Chapter 7: Dell
This flight is literally touching down on a highway to hell.
It’s true. Interstate 59 runs alongside the airport. It’s a road I got to know well as a teen, as I frequently got asked to drive from the racetrack to the airport to pick someone up.
It was almost never anyone important. Maybe a breeder. Maybe a trainer’s family.
The big-money people, the owners and big betters, were handled by someone way classier than me.
I glance over at Arianna, engrossed in her laptop at the table. And Grace, asleep, strapped in her car seat attached to one of the chairs. It’s hard coming back here. I don’t want to strut in like I’m big stuff after leaving my humble beginnings behind.
I don’t want to be here at all.
But I am.
I should be grateful for the stretch of road I’m about to go down again. Despite my overwhelmingly negative memories of it, there was one exception, one that changed everything.
Roscoe Denny. He was a big-ticket better, coarse and rude. Every image I ever saw of him showed the sixty-year-old sun-weathered ex–ranch hand sucking on a cigar, his beady eyes hidden behind half-dark glasses in the shadow of a straw cowboy hat.
Back then, the racetrack had just phased out live thoroughbred horse racing, leaving only the greyhounds they’d added when I was twelve. A lot of the wealth and prestige had departed with the horses, and the track was perpetually in danger of closing. We had to court the people with money to bet.
At that time, we had a girl who drove the Mercedes to pick up the bigwigs. Armalina Redding. I had a bit of a crush on her, being only seventeen while she was a worldly twenty-two.
She was beautiful and kind spoken. She could charm anybody and knew the entire history of Birmingham. She’d treat the VIP guests of the track to a little storytelling on their ride over. They got to requesting her by name.
But Roscoe Denny was too much for her. He propositioned her. Made suggestive remarks. He took every opportunity to drape his arm over her shoulders, or place a hand on her waist.
I don’t think it ever went any further than that, as at least six of us at the track would have killed him, but she flat out refused to pick him up any longer.
And so one fateful day my senior year of high school, the track manager called me over and asked me to pick up Roscoe Denny.
I was still smarting over Frank Leon getting the newest lead-out position when it should have been mine. Frank hadn’t done squat at the track other than take up space. But his dad was a trainer, unlike mine, who cleaned up after dogs. He got the opening.
So I might have had a chip on my shoulder that day I drove the car over to the airport, between Frank getting my job and this Roscoe asshole putting the moves on Armalina the last time he was in town.
I sat in the pickup lane, punching buttons, trying to figure out the fancy features of that 1998 Mercedes. You didn’t have to put a key in the door to unlock it. The sunroof opened with a mechanical whir. And it didn’t just have a CD player, but one that could hold six CDs at one time and change them out.
I fiddled with this, moving between the Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, and LeAnn Rimes, my annoyance rising. Who picked these? I settled on the radio.
My instinct was to tell this Roscoe guy where he could stuff himself, upsetting a sweet girl like Armalina. She was perfection, and he was bullshit. I was tempted to shovel a round of dog shit onto the backseat to smear his fancy-ass suit and improve his stink.
My mood didn’t improve when some airport stooge banged on my window and told me I was supposed to be outside to open the door for my charge. I had to futz around to even figure out how to unlock the dang thing.
But Roscoe laughed the guy off and jumped in. “No bags,” he said to me. “We can hightail it on out of here.”
Which I did, the minute the door closed again.
“What a heel,” Roscoe said. “Thinks he’s important when he’s nothing but the dirt people tread on as they go real places.”
I didn’t expect this. I had half wondered if he was going to be pissed that I wasn’t Armalina.
“What’s your name, boy?” he asked.
I hesitated, as I always did. Hasmund didn’t shorten to anything. “Mac,” I said. I’d tried to get that nickname to stick since grade school, but nobody called me by it.
“Well, Mac,” Roscoe said, “you look like you’re about to fly the coop. You graduated yet?”
“About to in May,” I said.
“I’ve seen you around the track. You work hard.”
“Been with the hounds since I was twelve, and mucked out the horse stalls before that.” I circled the airport to head back to the highway. Roscoe wasn’t anything like I expected.
“You been a lead-out?”
I grimaced. “Nah. Keep getting passed over.” I wasn’t thrilled to admit this, but I saw no reason not to lay it out. I figured Roscoe was the sort to know what’s up anyway.
“I have never understood why they let those pansy-ass rich boys handle the dogs when it’s so critical how they go into the gate. Greyhounds are a whole ’nother kettle of fish than horses.”
This was my kind of talk. My hand slammed the steering wheel. “Exactly. Tommy Trueblood totally screwed his dog when he acted so squirrelly loading him that the dog got spooked. He came out of the gate like an unwhelped mutt.”
Roscoe laughed, long and loud.
I glanced at him in the rearview mirror. He didn’t seem so bad now. I didn’t know it then, but I was looking at the face of a good ol’ boy. And good ol’ boys did right by their kind to the exclusion of everybody else.
Which meant anybody who didn’t look and think like him.
These days, I eat good ol’ boys for breakfast. I enjoy dismantling the businesses they built on sexism and prejudice and selling them for spare parts.
But back then, all I knew was this man was rich and powerful, and he liked me.
We talked about other random things on that drive. Roscoe laughed a lot more. I didn’t know that day was going to change my life until a few weeks later, when I got called in by the racetrack manager. They said Roscoe was giving me a scholarship to Auburn University, as long as I could get accepted.
I spent that year repairing grades and joining clubs, making my application look the way my high school counselor said it should. I got wait-listed at first, but eventually I made it in.
And from then on, I saw how things worked. It wasn’t the job you did that mattered, but who you did it for. And I looked for the people who could point me the direction I wanted to go. I’ll be the first to admit I was a total bastard, sweet-talking sorority girls who could get me into frat parties where I made friends with people who had CEO fathers.
They all called me Mac.
Roscoe Denny died before I finished my degree. I never saw him again. And I don’t admire him as much as feel grateful that he chose me as a project. That first unexpected leg up sent me on my way.
Even if I never did get to be lead-out.
Arianna stretches as we wait for the crew to prepare to let us off the plane. Grace starts to stir too, no longer lulled by the gentle motion of the flight. It’s night here, well past her bedtime. But we still have to settle into the hotel. Tomorrow we meet the parents, and I can’t help but dread every moment of it.