Homestretch

by Paul Volponi

  In between jobs one time, when it was just Mom working, Dad was half drunk, sanding the paint off a beat-up kitchen chair.

  “Ever feel like you’re not good enough, Gas?” he asked as I got home from school. “Like there’s a ton of shit out there, and you can’t figure out how most of it gets dumped on you?”

  Hearing that was like looking into a mirror, and I was too busy staring at myself to answer.

  “Your mother’s the only one who’s ever believed in me. I’d be nothing without her,” he said. “But women, they dump little losers like me for somebody better every day. That’s the world. That’s reality.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I said, feeling like I had to defend her.

  “Who knows? Maybe you’re right. Her grandparents on both sides are from Spain. They follow tradition there—all about family. I don’t care if they speak Spanish the same as shit-hole Mexico. They’re nothing like them beaners from across the border,” he said. “Anyway, you got nothing to worry about. She’s your flesh and blood. She can never ditch you.”

  That was the first time I ever grabbed hold of the idea that he was jealous of my relationship with Mom.

  When Dad got that job at the stables, Mom wanted me to learn how to ride. At first I was too scared to get up on a horse. They were so much bigger than me, with a mind of their own.

  I guess Mom saw that.

  “I haven’t done this since I was a little girl,” she said, hopping onto a horse that Dad had saddled for me. “Tell me, Gas. You gonna let your old mother show you up?”

  That practically shamed me into it.

  So I pulled up all my nerve, climbing onto the next one.

  Dad walked us both around the riding ring.

  I’d hardly ever seen Dad like that before. He was calm and in control, and those two big horses acted like they loved him to death. He’d nicker to them softly—chha, chha— and they’d just follow him anywhere.

  Mom was smiling in the saddle next to me, enjoying every second of it. And after my heart stopped racing, I did too.

  I looked down from on top of that horse at everything around me, and it was the tallest I’d ever been in my life.

  The flatbed hit a bump, and my eyes landed back on that first beaner. That’s when he looked right at me to talk.

  “Nacho,” I thought I heard him say, tapping his chest.

  And I nearly laughed in his face at that.

  “Mis hermanos—Anibal y Rafael,” he said, pointing to the other two. “Me—brothers.”

  I just nodded my head with the vibrations of the truck and never even thought about telling him my name.

  The fourth beaner traveling with those brothers was much older. At first I figured he was their father or uncle. But they never looked at him once like he meant anything to them.

  That last beaner was twice as filthy as the other three, with a scruffy beard that the flies from the chickens were nesting in. And when he finally woke up, he started drinking from a small bottle of brown whiskey.

  “To Amereeeca ‘n’ da money!” he hollered, raising his bottle.

  Then he started laughing out of control, slapping Nacho’s chest for him to celebrate too.

  Neither Nacho or his brothers looked happy about it.

  I couldn’t tell if that beaner was drunk or just plain crazy.

  “Los caballos americanos!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Y los caballerizos mexicanos!”

  Except for the “American” and “Mexican” parts, I had no idea what that gibberish meant.

  The next time he went to slap at Nacho, the three of them grabbed him hard. The bottle went flying up into the air, bouncing off the top of the truck’s cab.

  I heard it shatter onto the highway, and the truck driver blasted his horn.

  WHOOOOOOO!

  The chickens flew into a frenzy, clucking and pecking at one another.

  That lunatic beaner was buried at the bottom of the pile now, with them all cursing in Spanish. And I was worried that one of them might pull out a box cutter or a switchblade.

  The driver got off the highway at the next exit, rolling down an incline and stopping at the first light on the service road.

  He came around back and pulled down the middle row of cages, waving a Louisville Slugger.

  “Let’s go, you damn Mexicans!” he screamed, like he’d smash their heads to squash. “We’re close enough! Find your own way from here! Out! Out!”

  He didn’t need to speak any Spanish because that baseball bat was doing all the talking.

  I pressed my back up against the cages as they filed past me, jumping off the truck.

  “You too! You’re no better than them!” the driver yelled at me.

  Hearing that was nearly the same as getting smacked in the mouth with that bat.

  I wanted to tell that driver how I was just like him and should have been riding up front in the cab all along. I wanted to beg him to leave me off anywhere else in the world except next to those beaners.

  But he was as angry as Dad at his worst, without even drinking. And I didn’t want to risk hearing what else he might say.

  He drove off, leaving us stranded on the corner of Lost and Nowhere, sandwiched between the highway overpass, a fenced-off soccer field, and a little park with picnic tables at the very beginning of some neighborhood of identical single-family houses.

  Those stupid beaners stood there arguing with one another.

  The spit was flying everywhere, until the one who’d been drinking raised his middle finger to the rest of them and me.

  “Putos grandes!” he sneered, bringing his hands apart wide.

  Then he left. I watched him stagger away, crisscrossing the solid yellow lines in the street back toward the overpass.

  Right then I couldn’t have cared less if some sheriff’s deputy came speeding from the opposite direction with his lights flashing and siren blasting, flattening his ass into Mexican roadkill.

  The sun was blazing hot, so I headed for a tree and some shade inside that park.

  Nacho and his brothers were busy at a corner pay phone, before they came over to where I was.

  “Change, por favor?” Anibal asked, with the others nudging him forward. “Please, señor. Change?”

  Those beaners didn’t even have a dollar bill to trade. They were looking for a handout, and that pissed me off beyond belief.

  I dug deep into my front pocket, then flung a fistful of dimes and nickels at them.

  “Here, fuckos!” I shouted. “Like I’m not broke enough for you!”

  Then I watched them pick through the grass and dirt for every last one. And everything Dad had ever said about them taking our jobs and our money echoed inside my head.

  I was trying to make a plan for myself when Nacho came running back, with his brothers still on the phone.

  “Dónde? Where is—here?” he asked, out of breath.

  That’s when it hit me for real that I had no idea where I was.

  So I just stared at him cold and blank, without even blinking.

  Rafael went up to a car at a red light and must have got the answer, because he sprinted back to Anibal, who was holding the phone, telling him something.

  For the next three or four hours I sat underneath that tree drawing in the dirt with a stick, wondering if Dad knew I was gone yet, or if he even cared. Nacho and his brothers spent most of that time staring down the service road, like some magic carpet for beaners was about to come sailing through.

  Only, I was wishing it would be the dogcatcher instead.

  The cars that drove past mostly had Lone Star State license plates. But I was seeing more and more cars with Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana tags too. So I figured I was close to the northeastern tip of Texas, where all those states practically met. But it bothered me bad that those beaners probably knew exactly where we were and I didn’t.

  I wasn’t about to ask them or anybody else.

  It was closing in on dinnertime and I
was still stranded in that park, twenty yards from Nacho and his brothers, like there was an invisible string tied between us.

  My stomach was grumbling, so I broke down and bought myself an ice cream sundae and a soda off a white truck with jingling bells. That left me with just three lousy bucks to my name. But I enjoyed every bit of that food in front of those starving beaners, who’d been sucking water from a fountain and eating shriveled figs off a tree.

  A few joggers showed up, along with some parents bringing their young kids to the park’s playground after work.

  Most of them were staring at us.

  “For Christ’s sake! You all gonna pitch a tent and live here?” barked a man walking a big German shepherd. “This ain’t a refugee camp!”

  I knew it was a matter of time before somebody called the cops.

  Then, just as the sun was sinking low, a rusted horse trailer pulled up to the curb, and those beaners shot up at attention like they’d been drafted into the Mexican army.

  The man who got out was tall, and as thin as a whip, leaning off to one side. He had on mirrored sunglasses, with a toothpick rolling around in his mouth, and there was a small alligator over his shirt pocket.

  “There’s supposed to be four of you!” he yelled. “Four! Can’t you fucking count, muchachos?”

  Nacho called out to me in a panicked voice, “Come! Trabajo! Work—money!”

  I didn’t know what work those beaners had waiting—the kind that was worth crossing the border and riding all this way surrounded by stinking chickens. But it was probably better than what was waiting for me if I had to go crawling back home, or if the cops dragged me there.

  Besides, I was going to need money to survive, to put a roof over my head. And just like Dad, I was unemployed.

  So I walked over and let that man grill me up and down through those mirrored glasses, like I was a week-old burrito at a 7-Eleven he was thinking about stomaching.

  I just stood in front of him with my mouth shut tight.

  When he finally nodded his chin, I climbed into the back of that empty horse trailer behind Nacho and his brothers. It was almost pitch-black in there, and I stood up the entire ride, with my eyes peering out between the wooden slats of a window.

  I needed to see every sign along the highway and know exactly where I was.

  Chapter Three

  WE ROCKETED UP INTERSTATE 30 past Texarkana, with that whip of a man hitting the horn and riding up on the bumper of every car that didn’t move out of his way fast enough.

  I stood at the window the whole time, with those Mexican jumping beans sitting at my feet, bouncing around at every bump.

  Right before we hit Hot Springs, Arkansas, that man got off the highway and snaked down the side roads about a mile.

  The huge sign over a high chain-link fence read, PENNINGTON RACETRACK.

  There was a painting of a racehorse with its jockey on that sign. And I guess the dark lines sweeping straight back off the two of them were supposed to make you believe how fast they were going.

  We passed through the racetrack’s gates, and the driver stopped in front of a security station. Then he hustled us out of the trailer into a small brick building where a fat sergeant sat behind a desk with his feet up, watching America’s Funniest Home Videos.

  “Newbies? This time of night, Dag?” the sergeant asked him, annoyed.

  I didn’t know what kind of name Dag was, but the more I watched the sharp point of that toothpick rolling around in his mouth, the more it seemed to fit him.

  “Emergency—had a whole family of Mex grooms quit me for a track in Oklahoma,” Dag answered, slipping him a twenty. “I had to go pick these boys up myself. So just express them for me. Will ya?”

  The sergeant handed each of us a yellow card to fill out and pointed to the lines on them with a stubby finger.

  “Name—here. Birth date—here,” he said slow and steady, like we were retards.

  Then Dag took the cards to write his name in the space that read “Employer.”

  I looked up at the TV to see some father lob a baseball to his little son, who was waiting there with a bat on his shoulder. The kid smacked a line drive right back into his father’s nut sack.

  The sergeant howled over that, and so did I.

  But those beaners never smiled, and just winced at the replay.

  “GAS-TON GI-AM-BANC-O!” Dag roared after reading my card. “WHAT THE HELL’S THIS?”

  “That’s me,” I answered. “It’s my name.”

  “You’re not a groom from Mexico?” he asked, with the sergeant laughing more at Dag now than that TV show.

  “I know lots about horses. Really. My dad worked at a riding stable,” I answered.

  “Oh, did he. Well, la-di-fucking-da.” Dag smirked. “Do you know the family of these boys have groomed racehorses for generations? That their father’s father’s father probably came to this country to take care of horses? It’s in their blood. It’s what they dream about. Your dad worked at a riding stable. Doing what—shoveling horse shit?”

  I saw my reflection in his mirrored glasses, and I never looked so small.

  “Boy, you’re lucky I need a hot walker,” Dag said, crossing out one of the lines on my card and writing in something new. “But they make a hundred and forty dollars less a week than grooms do. So live with it.”

  I didn’t even know what a hot walker did.

  I’d seen a guy walk barefoot over hot coals once at a carnival. Dad swore the guy had probably made some kind of deal with the devil to do it. But I never believed that.

  Anyway, I had a job now.

  A hundred and forty less a week meant I’d be getting paid something, even if it wasn’t as much as those beaners.

  I knew I was twice as smart as them and would probably be their boss inside of a week.

  The sergeant took Polaroids of us. Then he pasted our pictures on those ID cards, and I saw white spots in front of my eyes from the flash of that camera for close to five minutes.

  “These cards—muy im-por-tante. Wear them all the time—on your outside clothes,” the sergeant said, tugging at the tin badge pinned to his shirt. “With them you’re legal on the racetrack. Without them you’re an illegal. Understand?”

  Nacho and his brothers nodded their heads in excitement, like they’d just been made U.S. citizens.

  I looked at my card and saw that Dag had changed my date of birth. I wasn’t thinking and had put down my real one.

  On the walk out Dag asked me, “What’s your name again, kid?”

  “Gas,” I answered, cautious.

  “Well, genius Gas, you need to be eighteen to live and work on the racetrack. Remember that.”

  At the time I believed he was doing me the favor.

  Dag drove us to his barn on the racetrack’s backstretch—where the rows of stables, the dorms, and the cantina were. But it was closing in on ten o’clock that night, and most everything there was stone quiet.

  The sign on the side of his cinder-block barn read in big black letters, DAMON DAGGET—PUBLIC RACING STABLE.

  The horses whinnied loud—whhhaaa—at the sound of his trailer pulling up.

  Then Dag cut the engine and everything fell silent again.

  We ducked under a waist-high wooden latch, following Dag inside his barn, past the night watchman. There was a long row of fourteen stalls, with a powerful Thoroughbred standing tall in each one. There were another fourteen horses in the stalls behind them, and a curve on each end of the barn, which was laid out in a tight oval.

  “This way—venga,” said Dag, showing Nacho and his brothers the horses they’d be grooming.

  Each of them got two Thoroughbreds to take care of.

  “Ah, sí,” those beaners said, back and forth. “Bueno.”

  They walked up to the stall doors, kissing and stroking their horses on the nose, looking them over from head to toe. I would have sworn those stupid beaners were in love. But if it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have g
iven them a jackass to look after in this country.

  I glanced over Nacho’s shoulder as he moved to the next stall. The gold nameplate on the leather-strapped halter around that horse’s head and powerful jaw read, BAD BOY RISING.

  There was fire in that horse’s eyes and a long blaze of white hairs running down his dark brown face. Something made me reach out to pet him, and Bad Boy Rising tried to take a vicious bite out of my hand.

  “If that one had as much speed as he does attitude, he wouldn’t be one step away from the slaughterhouse. From the stable to the dinner table, that’s what’s waiting for this one if he don’t win soon,” said Dag. “As for you, you’ll be walking horses in circles after they come back from training every morning. You’ll pick ‘em up hot and walk till they’ve cooled down. Forty minutes each you’ll walk ‘em. Then we’ll see how much gas you got in your tank.”

  Dag said it was too late that night to get registered for a dorm room. So he walked us past his office, which had a comfy-looking leather sofa and chairs, and into a stuffy equipment room without windows that was maybe half the size. It was filled with dusty horse blankets, bridles, whips, riding helmets, and worn-out saddles.

  “They’ll all sleep in here tonight,” Dag told the night watchman, who had some Spanish in him. “I’m heading home for some shut-eye.”

  Then Dag’s wiry frame dipped under the wooden latch and he was gone.

  That night the four of us slept shoulder-to-shoulder on the dirt floor, under horse blankets. And before the light got turned out, I looked at the yellow ID card hanging over Nacho’s heart and saw that his name was really Ignacio.

  From near the end of my sophomore year until the week before she died, Mom drove me down to the stables on Fridays, just before Dad knocked off work.

  In the beginning I was happy with my horse just walking the trail—its nose following the tail of the one in front of it. But Mom kept pushing me to gallop with her.

  “Come on, Gas. You wanna feel those four legs flying beneath you,” she’d say. “Think about the poor horse. He was born to run, not be bored out of his mind playing follow the leader in slow motion.”