“Yes,” I answer, and then the yard goes bone quiet, as if this is the word we needed to say to scare off birds.
He loads the boat, which, tethered at both ends by chains hung from stones cemented to the shoreline, has three aluminum bench seats, its floor an unexpected turquoise blue, its outsides spray painted Desert Storm camouflage. He says something I can’t quite hear about knots.
“Say that again?” I ask.
“That’s my pet peeve—knotted lines,” he says clearly. “One line tangled around itself I can handle. But more than one? Forget it.”
I nod, Bark’s gun steady. A single bird chirps.
“You get to some fishy spot with the weather just right?” Gabe says. “And then spend an hour untangling your lines?”
And as if following someone else’s orders, he walks off, up the stone path toward his house. He could phone someone, so I jog to catch up. I realize I could shoot him and take the boat. The gun, aimed well, quivers as he opens his fridge. He moves aside jars and I remember my aunt in Georgia telling me how, when you fish in creeks and rivers, you should proceed upstream, since the current takes whatever you dislodge downstream—and this scares fish into not wanting to bite. And I all at once miss my aunt, in this rattrap of a house miss her as badly as ever, though I’m also glad she passed on before Bark lied about me on TV.
With his back to me, Gabe says, “You like liverwurst?”
“Love it,” I say, though the truth is I’ve never tried liverwurst, since liverwurst, this same aunt once told me, was for them.
Gabe stuffs something I can’t decipher into the bag, so I ask, “What’d you just put in there?”
“Bread.”
“What else is in the bag? You got a cell in there?”
“No.”
“You got a cell on you?”
“I have never owned a cell phone, Douglas.”
“Come on, man. This is really no time to mess with me.”
He sets the bag on his counter, holds up his hands. “Go ahead and search me.”
I step toward him, and it hits me that this risks him wrestling me for the gun, so I step back and say, “Just pull your pockets inside out.”
He obeys.
“You really don’t own a cell?”
“Mr. Sharp,” he says. “Look at this place. Who am I going to talk to?”
His shabby couch and dusty floor assure me he lives alone. I’d feel sorry for him if the gun didn’t remind me of Bark, whose name now means anyone friendly can backstab. I gesture with the gun, and he heads out the door and presses on, waddling toward the boat. The stream all but dazzles me. He kneels beside the boat, arranges the motor, batteries, tackle box, oars, two safety-orange seat cushions, the four fishing rods—each handled individually—and the lunch bag. He points at these things one at a time, as if his mind needs to count to know everything’s packed. Is he old enough for Alzheimer’s?
“We’re set,” he says.
“Which way we headed?” I ask.
“Upstream,” he says. “And that’s always, Deesh. You always, always go up.”
36
JAN
“TALKING TO YOU, GIRL” was what Tug and I then heard, and I glanced over and saw the usual crew of railbirds along the chain-link, but there, third closest to me, stood that pig Arnie DeShields.
And he had the nerve right then, on that same day Tom went missing, to lift his chin at me the slightest bit, in a way that assured me he rarely needed to try to get women to sleep with him. And after I stayed put right beside Tug, he beelined toward me as if Tug weren’t there, and Tug headed off without a word, toward the bet-taking tellers under the grandstand, and I thought: If I were Tug today, I’d probably want to escape the world, too.
“Mr. DeShields,” I said.
Arnie held out his hand. “Just call me Arn. Or, if you insist, Arnie.”
I nodded and we shook, and as his hand squeezed mine, I was sure he knew something about where Tom Corcoran was.
But all he said was “You know, your daddy jocked entries for me.”
“Yessir I knew that.”
“And he asked me once if I’d let any of his offspring ride for me someday. And now, young lady? Well, you do look old enough.”
All I wanted right then was to be running at night. “You’re acquainted with my mother?” I asked flatly.
“Rather well. And I see you’re her daughter because you have her same shape.” Two of his fat fingers touched his fake upper teeth. “Lemme put this to you directly,” he said. “I could use you to help handle my morning workouts. If everything goes fine, we could then discuss you riding for me.”
“Arnie?” I said. “Let me put this to you directly. I have a few other concerns presently.”
“I bet you do, girl,” he said, and he winked. “Not a man here would doubt that.”
Which removed any doubt in me that I could jock professionally a heckuva lot faster if I slept with him. But all I did at that point was shake his hand curtly, not one more utterance about a future between us, though I’ll admit that, with this handshake, the wannabe jock in me squeezed his hand firmly enough to show off my arm strength.
And being “courted” like that really did mess me up on the inside. Because after Arnie walked off, I stood there, roughly where Tug had left me, all jangled in my thoughts and jittery and queasy in my stomach. Plus I felt this sort of woodenness in my face, like my jaw was now suddenly heavier, like I couldn’t have smiled if you paid me, and when Tug returned from beneath the grandstand, where I now figured he’d probably made a bet, I was sure he’d say something about how weirdly thrown off I looked, but he just stood next to me, hands clawed to the chain-link.
And after a while of us being together like that, he said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“To look elsewhere?”
“No. I just wanna leave.”
“Because we can keep looking, Tug.”
“I know. But I can’t imagine where else around here my dad could be.”
“He’s never anyplace else other than here or at home?”
“Hate to say it, but that’s pretty much the truth.”
And so there we both were, near the finish yet leaving it quickly, Tug in the lead until, out in the parking lot, we headed toward the woods that bordered the railroad tracks that led to the Corcorans’. As I recall, we passed The Form Monger out there that day, and as we did, I glanced at his purple stump, clueless about why his hand had been severed (because, as of then, no one had told me the story about his losing streak and his wife’s disappearance), and he ignored me to nod Tug’s way and shrug, as if to say I have no idea where your father is.
Tug looked over his shoulder to face away from me, maybe because he was set to cry and didn’t want me to see, maybe just to take a last look at the grandstand, full as it was of rusting steel beams and concrete and that particular seat up inside it, where his father had usually sat.
So then there we stood, in that parking lot short of the woods, Tug completely still, maybe missing his father, maybe worried about some bet, my insides a little shocked by the uproar of the grandstand crowd, which happened to be cheering now that we’d left.
37
DEESH
WHAT GETS ME IS that once I step into the boat, the cool, who-gives-a-shit white dude who so smoothly called me a killer has now turned into a talker. And I don’t mean a veteran wisecracker like James. I mean more of the nervous type, a guy who can go off on a blue streak so long you wonder if he’s got problems worse than yours.
And in his case I mean mental problems. Or, I guess, emotional. The kind Madalynn would have called “issues.”
Like right off the bat he goes on and on about how I should watch my balance and be careful not to fall in and that, of course, I have the g
un so I can sit where I want but that, in his opinion, I should take the smallest seat, near the front, as opposed to the wide one in back, and he explains at least twice, the second time at great length, that he’ll need to sit in the wide one in back because the motor will hang off the back and he’ll need to turn the motor on and off and steer us. “And, see, Deesh, the turning on and off of that motor will prove crucial to your goal,” he explains, “because the catching of bass requires that you move along as naturally as you can.” And then he takes pains, with a wince that won’t leave his face, to explain how a guy can’t use a motor of either kind, electric or gas powered, in stretches of the stream that aren’t deep enough, because, see, when the stream’s going low you don’t want to obliterate your prop against river stones, and how we’ll need to save battery power to get deep into the woods. It’s like he’s now all of a sudden into fishing-guide mode, which you’d think would help him relax more about the gun, but instead it’s got him all messed up like start-of-a-big-game jitters.
And the longer we sit like that, maybe eight feet apart, face-to-face, with me aiming a gun at the heart of a man I can’t deny is a hostage—a gun that’s already let loose a bullet to kill a cop—the more I get intensely freaked, too.
Then, on deeper water, he clicks off the motor and begins to row. He’s on another blue streak, this one about how his sight isn’t perfect because of some “fucked-up open-heart surgery,” and an odd twitch from inside me, like a shiver but up my belly instead of down my spine, jolts the gun out of aim. I ease it back down toward his mouth as he mentions as an aside that he’s on “several medications,” which makes me wonder if, besides being in hyper fish-guide mode, the man is high. Brothers tripping on painkillers have done wilder shit than they’d do after draining a night’s worth of forties, so now, here, listening to Gabe, I’m back to using a motto coached into me when I played ball: Defend, defend, defend, but always be set to shoot.
And it’s not until Gabe opens the tackle box and grabs a lure and tosses it back in that I realize the twitch attacked me because I suspect this guy is conning me. And I’m not thinking some everyday con like brothers hawking knockoffs on Eighth Avenue. I’m thinking a con that came to his mind twenty minutes ago for the purpose of turning me in, maybe killing me. As in the swindle of my life. As in summer sunshine is now warming my knees and we are gliding up a stream through countryside more beautiful than any I’ve seen on TV, with the tat-tweet-tot of a bird somewhere in branches ahead, but now I will never relax.
Then there’s an explosion of birdsong unlike any in the Bronx, Carnegie Hall birdsong, a kind so loud and complex and glorious brothers like me never hear let alone see the source of, and with Gabe going on about some theory of his, something about how to catch big fish, I lean back and hold the gun over the water—so Gabe would need to lunge farther to grab it—then check out the bird itself, which is gray as a mouse, not tiny, not big, just a plain-assed gray bird bursting forth with this odd, bold, loud jazz that, I swear, is all about freedom.
It’s messed up is the riff this jazz keeps sliding back to. Freedom looks pretty, but it’s all messed up.
38
JAN
AS TUG AND I WALKED on the railroad tracks through the woods from the track to his parents��� house, he faced the woods until I said, “You are set to cry. Is it about something he said to you?”
“Jan, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then just . . . listen to me, Tug. Because I want to talk.”
“Why?”
“Because I care about you and you care about him.”
“Then go ahead. Talk. Just remember: I’m predicting right now that you’ll end up calling me a baby.”
“Why would I do that?”
“A guy cries and a woman at first believes he’s sensitive and as such a good catch, but then she decides he’s a baby.”
And with that word—baby—now having been said more than once between us, we walked on as if there were nothing left to say, and I took the lead, letting my steps land between the rail bed’s weathered ties, Tug on the soot-colored gravel just outside the rail on my right. We walked like this for a long while, with Tug now and then sneaking peeks toward the woods, maybe to look for his father, risking that I’d think he was again set to cry, concerned, I was sure, that I was already deciding about him: about the way he’d be as a man thanks to his father; about how his father’s quirks and habits and, damn, even his father’s disappearance might manifest themselves in the person Tug would always be; about how every good and bad trait of both of Tug’s parents might affect Tug’s potential; about how maybe, right now, Tug and I, as a couple falling in love, were likely to face the same troubles Tug’s parents had faced because we were horse people, too. I was already also deciding, Tug probably thought then, about Tug’s Attitudes Toward Women and Tug as a Possible Lover and Tug as a Simple Partner, maybe even Tug as a Future Husband, and, what the heck, Maybe as a Father Too.
And I asked him, “Why would I think you’re a baby?”
And we walked. And we walked. And we walked.
“Because babies cry,” he finally said. “But that wasn’t my point, Jan. My point was that you might believe you want a guy who cries, but you don’t.”
I studied the splintered ties, considering this.
I asked, “Are you figuring he won’t come back?”
“I told you. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“He’s coming back, Tug. Mine never did after he got stuck in those weeds, but that was different. I mean, be real with me, Tug. What are the odds that, with us being this young, both of our fathers would leave us for good?”
He shrugged, as if here, this far from the grandstand, things like odds didn’t count.
“He’s coming back, Tug. He has to. How could he not? After seeing what my father’s absence did to me and my mother?”
And for a while there, my silence had Tug appearing calm and well-adjusted, as if I’d consoled him, and, for a few moments, I felt that I’d just made the only relevant point. Then, maybe because I’d asked, maybe because he just wanted to be honest with someone, he came out and said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
And his voice went all quiet:
“I just—I just have a sick feeling.”
And he shrugged without glancing at me, even though he was now directly beside me, making no bones about hiding his face.
Then, all male and female pride be damned, I said, “When you’re set to cry, Tug? You should. Because if you don’t, bad things can happen.”
And then there I went, too, trying to spot a bird or squirrel or something alive other than trees in those woods, wishing I could run off to someplace far from everything that was happening to us.
And Tug let me do that. He let me look off for as long as I wanted.
Then he said, “What sort of bad things?”
And we faced each other, both of us frowning. We had this new mutual dead seriousness.
“Like your heart could go sour,” I said, and I remembered Tom’s recent speech about heart and luck and losing. Had Tom really wanted both Tug and me to hear that speech—or just Tug?
“Or you’ll run away,” I said now. “And never come back.”
“Who would I run from?”
“Your father. After he comes back. Or your mother. Or anyone else you might love.”
“Who said I ever loved anyone?”
“You love your father and you know it. And that’s the problem here, Tug. You got yourself all wrapped up in pretending you don’t care about a guy who, given how he behaves, cares only about placing bets on horses. That’s a big mess, Tug.”
And there, after I said that, I pretended I was captivated by something deep inside the woods. To Tug I probably looked like I despised the world, an
d in a way I did, because right then it hit me that there were plenty of folks now gossiping about the Corcorans and me and my mother as viciously as people had gossiped back in Arkansas.
Then Tug said, “Just don’t ever call me a baby, okay?”
I smiled a little at that, with one of those smiles Tug knew all about, the kind that force themselves on you when things feel at their worst.
And with that smile refusing to leave my face, I glanced over.
And I said, “Tug? If I’m with you and I happen to call you baby? Trust me—you won’t mind it at all.”
But what’s probably most important about this whole business of Tug not wanting to be called a baby was something I learned the next day: that despite all the adulthood and manliness Tug aspired to, he could not dismiss a rule Tom had declared for him back when he’d been a kid, which was that if ever Tug and Tom were together in the grandstand, Tug was to consider himself the Stay Putter and his father the Always Come Backer. This rule, of course, was meant for whenever Tug felt lost; Tug was, according to this rule, supposed to continue sitting or standing wherever he and Tom had last spoken, then wait there confident of his father’s return.
And no doubt Tom had laid down this rule to keep them from chasing each other in circles, but back then Tom never explained it to Tug as such, instead telling him that he should take pride in any departure of his father—since Tug was the luckiest kid, since he had a father whose eventual return was as certain as the fastest, most honest-running sure-thing horse.
And sometimes back then, Tom would be gone long enough that a grandstander would ask Tug if Tug was lost, and Tug would say no, then say, My dad is no loser, and the grandstander would laugh hard, as if Tug had made the perfect joke, and then Tom would return and the grandstander would recognize him from back when he’d jocked, and they’d shake hands and ignore Tug and talk the highs and lows of the game.
As a result, when Tom’s disappearance had continued on into its second day and beyond, Tug would spend his mornings in town or in the woods near the track looking for Tom, but he then spent his afternoon hours in the grandstand, in that same upper-tier section his father had claimed, the one overlooking The Crux. On the first day Tug did this—that is, essentially, wait up there—I went with him, and as we sat there, right where his father had, he explained to me, after I suggested we again check the backside, that he believed it was wisest to follow his father’s advice to stay put. Whether he actually believed his father would return and we’d all end up happy was something I quickly learned not to discuss, because the one time I asked him about this he acted as if he hadn’t heard, just stood and excused himself and headed off, to bet two of his father’s dollars on a long shot.
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