We pass closed warehouses and bankrupt banks grayed by soot. I head in the direction of older buildings—wouldn’t a bus depot be downtown? I would ask for directions but fear being seen, then remember Madalynn declaring, before she got pregnant, that I never asked her for anything and that the reason I never did was pride, and now here’s Bark, after I brake for a red light, calling “Bus depot?” to a scraggly, strung-out white dude who nods in a direction I follow. And when Bark points at the depot, there’s no need to ask if we should park at least five blocks away, no need for Bark to say “on” or “off” as he shows me how to work the safety. And after we leave the truck and he holsters the gun for me between my waistband and the small of my back, there’s no need for him to even raise his chin to have me stand lookout as he yanks off his truck’s plates, which he hides under his shirt, then slips into a trash can as we walk.
And our coolness stays strong all the way to the depot, where I hope we’ll lie well enough. I don’t believe I could aim a gun, but that’s what every convict once thought. Mostly I’m worried, as we approach the depot, about who’s inside—and who will be.
And now, in the depot’s parking lot, sit three idling buses, signs on two announcing the destinations D.C. and Denver, the other sign blank.
“Looks like you’re set,” Bark says.
“You could go to D.C.”
He nods, and I remember the sweetness of an alley-oop pass I fed into his dunk in our junior year state semifinals.
“Want the gun back?” I ask.
“We’ll see,” he says, and we walk in. A shiny-scalped brother works the ticket counter, no one in line. I head on over. Bark stops under a TV hung from the ceiling by chains.
“One to Denver,” I say.
The teller glances up. “Round trip?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’ll be four hundred sixteen,” he says. “And I’ll need some ID.”
I reach for my pocket, pull out the Benjamins, let him see them as I thumb through them, letting him know, I hope, that I can tip big.
“You know?” I say. “My ID’s in my wallet.” I set seven fanned hundreds on the counter, slide them over. “Which I lost.” I glance over at Bark, whose jaw is now clenched.
“Gonna need that ID sooner or later,” the teller says, and I nod, and then he does nothing but type.
A message to the cops? I wonder. Or plain business?
A grungy printer prints, and the teller swipes up my cash, counts it, makes change he slides toward me—with the ticket.
“Tips get me in trouble,” he says, and I grab the ticket and the change. “If I were you, I’d board now.”
“Appreciate it, man,” I say, and I head for the door certain he’s set to call 911. I flash Bark the tiniest thumbs-up, then step outside, on my damned own, bound for Cleveland or Chicago or who knows.
In the bus, which is crowded, the air is hot. I sit directly behind the white driver. Across the aisle a black woman old enough to be a grandmother and the white woman beside her are on cell phones, talking quietly. The driver swigs from a plastic bottle. My hamstrings absorb revs. I want to turn around but no way. I try to make plans for when the inevitable happens:
Pull out the gun and shoot? Pull out the gun and aim?
Pull out the gun and aim to get the bus to stop, then run off of it?
Run off with someone to use as a hostage?
Maybe the old woman?
But the old woman can probably barely run.
Under me, brakes hiss. We are backing up onto the street. We stop. We ease ahead, make a left. We are rolling when a squad car speeds toward us and stops, facing me only, it seems, the bus squeaking to a halt, its driver standing and pointing at his chest as if to say Me?
A cop leaves the squad car, pistol drawn. He heads toward the bus and I stand and step into the aisle, beside the two women. The old woman glances at me, though she seems too focused on the cop’s gun to notice the one that’s now at my side. Outdoors, the armed cop is flanked by his partner. They walk toward the front of the bus, then pass it to head toward the parking lot, where Bark might or might not now be. I slide his gun back against my waistband. Has anyone seen? A white guy five rows back speaks into a phone.
The engine of the bus revs, and we accelerate. Just make it to D.C., Bark, I think as I sit, though I know Bark’s odds are long.
Still, I can hope. Everything, I remind myself, needs to appear innocent. I close my eyes as if asleep, open them. No one near is checking me out, the white guy now off his cell, motionless, his own eyes shut. The driver looks to be busting ass to leave Jersey, and, yes, he could be headed to some cop shop, but after we merge onto I-80 West, I doubt it. Behind me might be true relaxation: newspapers being unfolded, chips bags being torn.
Then it strikes me that, if those two cops find Bark in the bus depot parking lot, they’ll ask that teller about me.
But that teller’s a brother, I think. He won’t squeal.
I reconsider this, then decide there’s no predicting who’ll squeal when about anything. Plus I keep remembering the cop’s open dead eyes. And the thud of that drum upstate when Bark, James, and I dropped it beside that straightaway. My thumb rubs mud from the zigzagging tread of one of my sneakers, mud maybe from that gulley itself.
Should’ve never touched the drum, I think. Should’ve never gotten involved with money that big.
28
JAN
THAT FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL was by far the most money Tom Corcoran had ever given Tug to gamble with, and the next morning he and Tug hit the track without me, standing with horses and barn hands just outside shedrow stalls, often without speaking, just breathing the smells of hay and feed and sun-softened hose rubber. Then the beginnings of shadows said it was just past noon, and Tug felt the weight of another day’s races come upon them, in a way, he then believed, only he, Tug, could, and Tom pulled an emerald blade of grass from between his teeth, elbowed Tug, and said, “Let’s go.”
They were beside the Capizzi barn then, Frank Capizzi and his brothers having never arrived, and they walked away knowing the Capizzis might have juiced a horse and were now keeping it secret, and the Ecuadorian hands watched them leave.
Devilette, the only tip horse Tom liked on that day’s card, was running in race two. How Tom had gotten the tip was something he didn’t want to discuss with Tug, which bothered Tug, though not enough for Tug to force questions about it, and anyway what bothered Tug most was he couldn’t decide what gift to buy for me. It needed to be something serious enough to let me know he’d always cherish our running in the dark, yet he didn’t want it to cause me to consider him sappy—and he didn’t want it to remind me that he wasn’t stinking rich.
Before race one, as Tom bought programs, greed urged Tug to bet Devilette as half of a daily double, but Tug knew what any grandstander knew—the double was a sucker bet—so he brushed off that temptation, then followed Tom across the upper grandstand toward the empty seats nearest the top of the homestretch. Tom had named this area The Crux because that turn is where jockeys most often affect races: where their whistling gets loud, where they flap whips dramatically to force oncoming horses to run wide, where they cuss to rattle the favorite or talk to fix results, where they kiss-kiss secretly game horses into finally making big moves.
“This is good here,” Tom said now.
“Without the crowd,” Tug said.
“Without anyone.”
Tug wondered who else Tom was avoiding. Tug’s mother? Some loan shark? Me?
And Tug eyed the odds board as Tom studied his program and chewed his fingernails, a habit recently revived from the days when he rode.
“Let the first race go,” Tom said, as if to himself.
“I told you,” Tug said. “I’m backing one horse. In one race.”
“And you like Devilette.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“Not with your life.”
“I thought you said he was a lock. I mean, this was one of those man-to-man tips, wasn’t it?”
Tom flipped to race two in his program.
“It was,” he said.
Devilette was the three horse, which meant he didn’t have to break against the rail, and he had Jorge Garcia on him and no workouts listed, his morning line six to one.
“His odds will go off lower than that,” Tom said, and Tug slipped two fingers in his pocket and fished out the fifty Tom had lent him and wondered if their tip had long been common knowledge, and race one began and ended with the frontrunner stealing the win. That meant today’s track might have been biased toward speed, and Tug realized, given what he knew about Arnie DeShields from Tom’s riding days, that Devilette was probably trained to run from behind. So a speed-biased track, Tug told himself, would only make their wagering victory more impressive and heartfelt, and he remembered Tom’s speech the previous day about winning and heart and luck, and he supposed the point of that speech was that if he, Tug, won this bet on Devilette—or any bet on any horse, really—he should temper all joy about making money so quickly and easily, and Tug resented such discipline and wished he could be elsewhere, but then he told himself he was about to make the cash necessary to buy the perfect gift for me, and sitting there, in that grandstand beside his father, felt right. Tug stared at the pond in the middle of the track during a silence that bothered him minimally, then remembered watching me reel in the last keeper muskie I’d hooked, then wished he’d kissed me after we’d run through the dark so his memory could now replay whatever would have happened after such a kiss, then wondered why his father and mother had kissed for the first time, touched each other, made love, married, taken vacations, cheered for horses, argued, retired, kissed for the thousandth time, ignored each other, spent days with him, lied to each other, stared at their aging nakedness, bet on strangers’ horses, slept. He glanced at Tom and reminded himself that Tom would always be his one and only father, then noticed that Tom was now watching the pond. Tug wondered if Tom was picturing my dad—Tom’s long-ago colleague, the renowned Jamie Price—groping for air in the sun-bleached weeds only to swallow water, and then the bugle announced the post parade, and Devilette appeared from beneath the grandstand and stepped onto the track, black and shiny as a showroom Maserati, all of its ankles wrapped with bright white tape, one hoof, then another, spoiling the freshly furrowed dirt.
And Tug had long known that Arnie DeShields didn’t wrap ankles to keep them strong.
He wrapped them to make gamblers feel fear.
29
DEESH
NIGHT THIS FAR WEST IN JERSEY is twice as thick as it gets in the Bronx, and trying to see through it out my window gets me thinking about Madalynn and her complaint, before she got pregnant, that I never asked for what I needed, her claim back then being that there was only one way couples in poverty stayed true: awareness of need nursed by constant mutual asking. Had my pride allowed me to ask, she’d say back then, we could have both known our needs and been something, and I now wonder if maybe, when you really get down to it, she was right, and after we pass a sign that says DELAWARE WATER GAP, another says ENTERING PENNSYLVANIA, and I shiver.
Even if those cops in Passaic wanted my arrest to catch me by surprise, I tell myself, they would have pulled this bus over by now. Everything’s cool.
But across the aisle from me the white woman, ponytailed, maybe college age, keeps glancing over, like she’s ready to ask something—until I’m set to say what’s up, when she sighs and faces the all but black night. And now, with her eyes off me like that, my mind won’t stop seeing the cop down. Won’t stop focusing on how blood filled the hole in his face. Won’t stop thinking about how that was it I was looking at—death—and how it forever would be caused by a bullet fired from the gun now pressed against my hip bone so hard it hurt.
A mile marker says Pennsylvania will stretch three hundred miles. I watch darkness grow darker, thanks to more trees and monstrous hills. Only here and there are the lit yards of lone houses, but still I think:
Keep going.
You need to be in pure nature.
30
JAN
DEVILETTE HELD HIS HEAD HIGHER than the rest of the field, trying to see beyond the odds board, and Jorge Garcia, in bumblebee-colored silks, sat on him comfortably, going with the bounce of the canter.
“Prepared to lose?” Tom asked.
“Why?” Tug said. “You don’t think he looks right?”
“I think he’ll be there. But a savvy handicapper never bets a penny he can’t afford to lose.”
“I can afford it,” Tug said, and Tom stood, and Tug handed him the fifty. “Ten to win on Devilette,” Tug said, and it wasn’t lost on him that Tom was about to do for him the very kind of thing that had gotten Tom in trouble, and Tug considered asking for the money back, but Tom raised a thumb and walked off. Tug wondered how he’d pay Tom back if Devilette didn’t win, then convinced himself that, if he lost, he’d find work, any kind of work. He imagined himself trying for jobs he’d never considered—truck driver, auto mechanic, gas station cashier—and his horse farm struck him as the kind of dream that makes you look foolish unless you’re born with a silver spoon, and his face grew hot from shame and sentiment about certain horses he’d cared for and that god-awful feeling he sometimes got when certain he’d never know what he was feeling.
Don’t worry, he thought. No one sees you now. He also believed that no one but Tom would know they’d bet this race, and that the only reason he, Tug, had bet was because he loved me. In that sense it seemed good and even admirable that he had done it, and then Tom returned with Tug’s ticket and change, all of which Tug folded into a square he shoved well into a front pocket, and then it was post time, and an assistant starter Tug didn’t recognize was loading Devilette into the third stall. Tom slouched back in his seat, his eyes, intent and forlorn, on the midnight blue starting gate, and Tug wanted to grab his wrist but told himself they were too old for that, and then the flag was up, and they were off, and Devilette took a bad step and Tug’s heart went dead. Jorge let out the reins right then, and Devilette, nine lengths behind, found his stride, and they were all into the turn but the seven horse led by one, and then the pack tightened, Jorge’s bumblebee colors gaining, and Jorge took him at least six wide and used the whip. Tug didn’t hear it crack until a moment after it struck—and Devilette shot ahead into third, and Tom rose and Tug stood, too, and Devilette, game, closed the gap. Well down the stretch they were even, Devilette and the seven, and Jorge now whipped cruelly, and Devilette nosed ahead, then hung on.
“Sweet,” Tug said, though all this victory had done was bring his mood back to even.
Tom glanced off, toward the finish line more or less, then focused on the results board.
“You bet him, too, right?” Tug asked.
“I put him in an exacta with Capizzi’s entry.”
Tug skimmed race two in his program to see which number Capizzi’s entry wore. The exacta, he knew from Tom’s past advice, was not a bet Tom generally endorsed.
“Capizzi’s was the one horse,” Tom said. “She photoed for second with the seven.”
The results board showed three in the WIN box, the PLACE and SHOW boxes blank. Tug stared at the darkness inside the PLACE box, trying, for Tom’s sake, to will the numeral one to appear in it, and as Tug stared, he knew Tom was watching that darkness, too. Tug tried not to jinx things by wanting more than one thing at the same time, but right then he more than anything wanted to run in the dark with me: He was not, he finally realized then, in that minute of that hour on that day, what Tom would consider an ideal gambling pal. Devilette had gone off at three to one, which meant Tug himself would profit at least thirt
y dollars, but what did Tom care about thirty bucks flowing from the track to Tug?
And wasn’t thirty only a small step toward payment for the diamond earrings Tug now wanted to give me?
Then the PLACE box flashed seven, and Tom said, “Dammit.”
“I’m sorry,” Tug said.
“For what?” Tom said. “I’m the one who screwed up. I shouldn’t have gotten greedy and gone for the exacta.”
“You didn’t bet Devilette straight up at all?”
“No. I lost everything. Which shows you how fucking out of my mind I am.”
Lost everything? Tug thought. “How much did you bet?” he asked.
“That’s not the issue. The issue is why.”
“Well?” Tug said. “Then why?”
Race three’s odds appeared on the board, staring back at them.
“I borrowed some money,” Tom said.
He assessed Tug unabashedly, as if he’d just explained everything irrational he’d ever done in his life.
“And I wanted you to be an attorney someday,” he said. “And have your horse farm.”
“We gotta be realistic,” Tug said, even as he thought: He just lost his ass and then some. He’s out of control doubling down.
“Not to mention someone had to come up with the cash to pay Jan for those muskies,” Tom said now.
“You’re saying you won that muskie cash gambling?”
“At first.”
“But why? I mean, why pay her to fish?”
“Because Cindy was too proud to take a direct handout. Cindy and Jan were broke, Tug. They couldn’t pay their rent in Arkansas. Your mother and I—this whole thing started with us trying to do the right thing.”
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