Authors: Mark Wisniewski
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?
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.
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.
DEESH
ON MY HEAD THERE’S SUNSHINE
shot toward me from around the edge of a rain cloud, and inside all of me, not just
in my mind, there’s that invincible sense of a decision already made.
So I say to Gabe, “I want to go back.”
“What?”
“I want to go back to the Bronx.”
“What are you talking about, man? You’ll get your ass kicked in the Bronx. Plain and
simple.”
“Then let the ass-kicking begin.”
And there Gabe goes, diving into a loss of words that threatens to last longer than
his worst and bluest blue streak, maybe thinking through insights, maybe not. But
I try to imagine. I imagine his gray eyes looking in. And what I imagine is that,
here, in this boat with me—and inside him—there is still love for his wife, has been
all this time, throughout his marriage and long before it. I imagine he loved her
back when he was being hated by The Man Hater. I imagine that, for years since The
Man Hater messed up his chances to teach, he’s mostly felt like hell and wanted to
do something significant, something good, and I see how I, Douglas Sharp, America’s
most recent notorious black man on the run, have been giving him the chance to do
that good thing by asking him to help me hide. But now here I am saying,
No, you can’t help me. I don’t want your friendship. I don’t want to live near you.
I don’t care if you’ve been hated because I have
real love waiting at home, and
—
hell
—
maybe it’s sustainable.
“You’re being very foolish, Deesh,” he says now.
“Matter of opinion, bro.”
He sighs. He goes cross-eyed but seems not to mind. Then his eyes seem fine, though
he’s again gone pale.
“Then at least,” he’s saying now, “at least let me—you know—at least let me show you
how to fish.”
And I fuck that up, too, by saying, “That would mean putting down the gun.”
“
So?
You’re about to put it down anyway.”
“Not around you.”
“Then who you gonna put it down around?”
“A sheriff or whatever.”
“You plan to have me drive you to the nearest sheriff’s station so you can walk up
to the building with a loaded
gun
in your hand? The gun that’ll end up making your conviction a sure thing?”
“It’s not a sure thing. I didn’t shoot the guy.”
“Just put the fucking thing down, Deesh.” He flails an arm into pointing at a flat
clearing past a sunlit shoreline behind us, and then he’s waving both arms more wildly
the louder he talks. “Or
throw it in that marsh. Nothing’s going to happen here—can’t you see I’m a dying old
coot? I’m just a washed-up wannabe; I’ve failed miserably in my career and marriage
and health. I have no kids, no siblings that care, no money besides the two tens and
six ones in my wallet, just a mortgage on a piece-of-shit house I’ll never pay off.
Hardly anyone ever hires me as a fishing guide. I’m depressed! I’m on a million meds!
And you think I’m gonna kick your ass? Can’t you see I’m dead tired of hatred, Deesh?
Like anyone hated eventually gets to be? That I’m done with the endless
ar
gument? Can’t you just—if you’re not going to stay in the cabin—fish with me for two
minutes?”
And then he goes still, other than to row to keep us in place in the stream.
And the guy is glaring at me.
So I say, “Fine.”
And he nods but does nothing. That one word from me seems to need to sink in.
Then, as he hands me a fishing rod, I set the gun beneath my thigh, the perfect compromise,
if you ask me, then say, “Let’s do this, man.”
“Remember how I’ve rigged it,” he says. He is blushing, maybe embarrassed now that
he’s won, or maybe it’s just a dogged collection of side effects. “Split shot fourteen
inches from the hook,” he says. “Worm hiding the whole hook except for the barb.”
And it’s right then, committed as I am about returning to the Bronx, that I realize
that, push comes to shove, I like this guy. Like how, dammit, he’s still trying to
teach. Like how his blue streaks made for conversation between two dudes in a boat
with little in common. Like how even though he’s old, white, out of shape, and generally
uncool, he isn’t the racist prick I thought he was. Like
how there’s still a kid left in him. How he
did
want to do something to protest hatred. Maybe mostly like knowing he cares about
me.
“Purple rubber worm hooked an inch and a quarter from its thickest end,” he’s saying
now. “Know how to cast?”
I doubt I do. But I remember that aunt showing me how in Georgia, so I nod. Then this
gear, belonging to this Gabe I will never forget, is solidly in my hand, mine to keep
if I wanted it, I’m sure, and, with all of this in mind, I try. The purple rubber
worm falls short of the opposite shore. As I reel in, Gabe says nothing. No praise,
no criticism—nothing.
Then: “Deesh.”
“Huh.”
“You ever envision a place after you’ve left it?”
I shrug. I think, This is an extremely odd man. “I don’t know, Gabe,” I say. But the
truth is I have envisioned such a place: the Bronx. I’ve envisioned it often in this
boat, most every time I’ve thought of Madalynn and Jasir.
“I mean,
specifically
,” he says. “I mean, you ever picture exactly how it would look to someone else?”
“Can we just fish, good brother?” I ask, since I’m not sure what he’s driving at,
and since right now what I’m picturing, if anything, is Jasir and Madalynn and me
here
, on this very same stream, maybe in a matter of weeks, maybe in a few years, maybe
with Gabe teaching us all to bait hooks using this same kind of purple worm I’ve just
cast again.
“I mean, a guy’s supposed to get over love, right?” he says.
I say, “You telling me you believe I should be over this Madalynn?”
“No,” he says. “Not at all.”
Good, I think. Though already what this man believes matters far less than it did
an hour ago, since, dammit, I am going home. And I’m not entirely hopeless; I’m less
like Gabe than he thinks. Still, now that I’ve reeled in a second time, I check my
“presentation” for his sake, maybe a little for mine, too, and then I cast again,
for the heck of it, a last-try-before-we-go effort if ever a guy made one, this time
showing improved aim, and then I reel quickly, slowly, quickly-slowly-quickly, as
Gabe’s Theory of The Big One seemed to suggest, wondering if that theory or any theory
of his—or of anyone’s—is ever completely right. How could he be an expert? How could
I be an expert?
Who
could be the expert on what a lover is or isn’t supposed to get over? The most I
know, if I know anything about love, is that, right now, I want to talk with the stateliest
woman any man in the city has ever laid eyes on, then get to know her son.
And that’s why now, as I reel, I feel a lot less freaked. There is only this world
full of beautiful and ugly things, and I, a runaway brother casting into water smoothing
down this world, am still one of them.
And it’s not long after I think all this that one of my fingertips, the one against
the line just after I cast it, feels a very light tap, then another, then something
more like a tug. I stand and yank the gear over my head, and then I’m still standing
but trying to regain my balance, jerking both arms higher to keep what’s on the line
hooked.
And Gabe has stopped rowing. We are in a calm pool. “It’s big,” he says, and he uses
an oar to turn the boat to help me face what I’m doing. The fish cuts through deep
water, possibly pulling us slightly. I am reeling fast—until I can’t. I kneel on aluminum,
yanking, reeling, yanking, reeling, Gabe’s arms out at his sides to
steady the boat, and as much as I’m charged by having a monster on the end of this
line, I am now wholly committed to leaving this stream. I will, as soon as I land
this fish, insist that Gabe and I return downstream so I can find a county sheriff,
tell him every detail about how Bark shot the cop, then return to the Bronx to face
Madalynn and Jasir, and embrace whatever love they might still share with me. I might
be arrested; I might be questioned harshly for days; but as sure as I’m standing to
reel and now yank this darting fish within three feet of me, I believe my truth will
win out over Bark’s lies—this monster bass has put fight in me.
And it’s right then, as I pull the bass straight up toward me, that I hear the gun’s
report, which is quieter than I would have expected, probably because Gabe’s mouth
smothered the volume. Pale pink insides from his skull—pieces of a brain he’d trained
to read and remember poems and teach, I realize—are sinking into the pool, the rest
of him already floating on his back and begun downstream, limp and more rotund than
I once figured, the gun nowhere visible, nowhere near the tackle box or on the fishhooks
scattered across the boat’s blue floor. An orange prescription bottle rolls toward
me as the boat spins, taking me, as it spins, downstream, too. I am sitting now. Only
one oar is intact. The gun is no doubt in that pool now well behind me—I can’t see
it at all and believe I never will.
But I can still see Gabe. Barely, but I can see him. He’s still on his back, bobbing,
and we’re both spinning downstream, he still in the lead, me clutching the aluminum
sides to keep the boat upright, the lunch bag already trapped inside an eddy, the
gear gone from my hand, the rod and the reel just now underwater in sunlit riffles
back there, my big bass taking it, escaping with it, headed upstream in a wisdom of
its own.