Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  I smiled at her more than was honest, a sort of Tom Corcoran smile, I thought. “And you figure my talking to Tug is the straight path to happiness?”

  She smirked, the clothespin possibly to blame for the absence of a full-fledged grin, and then she returned to hanging up clothes, so I headed off, past the Corcorans’ royal blue hydrangea and into the south woods.

  In sunlight, the maple trunks along the way appeared thicker than I remembered, and the huge boulder on the right seemed less unnatural during the day, the meadow less promising and lonelier, and there was Tug, kneeling near the gap in the fence. The lean-to, I noticed, had lumberyard spray paint still on it. I ducked under a birch log on my side, walked across the meadow, stopped just short of Tug.

  “Hey.”

  “Jan?” he said, without a glance up. He was wearing rawhide gloves and an old button-down that sweat kept stuck to his back. He raised a sledgehammer above a loose fencepost, and it was clear to me now that, physically speaking, he was a far better natural candidate to jock than I was.

  “Not to imply that I know horses more than you do,” I said. “But if you ask me, you’re spending good energy on the least important part of your farm.”

  “I’m sorry?” he said, and down came the sledgehammer, with no small amount of anger, it seemed, since the fencepost split in half.

  “It’s that lean-to over there,” I said. “You should, you know, make it so it’s got four walls and a roof and a door you could close when it rains or gets cold.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be a lean-to,” he said. “Then it would be a barn.”

  I let him enjoy that one for a while. Then I said, “Precisely my point, Tug Corcoran.”

  He kept working on, as if I weren’t there. If this were some recommended legal-schmegal tactic he’d learned from one of his secondhand law books—tapping into your opponent’s insecurities by ignoring her—well, it did get my goat a little, but it sure wouldn’t get me in bed.

  “It’s like with people, Tug,” I said. “If they feel cared for when they’re around you, they’ll never think about walking away.”

  He went on working, now and then studying the outskirts of his farm to address the question of which nearby birch might make for a new fencepost, but possibly, I suspected, just to ignore me. For a while there, I wondered if my desire for a barn with four walls was rooted in my lack of privacy on the summer porch, which did, like the lean-to, have only one solid wall. But Tug said nothing about that, and soon I felt stupid for the times I’d imagined sleeping with him when I couldn’t sleep at all.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I’m not up for fishing this afternoon. Maybe I’ll go this evening.”

  “What, you haven’t heard?”

  “About what.”

  “The secret sprint.”

  I had no idea what he meant. He kicked at an intact log as if bent on breaking it, too. “Jasper’s driving us out past Geneseo tonight,” he said. He stared at my face so unrelentingly I was sure licorice had stained my teeth. “Some rich contractor claimed a horse. And the guy wants to have his friend ride it in a match race against a horse Bill Treacy’s buddy just claimed.”

  “Ridden by?”

  “You.”

  I folded my arms to hide my hands. “I’m not so sure that’s the best idea.”

  “Why not?”

  I was tapping one foot repeatedly, an expression of defiance I’d despised seeing my mother use—until I’d adopted it myself. “I’ve never ridden in an actual race, Tug. Not to mention I think I’m getting a little too . . . you know . . . thick.”

  “Now don’t go being that way,” he said. “Guys around here don’t race their horses for shits and giggles. In fact it was Jasper who set up the sprint, and Jasper’s seen you most every day this summer, so why would he have you ride without confidence in you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, though already I was constructing theories.

  “Well, think about that.”

  “Maybe he wants me to ride once for money,” I said, “because he feels sorry for me.”

  “He doesn’t feel sorry for you, Jan. No one does. You were born to be a jock—it’s in your blood, and that’s a fact.”

  “If you think so,” I said, but only because he’d taken on a sort of lawyerly tone of voice, and the last thing I wanted to do with anyone right then was argue for the sake of argument.

  Still, I was confused about why Jasper wanted me to ride when Jasper himself had just called me womanly.

  “Anyway, what’s this horse’s name?” I asked. “I mean, the one I’d ride tonight if what you’re saying is true.”

  Tug wiped his hairline with the back of his glove. In heat this humid, his cheekbones appeared sharp. One of his feet pressed down against a spindly birch log in a standing section of fence, and I was sure he could break it easily.

  “Equis Mini,” he said. He blinked away perspiration and sunshine. “Latin for ‘extremely small horse.’”

  15

  DEESH

  “TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION,” Bark says to me, “I’m going to my place so we can stop being scared.”

  “And you really think a gun’ll help us with that?” James says.

  “I do,” Bark says. “And yes, Jimmy, that is just my opinion. But we are talking about a ride in my truck, so anytime you’d rather walk, I’ll be glad to pull over.”

  “No need,” James says as he reaches past me to try to open the passenger-side door—and I shove him back down, ticked off all the more since here I am again, playing peacekeeper.

  Then Bark, too, gets all fatherly:

  “Okay, James. My gun will be in that glove box in front of you, so you decide. Mississippi, or your apartment. Choose your apartment and I will take you there. Not all the way to your building, mind you, since your building will probably have officers in front of its entrance, but I will drop you within, say, four blocks of those officers. It’s just that you need to let me know what you want now, so I can plan the best route through this traffic.”

  Then we all three sit as still as we had when we’d been screamed at by our hoops coach. It’s like we’ve scrapped and lucked our way this far, but now we’re all benched, losing our biggest game. Then it hits me that what Bark told James goes for me, too—head for Mississippi with an unregistered gun, or go home to wait for cops to knock.

  “Then I’m out,” James says. “But don’t take me to my place, Bark.”

  “Then where?” Bark says.

  “My grandma’s.”

  Traffic lets us move maybe three or four feet.

  “In Queens,” James adds.

  I roll down my window and look ahead and behind: cars as far as I can see.

  “Fine,” Bark says.

  “You take me there?” James asks.

  “I said I’d drop you.”

  And again, we all simply sit. This, I realize, might be our last conversation ever, and as scared as I am about the drum and the gun, my throat catches because of plain old sentiment.

  Bark clears his throat. “Obviously the story we all stick with is that, today, none of us went upstate.”

  “Agree with you there,” James says.

  “Today was all about the horses,” Bark says, “for all three of us.”

  “Right,” I say, and now here’s Bark, asking where James’s grandma lives, up near Ditmars or down toward Queensboro Plaza, and here’s James, telling Bark she’s just off Steinway on about Thirty-fourth Ave, and now here they go, talking restaurants and clubs in Astoria like Bark’s a cabbie James just met. There’s no mention of the trifecta cash, not once. But I know James has it in mind because I have it in mind.

  Bark picks at an ingrown hair on his neck. James closes his eyes. I’m still deciding if I’ll travel with Bark. My gut says play
the same card James did—insist we go minus the gun—but I can’t read Bark for whether, with one friend gone, he’ll value his last more or prefer flying solo.

  For a moment I want to say, James, you are bailing. Then we are whizzing ahead, and I can’t remember having rolled out of traffic, which confirms that, for a stretch there, I lost myself in thought. Stress, I think. Or are you just aging? Or were you thinking about Madalynn?

  Then there we are, pulling over on a street full of houses just off Steinway, and James’s posture straightens as he points at an upstairs duplex with white trellises without vines. Bark brakes hard and James and I get out, and there, on that sidewalk, I wonder how it feels to know one of your grandmothers, and I figure Bark wonders this, too.

  But Bark’s counting the trifecta cash.

  “Maybe you’ll need it more than I will?” James says, though he’s lingering right there, near Bark’s open passenger door.

  Bark hands James a folded share. He snaps off another few bills and gives those.

  “For Grandmama,” he says.

  James nods, pockets his share, heads for the porch. Halfway up the stairs, he stops and turns and nods at Bark, then at me.

  “Cool,” he says.

  “Right,” I say, but he’s already turned to ring his grandma’s doorbell, so I get back in the truck, closing the door as we accelerate off.

  Bark shakes his head and says, “Pussy.”

  He means James, though what I also hear is that Bark is not at all up for another request to travel unarmed.

  Then he says, “You just know he’ll tell Granny about that drum.”

  “Count on it,” I say.

  “The way I figure things? She takes those extra twenties and he tells her they’re from me? Best investment I ever made.”

  And again there is more than words to Bark’s words. There’s the point that he still holds my share of our money, that money still talks, that I’d be smart to stay on the good side of power. And already I miss James, because James’s verbal flow always gave logic a chance to be said out loud and considered. With Bark and Bark only, everything’s glances and cash and manhood. There’ll be fewer quibbles without James, but there’ll be fewer laughs.

  Still, as Bark and I and his truck roll out of Queens, instinct from somewhere, maybe the father I never saw, tells me that to abandon Bark now would be a loser’s move. After all, Bark’s been my man since high school. He’s found me work when I’ve needed cash. His time spent with Madalynn, platonic or not, proves we’re cut from the same cloth.

  On the Triboro, all lanes become jammed. Silence up here grows thorns. There’s no arguing about the truth that the Belmont win, by assuring we’d travel in this rush hour, cost us time.

  Bark clicks on the radio. A truck jackknifed, the broadcaster says, and someone in it died. No one will budge until everything’s chalked and photographed. I tell myself this means fewer cops looking for us. But then comes top-of-the-hour news about a murder in Putnam County.

  “No way,” I say out loud.

  Bark’s considered answer is, “You think?”

  I don’t dare say a word, sure my voice would crack. If James were here now, we’d be lectured. But now there’s no doubt about one thing. Bark is headed for his gun.

  16

  JAN

  TOM CORCORAN HELD his secret sprints on an abandoned runway six miles west of Varysburg, a flagging town on the shore of the Tonawanda River. Jasper owned a dirt-road-accessed acreage between two rolling hills there, and he and Tom ran the two-furlong races based on an understanding that results would never be leaked to the Form. One of the horses would be connected to some gambling pal of Tom’s, the other to what Tom called a “rookie owner,” a rich grandstander who knew nothing about training but had recently claimed his first racehorse for fun. Rookie owners came and went all the time—in fact Jasper’s theory was that horseracing relied on them—and Tom would bump into them at the stables, try to take them under his wing, and give them tips on feed, hay prices, and so forth. After he’d won their confidence, Tom would tell them about secret workouts he knew of, two-horse sprints where owners could assure their horses were tight without having impressive workout times reported publicly. Without grandstanders knowing about the workout times, primed-to-win horses, when they did run at Finger Lakes, would presumably command higher odds, meaning, again presumably, that rookie owners could cash in on long-shot-priced tickets. And of course nothing was certain but rumor had it that, thanks to a run of luck that began with a secret sprint, one rookie owner quit his job laying concrete to live in a penthouse with a view of pretty much all of Central Park.

  To keep the sprints secret, owners supplied surrogate jockeys such as sons, daughters, or neighbors. Rookie owners would agree to an evening, usually a Tuesday, the off day at the track, and, given the nature of the horse people present, wagers took care of themselves.

  Tom and his gambling pals would arrive on Jasper’s acreage a couple hours early, so they could slow down the rookie’s lane with water tanked on the back of a pickup and rake the mud over, then double-check the rookie’s gate to make sure it was rigged to open a half second slower.

  A half second advantage is all you need in a sprint.

  A half second puts you out in front by two and a half lengths.

  17

  DEESH

  “HAND ME YOUR CELL,” Bark says, and now, seeing I’ve already caved in about the gun, I want to say, Man, who do you think you are?

  But I know who Bark is. He’s the one driving. So all I say is, “Why?”

  “We’re disappearing, man. I leave both our cells at my place, cops’ll figure we’re still in the Bronx.”

  I yank out my cell, hand it over, hiss out a sigh I keep mostly to myself. Then we are rolling again. We slow down, then glide. A block from Bark’s building, he double-parks, gets out and jogs off, not a word over to me, which trips me about what he’ll do in there. He has no woman to call is our current understanding, though I wouldn’t put it past him to be speed-dialing Madalynn. I’d call her myself if I had my phone. I’d tell her a disguised good-bye.

  Then Bark’s back outside, across the street, walking toward the truck. His posture says he’s armed. He ignores me as he gets behind the steering wheel.

  “No need for it to be loaded,” I say.

  “Right,” he says, without even a quick glance over.

  Which, if you know Bark like I do, means his gun’s not only loaded—it’s begging him not to stay hidden.

  18

  JAN

  AS TOM AND COLLEEN CORCORAN and Jasper and my mother and I and Tug crammed into Jasper’s Galaxie to head for the secret sprint, the Corcorans’ yard struck Tug as emptier than usual, and he cringed when he realized why: The forty-gallon drum his family had burned leaves in was gone.

  Had Tug not been Tom Corcoran’s son, this drum’s absence would have struck him as the result of petty thievery, but, of course, Tug would always be Tom’s son, so now, as Jasper’s Galaxie headed off, Tug considered a reality most every Finger Lakes horse person had taken to heart at least once, the absence of The Form Monger’s wife.

  That cautionary tale had played out semipublicly back when Tug was just the tongue-tied kid who followed Tom around the track, and the upshot of this tale, as Tom once explained it to Tug, was that she, The Form Monger’s wife, disappeared because an odds-defying losing streak had compelled The Form Monger to double down and borrow from loan sharks. Only days before The Form Monger’s wife disappeared, The Form Monger had bitched and moaned openly in the grandstand about how he was so jinxed he’d even lost one of his garbage cans. And ever since she went missing—that is, for the past fifteen-odd years—the conclusion of every grandstander has been that The Form Monger’s once-super-fine-looking and now-long-gone-from-sight wife’s remains are still out there s
omewhere, in that can.

  And what a jury would need to know is that a week or so after The Form Monger’s wife disappeared, The Form Monger himself showed up in the grandstand after the fifth race with his right arm wrapped expertly in gauze minus the hand he’d once assumed was as inseparable from him as his wife had been—the conclusion being that this hand had been sawed off at the wrist, drained of its blood (since blood leaves telltale stains) and hidden amid the contents of a Dumpster trailer-trucked to New Jersey.

  And people would also need to know that The Form Monger then came to be called The Form Monger because, perhaps as a coping mechanism and certainly as a way of scrounging up cash to bet, he’d soon begun obsessively scalping used Daily Racing Forms. And this is no lie: Nearly every day since both his wife and his hand disappeared, the guy has been at the track, pretty much always on the move, cruising up and down the grandstand’s concrete stairways to see if any Forms lay discarded, sometimes following bettors to the parking lot to beg for their “recyclables” (his word) if they appear to be leaving early, sometimes even rummaging through the track’s trash cans. And ever since the spring his wife disappeared, he’s struck track patrons as repugnant not only because his stump remains gruesomely purple, but also because, as soon as he sells enough scuzzy Forms to have scrounged two dollars, he bets using a system that eventually guarantees loss: He bets to win on the favorite.

  Anyway, now, in Tug Corcoran’s eyes at least, the Corcorans’ missing forty-gallon drum meant a serious warning. It meant someone in the Corcoran household might disappear like The Form Monger’s wife had. Maybe it also meant that if Tom Corcoran didn’t then pay off his losing bets, a hand or a foot of his would go missing, too. But what bore through Tug’s thoughts now, as Jasper drove to the first and only secret sprint my mother and I would attend with the Corcorans, was that it might have been anyone in the Corcoran house who was on the verge of disappearance.

  Why, Tug wondered, would the victim necessarily be his mother?