Authors: Mark Wisniewski
DEESH
“BARK,” I SAY. “I’M PULLING OVER
if you don’t put that thing down.”
“It’s down,” he says.
I glance. His finger is off the trigger, the gun aimed down, to his right. How long
has this been? Am I now aiding and abetting? And in this truck still hangs the wisdom
acted upon by James: Bail on a brother before he bails on you.
Still, I drive on. You are, I remind myself, helping a man who shot a cop in the face.
And this man might still love the mother of your son.
An exit approaches. I pass it. You are a friend, I think. You are Bark’s friend, and
you don’t bail on a friend.
And now here goes Bark, gun still aimed at the floor, working folded cash from a front
pocket.
He says, “We don’t ditch this truck soon, we’re screwed.”
“Agreed.”
“So take the next exit,” he says. “Then we’ll have a running start on whoever might
look for us.”
Is looking
for us, I almost say. “You think we should hide in Jersey?” I ask, then, after his
nod, add, “Jersey’s not far enough, Bark. I say we run far. Remember, we do have that
cash.”
“So you’re saying Newark Airport.”
“Too risky,” I say. “With all that security? I’m thinking a bus depot, a small one.
And we find it fast so we buy our tickets before we’re on every TV in America.”
Bark says nothing.
“And no gun,” I say. “Just talk. Just whatever we need to say to get tickets.”
“Fine. I mean, right? They’re not gonna pull over every bus in the country to hunt
us down.”
Yeah
they will, I think, but I stay quiet. And for a good half a mile, the skinny scared
kid in me wants to be caught and arrested and kept far from Bark for the rest of my
life.
“I’m also thinking,” I say. I try three quick glances to make my point, but Bark doesn’t
get it—or doesn’t
want
to get it, so I say it: “I’m also thinking we go different directions.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We need to be smart, Bark. Someone saw two brothers drive away from that dead cop.
So as much as people will think black, they’ll also think two.”
“So where for me then?”
“You wanted Mississippi, so I’d say south. North too damn soon means Canada, where
they’ll check any bus at the border, so that leaves me with east or west.”
“And east means back home,” Bark says.
I nod, then picture myself asking for a job on some ranch in Wyoming. I might never
hoop again, in a future like that.
Bark says, “You should take the gun.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re gonna need it, man.”
“Not as much as you will. You killed a cop, Bark. You kill a cop, you need to go down
shooting.”
And here Bark stares longingly out his window.
I think of Jasir and say, “Plus I can’t be found with that gun.”
“Well, I sure can’t,” Bark says. “So get in the right lane—I’ll toss it.”
“No-no-no, Bark,” I say. “Do
not
open that window.” This is the advice of ex-cons talking: No other street smarts
in me want the gun near.
“But it’s evidence!” Bark screams.
“Which is why you don’t want it out there.”
“So where, then?”
“I don’t know,” I say. Flustered by a sudden sea of brake lights ahead, I say, “Just,
just—let me take it. I’ll toss it when my bus stops someplace remote.”
“Like where?”
“I don’t
know
, Bark,” I say, shaking my head in disgust of him, of the gun, of what has become
of my once stardom-promising life. “Pennsylvania?” I say. “There’s bound to be a stretch
in Pennsylvania that’s nothing but trees.”
“Fine,” he says, and we go quiet, and I change lanes.
Then he says, “Here’s yours.”
“My what.”
“Profit share. For being my blood.”
I glance over and see green. I realize that, yet again, Bronx-style
poverty is forcing me to sell myself out. I’ve done this so often it feels almost
natural, and this time it will tie me even tighter to a cop shooter, this acceptance
of cash that looks to be less than a grand. Very stupid, the goody-two-shoes core
of me warns in some teacher’s high-pitched voice, but here goes Bark recounting Benjamins
as if he’s always been into fairness, folding them as he hands them over, and here
I am taking them, maybe but maybe not such a stupid move since, yeah, yeah, this
does
strengthen my ties to at least one murder, but cash, I know damned well, can be lost
easily. Plus: As Bark places the gun on the floor just behind my feet, I tell myself
I’m no longer the fool I was minutes ago, when I was one pothole away from having
a bullet whiz through my brain. And then here I am, cruising down an exit ramp into
Passaic, no small town but no Newark either, and the main thing is that Bark is right:
These wheels need to be ditched pronto.
We pass closed warehouses and bankrupt banks grayed by soot. I head in the direction
of older buildings—wouldn’t a bus depot be downtown? I would ask for directions but
fear being seen, then remember Madalynn declaring, before she got pregnant, that I
never asked her for anything and that the reason I never did was pride, and now here’s
Bark, after I brake for a red light, calling “Bus depot?” to a scraggly, strung-out
white dude who nods in a direction I follow. And when Bark points at the depot, there’s
no need to ask if we should park at least five blocks away, no need for Bark to say
“on”
or
“off”
as he shows me how to work the safety. And after we leave the truck and he holsters
the gun for me between my waistband and the small of my back, there’s no need for
him to even raise his chin to have me stand lookout as he yanks off his truck’s plates,
which he hides under his shirt, then slips into a trash can as we walk.
And our coolness stays strong all the way to the depot, where I hope we’ll lie well
enough. I don’t believe I could
aim
a gun, but that’s what every convict once thought. Mostly I’m worried, as we approach
the depot, about who’s inside—and who will be.
And now, in the depot’s parking lot, sit three idling buses, signs on two announcing
the destinations D.C. and Denver, the other sign blank.
“Looks like you’re set,” Bark says.
“You could go to D.C.”
He nods, and I remember the sweetness of an alley-oop pass I fed into his dunk in
our junior year state semifinals.
“Want the gun back?” I ask.
“We’ll see,” he says, and we walk in. A shiny-scalped brother works the ticket counter,
no one in line. I head on over. Bark stops under a TV hung from the ceiling by chains.
“One to Denver,” I say.
The teller glances up. “Round trip?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’ll be four hundred sixteen,” he says. “And I’ll need some ID.”
I reach for my pocket, pull out the Benjamins, let him see them as I thumb through
them, letting him know, I hope, that I can tip big.
“You know?” I say. “My ID’s in my wallet.” I set seven fanned hundreds on the counter,
slide them over. “Which I lost.” I glance over at Bark, whose jaw is now clenched.
“Gonna need that ID sooner or later,” the teller says, and I nod, and then he does
nothing but type.
A message to the cops? I wonder. Or plain business?
A grungy printer prints, and the teller swipes up my cash, counts it, makes change
he slides toward me—with the ticket.
“Tips get me in trouble,” he says, and I grab the ticket and the change. “If I were
you, I’d board now.”
“Appreciate it, man,” I say, and I head for the door certain he’s set to call 911.
I flash Bark the tiniest thumbs-up, then step outside, on my damned own, bound for
Cleveland or Chicago or who knows.
In the bus, which is crowded, the air is hot. I sit directly behind the white driver.
Across the aisle a black woman old enough to be a grandmother and the white woman
beside her are on cell phones, talking quietly. The driver swigs from a plastic bottle.
My hamstrings absorb revs. I want to turn around but no way. I try to make plans for
when the inevitable happens:
Pull out the gun and shoot? Pull out the gun and aim?
Pull out the gun and aim to get the bus to stop, then run off of it?
Run off with someone to use as a hostage?
Maybe the old woman?
But the old woman can probably barely run.
Under me, brakes hiss. We are backing up onto the street. We stop. We ease ahead,
make a left. We are rolling when a squad car speeds toward us and stops, facing me
only, it seems, the bus squeaking to a halt, its driver standing and pointing at his
chest as if to say
Me?
A cop leaves the squad car, pistol drawn. He heads toward the bus and I stand and
step into the aisle, beside the two women. The old woman glances at me, though she
seems too focused on the cop’s gun to notice the one that’s now at my side. Outdoors,
the armed cop is flanked by his partner. They walk toward the front of the bus, then
pass it to head toward the parking lot, where Bark might or might not now be. I slide
his gun back against my waistband. Has anyone seen? A white guy five rows back speaks
into a phone.
The engine of the bus revs, and we accelerate. Just make it to D.C., Bark, I think
as I sit, though I know Bark’s odds are long.
Still, I can hope. Everything, I remind myself, needs to appear innocent. I close
my eyes as if asleep, open them. No one near is checking me out, the white guy now
off his cell, motionless, his own eyes shut. The driver looks to be busting ass to
leave Jersey, and, yes, he could be headed to some cop shop, but after we merge onto
I-80 West, I doubt it. Behind me might be true relaxation: newspapers being unfolded,
chips bags being torn.
Then it strikes me that, if those two cops find Bark in the bus depot parking lot,
they’ll ask that teller about me.
But that teller’s a brother, I think. He won’t squeal.
I reconsider this, then decide there’s no predicting who’ll squeal when about anything.
Plus I keep remembering the cop’s open dead eyes. And the thud of that drum upstate
when Bark, James, and I dropped it beside that straightaway. My thumb rubs mud from
the zigzagging tread of one of my sneakers, mud maybe from that gulley itself.
Should’ve never touched the drum, I think. Should’ve never gotten involved with money
that big.
JAN
THAT FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL
was by far the most money Tom Corcoran had ever given Tug to gamble with, and the
next morning he and Tug hit the track without me, standing with horses and barn hands
just outside shedrow stalls, often without speaking, just breathing the smells of
hay and feed and sun-softened hose rubber. Then the beginnings of shadows said it
was just past noon, and Tug felt the weight of another day’s races come upon them,
in a way, he then believed, only he, Tug, could, and Tom pulled an emerald blade of
grass from between his teeth, elbowed Tug, and said, “Let’s go.”
They were beside the Capizzi barn then, Frank Capizzi and his brothers having never
arrived, and they walked away knowing the Capizzis might have juiced a horse and were
now keeping it secret, and the Ecuadorian hands watched them leave.
Devilette, the only tip horse Tom liked on that day’s card, was running in race two.
How Tom had gotten the tip was something he didn’t want to discuss with Tug, which
bothered Tug, though not enough for Tug to force questions about it, and anyway what
bothered Tug most was he couldn’t decide what gift to buy for me. It needed to be
something serious enough to let me know he’d always cherish our running in the dark,
yet he didn’t want it to cause me to consider him sappy—and he didn’t want it to remind
me that he wasn’t stinking rich.
Before race one, as Tom bought programs, greed urged Tug to bet Devilette as half
of a daily double, but Tug knew what any grandstander knew—the double was a sucker
bet—so he brushed off that temptation, then followed Tom across the upper grandstand
toward the empty seats nearest the top of the homestretch. Tom had named this area
The Crux because that turn is where jockeys most often affect races: where their whistling
gets loud, where they flap whips dramatically to force oncoming horses to run wide,
where they cuss to rattle the favorite or talk to fix results, where they kiss-kiss
secretly game horses into finally making big moves.
“This is good here,” Tom said now.
“Without the crowd,” Tug said.
“Without anyone.”
Tug wondered who else Tom was avoiding. Tug’s mother? Some loan shark? Me?
And Tug eyed the odds board as Tom studied his program and chewed his fingernails,
a habit recently revived from the days when he rode.
“Let the first race go,” Tom said, as if to himself.
“I told you,” Tug said. “I’m backing
one
horse. In one race.”
“And you like Devilette.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“Not with your life.”
“I thought you said he was a lock. I mean, this was one of those man-to-man tips,
wasn’t it?”
Tom flipped to race two in his program.
“It was,” he said.
Devilette was the three horse, which meant he didn’t have to break against the rail,
and he had Jorge Garcia on him and no workouts listed, his morning line six to one.
“His odds will go off lower than that,” Tom said, and Tug slipped two fingers in his
pocket and fished out the fifty Tom had lent him and wondered if their tip had long
been common knowledge, and race one began and ended with the frontrunner stealing
the win. That meant today’s track might have been biased toward speed, and Tug realized,
given what he knew about Arnie DeShields from Tom’s riding days, that Devilette was
probably trained to run from behind. So a speed-biased track, Tug told himself, would
only make their wagering victory more impressive and heartfelt, and he remembered
Tom’s speech the previous day about winning and heart and luck, and he supposed the
point of that speech was that if he, Tug, won this bet on Devilette—or any bet on
any horse, really—he should temper all joy about making money so quickly and easily,
and Tug resented such discipline and wished he could be elsewhere, but then he told
himself he was about to make the cash necessary to buy the perfect gift for me, and
sitting there, in that grandstand beside his father, felt right. Tug stared at the
pond in the middle of the track during a silence that bothered him minimally, then
remembered watching me reel in the last keeper muskie I’d hooked, then wished he’d
kissed me after we’d
run through the dark so his memory could now replay whatever would have happened after
such a kiss, then wondered why his father and mother had kissed for the first time,
touched each other, made love, married, taken vacations, cheered for horses, argued,
retired, kissed for the thousandth time, ignored each other, spent days with him,
lied to each other, stared at their aging nakedness, bet on strangers’ horses, slept.
He glanced at Tom and reminded himself that Tom would always be his one and only father,
then noticed that Tom was now watching the pond. Tug wondered if Tom was picturing
my dad—Tom’s long-ago colleague, the renowned Jamie Price—groping for air in the sun-bleached
weeds only to swallow water, and then the bugle announced the post parade, and Devilette
appeared from beneath the grandstand and stepped onto the track, black and shiny as
a showroom Maserati, all of its ankles wrapped with bright white tape, one hoof, then
another, spoiling the freshly furrowed dirt.
And Tug had long known that Arnie DeShields didn’t wrap ankles to keep them strong.
He wrapped them to make gamblers feel fear.