“The three was toward the front,” I say. “Wasn’t it?”
“It was when they passed me,” Bark says. “And it was supposed to stay up there.”
He won’t look at James, so I do.
“Well, James?” I say. “Did the three hold on?”
“It might have,” he says. “But I’m telling you, man—from where I was standing, I really couldn’t see.”
“Sonofabitch,” Bark says, and I look at the board, where a clear-as-dawn number is now in the SHOW box:
3.
“It’s not official,” Bark says. “And when it is, pretend it isn’t. The last thing we need is someone following us out to the parking lot.”
“Let’s get in line,” I say. “Let’s get our cash and get out of here.”
“Just chill,” Bark says, but then he’s heading back under the grandstand, and James and I jog to catch up.
“The three held on,” James says, and he clamps my shoulder like he did the first time we won state, but hoop and all those wins back then hit me now as pretty damned small. Because this win now, with its promise of the kind of cash a guy could really throw around, has me wishing I could get back with Madalynn.
But I don’t dare mention Madalynn now.
Not around brothers like these.
I say, “You know it, men. And there was no doubt, right? Never any doubt we did it.”
12
JAN
ONE-POUND MUSKIES, I soon learned, were worthless because Jasper wouldn’t pay a cent for anything that weighed under six pounds. Tom Corcoran said Jasper refused such small ones because possessing them could get you fined just as catching them could, but Colleen, in a very hushed conversation with me, said Jasper sold the muskies I caught to pros who’d use them to win fishing contests—and that no pro cared about a fish unless he couldn’t collar its neck with two hands.
Anyhow, Jasper would drive his metallic green ’62 Ford Galaxie down the road behind the Corcorans’ house every morning just after sunup. If I’d caught any muskies the previous day, I’d have hung a red mechanic’s rag on the hedge of milkweed bushes alongside the road to town, and he’d stop. He’d sometimes sit in his Galaxie for a curious while, maybe till the end of some song on his AM dash radio, and finally he’d stroll, kicking dandelions, across the crabgrass.
Sometimes when he’d arrive I’d still be on the summer porch cot, not completely awake, wishing for things like the pride my father must have felt when his mounts won big, and Tug would already be out there on the far end of the pier, watching the sun rise or whatnot, and my first perception of Jasper would be a quiet but strong knock on the roadside screen door. Colleen would usually answer, my mother upstairs praying or reading or still asleep, and I, in only a T-shirt but wrapped in the Corcorans’ quilt, would overhear Tom offer Jasper a coffee, a lemonade, or a Schaefer beer. Jasper would usually say no but he’d sure be obliged for a glass of water, and then, after the plumbing beneath me rattled and shook and squeaked, Jasper would pass the windows that made for the south wall of the porch, bearing down on the lake as he sipped from one of Colleen’s unmatched crystal goblets.
And Tug would have any muskies I’d caught alive in the lake, on his stainless steel stringer near the shore, and Jasper would place the goblet on shale beside the half-dead crab apple tree that had been split by lightning a year earlier and appeared lifeless except for three green shoots near it—the same tree my father slept against on his last morning alive. I’d get all stuck on the fact that, staring me right in the face, was this same crab apple tree, and Tug would nod hello to Jasper, who’d crouch and pull up the stringer, wipe his palms against the worn-shiny thighs of his trousers, slide a finger under a gill of the largest muskie, then lift it. If you were close enough you’d see its teeth and hear Jasper say, “Nine and a half,” or “Eight pounds, ten ounces,” a proclamation that itself suggested his life of watching 1,200-pound horses run had somehow left him with the sensitivity of a post office scale, and I never, for the first part of that summer, doubted him about that, or about anything. Then he’d slide his cash-fattened wallet from his shirt pocket, undo the rubber bands around it, and pay me if I was there or Tug if I wasn’t, Tug himself good as gold for making sure the money would, one way or another, wind up in my mother’s purse.
Sometimes Jasper would pay fifty to sixty dollars a fish, making for sums that, to my way of thinking, seemed impossibly high. Then he’d bend a finger into the shape of one of the loops on the stringer, and, with a calmness that made you sure his experience at the track had somewhere along the line taught him the pointlessness of worry, he’d mosey back to his Galaxie.
13
DEESH
AS BARK ACCELERATES US away from Belmont, it’s those three words—We did it—that keep running through my mind. But I’m not thinking about Madalynn or the trifecta cash. Mostly it’s about the drum. Now and then I glance out Bark’s passenger-side window only to picture the pigeon-toed woman’s yellow house, but already, without even a kiss between the pigeon-toed woman and me, I have left her forever. I mean, that’s how it’s always worked for me: I’m attracted to a woman and I run from her. You might say Madalynn first started me on this pattern of behavior, but if so you could also say Bark did, too. And now, here in this pickup truck, Bark merges onto the Grand Central Parkway, and I ask, “Where we going?”
“My place,” he says.
“For what?” James says.
We cruise, each staring through the windshield. We come to a quick standstill.
James says, “I thought you wanted to go to Mississippi.”
Bark nods, squeezes the steering wheel.
James asks, “Bark, you hear me?”
“Uh-huh,” Bark says.
“You got an answer?”
Bark’s glare misses James to land on me, as if to say, Li’l help, Deesh? No doubt he wants my agreement. Through a closing hole in the traffic to his left, he accelerates, and toward his right shoulder he says, “There’s something at my place we should have.”
Shit, I think. His gun.
“Bark,” I say, “we really don’t need that thing.”
He’s gazing now, out the window to his left. “Deesh. If ever there was a time.”
James, studying my expression, asks: “What.”
I hold up a finger, cock the thumb beside it, fire an imaginary bullet.
“Oh no,” James says. “I was with you on the drum, Bark, and I was with you on the bet, and I’d be with you all the way to Mississippi. But not with no damned gun.”
“Then I’ll drop you,” Bark says, his quickness underscoring that he holds the trifecta cash.
And his two buddies from way back, his glances at me and James probably tell him, are still prep-school-boy scared about the contents of that drum.
Still I say, “Bark, you’re being stupid. I mean, a gun’s bad enough. But the real thing is why, when hundreds of cops around here are already looking for you—and peace in Mississippi waits for you—why wouldn’t you just head for that peace?”
He smirks. He’s used this smirk before, to mess with me. If there’s one person in the world he likes to mess with, it should be James in my opinion, but in reality it’s me.
“Deesh,” Bark is saying now. “Why you always running?”
Again, traffic has us stopped cold. My eyes pin his. “Meaning what?”
“You know,” he says.
“Bark, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, though I know he’s talking about Madalynn, who I’ve on and off suspected he’s slept with. I can’t prove he’s been with her in that way, but we have this running joke, he and I, about him comforting the women I run from. We’ve never talked seriously about this joke, but it’s code, if you ask me, for admissions that we’ve both called Madalynn in the middle of the night
more than once.
As for either of us admitting out loud that we both might still have it bad for her?
Now there’s something I’d never bet a cent on.
14
JAN
AT FIRST TO HONOR MY FATHER, I took to running every night, sometimes well past sundown, and if I hadn’t gone with Tug and Tom to the track I’d run away a few afternoon hours, too. You might say my running was simply me doing what most jocks, wannabe or otherwise, did when they weren’t riding. But for me, gliding away from that lake house and later cruising back was how I assured anyone who cared that I’d not only ride soon, I’d also someday mess with a track record or two set by the man himself.
Then one day, after an all-out sprint over the last hundred feet of a jog into town, I was opening the screen door to the feed store on Main when the talk inside went silent. I headed on in as if I hadn’t interrupted a thing, and Jasper and Bill Treacy, the owner of the feed store, were both sitting behind the glass counter staring at me as if the other weren’t there. Usually I loved the smell of that feed store—a sweet, magic mixture of cedar, dog chow, and caraway—but this time breathing it in made me about gag, so I nodded at Jasper’s raised eyebrows, bought three strings of licorice to keep myself from fainting, and walked out. I stood on the plank wood porch with my back to the bug-eaten clapboard and my eyes closed against sunshine, nibbling a licorice string half an inch at a time, wishing all sorts of things, none of them involving my life remaining as it was.
Then I heard Bill Treacy say, “Why the silent treatment?”—and I chewed a little faster.
“Because that was Jamie Price’s daughter,” Jasper said.
“Oh, was it now.”
I stopped chewing to hold a breath.
“And Jamie’s spill didn’t happen the way most people believe it happened. The way it happened was my son was supposed to be holding back Cold Cash.”
“Ronny was already riding back then, huh,” Bill Treacy said.
Jasper paused. I pictured him nodding. “And this Cold Cash he was on was the favorite,” he said. “In the first race, the race they usually fixed. And it was Jamie’s turn to win.”
Now I knew I would listen. The only question was how not to be heard.
“They had it that organized back then?” Bill Treacy asked.
Again, Jasper paused. “And when they come around the last turn, the leader was tiring and the trailers were in a pack. And Ronny’s horse Cold Cash was on the outside of the pack, looking to the grandstanders like he was set to fly wide and win. Then the colt Jamie was on—I believe he was called Red Sox—got daylight to leave the rail.”
“He’d taken the rail by choice?”
“He’d been boxed in. When he saw an opening, he moved Red Sox off the rail and found himself behind Cold Cash and a bit to his left. And Cold Cash was full of run, so Ronny eased him slightly using the left side of his reins—so the crowd wouldn’t see—and Cold Cash stepped left and stopped. I mean, that horse killed a full run in two strides, and he did so right as Jamie whipped Red Sox, so Red Sox shot ahead with nowhere to go except Cold Cash’s behind.”
“And Jamie didn’t jump off?”
“He jumped,” Jasper said. “Smack in front of eight stretch-running horses. He was lucky all he lost was the use of that hand. Though from then on he figured himself unlucky.”
Something squeaked: Bill Treacy leaning back in his chair?
Bill himself then said, “Proves luck is all how you see things. A jock that good should’ve known that.”
“Jamie wouldn’t have believed that if he did know it,” Jasper said. “I mean, after that spill, he was just not right. Because his days were all of a sudden too long for him. He was so used to traveling an eighth of a mile in twelve seconds, he now had no patience for anything. Fact it’s lack of patience why he ain’t around.”
I shifted my weight and a porch plank creaked. I pictured Jasper and Bill Treacy raising their chins in my direction. I considered running off, but Bill Treacy said, “How do you mean?”
“I mean the man,” Jasper said, “couldn’t wait for death. I mean before they drug him up from the bottom of the lake, he tried to bring it on with painkillers and a jug of grain alcohol. Because, see, Cindy—who he still hadn’t married—was with child. And he believed that Ronny had slept with her.”
“He thought Ronny had?”
“Probably because he held Ronny accountable for that spill. Told his bourbon pals that Ronny had stopped Cold Cash on purpose—in order to ultimately win over Cindy. Course, Ronny would never do that. Because, see, Ronny respected Jamie. Respected him as if he were the king of the world.”
“Even after the spill?”
“’Cause of the way Jamie had with thoroughbreds. What Jamie didn’t have was the patience to see if his jealousy made sense—couldn’t wait to even see the color of that baby. He was so sure that baby wasn’t his, he tied that caught muskie to his ankle and swam out into those weeds. With a belly full of hundred-proof hootch.”
“You know this as fact?” Bill Treacy asked.
“Bill, that fish wasn’t big enough to pull any man into those weeds. Not the smallest jock in racing, not the drunkest drunk you know, not the biggest fool on God’s earth. That fish was only as long as my arm.”
“Says who?”
“I was one boat over when they drug the man in. And I know he’d been drinking because I saw his jug laying on its side empty on the shore. A jug that, Lord forgive me, I funneled a quart of mash into the night before—for a lousy five-dollar bill.”
Bill Treacy and Jasper fell silent. I worried about my breathing: I was sure they would hear it. Get on home, I thought. Run like hell as soon as one of them speaks. The porch creaked—by itself, it seemed—and Bill Treacy said, “Does Jamie’s daughter know this?”
“I doubt it.”
“How ’bout Tom Corcoran’s son?”
“Doubt he knows either.”
“Probably better,” Bill Treacy said.
Jasper coughed. “You know, Jamie’s daughter’s maturing this summer. Having quite the womanly growth spurt, I mean.”
No, I’m not, I thought. My growth, I’d believed until then, had always been late and slow—the opposite of a spurt—and, for the past year or two it had slowed to the point that I’d quit measuring.
“As I see it,” Jasper continued, “she’s grown both wider and curvier in the last few weeks.”
“And I figured her a natural-born jock,” Bill Treacy said.
“Maybe natural-born,” Jasper said. “But she’s more of a woman than a jock now. Could end up fleshier than your average grandstander.”
Then he and Bill Treacy laughed, and then they laughed harder, in that obnoxious way old, know-it-all men like them could, and I spit out what licorice was still in my mouth and walked off without caring about planks creaking or anything. I didn’t care because I knew why Jasper and Bill Treacy were laughing—because, among the truest horsemen, grandstanders were nothing but laughing- stock.
I jogged toward the canopy of elms at the end of Main. Grandstanders are losers was how Tom Corcoran had put it at the track a few days earlier. Because they’re either gamblers or on their way to being gamblers, and in the long run, gamblers always lose.
And after the elms, I ran so fast I was sure I’d fade to walking long before I reached the Corcorans’ house.
Grandstanders are behind before they even sit down, Tom had said, with damned near resentment. The suckers pay just to get in.
And with those words in mind, on top of what Jasper had said about my father, I did not fade. Instead, fueled by rebellion against pretty much the whole world, I accelerated through the opening in the Corcorans’ milkweed hedge and onto their driveway, then sprinted to where my mother was hanging sheets on a clothesline slun
g between pear trees. She glanced over her shoulder at me as I stayed all out toward the lake, a wooden clothespin between her teeth, her face more worn than usual, it seemed, her upper lip raised slightly. Since we’d moved in with the Corcorans, she had this faint way of crinkling the corners of her eyes, and I pulled up and stopped at the Corcorans’ orange forty-gallon drum, which I touched, as I always did, before I cooled down: my own personal finish line.
“Hey, Jan,” my mother called softly, facing the laundry.
I aimed my shoulders in her direction, hoping she’d say more than that, since I was winded enough to need to grab my knees.
“They all inside?” I finally asked, my scalp itchy against my cap.
She shook her head, grabbed up a pair of jeans. “Tom’s at the track; Colleen’s getting groceries, I think. And Tug just headed into the woods saying he’d work on his farm.”
“He’s got a boarder?” I asked, and the thought of a horse now out on that meadow, whether it proved to be a thoroughbred or a standardbred or just some aging mutt, recharged my insides.
“I don’t think so. Just repairing it to make a horse more likely, I expect.”
“You see it yet?” I asked.
“See what.”
“The horse farm.”
She brushed a ladybug off her forearm, shook her head no.
“Not much of one,” I said.
“Is that right.”
“Pretty small, to begin with.”
“Then why don’t you help make it bigger?”
“You trying to get rid of me, Mama?”
Here she held an old blouse of Colleen’s by the hem, well below her own chest, both sleeves touching sprigs of crabgrass, one of the rare times since we’d moved, I then realized, that she was looking me in the eye.
“Baby,” she said, “I just want you to be happy.”
Watch Me Go Page 5