No Sleep till Wonderland

by Paul Tremblay

  The track and the city of Revere are just five miles north and east of downtown Boston, but it might as well be five thousand. While Revere is almost as old as Boston, it has none of the fabled charm or cachet of Ye Olde Town. Revere’s reputation—fair or not—is of blight, sprawl, and decay. For many Bostonians, Revere and the whole East Boston area is an urban caricature that never fails to make us feel better by comparison. A mythical place of exaggerated crime where the people have accents worse than ours. A place most of us see only from the window of an airplane landing at Logan.

  The cabbie rolls my window back up for me. What a guy.

  I say, “I haven’t been here in over a decade. Me and my buddy George would come here when we didn’t have enough money or gas to drive down to Foxwoods. We’d always pick the long shots and lose.” I don’t know why I’m reminiscing with the cabbie. For some reason, it feels like it was important enough to say out loud: the old-and-improved me was once here, and he had a real live friend named George.

  “There’s your car, Mr. PI. You can reach out and touch it if you want.”

  What an odd thing to say. I pry my stare away from the club house entrance and its glowing Americana and wearily survey the row of parked cars to our left. Just outside my door is the Lexus. We’re parked perpendicular to it, and we make a bulky T together. This is good news, and I might celebrate by making T the letter of the day. It might not be Ekat’s car, but it is the one I wanted him to follow.

  I say, “Don’t need to touch it, but that’s the one. Well done, my good man.”

  Buoyed by my praise, he says, “I hung back a few rows until they walked inside.”

  “How long ago was that? How many is they?”

  The cabbie’s hands still grip the wheel, and he doesn’t turn around to talk. “Ten minutes ago. There were two people: a man and a woman.” His voice is a breathy sigh, like he’s angry or disappointed with me. Like I’m not giving him enough credit or enough attention. You can’t please everyone.

  “What’d the man look like?”

  “Didn’t get a great look. I was too far away. But I thought he looked younger.”

  “Younger?”

  “Younger than you.”

  Gus looks younger than me. Him being Ekat’s mystery driver is a notion that has progressed past the hunch stage. I say, “Aren’t we all.” The words aren’t right, but the sentiment is legit. I add, “All right, good to know, chum. Thanks. Really, I appreciate it.” I slide across the bench seat, ready to duck out.

  He says, “When I first pulled in, I thought you were awake.” He stops there, at a place where neither of us is comfortable.

  I shrug my shoulders and say, “Sorry?” A one-word question and apology.

  “You asked if I was married and if I had any friends.” He doesn’t turn around to talk to me. His words bounce off the windshield and never fully recover their volume.

  “I must’ve been asleep. I don’t remember asking that. Happens to me all the time, unfortunately.”

  The cabbie nearly yells, “I know! I know you were asleep. I turned around and saw your eyes closed. I snapped my fingers in front of your face, and you kept talking. It was weird. I didn’t like it. You said we should go inside, hang out, have a few drinks, have some fun or something.”

  The narcoleptic me is as lonely and hard up for companionship as the awake me. I say, “I’m a little busy tonight. How about a rain check on the boys’ night out?”

  With his right hand, the cabbie taps and touches the dashboard instruments in a completely random yet orderly manner. He shifts from park into drive and then goes through the touching ritual again before stopping and flexing his fingers around the wheel. We all have our problems.

  He says, “No. I don’t want to anymore.”

  Did I hurt his feelings, or did I give him the willies? Which one of us is the lonely freak here?

  Time to move. I hop out of the cab. His front tinted window opens only a couple of inches. I can’t see his face. I slide him forty dollars, which includes one hell of a tip. He gives me my PI license back. I have a business card palmed, and I think about flicking it into his cab and insisting that he and I go out for the drinks that the narcoleptic me promised. But I don’t. I’m too slow or too something, and he drives away.

  I’m alone in the parking lot. Used betting slips and wrappers scuttle over the pavement like crabs. I run my hand along the cool metal of the Lexus. It’s real. Touching it isn’t a bad suggestion after all.

  Twenty-Seven

  It only costs me two of my crumpled and dwindling dollars to get into Wonderland. What a bargain.

  There’s a bar on my right when I first walk in, with a track-level viewing area that’s mostly empty. I walk up a cement ramp to the main concourse. ATM machines and concession stands flank the row of betting windows. Two out of every three windows are open and occupied. There’re enough people here to designate them a crowd.

  A couple of retirees wearing faded and threadbare Wonderland jackets hand out free racing programs and personal observations on your chances of getting all kinds of lucky. The observations are free too.

  Smoking isn’t allowed, but the place smells like stale tobacco. Old betting slips, the dead skin of the afternoon races, are everywhere. The remnants of the ticker-tape parade for the desperate cover the counters, the concourse floor, and the ramps. A group of loud teens trades shoulder punches and picks through the discarded slips, looking for winners. They won’t find any. The speakers crackle with a voice from out of time and out of place, announcing to everyone that the next race starts in ten minutes. He says it like the next race might be the last.

  I pull my hat over my eyes, not wanting to be seen by Ekat or Gus before I see them. Where do I look first? There’s club house and grandstand track seating. TV carrel seating as well. I’m going to try the grandstand first. Popcorn and peanut shells crunch under my feet.

  It’s an overcast night, and the grandstand is only a quarter full. Everything is different than it was when I was last here. Private tables, each with its own hanging television. The people already seated drink and eat and stare at the TVs, although there’s only a white text scroll on a blue background of the next race listing being broadcast.

  There’s a small stir in the grandstand as handlers lead the greyhounds down the track. The dogs’ legs are as thin as knives. Their skin stretches across overbred muscles and tendons like drum heads wound too tightly. The dogs have their heads down looking disappointed, defeated already. Maybe running all that distance and ending up in the same damned spot brings them down. Maybe someone told them that the rabbit they chase every night is a fraud.

  I leave the grandstand and head into the concourse again, planning on cutting through and wading into the club house. Then I see him. I stutter-step and plow into one of the retirees handing out the racing programs, the one with the Clementine-sized goiter in his neck. He doesn’t drop any programs. He says, “You’re gonna be the big loser tonight if you don’t watch where you’re fuckin’ goin’.”

  “I read that in a fortune cookie once.”

  He laughs, slaps my back, which echoes hollow, and tells me to get the fuck outta here. We’re buddies now. I resist the urge to rub his goiter for better luck, and I hide behind the popcorn guy’s cart.

  Okay. Him. I almost didn’t recognize him without his sunglasses. Timothy Carter. I wish I could say he looked nervous, like the dogs were going to be chasing him instead of Frankenstein’s rabbit, but he still has that my-shit-tastes-better-than-yours grin, big and bright as a center-stage spotlight. His eyes are little black rocks, like bird’s eyes. Twitchy and all iris. Windows to his soullessness. He should’ve kept the sunglasses on.

  Carter wears a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled over his pampered forearms. The shirt is tucked into disco-tight khaki pants. He’s a goddamn walking mannequin with a beer in each hand.

  Hanging off his shoulder is Madison Hall, the wife of the CEO Wilkie Barrack. Hanging o
ff his shoulder is my previous case, the woman I was supposed to follow, the platinum blonde with a thing for lacrosse players.

  I look away. I’m staring at an eclipse, and I’m afraid I’ll do serious damage if I don’t protect myself. I scan the crowd again quickly. Seeing Carter and Hall is an unexpected treat, but where’re Ekat and Gus?

  The power couple saunters through the concourse, and I stare at her. She isn’t the real Madison Hall. She’s the other woman that I mistakenly followed. Or the other woman that someone wanted me to follow. It’s suddenly hot in here. My heart goes all rubber ball inside the cement walls of my chest.

  Carter and faux-Hall stop walking in front of the ramp. She pulls him down to size and says something into the satellite dish of his ear. His awful but younger-than-mine face splits open to let out a wild impersonation of a laugh. He goes down the ramp toward the club house, gliding like the unclean wraith that he is. She struts to a customer service window, hips swinging like a metronome and heels clacking out a message on the concourse cement.

  I swap my popcorn man hideout for the hot dog man. Everyone knows you can’t trust the hot dog man, so I hide behind a couple of middle-aged women in leather biker jackets who read their race forms and argue about a dog assigned the number five. I follow faux-Hall to the customer service window, and it feels okay because I’ve had practice following her.

  The blonde wears black horn-rimmed glasses that are shaped like the eyes of a cat although we’re at a dog track. Her little canary yellow short-sleeved dress ends above the waterline of her knees, and her black shoes have finger-length heels sharp enough to pop balloons upon sight. She opens her black purse and slides something under the customer service window.

  The man behind the glass is blurry in the booth’s amber lighting. He hesitates to accept whatever she slid under the window, like he’s looking at the subject of some fifties B horror movie It Came from Her Purse! He does finally pick it up, inspecting her gift and her. He asks a question that I can’t hear. She holds up two fingers and grinds the toe of her right foot into the cement.

  My human shields leave me, and I don’t know if they resolved the great debate over dog number five. I’m not a betting man, anyway.

  The customer service agent counts out a seemingly endless stack of bills, then slides the bounty under the glass. Faux-Hall folds the windfall, and I swear that it’s too big for her purse, but she fits it all inside and clasps it shut. Maybe it’s a circus purse, and I’m the clown who’s supposed to crawl inside too.

  I teeter, blink, and shake my head, and she’s already walking away from the window to the ramp. All right, new plan. I dig into my jacket pocket and make sure my cigarette-lighter gun is still there. Another wave of fatigue threatens to sweep me under. My legs are made out of oatmeal, and my hands tremor and shake, nervous about what I might do or say. I ignore it all and cut her off at the top of the ramp.

  She sees me. She adjusts her cat glasses, which I now notice are broken. The left temple is tied to the frame with a wound-up rubber band. She turns, twists on her heels, looking back at the milling and droning crowd of the concourse, surprised that everyone else in the place doesn’t share her displeasure that I am here. She’s taller than I remember.

  I make a gun-tent with the cigarette lighter in my jacket pocket and point it at her. Yeah, like the gun and the rabbit and woman in the blonde wig, I’m a fraud too, pretending to be the hardest of hard guys.

  She says, “Is that a gun?”

  With my voice coming out from the land of the lost, I say, “Hi, Ekat. It’s a gun, and I’m not all that happy to see you. I dig the wig and glasses, though.”

  Twenty-Eight

  We’re outside, walking across the parking lot like we’re the only two people left in the world. Just us and greyhounds. We phantom away from the club house entrance, away from any windows, she in her blonde wig and me in my hat. I have the urge to pluck and snap the rubber band on my wrist. I keep my hand on the fake gun instead.

  My feet are afraid to lose contact with terra firma, so I scrape their bottoms on the gritty blacktop until they throw sparks. Ekat is on my left. She’s quiet, only looking ahead. She rubs her arms like she’s cold, but she’s not cold. It’s just something for her to do to pass the time. Time is distance tonight.

  We dock underneath one of the giraffe-tall lampposts with a dying bulb that flickers. It uses us to make shadows, but we don’t mind. I pull my fake-gun hand out of my pocket and fill it with something truly lethal: a cigarette. The rush of tobacco and nicotine gives me a quick but powerful buzz. Maybe that’s just the hum of faulty wiring above or the faulty wiring within.

  Ekat leans her back against the light post, and she glows like a blinking traffic light. Yellow. A warning to slow down. I don’t need the warning. I know only slow.

  “I lied about liking your wig. It couldn’t be more obvious. Might as well be wearing a flashing siren on your head.”

  She says, “As obvious as that lump in your coat pocket? I know it’s not a real gun. You hate guns. You told me that night in my apartment.”

  I go back to my pocket, but my hand and cigarette lighter are clumsy and forget who is supposed to lead. They’ve lost the motivation for the scene.

  Ekat continues, “Don’t you remember? We talked about your job, and I asked if you carried a gun. You said other than the cigarette lighter your friend gave you, you’ve never owned one, never used one, never even held one.”

  Don’t remember saying it, naturally, but it’s the truth. Nothing like a little gun talk among friends. I say, “I lied. I’m so untrustworthy. I have lots of guns. Big nasty ones that’d chew a hole through your lamppost.”

  “You don’t have a gun, and I just want you to know that I came out here with you anyway.” Ekat talks in a quavering, the jig-is-up voice. “So how much do you know?”

  “Enough to be here, out in the parking lot of Wonderland with you, Marilyn.” She doesn’t say anything. Goodbye, Norma Jean. I try a couple more prompts. “Enough to know you’re responsible for the fire and that you guys played me like the long-shot fleabag in the sixth race.”

  “Oh, that’s not it, Mark, and it’s so much more complicated than that. I am sorry, Mark, so sorry, but I can explain everything.”

  “Don’t know what name is on your fake license and credit card, but the rubber band on your glasses is a nice touch. You’re incognito, but with that dash of perky personality. You’re a reckless renegade, but endearing too, right?”

  She doesn’t hear my last bit as she talks over me, burying me in words. She says, “It was never supposed to be like this, get to this point, get to any point. We didn’t know what to do. Timothy was out of control, and I wanted out. Me and Gus, we set up the whole cheating-wife surveillance thing with you, but not to purposefully embarrass or harm you. I mean, we didn’t really know you then, but it wasn’t ever about you, I swear. It was about him. About Timothy. It was a kind of…I don’t know; I’m not saying any of this right.” Ekat pauses, rubs her forehead, looks away, at her feet, and talks to her shoes. They won’t talk back. “We were desperate, and we thought we could get something on him, blackmail him, get some leverage, or just get his attention at least, get him to listen to us and to show he wasn’t totally in control of everything, that he definitely wasn’t in control of us, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t smart, and we didn’t think it out. We made it all worse, I know. We screwed up. It was a panic move, but we had to try something. We didn’t want anyone to get…”

  Her words are moving at the speed of light when I’m still stuck in the dark. Need to try and organize things a little. “How do you know Carter?”

  It should be an easy question to answer. She looks back up at me, her face hiding in the wig’s schizophrenic, on-again-off-again shadow. She says, “He went to high school with Gus and me.”

  Her answer ignites an irrational and complex mushroom cloud of rage. I don’t know if I’m Mr. Boiling Point because of how they’re using
me, or if I’m school-yard jealous because the cool kids, Ekat and Gus, choose an ass-hat like Carter as a friend over me. Whatever. I’m usually such an easygoing cat, too, but now I’m ready and willing to go all lake-of-fire, see red, crack the earth, and spit blood. Yell, bellow, froth at thine mouth. I am the god of hellfire.

  “Fuck me! And you! Fucking unbelievable! Getting owned by a goddamned high school clique. A mini–class reunion.”

  mark

  “So let me get this straight; you three amigos had your cute little identity fraud game going, using people like Jody and Aleksandar…”

  mark listen to me

  “…giving them fake IDs and stolen cards because they’re not from the south shore, they’re more suited for the dirty work, right?”

  no mark that’s not it really it isn’t

  “So you kept such good mules, they’d get big cash advances, you guys got your cut, and you got your adventure, your fucking jollies and goose bumps, and if your bagmen were ever caught, who would believe them over you, right?”

  please stop and listen to me stop it

  “Then you guys decided it was over, maybe you got bored with it, thought identity theft was too bourgeois, and then it was burning-down-the-house time…”

  stop it stop it stop it

  “…you know that song, sung by that guy with the big white jacket with big white shoulders, and he also sang something about asking yourself how you got here or how you go there howyougothere…”

  “Stop it!” Ekat has my lapels wrapped inside her fists. She shakes me like a burned-out lightbulb, listening for the filament, testing to see if I’m broken. She’s strong, and the wig remains on her head despite the violence.

  I pry her hands off me and gently push her away, back to the safety of the lamppost. I say, “I stopped it.”