THAT NIGHT I LAY in bed with the lights on. My body was sore as could be, and every part of me, inside and out, ached.
Then, out of nowhere, Nacho started jawing at me.
“No good today, Gas,” Nacho said. “You ride ve-ry bad. Muy malo.”
“So? What’s it to you?” I said with some attitude.
“I Bad Boy’s groom,” he answered. “No look good. Maybe Señor Dag give me trouble for it.”
“Too bad,” I told him, with my eyes following along a crack in the ceiling. “Not my problem.”
“Sí, no you problem,” Nacho said. “Only mi, y mis hermanos.”
“Maybe you need to jump the border to a different country,” I said. “One without me in it.”
“No jump. Crawl. Through a big pipe en de sewer,” he said, moving both his hands and feet. “Then run, en de dark. Climb fence. Run more. Always running, running. Policía hate us—muy peligroso.”
“I’m glad you didn’t steal a car,” I said, closing my eyes on him.
Anyway, none of Nacho’s crap was even close to the heat I’d felt when I got back to that jockeys’ room after the race.
“Hey, know what your horse said when he was runnin’ around the track without you? ‘This feels great! I just got a hundred-pound pimple taken off my ass!’”
Parker was the only one who didn’t smile over those wisecracks as he wiped down my saddle.
Tammie kept her distance from me because of the mud.
“It’s just one bad ride. Nothing more,” she said, standing outside of my reach. “You fall off a horse, you gotta get right back on, Gi-am-banco. No fear.”
I could almost hear Mom’s voice inside of hers.
Right then I wished I had the courage to kiss her on the lips, covered in mud and all. But I didn’t.
I was shocked when Dag wasn’t steamed at me. He even named me to ride on Rose of Sharon the very next day. Only, she wasn’t going to be another 25–1 long shot like Bad Boy Rising. Dag was dropping her way down in class off that big win three days ago, from $20,000 company into a $10,000 claiming race.
A claiming race is where any trainer or owner can buy one of the horses entered just by writing a check.
Rose of Sharon was listed in the entries as the 2–1 favorite, even with me in the saddle. She was supposed to win easy against those cheaper fillies, and probably get claimed for such a bargain price.
“Señor Dag es loco,” said Nacho in a stressed voice. “Somebody claim her away—sure. Then I left one horse. One bad horse—Bad Boy.”
That’s when I pointed to the Scotch-tape outline of that torn-down picture on the wall next to my bed.
“Better than what I got,” I said. “You got brothers—family. Me—nada. Nothing.”
“No familia any-where?” he asked. “Muerto? All dead?”
I didn’t answer and went back to studying that crack in the ceiling.
“You have picture here,” Nacho said, tapping his arm where my tattoo would have been. “In you head, no picture? Of you family?”
“Sometimes,” I answered.
“Tonight you have this one,” he said, handing me the tiny photo of his mother, María.
I only reached out to take it because I saw how serious he was. And when I touched it, it felt like an angel’s wings between my fingers.
I wasn’t sure where to keep it safe.
Then I took out the Spanish Bible from the top drawer of the nightstand, flipping to the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis, where I’d pressed that dried rose from Mom’s cross in our Bible at home.
I recognized it by a little drawing of a man and a woman covered up with fig leaves beneath a tree.
“La serpiente, que era el más astuto de todos los animales del campo que Jehovah Dios …”
I put the picture between those pages and closed the book shut.
“Bueno. She sleep good there,” Nacho said before he turned out the light. “Now, you sleep good too, and no fall off my filly tomorrow.”
Early the next morning, with the sun breaking through the clouds, Dag had me jog a few horses out on the racetrack. But he wouldn’t let me go any faster than that.
“You just concentrate on staying in the saddle. That’s all,” he told me. “I don’t want to risk you getting hurt out there.”
I almost couldn’t believe his concern.
“I need you to ride that filly today, and I’m entering Bad Boy for tomorrow. He’s yours too,” said Dag.
“Why me?” I asked. “Didn’t Gillette just win on Rose of Sharon?”
“I already told you, I do the training here,” hissed Dag. “You just keep your mouth closed and ride, or maybe I’ll find some other bug to bless.”
Dag didn’t wait for any kind of answer. He just walked away from me like he pulled all the strings and I was his little puppet. So I turned my head from side to side, looking all around me with both of my eyes wide open, just to prove to myself it wasn’t true.
Later, El Diablo jogged another of Dag’s horses alongside the one I was on.
“Thanks for letting me borrow those boots,” I said, feeling out his mood. “Sorry I disgraced them like that.”
“Pray that’s your biggest mistake—falling off horse. That’s nothing,” El Diablo said. “At least you see ground coming. I fall so far I let you know when I hit bottom.”
Then El Diablo broke his horse into a full gallop, leaving me behind.
With the sun beating down on my face, all I could hear in my head was Tammie screaming at Dag after Rose of Sharon’s last race, “You can’t train a horse to do that!”
I didn’t know if Dag had pumped her full of one of those magic milk shakes that day she’d won or not. I just knew that I’d be riding her now, and it was going to be my ass on the line.
After the horses got put away that morning, I saw that there was no webbing up in front of Rose of Sharon’s stall. That she was filling her stomach just a few hours before she was going to run.
I remembered how it wasn’t that way the last time she’d raced.
But I’d learned my lesson and wasn’t about to say anything to Dag over it. And I saw Nacho grimace as Paolo tossed another scoop of feed into her bucket.
“Gas, I got a big surprise coming,” Tammie said when I saw her walking through the courtyard later. “I just can’t say what it is yet.”
“Is that some kind of tease?” I asked.
“If that’s what you want it to be,” she said, winking. “It’s really my grandpa’s business, so I can’t tell. But I’ll let you know right after your ride. I promise.”
That wink of hers carried me through the early part of the afternoon.
There was a small patch of flowers out in front of the dorms. Most of them were bent over pretty bad from all that rain the day before. Back in Texas we didn’t have any dirt surrounding our apartment, just a concrete sidewalk. But Mom always brought seedlings home from her job in the hothouse and planted them in our window box.
“Flowers can grow anywhere. All they need is a fighting chance—a little sun, water, and somebody to look after them,” Mom would say.
I almost picked one of those flowers on my way over to the racetrack. Then I realized it wouldn’t be there anymore when I got back.
Rose of Sharon was entered in the seventh race, and I didn’t want to spend any more time trapped inside that jockeys’ room than I had to. So I started walking over from the dorms just a few minutes before the third race was supposed to be run.
Dag trained a horse in the third race, one that Rafael groomed.
When I got there, I could hear the track announcer’s voice echoing through the grandstand. The field was already racing down the backstretch, heading into the far turn. Rafael was cheering for his horse by the finish line, with Nacho and Anibal on either side of him, cheering too.
That’s when part of the crowd let out an “OOOHH!”
Dag’s horse had broken down, dropping far behind the others until he slowed to a dead stop.
I heard a man cursing as he ripped up a thick stack of betting tickets.
“God damn it!” the man yelled, before tossing them into the air like confetti.
Rafael tugged hard at the empty lead he was holding from both ends, and I heard that leather strap pop between his hands.
The jockey had jumped off and was holding that injured horse by the bridle. Even with the rest of the runners roaring through the stretch, Rafael tried to jump the rail to get there. But Nacho and Anibal held him back until the race was over.
Then the three of them went sprinting up the homestretch toward Rafael’s horse.
My heart told me to follow them, but my weight wouldn’t shift. It was like my brain had talked my feet into believing they were nailed to the concrete. It had been one week since I left home, and now I wasn’t sure who I was or what to feel.
Was that really supposed to be me, chasing after beaners on an Arkansas racetrack to help? Maybe Dad was somewhere right now chasing their kind through the streets with a stick.
I looked over at Dag, who hadn’t moved a muscle except to get on his cell phone. That convinced me to hop the rail. And when my feet sank into that soft, damp earth, I swear they started running on their own.
By the time I got to Nacho and his brothers, a horse ambulance was already there.
Rafael had his arms wrapped around his horse’s head.
“Eee-sy ba-by,” he said with tears in his eyes. “No move. Eee-sy.”
Both Anibal and Nacho had a hand on Rafael’s shoulder.
The horse’s right rear ankle was dangling from its leg, six inches off the ground, like a bag of crushed ice.
The racetrack vets put up a blue screen to hide that sight from the crowd.
“No can save?” Rafael asked the vets, without getting an answer.
Then one of the vets took a needle out of a black bag and gave that horse an injection.
I didn’t know how much time the horse had left. But without Rafael there it probably wouldn’t have been worth living.
Inside of a minute that injured horse had collapsed dead to the ground.
I looked at Rafael’s face, and except for myself over the last five months, I’d never felt more sorry for anyone in my life.
The four of us walked back toward the finish line together without saying a word. We didn’t have to. That empty lead strap slung over Rafael’s shoulder said enough.
I turned back around at the sound of an engine and saw a tractor shoving that horse’s lifeless body into the ambulance.
That picture stuck hard in the pit of my stomach. “I’m sorry,” somebody from the crowd told Dag, who just nodded his head politely.
Only, nothing had really touched him.