11/11/2012
Chapter One
Twenty-one year old Tyler Lucas woke easily to the beeping of his alarm clock. The glowing red numerals the same every morning: 4:30. Throwing back the comforter, he slid from the sheets. Seven days a week, this was his life and he loved it as well as his job--the leading jockey at the Detroit Racetrack two years running, with a third on the cusp.
Padding down the hall to the kitchen as he had many times before, he marveled at the difference between life today and how it was as a kid, bare feet on cold, grimy concrete timidly scooting down to the dormitory bathroom. It was a far cry from the plush carpet his toes now sunk into. Most days he didn’t dwell on this, but then there were some mornings, sitting alone in the kitchen of his upscale townhome, he struggled to keep those thoughts at bay. They would march right back into his life as if they had never left. Like this morning while sipping coffee, those things he had endured as a child pecked at the shell of his memory. As long as he could remember, hardships and insecurities had been a part of his everyday life. He recalled how his mother had lugged him from track to track, living in pay-by-the-week motels and tack rooms while she worked for an array of trainers.
Even his first job at ten, walking hots, weaseled its way into his thoughts. He would be handing her the money to buy beer or something else she thought she couldn’t do without. Even into his early teens there was no hope for a future or none that he could see. Not until his mother started cleaning stalls for old Blackie Nelson, a widower who took an interest in Tyler and his well-being. He would always look fondly on the day Blackie had legged him up on the pony, teaching him how to tie a knot in his reins. That was the very moment he knew his life had changed.
That old man had coached and trained him right into riding in his first race by the time he was seventeen. And even though he hadn’t won, just thinking of it always made him smile. He would always be grateful to Blackie for that, and for all that he now had, like money in the bank, a new pick-up, and a future that was in contrast to the way he had been raised.
One of the things he had never done, though, was blame his mother for the life they had lived, nor doubting her love for him. He only wished love would have kept her from a life of destruction. But it hadn’t; on the day he had won his first race she had died of a drug overdose. She had been thirty-seven.
All through Tyler’s life before her death, she had clung to a tattered old picture of a jock winning a race in Chicago. She had carried it wherever they went, tacking it up on every wall of every rat-hole they had ever stayed in. He hadn’t known his father, hadn’t cared to. Yet, when he was younger, he had often asked about the jockey in the picture. Bonnie Lucas sadly answered that he was some cowboy down in south Texas and that his name was Johnny Harwood.
