Homestretch by Paul Volponi Page A

at full speed, sandwiched between those other two horses. His head was shooting straight back like a piston, right at mine.
    I was just trying to keep my balance, praying to hold on.
    El Diablo was riding to my outside.
    Coming off the turn, he leaned in and hollered, “Yahhh!”
    Bad Boy spooked and nearly ran out from underneath me.
    But I had a death grip on a handful of his mane, and Istayed in the saddle. When we flashed past the wire, I pulled back on the reins as hard as I could. But Bad Boy Rising only stopped running when
he
was ready to quit.
    After I’d caught my breath and my lungs stopped hurting, I saw that my knuckles had turned pure white from squeezing the reins so tight.
    â€œYou got some raw talent,” Dag told me. “Maybe I could use you for some things.”
    Part of me was satisfied because I’d done it. I’d hung on to that demon, a horse even El Diablo didn’t want to ride. But another part of me could hear in Dag’s voice what I’d heard in Mrs. Mallory’s, our high school drama teacher, when she recruited me
special
for the school play.
    â€œI’ve had my eye on you for a while now, Gas. I think you could be a valuable part of this production,” she said.
    I went home on cloud nine, thinking how actors like Tom Cruise were shorter than everybody else around them in their movies.
    Then the next day I found out that she needed me to play a Munchkin in
The Wizard of Oz,
and even thought I could handle two roles and be one of the Wicked Witch’s little monkeys with wings, too. But I never showed up for rehearsal or answered the notes she left for me in homeroom.
    Later that morning, after I’d finished walking my last horse, Dag sent me over to the racing office. A man there fingerprinted me and used the information on my yellow ID card to issue me a temporary jockey’s license.
    I couldn’t believe it. I held that paper by the corners so any ink left on my fingers wouldn’t smudge a single line.
    That was the first thing I ever got in my whole life for being small. And I didn’t even want to fold it up to fit inside my wallet.
    I showed the artist who ran the tattoo parlor my fake ID, and the first thing he said was, “Kid, it’s not my job to talk people
out
of getting tattoos. But at your age it’s a risk to put a girl’s name on your arm. Two weeks later she’s left you for somebody new, and you get to see how big an idiot you were every day in the mirror.”
    â€œShe’s already gone,” I told him. “It’s for my mom.”
    That’s when he pulled up his shirt and showed me
his
mother’s name surrounded by two angels blowing trumpets over his heart.
    The artist sketched out the cross on a pad for me with the letters of Mom’s name running down the middle. That part was simple. But he worked for almost forty-five minutesdrawing in the petals from all the flowers and roses until he got it just right.
    The picture got transferred onto my right bicep with a stencil. Only, it looked cold on my arm without any color to it.
    He poured caps of black, purple, and yellow ink, and took some sharp needles out of a bag.
    â€œConcentrate on breathing slow,” he told me, putting on a pair of rubber gloves. “Every now and then somebody passes out. It’s not from the pain. It’s because they forget to breathe.”
    The machine that held the needle started buzzing louder than the neon sign in the front window, and I could feel the needle digging into my skin. But it wasn’t even close to the pain I’d been feeling. And when that tattoo was finished, I knew I’d have it in my life forever, no matter what.
    I sat in something that looked like a dentist’s chair, gritting my teeth and looking up at the drawings that lined the walls.
    There were cute teddy bears, skulls, bloody daggers with snakes curled around the handles, a marijuana leaf, a bald eagle