The odds up on the board flashed and changed. One of the outside-post entries in the upcoming race was a one-to-nine favorite, meaning some owner had piled on it so heavily it would barely bring a profit.
“But now you’re doubling down with borrowed money?” Tug said.
Tom shrugged.
“And losing,” Tug said. “To chumps.”
“Don’t worry about the chumps. The chumps will never touch you.”
“What about Mom? What if they go after her—or Cindy or Jan?”
“They wouldn’t. They never touch the women. That’s code.”
“They got The Form Monger’s wife.”
“No, they didn’t, Tug. The Form Monger’s wife ran off.”
“With one of them?”
Again, Tom shrugged. “What’s the difference, Tug? It makes no difference. The man’s wife left town, and then the only one they went after was him.”
Tug couldn’t stop shaking his head, unable to say as much as one darned word, shocked as he was that Tom knew so much about crimes of that magnitude.
“So don’t worry about that, Tug,” Tom said. “You worry too much. Anyway, let’s just go. But you do need to realize that you worry too much. I don’t know where you got that. Your mother—your mother? Your mother probably wants both of us home.”
31
DEESH
SOMEWHERE PAST MILE MARKER 220, the bus veers onto an exit ramp, then brakes to a halt at a stop sign. It turns right and comes to rest in a minimart parking lot, and I think, Someone’s here to cuff me.
The engine clicks off. The driver stands and passengers stir. An old maroon minivan sits in the fluorescent light spilling outside the minimart’s front windows.
“Ten minutes,” the driver calls, and he heads down the stairs and off. Men behind me glance at each other. I am hungry, so I leave the bus, walk over the gravel parking lot toward the store. Armed as I am, I fear power. A small TV beside the coffeemaker shows cable news, and I see the words BREAKING STORY. I glance off, hear the news reporter explain that, for the fatal cop shooting in the Bronx, police have someone in custody, and this someone, the police are saying, is Cornelius Barker.
Bark.
Then a detective being interviewed declares Bark merely a person of interest.
Bark, this detective says, has cooperated fully.
And thanks to Bark, this detective says, a country full of capable law enforcement is now searching for me.
I pretend to read the nutrition information on a small jar of bean dip. I am sweating full-out. The broadcaster talks on, about the shot cop’s wife and kids, the hand at my side now a fist. Madalynn and Jasir keep walking up to me in my mind, stopping to face me on that sidewalk in Brooklyn, but mostly I’m trying to keep composed while squaring myself with the truth that, goddammit, Bark sold me out. I fear the suspicion of the redheaded woman at the register and decide not to go back on the bus—Bark knows I was on it. I grab a chocolate bar, then two more, walk to the counter, pull a ten from my cash, trying too late to keep the hundreds hidden. I pay, nod at the cashier as I take the change. She doesn’t nod back, and to keep myself calm I tell myself she’s just shy.
Then I’m out the door, headed for the bus, the driver, now seated, watching me or someone behind me. I stop on parking lot gravel twenty feet from him, pocket the chocolate bars, touch my toes as if I’m stretching, take a step away from him toward the middle of the bus, where I stretch again. Other passengers leave the minimart, headed toward me. Did they see the news broadcast? Did they listen? I reach overhead as if stretching my arms, step a little more toward the rear of the bus. I am alternately stretching and easing myself toward a spot behind the bus, where I hope the darkness of this night, thicker still here than it was in Jersey, will soon hide me completely.
Then I am back there, five feet behind the warmth and bitter smell of bus exhaust, not stretching, facing neither the minimart nor the bus driver, facing the nearby woods, not doing much except maybe appearing suspicious. It’s my fear of wilderness—bears and wolves, yeah, but what’s always scared the shit out of me is how even the tiniest mouse can have rabies—that keeps me from sprinting into the woods, the border between this asphalt I stand on and all those trees not even forty feet off.
I am that close. I am that scared. I consider how Madalynn and Jasir would feel if I were arrested, and with them well in mind, I think: Go.
32
JAN
FOR A COUPLE NIGHTS AFTER Tom Corcoran took me and Tug to the track’s backside, I finally slept well, almost luxuriously, seduced into all but sexy dreams rooted in my confidence in becoming a jock, dreams about crisp morning workouts and braided manes and nationally televised post parades, about turquoise and maroon and lime green silks blurred gloriously as I’d weave a game colt through an unyielding pack, about gearing down graded-stakes champs yards before the wire to save their gas for future wins. In one dream, I sat in this huge chrome grandstand packed with Ecuadorian farmhands chatting and laughing controllably like wealthy folks do, and I woke from that dream certain these people and I had won some revolution, then lay there, on the Corcorans’ summer-porch cot, savoring this sense of victory, pushing out my heels to stretch my calves, which felt leaner and not at all sore. And it was then, lolling around like this, that I realized how I could use Arnie DeShields: Ask him to get me a track ID.
That’s really all you need, I thought. Access. And I faced the lake and rose for the day.
The living room, still untouched by that dawn’s sunlight, was soundless as I walked through. In the kitchen, Colleen stood beside the table, staring down at an unopened Form.
“Morning,” I said, and I headed for the coffeepot, which wasn’t on. “And I really do mean it, Colleen. This has got to be one of the best.”
I filled the pot at the sink, measured out the coffee.
Colleen didn’t move, not even to nod.
“Colleen?” I said.
“Jan,” she said quietly.
“What.”
“Tom is gone.”
And right then the screen door opened, and Tug walked in. He faced Colleen as if he and I had never met. “Nothing odd, really. The pickup’s still there, so maybe he went for a jog?”
Tom’s glasses lay there, near the Form.
“You know the drum’s gone, right?” Colleen asked Tug.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Our forty-gallon drum,” she said. “For burning leaves.”
“So?” Tug said, sour-faced.
“He didn’t say anything to you, Jan?” Colleen asked. “About anything having to do with horses?”
I remembered what Tom had said to Tug and me just before I’d met Arnie DeShields, about the effects of betting horses on the human heart, and I figured Tug would now pipe up about this, but Tug just stepped back to the screen door and stared out.
“Not really,” I said, to play things safe.
“You have no idea why he might be gone?” Colleen asked.
I shook my head no, worried she was thinking about the hours Tom had spent without her in the kitchen in the middle of most every night. Was she implying she suspected he’d come on to my mother?
Didn’t she know he studied past performances while the world slept at night? Wasn’t it common knowledge that, if Tom Corcoran were at all a religious man, the Daily Racing Form was his bible?
33
DEESH
SUMMERTIME IN PENNSYLVANIA’S woods isn’t as hot as it is in the Bronx. But there’s brush you can feel trapped forever inside, which can make you sweat fast. And, for real, there is no path anywhere. There are only trees and a darkness more serious than any I’ve walked through. It’s everywhere above and between the branches and down to the rocks and vines and dirt under my feet. I’d fear wildlife more
if I wasn’t sorting through thoughts about Bark:
The guy stabbed your back.
And he’s a killer.
Possibly turned on you long ago, when he knew you slept with Madalynn.
Who knows?
Who cares?
And of course I care, but I can’t afford to care. Any focus on my past, I think, saps focus from what I’ll need to do to survive from now on.
Keeping walking, I think.
Keep training your mind to avoid light.
The less you can see anything near you, the less likely you will be seen.
You can’t risk being perceived as the brother on the run.
From now on, there must be no people.
34
JAN
FOR HOURS AFTER Colleen and Tug and I realized Tom was indeed gone, we visited every barn on the track’s backside, asking about Tom as nonchalantly as possible. We checked the paddock and the crowd near the winner’s circle and every nook of the grandstand, and Tug himself checked the jocks’ locker room, where he was played off until Jorge Garcia raised his eyes and shook his head no.
Minutes before the first race that day, Colleen said she was thinking of going into town to ask around about Tom there, and her use of that phrase—into town—caused Tug’s throat to catch, probably because reliance on people like Bill Treacy struck him as a notch above desperation.
And my crush on Tug did not in the least keep me from noticing that catch in his throat, and I right off suggested it might be best if Tug and I stayed on at the track, and Colleen paused to consider this, maybe trying to decide if the track was still a comforting place the Corcorans could use to escape their troubles, then nodded good-bye and headed off. And, standing there, with me and me only, Tug convinced himself that Tom was as likely to appear here as anywhere, and he focused on the action of the first race, then on the uplifting reds and pinks and yellows of the picnics near the snapdragons and phlox.
Then a voice behind Tug said, “Champ.”
And Tug and I didn’t turn around because it sounded like Arnie DeShields, and Tug didn’t want to give Arnie the satisfaction of watching him blink if Arnie asked, “Where’s the old man?”—and I didn’t want to give Arnie any satisfaction period.
“Champ,” the voice said.
“Someone’s talking to you,” I told Tug. Race two’s entries were being led from the stables to the paddock, unsaddled, unmounted, just horses.
“I don’t think so,” Tug said. “I think the sonofabitch is talking to you.”
35
DEESH
I DO NOT SLEEP. I keep walking through gangs of gnats and mosquitoes and streetlight-forsaken darkness. For hunger, there are the three chocolate bars. For fatigue, there’s plenty of fear.
In late morning sunshine on the fourth hill, I hear no birdcalls or traffic noises or swishes from breezes. Bears, I keep promising myself, would hate this much light. My insides are jittery yet my pace stays even. Maybe, I now believe, a guy actually can disappear into woods.
When I see a gravel road, I stop. Everyone knows one road leads to another, and this one is at the very bottom of the hill I’m descending in zigzags to keep hidden behind the thickest trees. Then I see, across the road, a long, barely curved orange-mud driveway leading to a small, moss-stained white house.
And near the dented car in the driveway is a hand-painted sign:
FISHING GUIDE—INQUIRE WITHIN
Inquire within? I think. That’s all I’ve been doing.
I remove Bark’s gun from my waistband, let a finger rest on the trigger. I still believe I could never kill. I turn off the safety, though, and once I’m in the yard, I stride.
I climb the porch stairs. One hard kick opens the door. I hear television—a CNN report that’s probably long past showing some photo Bark took of me—so I dash through a room faster than my eyes can scan all of it, the gun in both hands as far from my face as possible. Just off that room, in a bedroom, on top of the covers with an open book lying on his chest, is a white guy, round, balding, eyes closed.
“Excuse me,” I say.
His eyelids open. Neither of us moves. He goes a little cross-eyed, blinks twice.
“You’re that killer,” he says flatly, and his calmness has me all the more scared.
“Never killed a soul,” I say.
My aim zeroes in on him.
“But what’s important,” I say, “is you’re a fisherman.”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“And you guide people.”
“Been known to do that.”
“Well, today you’re gonna guide me way the hell into these woods. And on our way, you’re gonna tell me what you know about living out there. Then we’re gonna say good-bye, and you’re never gonna tell anyone about me.”
I keep the gun pointed directly at his face. He clears his throat, says, “How do you plan to make that last part happen?”
“I’m hoping to hear some damned convincing talk on your part about how I can forget about pulling this trigger.”
He is standing now, beside the bed. He’s wearing jeans and a coffee-stained shirt. A breeze from the doorway behind me passes my neck.
“Justice, man,” I say. “You could be part of it.”
He walks straight toward me, then passes me and leaves the house. On the porch he sits on a gray metal rocking chair flecked with rust, the only chair out there, then looks up to face me as if to say, Yeah, I’m basically crazy.
“What kind?” he says.
“What kind of what?” I say.
“Fish. I can teach you trout or bass.”
I shrug. “Both?”
“Takes a lifetime to learn either.”
In the shade thrown by big trees, his face looks younger than the rest of him. If he ever played anything, it could have been football but not much else.
“Which is easier?” I ask.
He blinks three times. “Bass.”
“Then bass it is.”
He rocks in the chair, then stands and heads down the porch stairs, and I follow, keeping aim.
“Douglas, right?” he calls over his shoulder.
“Right.”
“Sharp.”
“Yes. But my friends call me Deesh.”
We are headed toward an unpainted wooden shed behind his house, on a clearing of spiky weeds between a propane tank and a stream.
“You do know you’re the latest celebrity,” he says.
“Kind of had that figured.”
“I mean, your name and face are out there.”
“A lot of TV watching around here?”
He steps into the shed, and I follow to just inside the doorway.
“They sure aren’t reading Chaucer,” he says. Here with him, I’m attacked by the darkness in the shed and rushed memories of Bark’s gunshot last night. Then, after I take a step back, I’m hit by hot sunlight and fatigue.
He gathers up two wooden oars and a tackle box.
“They watch TV, drink, and hunt,” he says.
“So they’re armed.”
“And they consider themselves the righteous majority.”
“But not you.”
“If I were armed, Douglas, you wouldn’t be here.”
I feel myself exhale. It’s like he wants me to shoot, thinks I’m down to one bullet and betting his life I’ll miss. He takes a fishing rod in one hand, a second in the other, and again we are walking, again with him pulling ahead of me, plodding over flagstones toward the stream. Two varnished oars are tucked under one of his thick arms, each hand aiming a fishing rod at the stream, a fat finger dangling an olive green tackle box. I square myself with the truth that I have never in my life caught a fish, that I tried only once, in Georgia wh
en I was six, with the aunt who took me in during the summer my mother tried rehab and couldn’t care for me.
I call, “Think I have a chance to actually live around here?”
“Does it matter?” he shouts over his shoulder. “What anyone thinks?”
“Matters what you think,” I say. “What I’m trying to ask, Mr. Guide Man, is can I survive out here?”
We are at the shoreline now, roughly beside each other, the gun somewhat lower but still aimed at his chest.
“If you disappear.”
And he’s looking me straight in the eye. No smirk, no grin, no frown, just suntanned skin over bones over a brain digesting those three words like mine is.
“And therein lies the irony, right?” he says.
“I guess so.”
“As for how you’d be received if you run into the typical denizen of this all but virgin wilderness? My guess is not well.”
“So I’m lucky I found you,” I say.
“Indeed you are.”
“You’re like an angel.”
He nods at the gun, then says, “Ready to fly.”
I glance over my shoulder at the gravel road. It’s still just us—it seems.
He says, “Name’s Gabe, by the way.” He’s packing a boat chained to the shore of the stream, which is not as long across as the narrowest stretches of the East River near the Bronx. But what really makes this stream unlike any I’ve seen is how it glistens over algae-covered rocks greener than the leaves on the trees. And here’s an orange and black bird that swoops twice, then lands in brush on the far shore, which rises into what Bronx folk would call a mountain.
I step closer to Gabe. Sunlight makes me blink. Gabe heads back toward the unpainted shed, and I follow, the gun aimed as he gathers more equipment. Last night’s over, I tell myself. He asks, “Ready?” and again passes me as if Bark’s gun is as harmless as dust, this time straining through the arms to carry toward the stream a car battery in one hand, an electric boat motor crammed under an armpit, and another two fishing rods, their tips leading him.
Watch Me Go Page 11