Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  And in Bark, too, on that sidewalk in Brooklyn, there was no doubt. One glance between me and Bark then made me sure that, when it came to being Jasir’s father, he felt free and clear, and a quicker glance now confirms it. I mean, that’s how things have been between Bark and me since our second championship season. All he and I needed back then was eye contact to know if I should lob the ball down to him or fake away and come back with a bounce pass or pull up with a jumper he was set to rebound. We’d never say a word, never even nod. We were tight like that, and now we’re still tight, but I don’t like where our tightness has taken us.

  James never had that unspoken vibe with us; in fact, he was always yakking at us and everyone on the court, refs included, even at the families in the stands. I used to think this was because he had the least talent of our starting five, but anyway since then he’s used talk as a weapon, keeping the threat of it to himself at times, letting the world have it when he’s backed into a corner. In a way it was good he talked so much when we played ball—it hid that eye contact Bark and I used—but now he just sits. And what makes me worry even more is that it’s Bark who finally speaks up, and, worse, what Bark says is: “I vote we go to Mississippi.”

  “Mississippi,” I say.

  “It’s far and we’d blend in.”

  James says, “Bark, we don’t know a damned soul in Mississippi.”

  “Exactly,” Bark says. “So we ditch the truck in Virginia or something, take a bus the rest of the way, start all over down there.”

  “Hang on, man,” I say. “For one thing, if we don’t know anyone, where would we . . . live?”

  “We’ll rent. Like we do now.”

  “With a thousand dollars?”

  “Deesh, it’s not like anything’s keeping us in New York,” he says. “None of us has a woman. None of us has a job other than to haul junk. Maybe this never crossed your mind, but you can haul junk for cash just about anywhere.”

  None of us has a woman? I think, and again I remember Madalynn, then realize that, when you count up all the years that passed before we saw her and Jasir last week, Bark’s right.

  “But we’ll go through the thousand like that,” James says with a snap of his fingers. “We got gas to buy, bus tickets, food—and you don’t just walk into a new town and start living, in an apartment and all, without a good pile of cash.”

  “True,” Bark says.

  Maybe ten miles pass while the three of us sit like strangers on an A train. Then, just by Bark’s suddenly stiff posture, I know what he’s got in mind. He’s not just heading to the city; he’s heading to his favorite place to hang out, Belmont Park, to try to bet our thousand into more.

  “Bark, tell me we’re not going to Belmont,” I say.

  “Why not?” he says, and I expect James to start lecturing, but he doesn’t.

  “Well, I’m not going,” I say.

  “Where you gonna go?” Bark says. “Back to your nasty apartment to wait for the cops?”

  “They ain’t gonna find me.”

  “Well, they ain’t gonna find me,” Bark says. “I’ll be in Mississippi. With a helluva lot more cash than I have now.”

  “You saying I don’t get my share unless you win?” I ask.

  “No,” Bark says. “You’ll get yours.”

  But it hits me he’s already planning to take a chunk from my third for gas and wear and tear on his truck, which he does now and then—and which is fair, even though it seems unfair because he does it only when he wants cash to bet on horses. So now I’m looking at $300, maybe even only $275, and as many groceries as $275 might buy me, it feels like it’s already nothing no matter whose pocket it winds up in, or where. Plus if Bark does leave for Mississippi and I don’t go along, I’ll need to find a new job.

  And what if he wins? I think. Bark usually doesn’t win, but, almost always, he comes close. His problem isn’t that he doesn’t know horses; fact is, in just about every race I’ve seen when I’ve gone to the track with him, he pretty much knows which horse will finish first. His problem is he lives for the big payoff, so he bets trifectas—which means he has to pick first, second and third in the exact order—and it’s usually third place, or sometimes only the exactness, that gets him.

  “I’ll take you home, Deesh,” he says now. “But on the way there, just hear out my plan.”

  He turns on the radio, turns it off.

  “We don’t bet every race,” he says. “We bet one. And before we do, we study all the races to see which one’s best.”

  I flick drying mud off the inside of one of my sneakers. “For the thousand,” I say.

  “Right,” he says.

  “We put it all on one race?” James says.

  Bark nods. “You guys are the ones saying we need more cash to move. You got any ideas about how we can make a pile in a hurry? I mean, legally?”

  Here’s where I most wish James would go off on another yakking streak—about all sorts of moneymaking ideas that never entered my mind. But again he keeps still. And all I can think about when it comes to big, fast money is what would have happened if I hadn’t messed up my knee in the semifinals the first year we won state. Yeah, we won state anyhow. Yeah, everyone on the team propped me over their heads as we left the court. And, yeah, the ligament healed in time for us to win state again our senior year. But everyone who scouted us that year saw my ugly-ass knee brace, saw how I’d lost half a second off my first step to the hoop, and even though I’d compensated by improving my jumper and passing game, everyone knew my burst of speed was why I’d gotten those thirty-four letters of interest from pro and college scouts. Knew that, for all the points and assists I’d racked up, my best bursts of speed were behind me.

  So we sit like that, all three of us, I imagine, remembering those days, as Bark takes us farther down toward the city, then pulls left onto the Sprain Brook, then exits onto the Cross County Parkway. The green of the trees and bushes and fields around us is too soon replaced by faster traffic and concrete, reminding us we live in the Bronx. And it’s not Mississippi or the death in the drum or the hope of winning a pile of cash that changes my mind about whether I’ll go along with Bark’s plan. It’s this appearance of the Bronx that does it. That feeling of being squeezed in. That feeling of knowing you are one of thousands, if not millions, of brothers caged into a future in which you will finally do something no-holds-barred stupid. There’s that stretch of moments, after we pay the toll for the Throgs Neck Bridge and stay just under the limit while we rise, when you see the blue water and yachts and think the good life could happen to at least a few brothers. But then the water is behind us and a Mercedes cuts us off as we exit the bridge, and then there’s the construction and the slowdowns. And you sit, itching to move forward, knowing that Belmont is, after all, a park with burgers and picnic tables and tents that sell beer.

  Quit worrying, you think. We’re almost there.

  6

  JAN

  I FIRST SAW TUG CORCORAN as he dove off the far end of the pier to swim to where the lake grew all shimmery. He’d taken that dive, I figured, to avoid having to meet me, but then I told myself that he and I were long past having excuses not to act like adults: Coincidence, I was sure, was why he was swimming right then. Tom Corcoran had gone straight to my mother and kissed her hello flush on the lips, Colleen showing no sign of jealousy, though already I could tell, by just watching her uninvested glance away from that kiss, that she and Tom weren’t getting along. There was this kind of coldness centered between them, and she hugged me then only because he did, it seemed, and he went off talking, in a hushed way that brought my mother in close, about how we should go easy on Tug because his horse farm wasn’t about to earn praise in the Daily Racing Form anytime soon. I took this as my cue to walk down to the lake, which had its own way of drawing me to it; on that day, in soft sunlight, the
kind that makes you feel like you’re a child again, all that water out there reflected azure so peacefully you never would have thought it could’ve hurt a soul, let alone your own daddy if he were a champion jock.

  And Tug, as I stepped onto the pier, was backstroking toward me. By the time I passed the second or third piling, he’d stopped to stand between the pier and a tangle of this year’s weeds, ripples around him fading, a minnow nipping at the taut skin just above his navel. He had the kind of shoulders you wanted to drape your arms over while you made out and talked, and I stopped walking only to tilt my head slightly, my insides gone to pieces about how the tan I’d gotten in Arkansas without trying might overwhelm any upstate New York man with skin as pale as his. And I’ll admit that, already, there was this tightness in my chest, though back then I wasn’t sure this was a sign of love—as I saw things then, he’d just made me go shy.

  But it turned out to be me who said hello first, even as I’d now have sworn our eyes were putting a charge in us both. Then there we were, this other jock’s only child and I, carrying on like good sports, with me telling him about my life’s dream to ride racehorses professionally, about how I was sure I’d never win as many races as my father had but believed I’d still try. And my mention of my father had Tug’s eyes darting everywhere except those sun-bleached weeds, and I wondered if, instead of desire, he was destined to merely feel sorry for me.

  “But right now?” I said. “I’m looking for work that’ll pay up front.”

  “Wish you could help on my farm,” he said. “But business is slow.”

  I shrugged.

  “Anyway,” he said. “Sounds like you need per-hour work.”

  “Already have some,” I said. “Fishin’ for pay for some old guy.”

  “Here?” he said. “I mean—on the lake?”

  I nodded.

  “Anyone I know?”

  “I think your father said . . . Jasper?”

  Jasper, as it would turn out, was Tug’s family’s oldest friend from the Finger Lakes racetrack. Back when Tug had been the kid who’d press his face against the chain-link alongside the homestretch, Jasper had been the soul entrusted to place bets for Tom if Tom found himself on an entry that seemed doped or otherwise geared up to win. Jasper would stand in the crowd near that same chain-link and—if Tom petted his mount three times quickly—walk away from the crowd, then run. Jasper would always have at least a few hundred dollars of Tom’s in his back pocket, but no bet made on behalf of the Corcorans was supposed to exceed fifty, because, back then, both of Tug’s parents believed that greed led to losing—not to mention they didn’t want to reduce a given wager’s payoff by driving down the odds.

  Jasper’s payment for placing the Corcoran family bets was the information about the live horse itself, but Jasper always pushed his luck: He was wise enough to bet a juiced horse straight up to win, but then, throughout the rest of the day, he’d consider any rumor, from anyone, a stone-cold tip, and he’d lose.

  So it made sense that fish for Jasper’s meals came from the lake. What confused me back then—and would confound me for weeks—was how Jasper could afford to pay me to catch them.

  And why had Jasper chosen me, a woman who’d never even cast a line, to be the person in charge of reeling his meals in?

  7

  DEESH

  THEN WE ARE THERE, on Belmont’s grounds, me and Bark and James, both of them, in hazier sunshine than we came from, looking older than I thought we were. Bark buys a program, the thousand again dented as it was to pay our parking and entry fees. He sits on a painted green bench near where they bring the horses to saddle and pet them before they bust ass out on the track.

  “They already ran the first four races,” he says, a little pissed, probably because it’s hours past noon and he’s gotten no kick from gambling. He slouches and studies away while James and I sit on either side of him. All we need, I think, is for Bark to find that one, best race. And to concentrate enough to pick the three horses in the right order. The corpse in the drum means pressure, I know, but Bark, I remember, played his best under pressure. In fact, lack of pressure was why he never made the pros or a college team. In the high school games we knew we’d win, which was most of them, he could never get himself to try all that hard, and, if you believed our coach, word got out he was lazy. But in those few big games, the major-pressure ones, he always showed up to leave sweat on the court, and even if his shot was off or he dragged down fast breaks from being out of shape, he did the kinds of things that make championships, like elbowing the wind out of the other team’s star when the refs weren’t looking, or giving a soft high five just before I’d toe the line for a free throw.

  Now he’s walking us to another green bench—beside the homestretch of the track. Again James and I sit up against his shoulders. He’s flipping pages in his program, back and forth from race six to race eight. He’s got it down to those two, he tells me. I want race six so we’ll know sooner if we’ve won or not, but I don’t want to mess with what all those numbers are teaching him. He holds race eight closer to his face. He sighs. I look off around us.

  “We’ll do it in the sixth,” he says.

  “You know which horses?” James asks.

  “The three horse for sure. And the one. It’s just a matter of whether we go with the four, seven, or nine after that.”

  “That don’t exactly sound solid,” James says.

  “Just being straight with you,” Bark says. “What’s left of the races today are hard as shit to pick.”

  “Can we just go with the three and one to finish first and second?” I ask.

  “That would be an exacta,” Bark says. “And everyone’s gonna box the three-one exacta. Which means it’ll hardly pay.”

  “We can’t take the three and the one with all three of those other ones you like?” I ask. “I mean, in trifectas?”

  “That would be three different bets,” Bark says. “Meaning we’d bet only three hundred–something on each. Which again means a lower payoff.”

  “But we’d be more likely to win.”

  Bark returns to studying, though I’d guess he’s also considering what I’ve said. Then I’m sure he’s trying to figure how much each of those three trifectas could pay, but then I’m not sure of anything.

  “How much do we need?” he asks.

  “Who knows?” James says. “But you’d have to think five or six grand would be cool.”

  And here’s where I both believe we’ll win but also wish we wouldn’t. I wish we could just get in Bark’s truck and go home. I want to start the day over. I want to go back in time even before that, and meet the pigeon-toed woman before whatever happened in her life that forced her to call Bark. I want to make love to her back then, night after night, so often and well the drum will stay empty, and mostly I want to go all the way back to Madalynn.

  But today is not at all in that past. It’s today, and now race five is running, without Bark betting a penny on it, which reminds me we’re here for serious business despite the white college boys beside us celebrating their summertime freedom by drinking beer, all of them hooting as the seven horse pulls ahead.

  Bark looks up as the seven wins easily. He glances at the odds board and says, “Twenty-five to one.” He hunches over to reread the program.

  “You know what?” James says.

  “Shut up,” I say. “Let the man think.”

  “You’re right,” James says.

  Seagulls almost land on the lawn inside the track, then swoop off. They’re headed north, toward the drum. That seven horse was headed north, toward the drum. Wind blows past the three of us—north, toward the drum.

  “The more I look at this,” Bark says, “the more I can see any horse finishing up with the one and the three. And the way the crooks here fix these races, any horse could beat the
one and the three.”

  “So what do we do?” I ask.

  “Key the one and the three with every other horse.”

  “Which means what?” James asks.

  “If the one and the three finish first, second, or third, we collect.”

  “Sounds good,” James says.

  “But they both have to finish in the top three.”

  “Sounds tough,” I say.

  “It’s as easy as I can make it,” Bark says.

  “How much would we win?” I ask.

  Bark shrugs. “Anywhere from double our money to a ton.”

  “But like you say, what good is double our money?”

  “Deesh,” Bark says, “we gotta leave here with something.”

  Which tells me that, today, he’s lost faith in horses. If it were yesterday, or any day before we moved that drum, he’d have enough faith for the three of us. But it’s today. It doesn’t matter that he’s got more cash in his pocket than he’s ever had at the track. Today is today is today.

  We all three sit. The horses walk onto the track, a jockey on each. Then Bark stands and says, “Let’s do it,” and James and I follow him under the grandstand to the betting windows, where we wait in a short but slow line. Finally, Bark leans in close to our teller, an old white lady. He talks so quietly she needs to lean, too, and then he pulls out the cash and hands it over for a ticket he reads even after his feet begin to shuffle off.

  “Gentlemen!” the teller shouts. “Your change?” She’s holding three twenties, and James jogs back to her, takes them, gives one apiece to me and Bark, then stuffs the third in his pocket. We walk back out toward the homestretch, and it hits me I might have done something for a twenty I’d never do again for all the money in the world.