Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  If loan sharks did in fact abduct the person loved most by the losing gambler, the person now about to go missing—given Tom and Colleen’s marital problems—could be my mother.

  Or me.

  Or hell, Tug probably realized then, those chumps might go after a guy’s first and only son.

  And true, Tug’s concern about the missing drum now portending someone’s early departure was speculation on Tug’s part, or maybe just paranoia. But there was logic behind it, and it only knotted Tug up more to realize that this logic was not the bookish kind used by attorneys but instead the kind used by thugs.

  Like everyone taking that ride in the Galaxie that evening, though, Tug said nothing of this. Instead he sat stoically in the backseat between his mother and mine, with me (oblivious as I was then to the fact that the drum was even missing, let alone what its disappearance meant) directly in front of him, between his father and Jasper. Whether Tug would mention to his father or to anyone at all his fear about the drum was a question Tug analyzed for miles—because, as Tom tended to see things, fear not only meant you were a pussy, it also, even worse, caused more loss. Don’t Bet Scared Money was one of Tom Corcoran’s mottos, but this had never meant any Corcoran should refrain from betting. It just meant they shouldn’t be scared.

  Because, when it came down to it, Tom Corcoran was going to bet.

  And Tom’s motto about not betting scared money did little to calm Tug now. All the motto did was run through Tug’s mind and make his stomach queasy. Tug remembered a trick Tom had used to fight fear of odds-on favorites, glaring directly at one’s opponent to remind oneself this opponent would perish like everything else, but it occurred to Tug that he himself didn’t know who his father’s opponent was. His father, for the record, now sat motionless in the front seat, and it occurred to Tug that, at this very moment, Tom might have been preparing to glare at his opponent as soon as the Galaxie arrived at the secret sprint. But what really got Tug right then, as Jasper sped on, was that he, Tug, was glaring intently at the back of his father’s head, which maybe should have told Tug that his opponent was the very blood he and Tom shared.

  Suffice to say the drum’s disappearance had Tug all screwed up, to the point that he almost got emotional in that backseat, confused as he was by flared-up sentiment and shock on top of his long resentment of his shame for having been raised in a family prone to gamble, and he told himself not to mention the drum’s disappearance to anyone, certainly not to me, since if he did, he might break down so pathetically I’d consider him worse than a pussy.

  Which was to say (using Tom Corcoran’s language) like a goddamned baby.

  And after Tug promised himself to keep his mouth shut, he sat quietly for miles, glaring at the back of Tom’s head.

  And when Tug could finally breathe in the boggy smell of the Tonawanda River, it hit him that this—the smell of a body of water he’d never fished or swum in—probably embodied the sum total of the peace in him that night. And when Jasper finally turned down the puddle-strewn gravel road that unfurled onto the acreage, I had already put on the riding helmet Tug had treasured as a kid, and quite a few horsemen were already present, maybe thirty, standing near their muddied cars and pickups, wearing Stetsons and pressed jeans and new checked shirts. Tug recognized some of these men from when he was nothing but a toddler at the stables, but there were also horsemen younger than Tom: slimmer, meaner-looking men Tug had never seen, the kind of guys that struck one as criminals whether one wanted to be an attorney or not, all with poker faces that, to Tug now, suggested that Tom might have owed any of them a boatload.

  Bill Treacy was unhitching a two-horse starting gate from a tractor, and Tom and Jasper opened their doors and stepped out and stood on either side of the Galaxie, apparently surveying the crowd. Tug envied me for this chance Tom had given me, renowned as Tug himself now was as a failure at his attempted horse farm—and Tug felt stuck between Colleen, who was gazing through the windshield at a new horse trailer behind a shiny truck, and my mother, who seemed glued to the Galaxie’s backseat.

  “Is the rookie owner already here?” Colleen asked. She said this as if only she and Tom knew about the gambling he and she both did, and Tug smelled the lemon juice she’d put in her hair to lighten it. She rolled down her window. “Tom?” she asked. “Is the rookie already here?”

  Tom’s navy blue T-shirt—all we could see of him—didn’t move.

  “Tom?” Colleen said.

  “Quiet,” Tom said, and Tug knew why Tom wanted quiet: If the rookie owner had already arrived, it was possible we were being set up.

  Tom took a step toward a group of horsemen, stopped, then walked quickly to Bill Treacy. He helped Bill Treacy unhitch the starting gate, lit a cigarette for him while they talked. Then he returned to the Galaxie.

  “Come on,” he said without looking in. “We’re all right.”

  I adjusted the helmet’s chinstrap, and Colleen stepped out and Tug stepped out, and Colleen grabbed Tom fiercely by the wrist.

  “He rigged it before we got here,” Tom said. “Because he was worried this particular owner would come early.”

  “So the rookie is here,” Colleen said.

  “Don’t worry,” Tom said. “We’re all right.” He still had fewer white hairs than brown. “We’re all right as long as we get gate number two.”

  “But Tom,” Colleen said.

  “Colleen? I’ve known Bill Treacy for twenty-odd years. Yes, the man’s dishonest, but I know how he sounds when he lies.”

  I stood beside Tug now, and Jasper headed off to the back of a trailer, then returned leading Equis Mini by the reins. Equis Mini was indeed a tiny chestnut, thirteen hands at most, but he had sheen without sweat and fine composure, too, and he wasn’t soaped up at all.

  Jasper saddled him, then settled him by ruffling up and patting down his mane. “Horse looks right, Tom,” he said. “All he needs is a top-quality jock.” He winked at me, and Tug studied his face, as candid a face as any nearby.

  I turned to Tug. “Should I do this?”

  “Of course,” Tug said. “It’s what you’ve always wanted, right?”

  Tom squeezed my shoulder and said, “Riders up,” and I took his leg up and mounted. I felt regal up there, in command of the world almost, my vision actually sharper, my worn jeans with holes in the knees apparently inviting the gaze of most every man there. By some instinct of their own, it seemed, my hips urged Equis Mini forward, and Equis Mini moseyed toward the gate. He looked tight enough for sure, ears pricked, Jasper and Tom flanking him, Colleen and Tug flanking them, my mother finally stepping out of the Galaxie.

  Near the gate, Jasper handed me a whip, and Tom held my ankle. “Take him out to that barbed wire and back,” Tom told me quietly. “You don’t want him standing as long as it’ll take to make the wagers and so forth.”

  “Sure,” I said, and Equis Mini responded to my heels, trotting proudly toward the sun. He felt geared up and eager to run, and after we reached the fence and began heading back, I saw the rookie and glanced off quickly, because his way of looking at me assured me that, in his mind now, I was his to desire.

  And now, as if Equis Mini were having misgivings of his own, he stopped trotting to stand. Maybe it’s my weight, I thought. Maybe I will always be too heavy. He dropped his head and held it low. He stayed there, fifty feet from the gate, as the rookie jock was mounting his horse. I leaned down and whispered “Treat a lady right” into his ear, and he seemed to consider this, then raised his snout and blinked.

  But as Tug would tell me later more than once, the rookie’s horse was all muscle no matter what angle you saw him from, the rookie jock easily smaller than me. And then my mother sidled up near Colleen and held hands with her as they stood on the number two lane side of the dirt track, and Tom climbed onto the outside of the number two stall.

 
“I guess,” Tom said loudly, “we get this one.”

  I steered Equis Mini toward him. “They’re entering their stalls!” a drunk on the rookie’s side of the track shouted, and I pulled up Equis Mini, to let the rookie jock get in the gate first. He did, and after his people closed him in, I turned Equis Mini around and let him walk a big circle, to let the rookie’s horse get fractious, and my glance over at Tug had me sure Tug was realizing I was a lot more experienced—with both horses and men—than Tug had thought when he’d met me.

  Then, after the rookie’s horse began rearing up and its jock flipped his whip under his armpit, I steered Equis Mini toward the correct stall, and Jasper loaded him quickly and Bill Treacy buzzed open the gate. Equis Mini broke cleanly and I whistled just once; we straightened course and I heard nothing beyond breaths and hoofs hitting dirt until we were well past the finish.

  “Twenty-one flat!” some guy with a stopwatch yelled.

  “That’s blazing!” someone else yelled.

  Everything around me seemed unsteady right then, with Colleen, beside my grinning mother, giving me a big thumbs-up.

  “You won,” Tom shouted in my direction, and I eased Equis Mini out of a gallop. Tug looked damned alone right then, waiting as he was, back there with his parents and my mother and all those horse folk, to feel privilege kick in: If Tom had bet enough to worry Tug as much as he had, Tug was now that much closer to affording law school.

  But mostly Tug was thinking about that forty-gallon drum.

  The rookie jock eased down his horse beside Equis Mini and me. Like one seasoned rider to another, we talked half standing in our stirrups. In Tug’s mind then, there was no question this other jock was chatting me up—and I’m here to tell you that, yes, that’s exactly what the guy was doing. And after the guy told me no one had bet on me, he was downright gross, saying things like how he himself didn’t at all mind the meat on my bones, how my ass was making him hard right there in that saddle, how he wished I would ride him that night, how the women’s restroom at the north end of the grandstand was always pretty much empty, so if he’d ever see me at the track, all I’d need to do was nod his way.

  And as Tug would tell me weeks later, it was right about then, as this guy was being crude with me, that Tug, without hearing a word of it, breathed in the Tonawanda’s smell and, for the first time in my presence, got tearful and hot-faced in a way that overcame him so quickly and powerfully he completely gave up on understanding himself. Tug’s fears about the missing forty-gallon drum made sense to him, but what confused him was that there was this little piece of him that wished his father would disappear and never return, and Tug hated how this little piece of himself had been there for a while now and seemed destined to last forever—and he turned away from me and everyone present as best he could, glaring at the tear-blurred tree line along the Tonawanda itself.

  But that river’s smell did sort of calm him. It reminded him of moss and turtles. Then he heard the peaceful sound of hoofs trotting willingly toward him, and he collected himself and turned to see Equis Mini and me pull up near Tom, Tom’s face sporting a grin Tug knew well was impossible to read.

  “You won,” Tom told me again.

  And I asked him, “Did you bet on me?”

  “What?” he said.

  “You didn’t bet on me, did you, Tom,” I said. My thumbnails dug into the rough side of the reins, and now here I was, getting all teary eyed, like Tug just had. “You backed down,” I said. “You thought I was too big for the horse.”

  “None of us backed down, honey,” Colleen called softly.

  “Yes, you did,” I said. “The rookie jock just told me. And he didn’t have reason to lie.”

  “Sure, he did,” Tom said. “He had pride. Pride and losing make any man lie.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. “You didn’t bet on me, and we all know it.”

  “Jan?” Tom said. “That’s no way to talk to me.”

  “I want to see the four thousand,” I said.

  “My money’s my business,” Tom said, and Tug kept his eyes fixed on Tom’s face right then and glared at him hard, as if to say to him, Four thousand?—because, even for the Corcoran family, four grand was a hefty chunk to bet on a sprint.

  Then again, Tug realized when Tom’s eyes skipped from Tug’s to mine to Colleen’s, their forty-gallon drum was gone.

  Tom loved one of us more than he loved the rest, and—if you believed gambling lore—that person’s days were numbered.

  19

  DEESH

  “SO YOU DIDN’T LOAD IT?” I ask Bark.

  “Why would I?” he says, and he pulls into traffic, turning up dashboard hip-hop I right away snap off. He speeds uptown, away from Mississippi unless we’re using the Tappan Zee Bridge, hangs a right onto 216th, stops across from his favorite bodega.

  No freaking way, I think, but he’s already out his door and run off, so here I am, again double-parked, no flashers on, rush-hour traffic approaching behind, and this is 216th Street in the Bronx, remember, with dusk already thick—it’s like I’m asking for trouble. What Bark’s doing right now is buying a six, since, without beer, he won’t be able to stay cool. He’ll sip as he drives. He’ll sip because winning big at the track makes him as nervous as he gets when he loses. He’ll sip because he used to deal weed and smoke the profits—until cops fired eighteen rounds into the only nonmob supplier he knew. He’ll sip because he then sold crack until a white dude in a GMC Yukon with thick-ass bulletproof windows told him to take his business elsewhere. Mostly, though, he’ll sip because, on top of everything that’s happened today, he can’t handle the fact that last week, when he and I ran into Madalynn on that sidewalk in Brooklyn, she didn’t care enough about him to ignore him as seductively as she ignored me.

  20

  JAN

  WHEN EQUIS MINI BURST OUT of the starting gate in that secret sprint, there was no need to whip him or urge him or jab him with my heels. There was just speed and our breathing and a feeling of flight, but none of that feeling was because of me or despite me. Instead there was only this sense of what you might call mutual shimmering, which I’m now quite sure has everything to do with the fact that there’s an afterlife.

  What I’m saying is that, yes, I got teary eyed just after the sprint because of what that rookie jock had said to me, but there was a lot more to it than that. Mostly I got that way because, during that sprint’s twenty-one seconds, it hit me that my father’s departed spirit was somehow inside that little horse; somehow, wherever my father’s soul had gone after he’d drowned in those sun-bleached weeds, it was now back on earth with me; somehow he was, through Equis Mini’s effort to run as fast as a shooting star, trying to say to me: If you, young lady, truly want to keep on, know I am here, with you.

  And this got me all the more emotional right then because, for months before that sprint—years, really—I’d been trying never to think about my father because of something that happened when I was a junior in high school. See, I had this friend named Stephanie Campbell, one of those best friends you get stuck with because you’re a dumbshit in your teens, and Stephanie invited me for a Saturday night sleepover, and beforehand her parents spoiled us by making us a steak dinner with champagne and au gratin potatoes and asparagus—in fact I’ll always remember Mrs. Campbell as the adult who taught me to eat asparagus spears with my fingers.

  And Stephanie and I ate our steaks and drank that champagne and stayed up till all hours talking in her room, mostly about the many vacations she and her parents had taken, and I fell asleep listening to her, then had this dream about riding a train over the Pacific Ocean. And the train made an unscheduled stop at a station crawling with vines, and I was about to drink water from a natural spring there when I ran into my father, who, in the dream, was a thoroughbred owner and even more handsome than my mother had always describe
d him, but then I needed to get back on the train and he said he wanted to stay, so I hugged him harder and harder—and I woke up hugging Stephanie, who kept trying to shove me off her and shush me. And she was all flustered because she thought I was trying to hump her; she insisted I leave and never talk to her again, and then, within days, there came to be all sorts of rumors about me at school—I was a lesbian, I’d slept with half the girls’ varsity lacrosse team, I had a large collection of dildos, I rode horses because straddling them brought me to orgasm, I regularly went down on the retired hot-walker who’d taught me to ride horses in the first place, and together this hot-walker and I had manually stimulated a stallion.

  If these rumors strike you as outlandish, remember one thing: They did all take root in small-town America. And let me say for the record that none of these rumors were true. Not that I was a virgin, so might I add that there were also numerous false rumors about what I’d done with a good portion of the male population of Pine Bluff. I guess you could say I never did fit in there.

  But what I want you to know I still haven’t said. Which is that I got so despondent about the rumors I practically stopped going to school and spent as much time as I could hanging out with old horses at the retired hot-walker’s trail-riding stable. And one day the retired hot-walker took a look at me and must have seen despondency all over my face, because she said, “There’s a woman here needs to see something, and she ain’t me,” then drove me, in her dented sky blue Subaru, for miles and miles until, on a two-laner in country that was darned remote even for Arkansas, she stopped. And out my window was pretty much just a bright white post-and-board fence, and beyond the fence was land pitched gently upward so you almost couldn’t see, on the horizon up there, a big old decrepit mansion. And between that mansion and us, near the white post-and-board, were a couple of silver thoroughbreds—two-year-old colts, it appeared, since they still had muscle to put on.

  And the hot-walker nodded to assure me we were there to watch those colts, so that’s what I did, already in love with how their coats shone, how they stood beside each other despite the smooth acres of emerald grass stretching out for them, and then one nudged the other’s withers in play and headed off, away from the fence, and the other kicked up turf to follow, and soon they were side by side in a canter, and then they broke into a gallop, challenging each other for the pure and unquestioned fun of it, like two kids seeing who’s fastest on some school’s asphalt track in summertime.