5. Jake
Jake
As the trail riders headed out, going slowly along the rise to the west, I looked around for something to do to keep my mind occupied. Colt had been a good stable hand; he came back to the ranch from time to time to help with trail rides, so I knew the whole group would be in safe hands.
Still, leading a string of horses with sensible adult riders was mighty different from leading a group of older teens from the city, most of whom had probably never been in a saddle in their whole lives.
From what I could tell—a quick glance, an overheard conversation—they weren’t mean kids.
Just rambunctious and easily excitable. Even now I could hear their laughter and shouts, and I could imagine Colt doing his best to stay calm, leading by example.
As for Dalton, who was a prime model of everything about the city that I disliked, I wanted to go to the top of the slope and wait for his return.
He’d not seemed at home in the saddle, his shoulders tight as though something was going to jump up and bite him. But he’d held the reins the way I showed him, paying attention like it was his life’s work. Didn’t twitch, at least not much, when I adjusted the length of his stirrups.
And those eyes. So blue. So wide. So terrified, even when facing only a simple ride. An hour there and back again. Just right for most first-timers, but, perhaps, too long for Dalton.
Still, he’d not complained, but had sat tall, taking up the tail end of the line of riders. Seven in all. And in those borrowed boots and my hat, donated to him at the last minute, he looked, as he glanced back at me, like he’d been astride horses all his life. Like he belonged at the ranch.
I felt those blue eyes knew what they saw when they looked at me: a man whose life was a series of jigs and jags. Of half-finished paperwork and a line of foster homes where no social worker had ever set foot.
Seven foster homes, starting at age three, when my dad left and my mom decided that taking care of my two younger sisters was enough homemaking for her.
I was a badly behaved child, or so the intake form in my file said.
At three? Give me a break. It also said I never smiled.
No facial expressions. Hard to interact with.
Years later, a yellow sticky note suggested I get tested for autism, that I might be on the spectrum.
I never thought I was, but what did I know?
The only thing I wanted was a room to call my own and a family that was mine. I pathetically held on to that dream all the way until I was shunted out of the system.
Mostly the homes they put me in were shells that contained people who were only interested in the money they could get for having a foster kid living under their roof.
In my final year, I brought in $1,795 a month. I didn’t know what the amount was in earlier years.
In most of those homes, I did chores and ate plain food. I had one pair of shoes, two pairs of jeans. The basics. I watched while the real children got bikes for Christmas and trips to the park to play catch.
Two of the homes were far worse.
In one, food was a reward, often withheld due to my bad behavior, my clothes came from Goodwill, and I slept in the basement on a ratty old mattress in which mice had surely set up housekeeping before being smoked out so I could use it.
Of the other, when I was around ten, I had flashes of memory strained through fingers of light and dark, like I was looking through bars.
I remembered fighting, lots of screaming, cigarette smoke, and being forced into baths of cold water to bring the welts down when the church ladies would come over with their casseroles and words of praise for the man and the woman who’d taken me in.
I’d never tasted those casseroles, but the smiling ladies presented them with such pride, and they always smelled good. Butter. Salt. Garlic.
Even to this day, I couldn’t stand having an empty belly. Even to this day, I could not tell you what that man and woman looked like. What their names were. Where the house was. I preferred to forget.
Then one day, my luck turned in a sharp, unexpected lurch. It was the evening before I was to leave my last foster home with nothing but a backpack and a voucher for a halfway house where I could stay for six months and look for a job.
I had no idea what I was going to do. I had yearned to be free of the system, only now that they were now kicking me out of it, I didn’t know how to feel.
In that house, the monthly payment had actually been spent to benefit me. At least some of it. The mother and father were still cold, and their two real kids, both younger, would look right through me. But I’d slept in a bedroom and had three meals a day. Decent sneakers. A coat.
The phone rang. It was the landline, which almost never got used.
“Jake, it’s for you.” The mother shook her finger at me as she handed over the receiver. “You have two minutes.”
“Hello?” I said, blinking, confused. “This is Jake.”
The person on the other end of the line was a social worker who specialized in job placement, and she wanted to talk to me about a job out of town that came with room and board included.
Right away I understood that this call wasn’t coming from a place of kindness. If she could parcel me out to a different county or city, I wouldn’t be on her books, and her responsibility for me would end at midnight.
I had the halfway house voucher in my pocket, but a job that could last indefinitely, that seemed like a better deal. Even if the job wasn’t great, it would be experience I could point to when I looked for something else.
“Where is the job?” I asked, completely puzzled. Not just about what she was telling me—something about a ranch—but by the very fact that anyone was talking to me at all about what I wanted.
“Snow Creek Ranch,” she said. “It’s up in the foothills, west of Fort Collins. They’re looking for ranch workers. Wranglers. Stable hands.”
“Wh—” What? When? Where? All those questions that started with wh. “Why me?” I finally managed.
“When you lived with the Leetons,” she began, “you wanted to be a cowboy for Halloween. It’s in the file. You had a model horse. So I figured you’d be a good match.”
I squinted at the mother as she stood in the doorway from the kitchen to the living room, watching me as though I might make a mistake.
But I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking into my past, rifling through the patchy memories, each house a picture in a slotted bin in my mind.
I couldn’t for the life of me remember the Leetons, let alone owning a model horse.
“Sure,” I said, because I’d be good goddamned if I let anyone know I didn’t remember. “They want me to be a ranch hand?”
“Walter Barrett, the owner, read about some program or other about bringing city kids out to a real working ranch, and he wanted to do the same. It’s a bit high-minded, if you ask me, but it’s a job with room and board. Say the word, and I’ll have a bus ticket waiting for you.”
I didn’t know, but that I didn’t have much to lose. And now that I thought longer, I did have flickers of memory about that model horse. A buckskin with a black mane and tail.
I’d called the horse Buddy, not being a very inventive boy. I’d been eight at the time, and who knew what happened to Buddy. Maybe he got lost during a move to a new foster home. Maybe some other boy owned him now.
“Well?” the social worker asked in a sharp voice, like I’d kept her waiting for an entire hour, which was about fifty-eight minutes too long.
“Sure,” I said, mentally shrugging. “Where do I pick up the bus ticket?”
“At the Human Services building on Federal,” she said. “Second floor. You’ll hand over your halfway house voucher, sign release papers, and then you’ll get the ticket. When you get to Snow Creek Ranch, ask for Walter Barrett. He’s the owner.”
“Okay,” I said, making a mental map as to how to get there.
“Well, good luck,” she said. “Goodbye.” And then she hung up.
“Who was that?” the mother asked, coming toward me.
I was too big to smack around anymore, but I flinched and backed away as I hung up the phone.
“I’ve got a job,” I said, not giving her more information than I had to. “Can you give me a ride to Human Services tomorrow? I have to pick up a bus ticket.”
I could see it behind her eyes that she wanted to toss me out on my ass then and there. But if she did that, she might not get more foster kids, and her monthly income would be slashed by that $1,795.
“Sure,” she said, though I could see she wanted to say no. “I’ll take you before work tomorrow, but you better not make me wait. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
The snap of her flip-flop as she turned on her heel to go find the father and talk to him echoed in my ears every now and then. It sounded like a door slamming. Or like the metal lid of a crawl space coming down with a hard bang, cutting off the light and shutting me in darkness.
There’d been a lot of doors like that, all through my childhood, so I didn’t expect that Snow Creek Ranch would be much different. But it would be a change, at least. It would be something.
The next morning, I showed up, dressed and packed, so I didn’t keep the mother waiting. The ride downtown to the center was quiet, and the entire way, she never said a word to me. But that was okay. My mind whirled with thoughts.
I’d seldom ridden in cars, except to and from foster homes. And, on one occasion, to the emergency room, when I’d somehow fallen and opened the flesh just below my right eyebrow. Blood had blocked my vision, and I remembered struggling against the nurses who wanted to put in stitches.
The mother and father from the house with the cage—had it been an actual cage, or just felt like one?—had stood in that emergency room and talked about how clumsy I was. How careless. Yes, those other bruises, that’s from when he fell down the stairs.
Except, in a piece of my memory that was somehow quite sharp, that house had all been on a single level, so how I fell down any stairs was beyond me.
Finally, a doctor came in. He was older. Had white hair. Warm hands. His name tag said Dr. Clemson.
He’d said, “Can you look at me, Jake? Look at my eyes or my name tag or wherever. The nurse is going to numb the area, and then the stitches won’t hurt.”
Well, I could trust him, or I could keep struggling. For a long, hard second, I hadn’t known which way to go. They’d turned the overhead lights off, so there was just the exam light on my face. So they could see what they were doing, I thought.
I’d been one hard breath away from kicking someone anywhere it could hurt.
Dr. Clemson put his hand on my cheek and patted me gently. “Let out a breath,” he’d said, and I felt the pinprick of a shot, and then a feeling spread across my face like warm, shifting sand.
All the while, as someone held my face still, I felt the tug of thread, but it didn’t hurt, just like he’d said. The entire time, Dr. Clemson kept his hand on my cheek and locked his eyes with mine.
I didn’t think I’d ever forget his kindness.
After the stitches were in, covered with a long, wide bandage, Dr. Clemson had told the mother and father that I should come back in ten days to get the stitches removed.
Of course, they never did, so, after a couple of weeks, when I got a moment in the bathroom, I took off the bandage, now gray with the edges coming up in curls, and used nail clippers to tug the stitches out myself.
I remembered looking in the mirror and thinking there were two cigarette burns where my eyes should be. That my hair was cropped short, too short. That my lips were chapped, and it looked like someone had smeared ash on my cheeks.
The scar had faded now, but I could still feel the thread being tugged as those stitches went in.