Homestretch Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œFor 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.
    â€œThere’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 driverstopped 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
.
    â€œNewbies? 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.
    â€œEmergency—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.
    â€œName—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