“It was like that fish was death itself saying ‘See y’all later’” was how my mother put it, her point, I figured, being that I should remember that I, too, will die, that therefore I should follow her footsteps when it comes to things like religion and sticking to the straight and narrow.
But that’s getting more into me and my mother rather than Tom Corcoran’s death.
What I’m trying to say is that people out there need to know that tragic death and gruesome injuries and need of all sorts (not just financial) and gambling and welshing and debt and vengeful violence have long, long been a way of life around the Finger Lakes racetrack.
People out there should also know that my father’s death left my mother so depressed and anxious she will never board an airplane. And that, as she and I plunked our butts down in a nasty coach-line bus for the thirty-four hours of drudgery between Arkansas and upstate New York, I was under the false impression that I’d stay with her in the Corcorans’ house for a few weeks to better understand my father’s life and death and legacy, but that, after I’d proven my fearlessness about all that, I’d move someplace where my own life could flourish, maybe someplace west or overseas.
I actually believed that then. I believed New York State would be only a place to visit. Somewhere in Kentucky, though, my mother began talking bluntly. And telling me things as though I were a normal adult rather than the daughter of a sex-deprived widow enamored of preachers. Things like how my father had gotten tangled up in those sun-bleached weeds in the middle of the day—not long at all after he’d sipped wine to relax himself to sleep.Things like how for a month or so just before he drowned, he tried to sleep as much as he could, to fight the impatience he felt while fishing, a pastime he’d adopted because owners weren’t letting him ride mounts on account of his recent failures to win.
Things like how these failures to win were thanks to a spill he’d taken on the homestretch just before the finish line, a spill that caused a yelp from him to reach the grandstand when his left hand was trampled, so that now the bones inside were just tiny pieces floating in an ugly swollen-up mush; like how his last day was a Tuesday covered by clouds shaped like toadfrogs, and how Tom Corcoran was the last person to see my father alive.
Tom Corcoran—or so my mother said on that bus ride—had jocked more than his share of horses that lost, and back then he was past the middle of his career and putting on weight, so he’d jog twelve miles every Tuesday, the dark day at the Finger Lakes track. And on my father’s last morning, Tom woke and put on his sweats and looked out his bedroom window toward the lake and saw my father sitting near the shoreline, leaning against a young crab apple tree. Resting against the other side of that tree was a bottle of port wine, which Tom thought odd, since my father had always told apprentices never to drink before sunset. Tom then headed down to that shoreline to say hello, but as it turned out didn’t say boo because my father was fast asleep, with one-hundred-pound-test black nylon fish line not only cast out into the lake but also wrapped around his ankle.
And see, Tom knew why that ankle was wrapped with that fish line: My father had already tried tying cast fish line to the trunk of the crab apple tree—so as to leave a baited hook out in the lake overnight—only to return the following morning to find the line snapped by what had to have been a huge muskie.
Tom considered tapping my father’s shoulder, to wake him and ask if he wanted to study the Form’s freshest charts, but he didn’t touch my father at all, because my father hadn’t done a single thing right at the track since that cavalry charge of hoofs had mangled his hand.
But all these details about my father’s death, as well as any lessons they held about the effects of drinking, were not, my mother told me, as important as my future, and my future, she promised, would not require that I live in upstate New York forever. I’d need to stay there merely as long as it took to get our feet on the ground moneywise, which the Corcorans, who my mother had kept in touch with on and off, had been generous enough to offer to help us do. And let me just say something that I think every public defender should mention to just about any jury: If you ever wonder why people do twisted things, just remember that, more often than not, it comes down to someone losing or needing or otherwise wanting money.
Anyway wouldn’t you know that, right then, my mother added her “little” kicker detail about the Corcorans. About the fact that they had a son named Tug, who’d recently turned twenty-two just like me, and who now managed a horse farm on their acreage while he saved for college tuition.
A spoiled smarty-pants, I thought, but to be polite given all those stuck-on-a-bus miles ahead of us, I took enough interest to ask, “This farm is for racehorses?”
“Can’t say I know for sure,” she said. “When it comes to racehorses, Tom Corcoran tends to hold his cards pretty close to his vest.”
3
DEESH
BARK SLAMS THE TAILGATE CLOSED, works his toolbox and scrap wood to make sure the drum won’t move. No way are we taking it to the dumps we sometimes hit, even the unguarded one that isn’t supposed to be a dump. The woman has her back to us, facing the creek. I’ll never see her again, but I need to. Finally she walks toward the crawl-space hole, hooks its screen window back onto it, and heads into the house. While she’s inside, James flicks a horsefly off his neck. She returns and walks toward us with her lips pursed. She’s even finer-looking with sunshine on her face. She gives Bark a handful of cash folded in half. He counts it, mostly twenties, then nods, slips it into his shirt pocket, and says, “Anything else?”
“Nope,” she says.
“Any ideas about where we should take it?” he says.
“That’s your business,” she says. “Anyone asks me, I never seen that drum in my life.”
“Right,” Bark says, and the way he gets in his truck—without a handshake or a good-bye or even a nod—tells me he wishes we could just roll the drum back down the lawn and give back the cash. But he starts the engine, lets it eat gas while James and I get in beside him, me in the middle. After we back up and ease out onto the road, I notice the woman’s gone—inside her house, I guess. And we’re not backtracking to return to the Bronx. Instead we’re headed north. Farther upstate. Two miles an hour under the speed limit, none of us making a sound. The radio’s off.
I think to ask Bark where we’re going, but it’s like the three of us have made a side deal not to talk. And if anyone’s going to break that deal, I’m guessing, it’ll be James, but James doesn’t say jack, and neither do Bark and I the whole time we cruise over tar-striped highways zigzagging us toward tree-covered hills. I imagine it’ll take hours to reach those trees, and maybe it does, but maybe it doesn’t because my gazing at them helps me remember Madalynn, this tall, willowy woman from my past and Bark’s, that one and only woman I ever had it bad for, and when we’re finally alongside the shadows of those trees, I’m all worked up about lovemaking with her. Behind us in Bark’s truck bed is, as far as I know, only one shovel, and damn if I’ll be the one to use it. We pass a farmhouse, a line of crammed-together mailboxes, a boarded-up gas station where a rusted sign reminds us of when unleaded was $1.44. Bark is scanning the bushy fields on either side of us, trying, I can tell by his grimace, to be more smart than scared.
We pass a state park with no one in the guard station. Then Bark is speeding down a straightaway. There’s no one around us, from what I can tell, but no place for the drum. Then Bark brakes and pulls over. There’s a hill to our right, but it’s a football field away. “How ’bout here?” he asks.
“Where?” James says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Where?”
“Right next to the road.”
“Are you high?” I say.
“Got any better ideas?” Bark says.
“Someplace more hidden,” I say, and for the first time ever, I wish New York was one of those middle-of-nowhe
re states. “With trees.”
“You’re high,” Bark says. “The last thing we need is someone up here seeing three brothers walking out of some woods. They’ll follow the truck. They’ll read my license plate. We get out now—without any cars passing us—and roll it out quick and take off, there’s no way anyone can trace anything to us.”
“Then let’s do it,” James says. “Fast,” he says, and he’s out his door. And Bark is out his. And again I tell myself I’m with them anyway, so I might as well make sure I get paid. James can’t lower the tailgate so Bark slaps away his hand and lowers it himself, and they roll out the drum, and I do what I can to help, though all I manage is to get my fingers on the thing two seconds before they drop it on the weedy emergency lane. I roll it farther still from the road, over a small rise and into a shallow gulley. It gets stuck against a rock surrounded by mud, and that new yellow lid now feels slightly loose, but Bark and James are back in the truck—and behind me, on the highway, a car is coming. I think to run, then undo my fly as if I’m about to piss, using this as an excuse to turn my face as the car passes, honking its horn.
It doesn’t stop, though. It’s two white women in a Prius, speeding to wherever. When I get back in the truck, Bark says, “What you do that for?”
“To take their eyes off the drum,” I say.
“That was stupid,” James says.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“He might be right,” Bark tells James. Bark waits until the speeding car, shrinking ahead of us down that straightaway, is out of sight, and I decide not to mention that the lid felt loose—they’d blame me for it. Bark glances behind us, U-turns, and takes off in the direction we came from. Now, with the drum gone, James starts talking as if he has to make up for everything we all three didn’t say since we left the woman’s house, asking why we did it, asking why he did it, saying we should have thought it over, should have discussed it in the privacy we had to ourselves in the crawl space—one of us, he says, should have put a foot down to keep all of us from losing our heads.
“We could have said no!” he shouts. “But we had to be greedy. We got all stupid for bad money!”
4
JAN
THERE ARE PLENTY OF OTHER THINGS about Tom Corcoran any jury you face should know, things I learned in confidence because, for a stretch of some very intense days just a few weeks ago, Tug Corcoran opened up to me like a man possibly falling in love.
Things like how, on the very same morning my mother and I were on that crowded bus headed upstate to spend this summer with the Corcorans, Tug walked through his parents’ woods to his horse farm, then saw that Silent Sky, the only horse boarded in his care then, was gone.
Things like how he also then noticed a hole in his horse farm’s fence wide enough to roll a tank through.
And like how Silent Sky herself had never been a bolter, never as much as glanced whenever Tug had opened the gate to tend to her, so the question that not only appeared in Tug’s mind but then seemed destined to stay was: What—or who—had prompted Silent Sky to leave?
And see, Tug first tried to convince himself that Silent Sky’s owner, Jack Silverton, had taken her on the sly so he could euthanize her to cut expenses. But Jack Silverton had money—old, endlessly flowing money—as well as a soft spot for thoroughbreds, a soft spot that competed with Tug’s own.
So even before Tug finished jogging across the meadow toward the hole, he suspected Tom Corcoran of having something to do with this. He hated suspecting his own father, but if his father had taken Silent Sky to sell her for cash to gamble with? Well, he damned sure hated that, too.
And see, there was no denying the fence had been vandalized. Two birch-log planks had been cracked clear through, another yanked out toward the woods. Leading away from Tug were bar-shoe hoofprints, wide enough to assure him they’d been made by Silent Sky’s flat, spread-out turf hoof, and just before the hole the hoofprints were all crowded up, meaning she’d stopped to resist whoever had haltered her and led her out.
Then Tug heard “What the hell?”—and there, across the meadow near the path through the woods, stood his father, the same Tom Corcoran known to local gamblers as the retired jock who still hung around the track and couldn’t, for the life of him, contain his will to win big. Since Tom had retired from riding, there’d been plenty of moments like that moment right then: when the sight of Tom, a man who struggled to care for his family because his first love was to gamble, would irk the hell out of Tug. But there’d been plenty of worse moments, too, moments when Tom’s presence had made Tug want to strangle the man, like when Tug’s mother would ask Tom a favor and Tom wouldn’t pay her any mind, or when Tom would second-guess a bet he’d lost, or when Tug had gotten all charged up talking about his dreams about breeding champions on his horse farm and Tom would interrupt to say how proud he’d feel when Tug would finally leave the house for law school.
But like the good son he’d always tried to be, all Tug did now was calm himself. Though then there he was, saying directly to Tom, “Whoever kicked those logs was either large or fairly strong. Or, I guess, pretty pissed off.”
“Why would they be pissed?”
“No clue, Dad. You mind telling me?”
Tom raised his lucky blue coffee mug just past his chin, then held it there, inches from his unshaven face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“All I’m saying is that, of the two of us, you’re the one spending time and cash with grandstanders.”
Which was as bold as Tug had the balls to be back in June—about how tired he was of acting like Tom and Tom’s track pals hadn’t gone too far with gambling, fixing races, bookmaking, and whatever else they were up to.
“Tug, those guys don’t care about jinxed mares,” Tom said. “I mean, she had no real upside, right?”
“Yes, but why—I mean, what are you saying?”
“Just that I can’t imagine why anyone I know would’ve wanted her.”
“You can’t?”
“No.”
“Well, I can,” Tug said, not so much because he’d imagined reasons specifically. Though he still did suspect that any of the regulars in the Finger Lakes grandstand—including Tom himself—might have stolen Silent Sky to sell her to a rendering plant for gambling cash.
“Maybe it’s better,” Tom said, facing the hole. “Since a couple new boarders are headed here anyway.”
He went all still then, as if considering something most crucial, and Tug went still, too, remembering Silent Sky’s fondness for being scratched between her ears.
“Thoroughbreds?” Tug asked.
“No.”
“Standardbreds.”
“No.”
“Then I don’t get it, Dad. What, exactly, are we talking about?”
Tom gazed at an oak trunk beyond the cracked logs, sipped coffee from his lucky blue mug. He squinted as if he’d just swallowed something bitter, faced Tug squarely, then used an obviously put-on upbeat tone to say, “People.”
5
DEESH
JAMES GOES ON ABOUT HOW he hates being poor, hates the endlessness of it—it’s like we were all born into these rubber bags we can’t punch our way out of. There’s no light in his life, he says. Not even in summer. Never was. He never should have hung with us, even in high school. He should have listened to his mother when, after we won state, she said we were bad influences, God rest her soul.
But that’s as close as he gets to talking about the death in the drum, and his carefulness about that promises me there was death in there hands down, even though I’ve been waiting for him to zip it so I could say that, for all we know, we just dumped off a crammed bunch of laundry that got moldy after the creek rose and flooded the woman’s house. There’s a million things other than a person that could be in a drum was what I convinced myself while
James went off like that, but now that he’s done, that million feels like a million too many.
Then a single word won’t leave my mind—fingerprints. Bark turns on the radio and presses SCAN, but it keeps coming back to this station that plays lite songs for white folks. He lets it play, though, and the news comes on, and I listen, expecting the dude to report a dead body found in a drum even though I know that’s impossible this soon. After the news ends, Bark snaps off the radio, and I imagine he’s thinking the same thing I am. For the rest of our lives, we won’t-but-will want to hear any news on any radio or watch it on TV.
And I don’t need to ask him if this thought is on his mind a mile or so later, because a glance from him, as we roll toward the city, tells me. He’s remembering how, just a week ago, as he and I walked side by side to a hauling job in Brooklyn, we came upon that Madalynn from our past, willowy Madalynn—she looking even finer than she had when I was the lucky brother to spend nights with her. How she was now walking toward Bark and me without yet realizing he and I were who we were, she side by side with an all but grown-up kid who, from the looks of things, must have been her son, Jasir. How after we all four came upon one another, Bark stopped her by simply standing right in front of her, forcing her, with his closeness and stillness, to look up at him. How that left me smack in front of Jasir. How Jasir was obviously as sinewy as I’d been at his age. But, see, that’s not what got me as the four of us stood there. What got me was how Jasir folded his arms over his chest a moment before I did. How, right then, as he and I stood there on that sidewalk, he was holding himself in the exact same way I always had and still do, palms flat against ribs, no telltale fists, just a wiry young man maybe protecting or hugging himself or both. And as Bark and Madalynn went on with their small talk, Jasir and I stood like that—arms folded to make each of us look far too much like the other—though we both played this off as if we cared only to listen to Bark and Madalynn. But, hell, if I heard anything right then, it was only Jasir’s thoughts, and what he was thinking was: This serious dude is your daddy no doubt. Looks too much like you not to be. Did it with your mama and good.
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