I WAS RESTLESS IN bed that whole night, stressing over El Diablo and riding in my first real race. I was sweating under the covers and slipped out of my sleep at least a dozen times, halfway between dreaming and being awake. I couldn’t remember a single one of those dreams, only the sound of the things hammering at me.
An alarm from the hall went off at four forty-five, and the rain was beating down on Pennington Racetrack in buckets.
“You be water bug today, gringo,” sneered Paolo at the barn.
The track had turned into a muddy sea of slop, and Dag sent just a couple of horses out to train on it. That meant the rest of the horses got walked inside the barn to stretch their legs. And they were probably happy to get at least that much exercise.
It doesn’t matter that Thoroughbreds are born to run, most of them spend nearly twenty-three hours a day cramped up in their stalls, aching for a chance to get turned loose.
That’s why I knew Mom would have felt sorry for every horse stabled at Pennington.
Bad Boy Rising had been his usual nasty self, charging his stall door and kicking at the walls most of the morning.
I saw El Diablo leaving Dag’s office, and for a second my heart stood still. But I planted both feet beneath me, and I wouldn’t sidestep him.
El Diablo stopped in his tracks, looking almost embarrassed over what had happened. Then he took a long breath and focused his eyes just below mine.
That was exactly how Dad looked after the first time he’d smacked me and had a chance to sober up.
El Diablo’s lips pushed together, and I thought maybe he was about to apologize. Then, suddenly, I saw the anger building in his face as his dark cheeks stiffened.
Only, I couldn’t figure out if he was mad at himself or me.
“Bug, no kill yourself or anybody else out there,” he said before he turned around and headed out of the barn.
“I won’t,” I said.
By the time those words had left my mouth, El Diablo was out the door, walking through the pouring rain to his car.
Underneath my shirt, on my left arm, I could feel the purple bruise from him, which was nearly as big as my tattoo.
Then I heard his engine start up, and El Diablo pulled away.
The rain never let up that morning. So no one walked their horses in the courtyard, and that meant no Tammie.
At around eleven o’clock, with most of the horses put away, Dag called me into his office.
“Those are for you,” he said, pointing to a pair of black leather boots trimmed with red and yellow flames on his desk. “El Diablo left them.”
“He did?” I said, surprised.
“You didn’t think you were going to ride in sneakers, did you?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Take the rest of the equipment you need from here—helmet, saddle, a protective vest. Then go over to the jockeys’ room and learn their routine. The clerk of scales, he runs the place. He’ll assign you a valet.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A valet. He’ll shine your boots, carry your saddle, wipe your nose and your ass if you need him to. That’s his job. He’s your mama and papa in that room, all rolled into one,” Dag said.
I’d noticed there was no webbing in front of Bad Boy’s stall, and asked Dag why he was eating before a race.
“It won’t matter. He’s just racing for the exercise today. I’m trying to get him into shape—the same as you. So let him eat up. He couldn’t get any slower,” said Dag, poking a finger into my shoulder. “But I see you learn fast. Just remember, I do the training here, not you. You only got a shot at this ‘cause I went out on a real limb for you, fudging your age. That’s what lets you live and work here, being eighteen. That’s what got you being a jockey, too. Or else you’d be dealin’ with whatever you ran away from back home.”
“Okay,” I said, picking El Diablo’s boots up off of Dag’s desk.
Before I left, I stood in front of Bad Boy’s stall watching him dig into his feed bucket. He wasn’t the least bit interested in making friends. And if that monster weren’t so hungry, he’d have probably been trying to bite me with those huge white teeth.
Then I saw the flutter of wings behind Bad Boy, and I had to look twice. A family of sparrows had nested in a deep crack running down the back wall of his stall.
I guess he didn’t mind them being there, because he’d never chased them out. And having sparrows for company was probably better than spending time with Dag’s chicken that walked backward.
I showed my license and signed in at the jockeys’ room. Then the clerk of scales assigned me an old, gray black man named Parker as a valet.
He was bent over at the waist, and that put him at my height.
Parker shook my hand and called me “boss.”
“I handle another rider too—Gillette. That’s where my money is,” he said. “I call him ‘chief.’ But I only got one Lord. That’s the big man upstairs. So I tell the truth. If your riding’s for shit, I won’t lie to you.”
“Why don’t you just call me Gas,” I told him.
“Because you’re the boss and I’m the hoss,” Parker said, picking up the bag with my equipment in it.
We passed through the swinging doors and into a big locker room. There were seven or eight jockeys there already, all grown men, eyeballing me as I followed behind Parker to a tall, empty locker.
“Steam room’s to the left if you need it. Bathroom’s on the right. There’s a pool table over there to kill time. And if you get hungry, there’s a food counter from where we just came, out by the main scale,” said Parker, pointing his finger like a compass needle.
“That’s all right, I brought my lunch,” I said, unwrapping a submarine sandwich and putting a can of soda on the stool in front of me.
“No, boss. You don’t take a bite before you weigh in,” Parker warned me. “I’d be careful about bringing that kind of food in here.”
I started to ask why, but there were already three or four riders marching over to make sure I knew all the answers.
“Whatcha eatin’, bug?” asked one of them.
Before I could open my mouth, Gillette said, “You know, most of us survive on one lousy meal a day, and we still gotta sit in that steam room sweatin’ our asses off to lose weight.”
“It’s his first time, chief,” said Parker. “He don’t know no better.”
“Yeah? First ride, bug?” asked a jock named Castro. “You gonna get one of us hurt in that third race? Maybe we sandwich you coming out of the starting gate so we don’t have to worry.”
That’s when Parker pulled those riding boots out of my bag, and everybody saw the flames painted on them.
“You usually got to kill a rider to get his boots,” said Castro. “Or do him a mighty big favor.”
“You know, I’m the one who testified against El Diablo at the hearing. How he asked me to hold my horse back too,” said Gillette, with his eyes piercing through me. “Did he send you here to give me a little shove over the rail to get even?”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “He lent them to me ‘cause I didn’t have a pair of my own.”
“He lent them to you,” laughed one of the riders. “El Diablo?”
“It’s true. I walk horses in the mornings for Dag. That’s where my saddle and everything else came from. I just want to be a jockey. That’s all.”
“We’ll see if you got what it takes, bug,” said Castro.
“You watch him close, Parker,” demanded Gillette, as him and the other jockeys walked off.
“Yes, chief,” answered Parker.
Then a voice came over the loudspeaker: “Giambanco Jr., report up front to get weighed.”
“Strip down to your shorts, boss,” Parker told me.
But when I took my shirt off, Parker said, “Jesus! What’s that on your arm?”
“That’s a tattoo for my mom’s memory,” I answered.
“I know what a tattoo is,” he said. “I meant your other arm.”
I was ready to lie like I always did. But I believed Parker when he said that he’d only tell me the truth. Maybe I’d been searching for somebody to say something like that for five long months.
“El Diablo was drunk yesterday and he nearly broke my arm off,” I said without holding back.
That was the first time I ever admitted to anybody I’d been hit.
The first time Dad saw my tattoo, I was coming out of the shower.
“Gas, you got a towel on?” he hollered, banging at the bathroom door.
I’d been hiding it from him for more than a week, but the word “Yeah” slipped out of my mouth before I could pull it back.
He stood there staring at it, with his hand glued to the doorknob.
Then he glared at me like I was a stranger who’d sneaked into his house and stolen something.
“When I got this,” he exploded, pointing to the hula girl on his forearm, “I hadn’t even met your mother yet! I was a stupid kid!”
He hit the bathroom door one time, and I felt my knees buckle.
“But she never minded,” he kept on. “I even told her I’d put her name under it. But she said no.”
Dad was stone sober. Only, it didn’t matter.
I could see the rage and pain building up inside him, until he was almost on some other planet. So I didn’t try to reason with him.
“You’re not old enough to do that without my permission,” he seethed. “It’s a crime. I’ll sue the bastard who gave it to you.”
“You can’t,” I said, with the water still dripping down my legs onto the floor. “I fooled him with a fake ID.”
“No! He knew!” he screamed. “Their lowlife kind—they all know!”
That’s when Dad put his fist through the bathroom door with a crack.
He pulled his arm back and sucked the blood right off the tops of his cut knuckles. Then Dad left, cursing himself.
I didn’t know why he was so jealous over Mom, or why everything that meant so much to me pushed him further away.
But I looked at the splintered door like he’d punched a hole in my heart. And I started to realize that Dad didn’t have to lay a finger on me anymore to hurt me.
Once I checked into the jockeys’ room, I wasn’t allowed to leave, except to ride in my race.
“No phone calls, unless I’m there to monitor them. And I have to approve all visitors,” the clerk of scales told me as I stepped onto the scale and he recorded my weight at 105 pounds.
“Why the prison treatment?” I asked.
“Anybody can grab you walking around this racetrack and threaten you into holding your horse back, boss,” Parker answered for him.
“You don’t take money from people either,” the clerk said as he went over my name, birthday, and address with me. “Since you’re eighteen, you can bet, but only on the horse you’re riding. Nobody else’s.”
“If I wasn’t eighteen, I wouldn’t be riding, right?” I asked.
“No, you can ride at sixteen in Arkansas, work on the racetrack, too,” the clerk answered. “You can’t live in those backstretch dorms like you do unless you’re eighteen.”
I felt the sharp twinge of how Dag had lied to me.
“Who do I notify in case of injury?” the clerk asked. “Any family?”
That question bounced around my brain for a few seconds, and it stung like hell to finally say, “Dag. I mean, trainer Damon Dagget.”
I watched the first two races on a TV monitor in the jockeys’ room. Gillette won them both, with Parker carrying his saddle back and forth.
The rain was still pounding down, and the riders all came back with their faces and silks splashed with mud.
Twenty-five minutes before the third race Parker put out the owner’s silks for me to wear. They were black, with a coiled-up cobra showing its fangs and a forked tongue.
I zipped up the protective vest with all the padding around my ribs and chest, and I felt like a turtle in a shell, carrying its home around on its back.
Then I pulled on those silks and El Diablo’s boots.
I looked into the mirror, holding a whip. I hardly recognized myself.
“Here, boss. You’ll need three or four pairs of these,” said Parker, handing me plastic goggles. “When you get blinded by mud, pull down the top pair and you’ll be able to see clear again. That’s important to remember.”
Right before we went out to ride, the clerk of scales paged my name and said I had a visitor. I walked through the swinging doors, and it was Tammie.
“Is that really you, Gas? All dressed up and ready to race,” she said, grabbing both my hands and spreading my arms wide to look at me.
I felt like we were dancing on air together.
The other riders were right on my heels, and Gillette asked, “Tammie, you know this little bug?”
“Gas is a friend of mine. Treat him right,” answered Tammie, hugging most of the jocks, who’d ridden for her grandpa.
“You’re lucky Tammie says you’re okay, bug,” said Castro.
“It’s one less strike against you,” said Gillette. “Now let’s see you ride.”
Tammie walked me all the way to the paddock gate, and I could feel the pulse of her next to me.
“Go get ‘em,” she whispered as I stepped inside the paddock alone. “Grandpa and me are rooting for you.”
Bad Boy Rising was already saddled, with Nacho at his head trying to keep him calm. Paolo was holding a huge umbrella over Dag, like the rain might have melted him.
The other jockeys were busy shaking hands with their horses’ owners. Then Dag stuck his hand out to me and said, “I own Bad Boy, Gas. You’re wearing my colors.”
That’s when I took a long look at that cobra on my chest in Dag’s mirrored glasses.
“Just push this horse as hard as you can out of the gate. I don’t care if he uses everything up early and finishes dead last,” Dag said. “Like I told you before, I’m working the two of you into shape.”
“Riders up!” called a racing official.
Dag gave me a leg up into the saddle. I tucked the whip under my left arm, and Nacho led Bad Boy Rising and me onto the racetrack.
“Por María,” Nacho said as he let us go.
I took a deep breath, nodding my head to him.
The horses paraded past the grandstand. But there weren’t any bettors outside in the rain shouting at us. So no one saw that look of steel fixed on my face.
Bad Boy was 25–1 on the odds board. He was a real handful, but I managed to jog him over to the starting gate. An assistant starter grabbed him by the bridle, leading him into stall number three. I leaned Bad Boy up against the back doors like El Diablo told me, so he couldn’t flip over. Then I peered through the bars of the doors in front of me, looking as far down the racetrack as I could see.
“One horse left to load,” shouted another assistant starter.
I heard the ambulance that was ready to follow behind us rev its engine. Even with all that rain my mouth had gone bone dry.
Suddenly, those iron doors popped opened, and the sound of the bell on the starting gate shot through me like a current.
Bad Boy stumbled on his first step out of the gate, nearly going down to his knees. Time seemed to slip into slow motion all around me as I went tumbling over his head, landing flat on my back in a foot of slop.
The rest of the runners and Bad Boy Rising, who’d righted himself, went splashing down the racetrack.
I felt for my arms and legs, and I was still in one piece. So I pulled my mud-stained goggles down, staring straight up at a gray, sunless sky.
Then I picked myself up off the ground and began the long walk back to the jockeys’ room, covered from head to toe in filth, like the bug they said I was.