Watch Me Go

by Mark Wisniewski

  But I hear no shot. Gabe keeps the oars still. Then there’s a rustling from the brush that he, pale again, keeps watching. Lime green branches near the rustling move, and I aim Bark’s gun at this movement, and out struts a cat smaller than a tiger but far bigger than a tom. Black tufts raise its ears into points, its legs long and anchored by monstrous paws, its tail looking like most of it got left in some trap.

  “Gabe,” I whisper, and the cat stiffens to check me out. Its expression says Try me as its eyes seem to deepen. Quick breaths appear in its underbelly only. Mostly, though, it comes off as cool, as if it’s not showing off how cut it is, as if, because of its looks, it owns every nearby person and tree and squirrel and fish, and fear in you swirls when you admit that its paws, three times wider than you’d expect, hide claws you’d need to be crazy to mess with.

  “Assume it’s rabid,” Gabe whispers, and I remember something my aunt once said: There are fools, there are damned fools, and there are goddamned fools.

  And now, all these years later, in this stare-down with this wildcat, I realize her point: Don’t be a goddamned fool.

  “Stay still,” Gabe whispers, though he himself lowers the anchor slowly.

  “Even if it attacks?” I whisper.

  “Just . . . maintain your presence.”

  “I’m trying.”

  The cat dips its head, takes three steps toward us while keeping us in view, stops in mid-stride to growl at Gabe.

  Sprint to a tree you can climb, I think.

  But no such tree is within fifty feet.

  And the cat closes the gap. If I weigh 180, it goes 130, though again, it has those claws.

  I aim Bark’s gun.

  “Should I shoot?” I whisper.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just stay still.”

  But Gabe isn’t still. He’s standing, gradually, even as his movement seems to draw the cat closer. The boat drifts toward the shoreline, and now we’re at max five feet from the cat, then maybe three: one pounce and it would be on us. Its snout is surprisingly wide. Its chartreuse and gray blue eyes, full of hatred so understandable you could almost love it, shift from mine to Gabe’s, and it growls, this time at me.

  “Should I?” I whisper.

  “One gunshot means a warden on your ass.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “And if you miss, we’re both screwed.”

  The cat steps into the stream, and now here’s Gabe, lifting an oar.

  And he holds the oar up there, over his own head, not the cat’s, and the cat hisses, raises a front paw, swipes in my direction—then turns and sprints off, into the woods.

  Somewhere out there, a stick snaps.

  Then there’s nothing but the sound of the current.

  Gabe is still standing, the oar well over his head. He could bring it down on me, seeing the gun is aimed at the cat. Yet I don’t move. It’s like we might trust each other.

  “What the hell was that?” I ask. And I’m sweating full-out.

  “That was your bobcat.”

  “Sonofabitch.”

  Gabe lowers the oar. After he finally sits, I aim the gun his way. If you trust him, I think, put the gun down, and I keep the gun aimed.

  “Thing probably associates humans with food,” he says. “That’s what makes them aggressive.”

  “So why did it leave?”

  “I don’t know. Because we didn’t?”

  “Oh, come on, man.”

  “If we’d run from it, Deesh, we would have defined ourselves as prey. But we didn’t run.”

  “But it could’ve kicked our asses.”

  “Yes, it could’ve—even with one of your bullets in it. It was the oar that saved us, Deesh. It was you deciding not to shoot or bolt, and the oar.”

  “What did the oar do?”

  “Made us bigger. The bigger you are, the more their instinct says not to attack.”

  Gabe pulls up the anchor, sets it in the boat. Rows enough to make progress, and his eyes cross briefly but he blinks them into place, and then his forehead’s creased like he’s trying to solve some problem. He sticks two fingers in a front pants pocket, pulls out an orange prescription bottle, cranks it open, shakes out a pill he tosses into his mouth. The current begins taking us back.

  “For your heart?” I ask.

  “Blood thinner.”

  He rows, aimed straight upstream.

  “Something I should probably tell you about blood thinners,” he says. “Let’s just say I bump my head hard? We wouldn’t even know that an excess of unnaturally thin blood is pooling up in my skull.” He snaps his fingers and says, “Could kill me in minutes.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Take one of these oars and smack me over the head,” he says. “And you’ll see a man die fast.”

  44

  JAN

  TUG STILL WOULDN’T SAY BOO, which would have been fine if we’d been running, but we were walking, just walking, so I came right out and asked him, “What do they mean, ‘middle priority’?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” he said. “Maybe no more active search?”

  To keep things hopeful I said, “You mean active search by them.”

  And we walked on, a solid five feet apart.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I meant.”

  “You ever consider that they might stop looking for certain people because they figure them still alive?”

  He nodded. “Not exactly a comforting thought for you, though, huh?”

  “That he’d be alive?”

  “That he’d have run off. I mean, of course, I’d rather the guy be alive, but if he did run off, he’s probably not what you’d consider an ideal role model for me.”

  “You think he’s with some woman?”

  “Possibly. But he could have run off for any number of reasons.”

  “Such as what?”

  “I don’t know, Jan. You tell me. I’m tired of always trying to figure that guy out.”

  Tug was now walking faster, as if he, like me, had learned the beauty of speed.

  I caught up and said, “Anyway, where else?”

  “You really still find my family worth your time?”

  “Of course, Tug. Because you need to know what happened. I mean, do you want to go through years of questions like I did? Years of people gawking?”

  We fell more into stride, some from me speeding up, some from him slowing down.

  “Yeah, but the thing is,” he said. “Where else is there?”

  “There’s not one place left that makes a tiny bit of sense?”

  He snuck a glance at the clouds between treetops ahead. He sighed loudly, in a huff almost.

  “Saratoga Springs,” he said. “Just after he retired, we’d always vacation there this time of year. It’s got a track that’s like a hundred years old, and there’s a ton of money up there.”

  “He’d be there to—what, start all over again?”

  “I don’t know, Jan. You’re kind of the expert on the answer to that question.”

  “I am?”

  Tug nodded.

  “I mean, seriously,” he said. “Why did you leave Arkansas?”

  And of course this made me wonder if he was trying to tell me he’d heard some of those rumors about me, maybe the same ones Arnie DeShields had obviously heard.

  So I said nothing, just walked on beside Tug, as if we had a complete understanding.

  And the next day, after Jasper drove our mothers and us to Saratoga Springs, I told myself to gear down the last of my hope as the Galaxie rolled onto the grass parking lot near the Saratoga training track. Though given the look on Tug’s face after we all
got out and began for the track proper, I was sure they actually believed he was minutes from again gambling with his father, as he had so many times when he’d been a kid.

  Then, from behind the rest of us, my mother called, “I’ll be in the car,” and we turned and saw her already walking back to the Galaxie.

  And right away, Jasper called, “You’ll need that unlocked,” and off Jasper went, toward her.

  And then there went Colleen, toward a dusty riding path that led west, away from the grandstand.

  And I, feeling hurt because Tug hadn’t said a word to me since we’d left the house, found myself veering off, too, in my case toward the white shedrows east of the track.

  And, sure, I figured Tug now wondered if, here in Saratoga, with the promise of a racing day ringing out from the chatter of the patrons, we, the final stalwarts in the effort to find Tom Corcoran, were quietly giving up.

  But if we were, how could anyone blame us?

  45

  DEESH

  SOMETHING’S GETTING TO ME in that festering, gnawing way you notice but don’t quite feel and then can’t ignore. Yeah, I’m hungry, and no doubt I need sleep, but this is something else, some mess made of nerves and impatience and nausea and awe about the steep pitch of a gorgeous green hill too close to me.

  “So what happened with Madalynn?” Gabe asks. He places the oars inside the boat, lowers the motor, clicks it on.

  “Like I said, we ended up kind of serious.”

  “You lived together?”

  “For a while.”

  “But you never quite took the bait.”

  “The way I saw it,” I say, “marriage meant a life of two people committed to having kids and then telling each other what to do.”

  I brace myself to hear Gabe ask, Plus you found a hotter woman?

  But for now at least, he just gives me one of those looks, the kind people give when they’re thinking better of speaking up, the kind that lets you figure things out on your own. It’s a better look than the one he was giving me when he was telling me about his plan for me and his cabin, all intent and hopeful and insistent—the look Madalynn gave me back when she was pregnant and she and I talked about marriage.

  “And what gets me now,” I say, “is that this little part of me never stopped loving her. I’d loved her since the first time I saw her in grammar school, and I would go on to love her. As the years just, you know, kind of went by.”

  And it’s with these words now out there, said by me to another human being, that I want Gabe to go off on a blue streak, about fish or bobcats or his own fucked-up heart. I need to hear someone talk about something other than me.

  But he just navigates on.

  He clicks off the electric motor. We’re in slow-moving shallows. He works his torso forward to grab up the oars and, again, rows quietly.

  “Real but unsustainable,” he says.

  “Huh?”

  “Real but unsustainable love. Saddest story ever, and it happens all the time.”

  And he goes off talking about how, for any wannabe stand-up husband, there’s the need to afford the financial costs of a marriage, not to mention, he says, that the prospect of having kids destines most any guy to a life burdened by debt—but how not having kids threatens to make him resented by the woman he loves if she comes to want motherhood.

  I’m nodding as he says all this, realizing that, right now at least, he does sound like some kind of professor. Maybe he really was one, I think, and we cruise onward upstream, splitting a patch of evergreens.

  “You used to hear the expression ‘living on love,’” he says. “But you don’t anymore. And you know why? Because it’s bullshit. Because, man, people in love have basic needs. People in love need to eat, shower, and sleep. Not to mention that, if people in love want to make love, they pretty much need to do it indoors, so a roof over their heads is probably a decent idea, too.”

  He reaches into his tackle box, finds a second prescription bottle, cranks it open. He shakes out its last pill, which he slaps into his mouth and swallows dry.

  “Blood thinner?” I ask, stuck less on worry about his heart than on what Jasir might be doing right now—and what he’ll always think of me.

  “Yeah,” Gabe says. “Without these, I’d be in more trouble than you.”

  “Hang on a second, man. Let me get this straight: If you take those pills and bump your head, you’ll die very quickly. But if you don’t take those pills, you’ll have a stroke.”

  And right then he stares directly at me like a son might, all eager to portray himself as earnest.

  “Not necessarily a stroke,” he says. “The other possibility there is a heart attack.”

  “Well, that definitely sucks.”

  “It does. Either way, six feet under, or might as well be. But as I see it now, Deesh, it really only puts me right back in the same mortal lot as everyone else. I just have less leeway to fuck up in.”

  And for a second there, I want to toss the gun. This guy’s a lamb, I tell myself. He really is trying to help you.

  And he’s letting me in on some theory now, his Theory of The Big One, which he admits boils down to one thing and one thing only—In order to catch your biggest fish ever, you must believe it swims where you are—but there’s no chance this blue streak will stop even though he’s already summed it up, because he’s already getting into some of its ins and outs, its examples of how, if you believe your biggest fish is nearby, you’ll behave like it’s actually there, always making sure that the “presentation” of your bait is perfect, its implication that accuracy of casts is more important than losers who catch small fish think, and he slows down a little, maybe for emphasis suited to me personally, to add that I’ll need to adjust my reeling speeds to find the one ideal for my biggest fish, who hasn’t lived long enough to grow big for no reason. Fishermen pass up their Big One probably every time they fish, he makes clear more than once, the last time very loudly, almost angrily, but there’s more of a love than anger here, I think after he holds up a hand to catch his breath. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, he is saying to me quietly, man-to-man yet still intimately—ninety-nine times out of a hundred fishermen have no clue what they’re passing up, so my best bet will always be to act, at all times, as if my Big One is near and aware of me.

  And the longer this blue streak goes on, the more I think: Jasir.

  Still, I keep the gun riveted. And again it becomes Madalynn’s face my insides focus on. Madalynn’s stateliness, Madalynn’s way, in bed, of closing her eyes to pretend to ignore me until, an hour later, she’d finally touch me. Gangly Madalynn in grammar school. Curvaceous Madalynn just out of the shower. That better-than-ever Madalynn I ran into with Bark in Brooklyn last week.

  And I remember for the thousandth time how, two years after Jasir was born, Bark proposed to Madalynn. About how Bark and I, cool as ever, never talked about that proposal, never got into whether it meant Bark had slept with Madalynn or had just tried to use Jasir’s need of a father as a way into her heart. How I learned of that proposal through James. How from then on Bark and I and James at most joked about my troubles with women, and how, whenever we laughed, I’d always, everywhere inside me, think Madalynn.

  Gabe reaches down just behind the tackle box, grabs up the lunch bag, opens it, holds it toward me.

  “Sandwich?” he says.

  “No, thanks.”

  He flips the bag down between us, starts rowing all downcast and serious, maybe moping because I didn’t take him up on his offer to share a meal.

  So I say, “Got a question for you, though.” And I’ll ask it to be nice, but I’ve been wondering about this all afternoon.

  “What,” he says.

  “How long after your divorce till you stopped loving your wife?”

  He considers
this, maybe trying to figure out why I asked it. He considers it long enough to be hung up on some huge argument he had with her.

  “You mean when did I start telling other women I no longer loved her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Something like two years after we divorced.”

  I wish it would rain now, hard, a kick-ass downpour with lightning and all so we’d need to dock and leave the boat. But there’s just ruffled gray clouds over us. I ask, “That long, huh?”

  He nods. “But that was hogwash on my part,” he says. “Because now, Deesh? All these years out? There isn’t a damned day I don’t miss her.”

  And this lovesick guy, I realize, still thinks I shot the cop.

  Maybe everyone except Bark still thinks I shot the cop.

  And everyone keeps on including Madalynn and Jasir.

  46

  JAN

  AS TUG WOULD TELL ME DAYS LATER, the antiquated Saratoga grandstand turned out to be far smaller and less grand than Tug remembered, and by the time he was walking up and down its wooden aisles among the well-heeled bettors, littered losing tickets and crumpled napkins and nearly finished cups of beer already lay here and there. Three loudmouths were making a hullabaloo about their profits while toting smelly cigars, no clue of Tom Corcoran anyplace, and as Tug accelerated toward the bluegrass band near the paddock, it was not lost on him that, at one time, his father’s race-riding on this same hallowed track had been cheered by loudmouths, loudmouths who had since aged considerably, and then, as he watched the bluegrass band play, fatigue and disappointment and hunger ate at him.

  Worst for Tug was not knowing how he’d greet Tom if he did run into him. Would they hug? Would Tug ask what in hell, precisely, had happened? Would he lose his temper about how the Corcoran passion for gambling had screwed up the chances of healthy love between him and me?

  And while all this uncertainty kept Tug’s mind away from whatever he felt for me then, I was off, away from him, too, asking after Tom in the stables and barns on the Saratoga track’s backside. And I’ll be frank right now about how, back then, in Saratoga, I didn’t exactly like how Tom’s disappearance seemed to be testing whatever Tug and I had sparked the night we’d first run together through the dark. But I will now also always understand that any woman entwined with male desperation as much as I was then with Tom’s and Tug’s—that, well, there are times when she, like the most desperate of men, will do whatever she needs to.