Authors: Mark Wisniewski
And I notice his face has gone bone pale, with sweat dripping through his sideburns.
I gesture toward his heart and say, “But he botched it.”
And he nods. After inhaling and holding his breath to maybe decide something, he goes
off, this time half softly, to let me know, just between me and him, that he
did
have a stroke four months after the surgery, right about when he was supposed to
be feeling—as I aptly put it—like running a marathon. That when any heart surgeon
saws a guy open and cuts out two of his valves and sews on
new ones, a primary goal after they staple the guy shut is that there be no clotting,
and clotting is
what caused his stroke. That a clot did in fact go to his brain, and this clot “almost
certainly” formed near one of the new valves.
And everyone, Gabe needs to tell me, knows there shouldn’t have been clotting. And
based on all this, the lawyer he hired more than a year ago has been badgering the
offending heart surgeon for a monetary settlement that would make things at least
somewhat close to fair, if not a do-over surgery. But, see, this lawyer of Gabe’s
has been getting the runaround for months. He’s just a rinky-dink personal injury
guy from Scranton, so he and Gabe are, in the eyes of the world, just poor suckers
in Pennsylvania up against a renowned heart surgeon and a hospital owned by a billion-dollar
conglomerate. Realistically speaking, Gabe has a piss-poor chance. Between his failed
marriage and a few other “mishaps” he doesn’t want to get into for my sake, his general
prospects have taken kind of a hit lately.
And you’re blitzing on Perc, I think.
And, no, he’s not done talking. And sweating more. And still pale if not another shade
near pure white. But I’m with him again, listening, if for no other reason than to
keep the gun aimed. And he sure is now off again, about how he’s no longer represented
by this rinky-dink Scranton lawyer—not really, since this lawyer just last week demanded
another retainer to keep on fighting. How there’s no money, certainly no cash anywhere
Gabe is aware of, for another retainer. He’s already taken out a home equity loan
on that shack of a house his fishing guide business barely keeps afloat, and his ex-wife,
who has been remarried to a jackass for years now, would never give or lend him cash.
How his failure at trying to be a literature professor left him bad-mouthed and isolated
and “fairly friendless.”
How, so, yeah, he has no one else to go to.
And we let this sink in some, too, on top of everything else, and I think, Damn.
And then I need to admit: I’m close to believing his whole story.
It’s almost to the point that, if someone’s out there offering a reward for my capture,
I want this guy to have it.
JAN
TWO DAYS LATER,
Tug and I and Colleen and my mother and Jasper and a couple volunteers who were strangers
to the Corcorans joined sheriffs to begin searching the woods and meadows within a
five-mile radius of the track for any sign at all of Tom Corcoran. We checked abandoned
fox dens and kicked aside fallen leaves, turning up pop bottles and twelve-pack cartons
and cigarette filters but little more, and often, while we searched, Tug lagged behind
to check areas the others might have glossed over too quickly.
This part of the search lasted nearly three days, Tug insisting on there being a third
after the volunteers had quit to tend to personal matters.
And then, on the day after that third day, Tug returned to the grandstand convinced
Tom would be there, only to get another choral refrain of the silent treatment, and
I have to admit it was
that afternoon that I, too, found myself generally unable to say much around Tug,
because, really, the more you saw business at the track and elsewhere carry on as
usual without Tom, the less it seemed possible that he would return—and, well, who
wanted to dish truths like that in some conversation you could never take back?
What I’m saying is, I didn’t want to lie to Tug about my lack of hope, or, for that
matter, encourage him to feel like his family’s future was rosy when pretty much everything
suggested it wasn’t. So the best default reaction for me to have to Tom’s absence,
it seemed, was to say nothing around Tug, to even let Tug sprint off on his own after
we’d left the house to run together at night.
At dawn on the following morning, Tug convinced Jasper to join him in a search of
the lake’s entire shoreline, including a far stretch that was part of a nature preserve.
After they did this using both a canoe and fishing waders, Tug decided that his staying
put in the grandstand had been sentimental foolishness at best. Late that afternoon,
he persuaded Colleen to have internet service connected despite the long-held Corcoran
family belief that they, being down-to-earth horse folk, would always avoid the lure
of social media, and Tug spent his first day online googling
Corcoran
and
Tom Corcoran
and
Tommy Corcoran + Jockey
and so on, finding that there was very little information about Tom posted, mostly
just county records of Tom’s previously secret DUI arrest back when Tug was roughly
two years old.
There also wasn’t much about my father, but then again my father’s jockeying glory
days had happened going on decades ago now, and soon Tug was back to searching in
the real world, jogging up and down dirt roads near the track and the Corcoran house,
sometimes on lanes cleared through woods for the sake of electrical
transformers and wiring, sometimes down exercise paths leading to streams feeding
the area’s numerous lakes, some public, some private, some on easements subject to
dispute. Tug’s hope felt strongest on the various grown-over paths leading to three
generally unfished ponds; he took his time on these, trying his best to see through
the thick brush, grateful for any sunlight that helped him decipher mammals as small
as woodchucks beyond the layers of leaves and branches, even though this fondness
for the sun made him wish we were running in the dark.
And he was on his way home from the last of those unfished ponds when the Galaxie
stopped beside him and Jasper rolled down its window and said he’d just learned that
Tom Corcoran’s file was now middle priority.
And it wasn’t long at all after Jasper said those words—
middle priority
—that the deepest breaths Tug could take couldn’t reach the bottoms of his lungs.
But Tug didn’t tell me about this then.
He acted cool, often keeping as still and quiet around me as a veteran thoroughbred
cooped up in a dingy stall, waiting knowingly.
DEESH
THE STREAM GROWS WIDER,
all flat and curvy and snaking its way toward thicker woods, the current slower. Gabe
is breathing easier, and he’s not sweating, as far as I can tell. “Obviously you have
problems of your own,” he says. “Probably one or two no one out there has a clue about.”
“Not really,” I say, and it hits me that I might try to match his hell-on-earth story
with one of my own, if for no other reason than to let him know that I, too, can mess
with a stranger’s head by going off forever on a blue streak. And, yeah, maybe I’m
falling for a con now by giving him what he wants—a story about me he’s earned by
telling me all about himself. But I’m doing it. I’m telling him one, a good one. I’m
telling him the one about me that very few men know, the one about how I was walking
to school one morning on 212th Street, back when I was maybe in fourth grade,
maybe in third—either way, just a kid. How I was barely awake that morning and walking
alone and doing exactly what I always did when I walked alone back then, scanning
the pavement for money. How, more often than you’d expect, I’d find a penny or two.
How once I’d found a twenty tucked behind the cellophane of a crumpled cigarette pack.
How on this particular morning I saw no money, saw nothing until it was too late,
because four of my classmates had surrounded me. How they held me. How three of them
yanked me off the sidewalk, then lowered me headfirst down a manhole. How the fourth
kid replaced the steel cover to trap me in. How I was freaked as much by claustrophobia
as by how quickly a bright morning could turn dark. How I felt too scrawny to remove
the cover. How I clutched the slippery footholds. How, after I would finally raise
the cover maybe an inch, the wheel of a car or truck or bus would slam it down.
Gabe, listening to this, has quit rowing.
“That is
some
shit,” he says. “Not exactly like heart surgery, but similar. I mean, that feeling
you get right when you start to go under—”
“That’s not the point, Gabe,” I say, and I realize that, damn, I actually want him
to hear me out. “My point is they did this to me because they knew I had a crush on
a girl. And you know how it goes when you’re a boy that age. Liking girls so much
that it shows is for sissies.”
Gabe nods, possibly cool with this, cool with the truth that, between him and me,
I have personal shit to say, too.
“You’re right,” he says. “That
was
how it went. I forgot all about that.”
And it’s then that his eyes remind me I’m still holding the gun, which has gotten
good at keeping aim.
Then there’s nothing but the sound of the tiny splashes made by his oars.
The blue streaks, it seems, are over.
Gabe says, “So what was her name?”
“Whose name?”
“The girl you had the crush on when they put you in that manhole.”
A crow launches itself across the stream. I think, Why can’t the gray-assed bird be
singing near us now?
“Madalynn,” I say.
“And was your crush on her . . . requited?”
“Not at first. She was like the other girls; she hated boys, too. And a few years
later, when liking boys was cool, she was into older guys—I mean high school guys.
But she’d give me these little looks when I’d catch her on the street acting lovey-dovey
with one of them.”
“Her being with them didn’t tick you off?”
Keep the gun close, I think. He’s just trying to win you over.
I raise the barrel higher, loosen my wrist.
“No,” I say. “Or if it did, I got over it. I mean, back then I never believed I had
a chance with her. Plus, you know: I
loved
her. Anyway I finally won her over when I was in high school myself.”
“When you were the basketball star.”
I nod.
“And
that
didn’t tick you off?”
“Why would it?”
“Gold digging.”
I shrug. “There wasn’t a one of us who wasn’t trying to get out of the Bronx, man.”
“So let me guess,” Gabe says. “You finally dated her for a while, but when you proposed,
she said no.”
“No. Loved her like crazy, finally slept with her, then slept with her every night
for a while. But, no, I did not ask her to marry me.”
I check the woods on both sides. I wish Gabe hadn’t started us talking. I wish I’d
never been through a lot of what my memory feels loaded with.
Plus, now I can feel Gabe studying my face.
He says, “But eventually she
did
care about you.”
“Eventually.”
“Loved you?”
“I suppose.”
“You don’t think she felt it from the start?”
“I don’t know. Can a girl love a kid who’s scared?”
And it’s just after I ask this, just after we’ve passed pink, silver-flecked boulders,
that Gabe stops rowing. He holds his oars at most an inch out of the water, his focus
on what I’m guessing is some hick near the shoreline not far from us, and I think:
If I’m going down today, shoot me dead right now, while I watch this glistening water.
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.”