Bark veers left, toward the bench near the homestretch. “Shouldn’t we watch closer to the finish line?” James asks, but Bark keeps on. James stands still, knees locked, yakking about how what we’d see from that bench won’t matter. About how he wants to eyewitness the very end. About how, if all of us shout enough near the finish line, we could affect whether we win or lose.
“Go ahead and shout,” Bark says. “I’m gonna watch from here.”
James huffs off, leaving me to decide who to watch with. I don’t follow him since the last thing I need is the sound of his voice. I don’t sit beside Bark since I’m pissed he’s the reason I went upstate. I stand where I am, partway between Bark and the finish line—in front of the odds board beyond the dirt where they’ll run. It all of a sudden doesn’t mean shit that the three of us won state twice together, hung together on countless nights since, might end up together in Mississippi for the rest of our lives. We’re all strung out along that wire fence like cousins who never met, each of us as alone as the skinny drunk beside me, all of us as stuck inside ourselves as whoever’s rotting in that drum.
And we stay like that until the horses are in the gate.
8
JAN
THE WAY THE CORCORANS had it set up then was the three upstairs bedrooms went one each to Tug and my mother and Tug’s parents, whereas I’d sleep on the first-floor summer porch, a long narrow room surrounded by three walls of windows, the widest facing the lake. During the day, this room was the best because all around were thick oak trunks and shiny rhododendrons and white blooming wisteria, and there was a family of chipmunks who spied on you and redheaded woodpeckers who charmed you by working upside down, and at any time a metallic green hummingbird with a scarlet throat might zing past as fast as a falling star, sip from a purple clematis, then dart to a lily the color of a conch shell’s throat, with the jade and aqua and shimmering lake behind everything.
But at night, if you couldn’t sleep, you’d hear creaks in the narrow ceiling overhead, let alone voices up there, sometimes hissed words if not clearly angry phrases, always between Tom and Colleen, often about money. And on my first night beneath such creaks and those voices, I lay under a lent comforter on the cot alongside that porch’s only privacy-assuring wall, and outdoors beyond that enchanted yard loomed that same body of water, waves on it throwing moonlight at me, reflected brightness lapping along plasterboard inches from me if even a meek breeze rose, telling me more directly than any voice above me that, yes, let’s not deny it, girl: You lay within a furlong of the lake that took your daddy twice—first when he drowned, again when your mother scattered his ashes from that pier.
And the longer I got worked up about how much easier my life could have been if my father hadn’t drowned, the more I wanted to leave that porch, though doing so would risk running into a Corcoran, which I did not want to do. What I wanted was to get away from both the lake and the Corcorans, maybe go out in the yard between the house and the road, maybe, if I could muster the spine, follow the path through the woods south of the house to Tug’s horse farm. Horses had long, long been my means of escape; riding them helped me avoid people I didn’t like, and on a saddled horse you also had more power than anyone who stood on human feet. Naturally, then, in the middle of that first night I spent in the Corcorans’ house, I wanted to see a filly or a colt I might take a liking to. Gnawing at me still was Colleen’s caginess during dinner at the kitchen table that evening, when I’d addressed no Corcoran in particular to ask how many horses Tug had in his care; she’d grown all at once interested in whether Tom believed muskies were biting, as if there’d been something about Tug’s farm she wanted kept secret.
Anyway I might have been more curious than brave when I pulled on my jeans and sweatshirt and sandals and tiptoed from the summer porch through the musty living room into the kitchen, which was lit by a high-watt bulb in a frosted fixture. I took two McIntoshes from the cracked ceramic bowl on the cherrywood table and, feeling not only brave but also generous now that each of my hands could offer a horse a surefire gift, escaped through the roadside door.
The lawn out there was a long stretch of crabgrass split by a path of flagstones sunken by rain and time and the weight of an unknowable number of horse folk, and it struck me that my father himself had probably walked on those stones, his actual flesh-and-bone feet pressing each a microscopic bit deeper, and this realization saddened me. If he hadn’t drowned and were still alive, I thought, he and I might be talking now, and I headed left, then into the woods south of the lawn.
And in those woods I kept to the path Tug had cleared, a trail just wide enough for thoroughbreds. I pressed on guided by the same moonlight that had haunted me on the summer porch, and between the crowns of the trees on either side of me were also stars strong enough to not only guide you but also to get you to thinking about eternity and family and afterlife and anyone you really cared about, and I wondered: Is it through one skinny ray—from the least visible star—that dead fathers communicate with daughters? Or is it through sunshine?
And I did choke up a little while wondering this, but then I told myself to focus on the future, on how I might be minutes from meeting horses, maybe one who’d prove as wild about being ridden as I was about riding. Filly, mare, colt, gelding, bay, roan, chestnut—no distinction would matter if this horse would love to run with me—and then things went black thanks to a huge boulder on my right, more of a cliff, really, a slice of the earth’s guts forced out past its skin by a glacier, it seemed. And the darkness here was thick enough to bring to mind bears and wolves and overly aggressive mama raccoons, but it also made the stars directly above seem brighter—trying to connect with my father was only a matter of looking up—and I stopped walking, as if stillness might help me hear my father telling me, through the brightness of those stars, whatever he had to say, maybe, I imagined, something like: I walked there, too. And, yes, I’ve long loved you.
And I felt taller as I walked on, and then, to my right and just south of the boulder itself, there it was, a huge, brightly moonlit meadow with a creek angled across the middle of it and a birch-log fence all around.
And compared to the darkness in the shadow of the boulder, the brightness here, on top of the openness, made you downright joyful, not to mention that miraculous feeling you get when you stand witness to something as defiant of logic as a meadow dropped into the middle of woods thick as hell. But then I noticed an uninhabited, shabby lean-to near the southernmost run of fence, and out there near the creek, where horses might have been drinking, there were none.
And there were none anywhere.
And part of the fence was missing—that section of birch logs was down. Maybe, I thought then, a colt had felt too penned and took his best running start and leapt and failed? Or tore open his coat bolting straight through? Either way I now guessed why Colleen had been cagey: A horse had died and she hadn’t had the heart to tell me.
Then I thought, No. Not everything ends with death. But I was glaring at the apple in my left hand as if it, rather than some six-foot muskie, was death itself, and I chunked it, hard, at the hole in the fence. My throw fell short, though it did bounce once and roll close, and I headed back onto the path to the house, where, as soon as I stepped inside the roadside door, Tom Corcoran glanced up at me, sitting as he was at the kitchen table.
He took stock of me calmly, as though women always trekked into his house at this hour, then asked, “What’s with the apple?”
“I thought there were horses.”
Spread out in front of him, I noticed, was a Daily Racing Form.
“There were,” he said.
“And?”
“Is it really your concern?”
“Well, I think I can say it is.”
“Well, then, let’s just put it this way: We had a small mishap.”
“When horses get lost in a forest,
I wouldn’t call it small.”
“Then call it big.”
He turned the page of his Form, his way, I was sure, of saying he was done with this conversation, either because Tug’s farm was indeed none of my business or because the numbers in the Form were all that should matter to anyone. I pulled the screen door behind me harder, trying for a click I never heard, then stepped cautiously toward him and set the apple back in the bowl, and as I headed for the living room to return to the summer porch, he said, very quietly, “You’re just like your father.”
I stopped, facing the living room, which of course meant facing the lake.
“I mean, he was always going out in the middle of the night.”
I turned. “You mean for walks?”
“Sometimes the man would run.”
“At night?”
“He’d be out there getting a complete workout while every other jock was asleep. I’m surprised your mother never told you.”
“My mama would rather pray to a ceiling than tell me the truth about my father.”
Tom’s watery eyes, unblinking and hazel and magnified frightfully by his glasses, wandered from me to the sink. Then he returned to studying his Form, a script more important, it seemed, than every father and daughter and family in the world. He struck me, as he squinted to read, as a formerly handsome man who might feel expendable; a husband whose paunch had diminished some attraction to him; a father whose thinned, graying hair probably scared the hope out of his son; a jockey whose retirement hadn’t exactly helped the prospects of that same son’s horse farm.
“Come to think of it,” he said. He starred an entry with a plastic pen. “Early in your dad’s career, he used to ride at night.”
“Thoroughbreds?” I asked.
“‘Just trust and let ’em run,’ he’d say.”
“Really.”
He nodded. “The guy would slip the track’s night security a little cash, then go crazy out there, galloping in the dark. He believed horses were happiest when they ran at night. If you rode one through the dark, he’d say, you’d be forming a bond that would help you win together from then on.”
What I was hearing right now, I figured, was Tom Corcoran being a plain old horse guy.
He said, “The thing was, I tried it once, riding in the dark. Horse I was on wouldn’t budge.”
And we were both studying each other’s faces then, as earnest, it seemed, as two people could be, though I had no idea what he was trying to say—other than that he had his own big mess of regrets and nostalgia and resentment and desire stuck in him, trying to charge out.
9
DEESH
I GLANCE OVER AT BARK, who nods. Then I see that the horses are running, already on their way down the backstretch. Because of their distance, I can’t tell if we’re winning, and then, because of the odds board, I can’t see them at all. I hear names being called, but to us it’s all about the one and the three. Then I see every horse out there bunched into a pack, and as they reach the far turn, what looks like a three is in second. Then they’re in their best full sprints toward and past Bark. Then they’re passing me, getting whipped, with the three for sure in front. But the rest of them are gaining—or maybe they’re not. The three might be fading, and a woman in the grandstand screams. And then I watch the rear ends of ten horses, and I haven’t seen the one at all.
10
JAN
WHENEVER TUG COULD, he’d fish with me.
And I always insisted that I, rather than he, do the guy stuff. I’d be the one to hook the baitfish under its spine, and it was my eager fingers that adjusted the float, and I’d add a split shot by using my molars as pliers.
And, most splendidly, I hoped, I’d cast.
Then we’d sit in silence that would ratchet up Tug’s insides, because, as I’d learn later, he always felt far too serious when he was with anyone quiet, especially anyone who knew horses. As a kid, Tug had rarely heard silence at the track, where either some trainer was gossiping workout splits or some hot-walker was cooing into a two-year-old’s ear, or some barn hand’s hose water hissed while the track announcer yelled Who’s gonna catch him? during a stretch run. The silences Tug had grown up hearing, certainly the memorable silences now, had been between his parents, often just after his father had lost so much cash at the track he’d refer to the experience as a “gofak” (good old-fashioned ass-kicking). So, for Tug, silence now went hand in hand with a truce called between spouses after vicious arguments about unpaid bills; it implied a woman was scared because a man had violated her trust, or that a man was at his wit’s end because a woman herself had agreed he should place some huge bet he’d then lost, not to mention his head was spinning because the last time he’d won on a long shot, they’d both agreed that he should have bet more than he had. Such silence had too often spilled out onto the yard and sometimes even past the first piling or two of the pier, and too often Tug would retreat to the far end of the pier, where, if waves or wind or geese didn’t speak up, he would hear silence as a pronouncement that he was maturing into his parents’ worst financial burden.
Often, during the silences between me and Tug while we’d wait for muskies to bite, I would think about my own father, and I’d picture the baitfish down near the sun-bleached weeds, or my father’s breathlessness in the ancestors of those weeds, or both, and I’d wonder if my father’s ashes had dissolved or joined the muck at the bottom.
And as Tug would admit later, he’d be thinking of my father’s death, too, and he’d figure there was nothing he could say to fix any of that horror, so instead he’d just dangle his legs off the deep end of the pier, facing the far shore, reading the pathetically upbeat hardbound his mother had bought him at a tag sale, So You Want to Practice Law. He’d apply this book’s advice to the man his parents wanted him to be, the man who might finally make something of himself now that his horse farm had failed. He would despise that man—a student and then parasite of law—and sometimes, while he’d read, he’d sense an unsteadiness beneath his thighs, a quivering that was sometimes his imagination but sometimes meant someone on the pier was walking toward him, sometimes me.
And on some days, the bright ones, I’d begin my time outdoors by sitting on the pier to read as well, though I’d sit only halfway toward the deep end, facing the tangled weeds, where we’d often cast the float. If Tug had left the So You Want book on the pier, I might give a sentence or two of it a try, but mostly I’d read one of the dozens of old Racing Forms I’d pilfered from Tom Corcoran’s sacred stack beside the living room couch. I’d study the charts rather than what most gamblers read—past performances—and when Tug finally conjured the nerve, on an unseasonably hot day I endured in only flip-flops and shorts and a lavender bikini top, to ask why I preferred the charts, I said, “Because my daddy did.”
Once, when we found ourselves both looking up from our reading at the same time, Tug was all set to ask if I’d learned a priceless nugget from those charts, some key to wisdom or gambling success, but I beat him to speaking up by saying, “Tug, you got me all confused.”
“How’s that,” he said.
“I thought you were a . . . horse farmer.”
“I am. I mean, I was.”
I pushed a frizzed strand of hair away from an eye. “And?”
“And as you might have gathered, my farm isn’t quite operating at full capacity.”
I came close to smiling. I nodded and said, “I did gather that.”
“So . . .” He pointed at his copy of So You Want to Practice Law.
“So . . . what.”
“So when money isn’t flowing toward you at all, there’s—reality to consider.”
I perused the shallows for the float, which now sat deeper than the sun-bleached weeds.
“Fuck reality,” I said. “You know?”
I
studied his face, critically, he thought. Then I continued reading, and he did, too.
Or tried to.
“We’re young, Tug,” I called out, without looking up. “There is no reality. At least none that lasts very long.”
And then I gave him a genuine smile.
“So you’re suggesting,” he said, “that I just . . . hang in there.”
Again, I returned to my reading.
“I’m saying I want to be a jock,” I said, “and I don’t hear anyone telling me to do anything otherwise.”
Because you’re Jamie Price’s daughter, he thought. But he didn’t dare say that then.
“So why should you give up?” I asked.
And then there I was, grinning even as I faced my charts, but then I looked up and over at him seriously, and he shrugged, and, in a manner that I’d later learn struck him as aggressively flirtatious, I shrugged, too, mockingly, a coy smile on me now, aimed at him.
11
DEESH
JAMES IS STILL BESIDE THE FINISH LINE, pointing but not yelling. Bark, with his arms at his sides, leans back against his bench. Then both of them are walking toward me, as if I’m in charge.
“Well?” Bark asks James.
“I couldn’t tell,” James says. “They were all bunched together.”
Bark shrugs, his eyes aimed at the odds board, on the three boxes beside WIN, PLACE, and SHOW. A lit-up ten is in the WIN box, the other two boxes unlit.
“We were right to key them with every other horse,” Bark says. “Nobody would have guessed the ten.”
“Which means a big payoff?” I ask.
Bark nods. “If we win.”
Then, in the PLACE box, I see the lit-up number one. “Here we go,” James says, and the whole board goes dark, blinks twice, then lights up. The ten is still up over the one, the SHOW box still empty.
Watch Me Go Page 4