Lean on Pete

by Willy Vlautin

  That night I couldn’t sleep at all. I thought about my dad’s things and what would happen to them. If they would be thrown away or given to a thrift store. I thought about him lying there dead in a freezer like on a TV show. I didn’t know what they’d do with his body, if they’d bury him or cremate him, and the more I thought about it the worse I felt. I tried to make myself lie still and I tried to think of things to relax me but none of it worked and the second the sun came up I got dressed and started working.

  When the next week’s races came, Del put Lean on Pete in a maiden 350-yard claiming race and he got second. It was a great race and even Del seemed happy about it. But later on another of his horses, Little Tramp, broke its right front leg on the stretch of a six-furlong race. He was in the back of the pack and then suddenly he stumbled and the jockey fell. The other horses kept racing but Little Tramp stopped and even from where I was I could see the bottom of his leg swinging back and forth. He stumbled around on three legs and the jockey lay on the track and he wasn’t moving.

  I was standing next to Del when it happened and he swore more than I’d ever heard him. We ran out to where the horse was. They got the jockey up and they loaded him into an ambulance and then a tractor pulling a large green box on wheels came out and they loaded the horse into it. Del said they had to put him down right after that.

  For the rest of that day Del was in a horrible mood. Every other word he said was fuck or cunt and then later on when his three-year-old Dash’s Dart came in fifth Del took him back and hosed him off and said horrible things to him. He sprayed water in his face and told him he wanted to slit his throat and then finally he threw down the hose and yelled at me and I came over and finished and he walked off.

  An hour later I found Del in the caf. I knew it was the wrong time to talk to him but I was broke. I only had a dollar-fifty left. I asked him for my pay.

  “I lost a horse today,” he said. He was sitting with two other guys I didn’t know and they were playing cards and drinking beer.

  “If you even have ten bucks I’ll take it,” I said.

  “Look, you’re sleeping in the tack room. I could charge you for that but I don’t.” He shook his head, then spit in a cup and started talking to one of the guys.

  That night I put fresh bandages on my hand and leg and walked to an Albertsons grocery store. It was a pretty big place in a strip mall. I got a basket and walked up and down the aisles and put in canned spaghetti, canned soup, and canned chili. I had eight in all when I went out the door. I started running through the parking lot carrying the basket. I looked back to see if anyone was following me and when I did a car pulled out of a space and hit me. It didn’t hurt that bad but all the cans went flying everywhere and rolled away on the asphalt.

  I got up and started running. I left the cans on the ground and ran out of the parking lot and kept going until I was in a neighborhood and saw that nobody was following me. My leg felt alright though. I checked it for bleeding but I couldn’t see any and it didn’t hurt. I walked for a while longer, then went to a mini-mart and asked the cashier where another grocery store was and he told me and I walked a long time to get to it. It was a Safeway and I went in there and got a couple plastic grocery bags and put one inside the other to make it stronger, then I went to the canned food aisle and set in six cans. I didn’t do anything after that. I didn’t look around or stall, I just went straight for the exit. As soon as I was out of there I ran as hard as I could. I turned around a couple times but no one came after me.

  That night I hid the cans in the rafters, then I lay there for a long time in the tack room but I wasn’t tired at all. I got up and went out to see Pete. I stood there and pet him in the faint light and then I went into the stall and sat down and leaned back against the wall and talked to him.

  I told him about a time when my aunt Margy and I went grocery shopping and how she let me get anything I wanted. We stacked the cart up to the top and then as we drove back to her apartment we passed a movie theater and she told me we should see a movie. She stopped the car in front of the theater and checked the time listing, then we raced home as fast as we could and put all the frozen and refrigerated groceries away and drove back to the theater and made the start of the movie.

  I told him of another time when she and I went camping. We drove way out to a place my dad and her went to as kids. We were onto a dirt road for fifteen miles or so and then we turned on another road and parked near a creek.

  “You could see a fire pit and a clearing where people had camped before us,” I told him. “There was a grass meadow. If you were there you could have eaten for a month on it. It was really nice. We set up a tent and then together we got firewood. That night she cooked us dinner on a camp stove and we sat by the fire and ate. It was really good food, too. It was macaroni and cheese with broccoli and ham. And for dessert we had s’mores. If you don’t know what that is I’m sorry. They’re good. You toast a marshmallow on the fire, then put it on a piece of chocolate and then you put that on a graham cracker. You make a sandwich out of it. The graham crackers are like the bread. Anyway, we ate, then we just sat there looking at the fire. There was no one around for miles. Just the trees and the sky and the mountains. But then we both started hearing things. Sounds of things moving and rustling around. We heard coyotes howl in the distance. We let the fire die out and we went to bed, but as we lay there we got more and more scared, and finally my aunt sat up in her sleeping bag and said, ‘Would it be alright if we left? It’s spooky out here and I’m starting to get scared.’

  “ ‘I am too,’ I told her.

  “She turned on a flashlight and we got dressed and threw everything in the back of her car and drove away and when we hit pavement she let out a long sigh.

  “ ‘I thought we were done for,’ she said and grinned. We drove back to town and ate at a diner. She let me get whatever I wanted and when we got back to her house we set up the sleeping bags in the living room and watched TV and spent the weekend camping there.”

  Pete looked at me half asleep. Once in a while he’d move his head around but that was about it. I pet him a bit longer, then put the halter on him and we walked down near the fences and I let him eat grass. After I put him back I walked up and down the shedrows. I passed the tack room where Bonnie Sparks was staying. The door was closed but I could hear a TV going and there was a light on so I knocked.

  You could hear the TV shut off and then maybe a minute passed and she answered.

  “What are you doing?” she said. Her eyes were bloodshot. She had dried mustard on the corner of her mouth, and she was dressed different. She had a red shirt on with white buttons and was wearing black jeans. She was dressed up.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Do you want to watch TV?”

  I nodded and she let me in. She turned on the black and white and we watched a show, then she told me of a party she was going to and invited me to come along with her and I told her I would.

  We walked out to the parking lot and got into an old Volkswagen Bug and she drove us pretty far out in Northeast Portland and parked us in front of a house. We went inside and everyone there was older than me, and I didn’t recognize any of them from the track. Bonnie left to use the toilet and I just stood by myself for a long time. There was music playing on a stereo, and there was a dining-room table that had a bowl of chips and some dip set out. There was also a plate of lunch meat and next to it a loaf of bread.

  I waited for her to come back but she didn’t. I stood there for maybe an hour, then I went over to the food. There was a cooler on the floor underneath the table and there were Cokes and I drank one and made a sandwich. Then I just sat down on a couch and listened to the music and watched everyone talk. Once in a while they’d look at me and I’d say hello but mostly I just sat there.

  A couple hours passed and I didn’t know what to do because I still hadn’t seen Bonnie. A few times I went outside to make sure her car was still there and it always was. Fi
nally, I went from room to room and knocked on the doors. No one answered any of them so I began opening them and looking inside. I found her. She looked asleep, sitting on the bed with her back resting against the wall. She didn’t have her shirt on. There was a naked man next to her who had a needle going into his arm. He looked up at me so I shut the door. I went back out to the party and left.

  I didn’t know where I was. I walked down one street and then another and then I was running. The thoughts in my head were swirling. I’d seen a lot of things. I’d seen my dad do things. I’d seen him having sex with women. I’d seen him bending women over our couch and ramming into them and I’d seen them in the kitchen sitting on top of him saying things to him. I’d seen him puking his guts out in the sink and snorting cocaine and smoking weed. I saw a woman passed out in the back of our car in nothing but a bra. I saw her pee on the seat. I saw a guy get a broken beer bottle pushed in his face while we were at a daytime barbecue. I’d seen my dad hit my aunt in the face and call her names when all she did was tell him to come back when he wasn’t so drunk and mean. I’d seen him wreck her car and then abandon it. I’d seen him talk to the police. I saw a kid get hit so hard that he began to foam at the mouth and go into seizures and I’d seen a kid shoot a dog in the head with a .22. I’d seen another kid tear the pajamas off his sister just so he could see her down there. She was screaming and crying. And I’d seen Del punch a horse as hard as he could and I’d seen a horse break his leg and wobble around on three while the broke one was held on by only skin.

  I kept running and running until I was so tired I couldn’t think about anything like that. It took a long time. It always takes a long time, but it always works.

  Chapter 14

  A couple days later I met a guy named Johnny Billson who had been a jockey at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields. After that he started riding at Portland Meadows before he quit altogether. He told me he hated horses more than anything, he told me that if never saw another horse in his whole life he’d be happy. Even so he said he was still drawn to being a jockey, that he still couldn’t completely shake it.

  He was a swing-shift cook at the Shari’s Restaurant down the street from Portland Meadows. He knew Del and I guess Del told him about me and Johnny hired me one morning to help him move from one apartment to another. His old place was on the second floor and his new place was across town on the third floor. So we carried all his things down to a pickup truck, drove to the new place, then carried them back up three flights of stairs. He had a lot of stuff and we had to move his record collection, which was really heavy.

  When we were done I had to ask him for the twenty dollars he said he’d pay me. He looked through his wallet, but I could see he didn’t have any money in it. He just stood there and lit a cigarette. He told me he thought he had the dough but he guessed he didn’t. He said he’d give Del the money later that week.

  “I got to buy food today,” I told him.

  “I can’t get the cash today,” he said.

  “Please,” I said.

  He looked at me, then finally said he’d feed me if I went to the back door of Shari’s during the dinner shift from Sunday to Thursday. All I had to do was ask for him. He said he’d give me three free dinners instead of the twenty. I told him okay and made him shake hands on it.

  I went to the restaurant that evening and knocked on the back door and a man answered and led me in. Johnny Billson was standing over the grill and he smiled when he saw me. He got me a Coke and made me a cheeseburger and fries. He told me to sit in the corner next to the employees’ lockers and eat. When I was done he let me have a bowl of soup and made me a sandwich to go. All in all I must have eaten there ten times and he never seemed sore about it.

  It was late July by then and football practice was to start in less than a month. I stopped by the high school and it was three times the size of my last school. It was called Jefferson High, the Democrats were their mascot. I wanted to go to school, but I knew they wouldn’t let me live on my own, I knew they’d put me in some sort of home. I decided if I couldn’t figure anything out by the start of football practice I’d ask Del if I could move in with him.

  I used my spare money to call the M. Thompsons from the list I’d written down. There was a payphone in the main grandstands at the track and I called all the numbers I had for that name in Wyoming but I never had any luck. I tried the place my aunt had worked again, Scottish Sam’s Auto Parts, but the same girl answered and told me the same thing she had before. I got on the library computer again to try and find her that way but I couldn’t. For a few nights I just lay in my sleeping bag and bawled about it. People say crying makes you feel better but it didn’t, it didn’t change anything, it just made me tired and embarrassed.

  I began buying my food at a mini-mart that was maybe a mile away. There was an Asian girl my age who worked behind the counter. She would always smile at me, and a couple times we talked and she said she was going to Jefferson High, the same school I was supposed to go. She was really good-looking and she always had her nails painted fluorescent green and when she talked she always said my name. One time she said it five times and we only talked for a couple of minutes.

  That week Del had four horses racing. Mr. High Pockets, Go Buster Go, Easter Sonny Boy, and Lean on Pete. He was in a horrible mood when he began talking about the upcoming races. It was early in the morning, the sun had barely come up and he was eating a candy bar and drinking a can of Coke. He stood there wearing jeans that were falling down and an old red flannel shirt that was stained with dried white paint.

  “All I know is with all the bullshit happening you can’t even call this a track anymore. Back in the seventies this place was at least a real track. People don’t give a shit anymore. They’d rather sit in front of a goddamn box with lights and sound effects and shove their money into it. No one wants to go to the track. They’d rather go to the fucking mall. That’s all casinos are. Longacres, that was a track. The seventies were a hell of a lot better than this. Shit, even the eighties were alright. I had some real horses back then and I had jockeys I could trust. You can’t trust anyone now. You can’t even trust the Daily Racing Form. And you can’t tell me that the Beyer number is worth a shit at this dump. I’ve spent hours trying to teach you the form and it’s like I’m pouring water onto a rock. It just bounces off and never takes. Every goddamn kid nowadays is like that. The world’s a mess, a real mess if guys like you end up running things. Did I tell you I saw that kid Luis looking through my truck the other day? And a couple weeks ago I caught Hopper siphoning gas out of it with a garden hose. I ask him what the fuck he thinks he’s doing and all he says is, ‘Del, is this your truck?’ Well he knows its my fucking truck. I let him have it. I’m an inch away from murdering his ass. Then all he says is, ‘Jesus, I swear I didn’t know this was your truck, honest.’ But he doesn’t apologize, he just walks away with five gallons of my gas and let me tell you gas ain’t cheap anymore. Nothing’s cheap. The goddamn farrier goes up, feed goes up, medicine goes up, and the purses go down. You tell me what to do.”

  “Me?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “All you ever do is ask for money and eat and I’ve never seen anyone make eating seem so goddamn unappealing. What can you tell me? I’ll tell you what you can tell me, nothing. I got an ulcer and I can’t feel my toes and I haven’t taken a decent shit in a year and all my horses are pigs.”

  I just stood there and he stared right at me and went on. He talked about how the vet was charging him too much and that the caf used expired food, and how since computers started you couldn’t win anything on horses and how his ex-wife owes him two thousand dollars and how the hot-water heater in his house was broken and how he paid a guy to fix it and how the guy took the hot-water heater back to his shop and went on vacation without fixing it. He didn’t have hot water for two weeks. He put in a chew and told me how he had to buy a brand-new one, and how they don’t make anything that lasts anymore. Then he
started talking about a woman he lived with who used to get so drunk she’d throw up in bed in her sleep. Then he told me about a brake job he got where they said they’d changed the pads but hadn’t. They said they turned the rotors but they hadn’t done that either.

  “They didn’t do a goddamn thing but I caught those lousy fuckers and what do I get? Nothing, that’s what.”

  Del kept going on like this until an old man came up to him and they started talking so I went back to cleaning stalls.

  Pete came in sixth that day, beating only one horse. Mr. High Pockets was last, Go Buster Go got fourth, and Del’s best horse, Easter Sonny Boy, came in second but got claimed.

  That night I gave Pete two apples and he ate those and kept nudging me, looking for more. He wasn’t lame but he hardly moved at all in his stall. He just stood there almost lifeless. Del had raced him three weeks in a row, plus the match races before that, and his times were getting slower each week.

  The next morning I went to Bonnie’s tack room to ask her about him. I knocked on the door and waited until she came out.

  “What time is it?” she yawned.

  “Almost six.”

  Her hair was messed up and you could see her legs. She wasn’t wearing anything but a black T-shirt. She told me to hold on and closed the door, and I could hear her in there getting dressed, then she came out in a different shirt wearing jeans and boots. We walked over to the caf and she ordered breakfast, and I sat there and watched her eat part of it, then push it away. She let the plate sit there and drank coffee and watched the TV they had going.

  “Are you done eating?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  I looked at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Would it be alright if I ate the rest of your breakfast?”

  She smiled and nodded so I took the plate and her fork and finished it. We sat there for a while longer while she drank coffee and then on the way out I bought two maple bars with my last dollar and gave one to her. We walked over to Del’s stalls and she went in and looked at Pete. She bent down and ran her hands up and down his legs.