and waited on Pete’s race. When I looked back at the building I could see the entire grandstands were closed off and Del told me they hadn’t been used in ten years.

  The track was beautiful though, and I felt good that Pete was racing on a real track and not a dirt road. I hoped his feet would feel alright and that he wouldn’t get hurt. I wished more than anything that he would win so Del would treat him right.

  The horses went into the gate and then the race began. An announcer over a loudspeaker began calling out the leading horses and his voice got more excited as the race went on. It was an amazing thing to see, all the horses running as fast as they could, and the jockeys all in different colors, whipping the horses. The only people outside watching were three drunk men yelling for their horses and a guy who was kissing his girlfriend and an old lady sitting on a bench. Pete started out alright, he was in the lead pack and the announcer said his name twice, but by halfway through he began to fade and as he passed us he was in fifth place and he stayed there.

  When the race was over Del shook his head, let out a sigh, and finished his beer. They brought the horses back to the finish line and the jockey jumped down and Del helped take the saddle off and I led Pete back to the shedrows. He seemed alright though. He wasn’t limping, he wasn’t jittery either, he just seemed tired.

  After the races I decided to go back to the house to see if I could get my dad’s toolbox. I was hoping I could sell some of the stuff in it, but when I got there his truck was gone and there was a “For Rent” sign on the lawn. The broken window had been replaced. There were no cars in the drive or lights on so I walked up and looked inside and it was empty. The sheets we had over the windows were gone. I tried my key in the lock but it didn’t work. I walked around back but there were no boxes or anything of ours still there.