And while we watched that race, it occurred to me that Tug had made that bet sentimentally, doing what his father would have done, almost, you could say, as a surrogate, carrying on the Corcoran family tradition, and I did not in the least want to mess with that, but it bothered me, and it bothered me all the more when I admitted to myself that, as we sat up there watching horses run, the hard-core grandstanders Tom had long known were obviously giving us the silent treatment.
Among these hard-cores I should probably mention now was The Nickster, a portly, clean-shaven Sicilian who had once scowled at Tug and called him a pussy for caring about retired horses—though now, with Tom gone, The Nickster would neither scowl nor react at all when he’d see Tug. At most he’d lick his thumb and turn a page of his racing program while letting his steely eyes drift.
There was also The Show Stopper, a gregarious loser who’d once famously bet ten grand on “a lock to show” (his words), only to see it leave the gate and stop, and whose gregariousness, now that Tom was gone, had suddenly pulled up lame, too.
And as always (in his usual place at the bottom of the pecking order), there was The Form Monger.
In fact, it was then, after Tom disappeared and Tug and I sat up there, that Tug finally told me the whole story of the absence of The Form Monger’s wife, including the part about how The Form Monger’s compulsive betting had led her as well as his hand to disappear pathetically forever. And what was odd was that, as Tug told me this story, all three of us—Tug and I and The Form Monger—were all right there, all three of us up there in the flesh in the grandstand, still making bets on horses despite the likelihood that, right then, as we gambled, Tom Corcoran was very well facing his own gambling-related horrors.
I mean, here, smack in front of us, was a guy whose right arm was a hideous purple stump because his attraction to betting had caused his hand to be sawed off, and he just kept cruising around in that grandstand in search of Forms, kept following losers out to the parking lot in case they’d drop anything—kept on aspiring to stand out there and scalp used past performances and return to the grandstand to bet.
And even though The Form Monger kept his distance from us, never once stepping foot in the section that overlooked The Crux, Tug kept wanting to be near men like him.
39
DEESH
GABE’S LATEST BLUE STREAK changes direction as sharply as my first right turn after Bark shot the cop. Gabe has a little something to propose, just a little idea he’s saying just now popped up in his head, an idea for a possible plan for me. The plan, the plan, his plan for me, is that he and I both keep on together, keep on heading upstream in his boat, for a good couple of hours. And that while we stick together like brothers and continue on, he’ll teach me all the finer points of baiting a hook and casting a line and catching bass, because a guy can’t live more than a week or two without protein, and I myself can’t risk shooting squirrels, or shooting anything, for that matter, since regardless of how much ammo a guy has to spare, the sound of a gunshot in these woods risks a warden rushing toward him faster than wildfire.
And, yes—of course—I would need to put down the gun in order to cast, so he won’t push any of these fishing lessons on me, certainly not now, not right at this moment, because he understands me, he gets how I need to keep the gun on him—he’d do the same thing if he were me—but of course, being himself, he also would like me to put the gun down, not only for his own personal safety but also for mine, because, if I, Deesh, think about it, I don’t need another count of murder or even just kidnapping added to the list of the counts already piling up against me. He’s sure I’ve already thought this through. But he really does want me to know he’s been thinking it through also, because, see, he really does want to help me, really does want what’s best for me.
“You saying you believe I didn’t shoot that cop?” I ask, to slow down—or, shit, end—this particular blue streak or, if not, to remind him that if he, (a), really does have heart problems, and, (b), truly wants this boat ride to be good for both of us, he should probably take a breath now and then to let a brother say something.
And his answer to my question wastes no time:
“Oh, no,” he says. “I think you shot him.”
So now my eyes stay as riveted on his damned white-guy face as his are on the gun.
“I just think he deserved it,” he explains.
“Why did he deserve it?”
“Because he was racist.”
“But man, you weren’t there.”
“I didn’t need to be. I’ve seen this scenario play out enough on the news. How many times do we need to see it reported after the black guy is killed? How many racist cops do we need to hire and suspend and put on trial and finally stick in jail? And you know we probably hear about less than a tenth of the shit.”
“But—”
“Deesh, this is a fucked-up country. It is totally fucked. It’s just one big old melting pot of hatred. And it just keeps boiling.”
“But how do you know I wasn’t the hater?”
“Because I’ve been around haters. Been around the best of them, and you can tell. Just listen to how they talk, and you can tell.”
And this, he then says, reminds him to give me the matches in his tackle box. And to show me what kind of tree branches to use to make the fires I’ll need to fry the bass I’ll catch. And I’ll need to remember never to make a fire during the day, or even at night unless it’s cloudy, since neither he nor I will want anyone to notice smoke rising past his land’s treetops, which of course would provoke suspicion.
Because, well, we both now need to remember these are his woods, but they’re not. He alone is paying the mortgage that says he owns them, but when it comes to land in this part of Pennsylvania, long-held land prime for fishing and hunting and hiking and fracking and whatnot, there are always rights-of-way and shared borders and so forth, and of course there are also state laws that apply to every hunter and hiker and gem collector who might want to encroach, at least theoretically speaking, but that’s not his point.
His point is the plan. That wasn’t the whole plan, what he’s told me so far. The whole plan, he explains after his eyes cross briefly and he blinks them back into alignment while he takes a ragged breath—the whole plan ends with him taking me to the empty hunting cabin that sits in these woods, these woods that are mostly his except for a right-of-way owned by a contractor from Philly who comes up very rarely, maybe once a year, sometimes not at all—but certainly, definitely only in fall—when deer hunting is legal.
Deer hunting, if he, Gabe, now can remember correctly, begins in October. October 15th or 20th or 25th. Or something like that, but it’s definitely in October. Which means the cabin’s always empty now. The cabin’s all mine. The cabin’s all mine for the summer at least and, with any luck, pretty much forever.
40
JAN
THERE WAS ALWAYS another place to look, certainly always Bill Treacy’s feed store and the tavern in town, and every morning Tug checked the shed in the woods behind Jasper’s cabin, and Tug and I again and again asked around at the track, and after eight days of such checking and looking and asking, we returned to the Corcoran house almost as a couple would, and Jasper, anchored across the kitchen table from Colleen, glanced over at Tug, and Tug said, “Nope.”
“Well, let’s face it,” Colleen said. “This isn’t good.”
And I thought, It’s horrible. But I didn’t dare say that.
And that was the thing about being in that house. The Corcorans acted as if you solved problems by simply not talking about them, which I knew made them worse. But at the same time it kind of lent you hope, so soon you almost liked keeping your mouth shut—or keeping on while waiting for someone else to speak.
So I did that for a good while, as my mother reheated Tug and I a lunch of fried bluegills
someone had caught from the lake. And I did it a while longer as Tug picked at his food and I ate nothing at all. Colleen then suggested that Tug join her and Jasper that afternoon, because today, finally, after eight days of Colleen’s consternation about whether they should or whether they shouldn’t, she’d decided that they’d skip the Podunk sheriff and go straight to the state police district headquarters forty-some miles away. And Tug nodded a yes, as if nothing being said were at all a big deal, much as he still seemed to be trying to keep me from knowing how undoubtedly fucked-up everything was.
And when he and Colleen and Jasper got there, to the non-Podunk state police district headquarters, a trooper eyed Tug on and off while he asked Jasper about Tug’s father’s gambling pals, and Jasper answered some of those questions reluctantly, some maybe dishonestly, but always, Tug thought, for his family’s own good. Then an older trooper had Colleen sign a missing persons report, which he said he’d file immediately.
And it wasn’t until after Tug and Colleen had finished their business there, on their way down those headquarters’ concrete stairs, that Tug eased up on worrying enough to imagine running in the dark with me, and again he wanted to buy me something I’d like that would show he’d always care, so right there, within earshot of Jasper, he gathered the spine to ask Colleen the kind of question Tom would have considered too intrusive.
“Mom, I need some of my tuition money—could you get it?”
“What do you mean get it?” Colleen said.
“I mean withdraw it.”
“Tug, that cash went into an account only your father can touch. You’ll have to ask him when he comes back.”
And on those stairs Tug tried to accept what she’d meant.
She’d meant: Honey, that cash is long gone.
41
DEESH
EACH BEND IN THIS STREAM presents the threat that we���ll sail directly into the range of a loaded firearm held by a redneck or a warden or a trooper or a strapping buck from the FBI, though so far we’ve seen no such life-forms here, just the hind legs of an orange fawn leaping between Christmas trees to escape us, then a pair of small yellow butterflies tumbling over each other, and then, way up there, a hawk or an eagle, who knows which, circling so high it seemed closer to the rolling gray clouds than to us.
But now there seems to be more to Gabe’s plan than he first told me. Or so he’s now informing me. The plan also includes his suggestion that he and I never be in contact once he drops me at the cabin. Of course he’ll give me all this fishing gear, the tackle box no problem, matches included, the lunch bag of bread and liverwurst and so on if it turns out we get to the cabin before we feel hungry enough to stop, and, now that Gabe thinks about it, he’ll need to replenish my stock of matches every few months or so. But he can do that, he’s willing to do that—just “happen” to drop a box of kitchen matches on the shore near the cabin when he’s up that way guiding a client—even though there is some risk involved—for both of us—in our being in contact after he drops me off, since, from his point of view, of course, he’d be thrown in jail for having given me refuge like this. For me, of course, the risk would be less significant. But there would be some. For me the risk would be that, if I felt that he and I had struck up a little friendship, I might be tempted to head downstream to hang out with him now and then, which would mean that if, say, by an almost inconceivable coincidence, he had a visitor, maybe some woman—maybe this one particular woman in a plaid jacket who, twice now, has hiked past the road just beyond his driveway whistling that one show tune, that one show tune he should be able to remember right now but can’t—he just can’t—what the fuck—it must be the synergistic effect of all the damned medications he needs to take thanks to his botched heart surgery.
But the point, the point he’s trying to tell me, is there would be risk for me, too. There would be risk for both of us if we stayed in contact. So the plan that stands in his mind right now, albeit sketchy, is that, after he navigates me far enough upstream and we take the short walk through virtually virgin woods to this basically unused hunting cabin, we’ll never see each other again, much as we would both, at that point, if I was happy with where he’d taken me, be on the very best terms, wishing each other the best of luck and all that.
And I think, He thinks I shot the cop.
He thinks I’m guilty.
Everyone thinks I’m guilty.
And everyone includes Madalynn and Jasir.
And I, right now, in this boat, wonder if I can abide this. My aunt wouldn’t abide this, none of my people would abide this—if my father somehow showed up right now, he’d resent it as much as I do.
And I keep on resenting it while Gabe rows around a bend with the tight-lipped look of a man who has just spoken his peace and a damned righteous one at that. And I resent it well into Gabe’s next blue streak, which, since I’m barely listening, might be about his heart surgery or the woman in the plaid jacket or—yeah, I’m sure he’s right that he could probably go on for days about his ex-wife if I let him.
But I’m not going to let him. Because I can’t stop thinking that he thinks I shot the cop. And of course I need to think. Everyone does. And sometimes everyone needs to think on their own, and it’s now, as I realize this, that I can see myself pulling this trigger. Because the more a guy who thinks you’re a killer yaps on about his owned fucked-up life, the more he can get on your nerves, to the point that you start thinking things like how shooting him right now, smack in the middle of him talking about shit you hardly care about, would be doing him a favor, too.
And of course he has no clue I’m thinking any of this. How could he, with him not giving me a chance to talk? So now here I am, waving the gun wildly in front of him, wildly for sure and still pointed in his direction, kind of aggressively, hell-yes risking that it might go off and put a bullet into some nearby life if not his, and finally, right about when he notices enough to shut up, I say, “Gabe.”
“What?”
And here another twitch comes up through me, startled as I am that his talking’s stopped, but I absorb this one to keep the gun aimed. “How do you know so much about hatred?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said you thought I shot the cop because you know so much about hatred. And I’d just like to know why you think you’re such an expert.”
“I didn’t say you hated the cop,” he says. “I said the cop hated you.”
“I know. But what made you such an expert on hatred that you knew the cop hated me?”
“Oh,” he says. “You don’t want to hear that whole story.”
“But I do, man. I really do. Otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.”
“Fine,” he says, and off he goes, on blue streak number eight or nine or, fuck, ten, and the thing about listening to a guy talk on and on for several hours is that it does help him get into your head—you start hearing his rhythms when you think—maybe you’re even starting to want what he wants, which can be a problem if you’re holding a gun on him and he wants you to put it down.
But that’s just me. Just me telling you how it feels listening to his eighth or ninth or tenth blue streak, this one about a woman, another woman, a woman he’s certainly lost contact with, a woman he doesn’t love at all. A woman he calls The Man Hater. And a Man Hater, he’s now explaining, in a shy but lecturelike mode, is exactly that: anyone who hates anyone born male. Yes, most Man Haters are female, but not all of them, he says. In a sense, he says, a Man Hater is not different at all from people who’ve despised me because I’m black—both a Man Hater and a racist like the cop he’s sure I shot won’t empathize with you, or hear you out, or even as much as give you the benefit of the doubt. Once they see you’re born with that certain physical characteristic they despise, they plug themselves into their hatred and let it rule you and them. No doubt, he says, there are also Wo
man Haters and White Haters. He’s sure there are haters of all the various ways that people are born to be. American citizenship, he thinks, encourages hatred. But it’s beyond America, he says. It’s international. It’s why there’s war, certainly why there’s terrorism. 9-11, he’s sure, happened because of Haters of Christians and Jews. He guesses most everyone in the world has been hated at least once. In fact, he says, he would bet on this.
“You’re talking about discrimination,” I say.
“I’m talking about hatred,” he says. “Hatred, Deesh, when you really stop to think about everything? Hatred is the world’s most wanted public enemy.”
I nod. He’s freaking playing you, I think. This is all just to get you to lose the gun.
But he hasn’t once glanced at the gun since blue streak number six. Though maybe that’s all an act. Either way he talks on, rowing, yeah, and sometimes studying a shoreline but mostly talking, about how this Man Hater he knew was the chair of the English Department at the university where he last tried to be what he’s always wanted to be, a literature professor—poetry. About how this Man Hater’s hatred of him contaminated his love of teaching and even his marriage. How, when he proposed to his wife and she said yes, they’d thought he’d bring in at least his modest salary as a professor, so when he was later denied tenure, their finances were screwed.
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