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.
More Praise for Willy Vlautin and The Free
“Working in the great American tradition of John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos while recalling the works of authors as diverse as Dalton Trumbo and Philip K. Dick, Willy Vlautin has delivered a fiercely relevant novel that manages to be both admirably bighearted and bravely unsentimental. Vlautin is one of our country’s best writers, and this is his best novel.”
—Adam Langer, author of Crossing California
and The Thieves of Manhattan
“Willy’s last novel, Lean on Pete, was one of my favorite reads of the last decade. I might love The Free even more. ‘Cinematic minimalism’ in the grand tradition of Fat City, Ironweed, and the works of the great Raymond Carver. Beautifully drawn characters that will stick with you long after you’ve finished reading it.”
—Patterson Hood, songwriter and musician, Drive-By Truckers
“Few contemporary western writers tell the truth with the unerring eye of Willy Vlautin, a literary realist whose emotionally charged characters achieve that rarest of goals in fiction—to tell a great story, and The Free is Vlautin at his best.”
—Craig Johnson, author of the Walt Longmire mysteries,
the basis for A&E’s hit series Longmire
“The broken, the poor, and the desperate fill this book—with dignity. This is a story of our times—about the lack of work, the cost of health insurance, the demonizing of war, and the damage to life in the working class. Vlautin writes cleanly, beautifully about the people who hang on despite odds. This is a fine novel . . . bounded by courage and kindliness.”
—Kirkus
“This strong fourth novel from Portland singer/songwriter and author Vlautin (The Motel Life) follows three protagonists who find the strength to make the best of difficult situations. . . . Despite the grim trajectory of Leroy’s story, Pauline and Freddie’s innate decency adds a refreshingly positive note to Vlautin’s character-driven novel.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Reading Willy Vlautin is like jumping into a clear, cold lake in the middle of summer. His prose is beautifully spare and clean, but underneath the surface lies an incredible depth, with all kinds of hidden stories and emotions resting in the shadows.”
—Hannah Tinti
“Willy Vlautin is the most exciting young writer I’ve read in a long time, matching desolate emotional landscapes with stark physical ones. That he makes me care so deeply about people scraping to get back from the bottom is a testament to his power. I can’t recommend him highly enough.”
—Tom Franklin
“I love Willy Vlautin’s novels. Downbeat and plaintive as they are, the tenderness holds on like the everlasting arms. . . . Willy’s voice is pure and his stories universal. He never loses hope or heart and I believe every word he’s written.”
—Barry Gifford
“This guy writes like the secret love child of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor—just plain, true, tough, irony-free, heartrending American fiction about people living in the third-world sections of our country.”
—Michael Gruber
“The comparisons with Steinbeck and Carver are richly deserved, yet Vlautin is a truly original voice . . . one of the best writers in America.”
—Mark Billingham
“Slighter than Carver, less puerile than Bukowski, Vlautin nevertheless manages to lay claim to the same bleary-eyed territory, and surprisingly—perhaps even unintentionally—to make it new.”
—John Wray, New York Times Book Review
Also by Willy Vlautin
Fiction
The Motel Life
Northline
Lean on Pete
Credits
Cover design by Richard Ljoenes
Cover photograph © CJ/LatentSeen
Copyright
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the excerpt from Dr. James Dobson’s Family TalkTM newsletter “Marriage Under Fire,” July 2011.
THE FREE. Copyright © 2014 by Willy Vlautin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-227674-2
EPUB Edition FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN 9780062276759
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The Free (P.S.) Page 24