Authors: Mark Wisniewski
JAN
“WE DON’T RUN FROM FUNERALS”
was what my mother whispered to me and me only before we’d left the state police
parking lot over in Saratoga County, so now here I was again, snug beside moonlight
reflected off the lake that had swallowed my father. But now, as I lay on the Corcorans’
summer-porch cot, it occurred to me that my mother must have gone through a hell of
her own waiting for my father’s cremation—before she could pour his ashes into the
lake and leave New York State to start her life with me. I reminded myself that I
was lucky to have had at least one parent who’d stuck close to me, but now, on this
night, even though I was in the same house as this parent, I felt more alone than
ever.
Then I heard footfalls, and I sat up and saw Tug emerge from the strip of lawn along
the south side of the house, jogging toward the shoreline, where he stopped to face
the lake. That he’d
run through the dark heartened me a little, though now I couldn’t deny he’d chosen
to run without me, and with this well in mind, I actually missed Arkansas.
Then he walked out onto the pier, in that slightly thicker darkness you see when a
cloud obscures the moon, and he kept on walking until he stood at the very end, his
arms at his sides, the whole of him reverently still, as if, right now, he might be
trying to give the benefit of the doubt to his father’s best intentions, but my gut
told me that, most probably, Tom’s love affair with gambling would always lead Tug
to disgust, and that this night, for Tug, would probably be unbearable.
If nothing else I knew well that a dead father never stops being dead, and no wish
or forgiveness or run through the dark can change that. And I knew, too, all about
the hardest part: Learning that, between you and your dead father, only one of you
is now capable of change—you—and then after you
do
change, the new you comes to feel all the more distant from him, and the longer Tug
stood out there on the pier, the more these lessons hit me all over again, and I hated
them.
And I wanted to walk out there and explain all this to Tug and tell him it was only
natural, but I sensed that, as bad as I’d had it growing up, Tug now had it worse,
because I, being born after my father’s death, couldn’t possibly have done a thing
to cause it, whereas Tug, if he felt so inclined, could second-guess dozens of things
he’d done and conclude that, hell, if he’d avoided doing just
one
of them, maybe Tom would be out there right now, standing on that pier with him.
Any insolence of Tug’s, any rolling of his eyes, any decision as recent as the one
he’d made to run with me in the dark the night Tom had driven off in a huff—anything
could be turned over and over in Tug’s mind as a possible fault, and as I
watched his stillness I wondered if, instead of being in love with him right now,
I might just be feeling sorry for him.
Then I realized that my hatred of what our fathers had put us through assured me I
didn’t want for there to be pity, from Tug to me or from me to him. What I wanted
was plain and simple—to be with Tug—and it hit me that what I liked most about running
in the dark was picturing myself with Tug some night long from now after some run,
doing whatever we wanted without concern about our parents’ troubles or anyone’s gossip,
doing it until we’d see that little smudge of light the sun can push between branches
at dawn. And it was then that there was simply no more kidding myself that, sure,
I was capable of feeling sorry for anyone going through hell, but that my desire to
put an end to Tug’s hell right now—so we’d be free of it—meant I loved him genuinely,
maybe invincibly. And it was then that I felt how quickly the summer was flying past,
how, even if he and I lucked into having long, healthy lives, we would each someday
go quickly, too.
And that’s why I stood and then left the summer porch.
And why I walked across the moonlit lawn, privy to that same tightness in my chest
I felt when Tug and I first met.
And why I stepped onto the pier, setting it into its seemingly microscopic quiver
over the black lapping water.
And why I kept right on walking.
And I don’t know why Tug turned around, but when he did, he saw me and sized me up
carefully and said, “Yes?”
And I said, “Yes.”
And he stepped toward me, then stood directly in front of me, and we kissed, just
once, but there was this sort of gravitational pull between us, and there was no shyness.
“Out here?” Tug said.
I shook my head no. “On the porch.”
“But they’ll hear.”
“No, they won’t, Tug. I’ll be on top, and you won’t move. Just one rule: No squeaks
from the cot. They’ll think we’re just sitting there talking.”
“And that could actually . . . work for you?”
I nodded. “I like our chances.”
DEESH
“I DO
WANT TO BELIEVE YOU, DEESH”
is what Madalynn says. “It’s just that . . . well, for you to be innocent makes no
sense. Since you—you know. Ran away and all.”
“But I was
scared
, Maddie. It’s as simple as that.”
She shrugs. She doesn’t cry. “Scared will never make sense, Deesh,” she says, her
voice higher. “If you love someone, there’s no
scared
. There’s no running! Unless it’s from something like . . . responsibility for a
life
.”
You blew it, man, I think.
“Or several lives,” she says.
Just shouldn’t have run, I think. Ever.
“You know?” she says. “When I first saw Bark talking about you on the news, I pointed
straight at his face on my TV and said, ‘That Bark is a
liar
.’ And I said that because I believed in you. But
when the news showed you being escorted in that
Pennsylvania
trooper car? I started
shaking
, Deesh. Because, all of a sudden my
body
couldn’t take it anymore. Because, dammit, Deesh? It wasn’t just Bark talking anymore.
It was
you
,
all the way out in those big hills covered with all those trees. It was a man obviously
caught on the run, and I needed to finally stop denying that that same man
was
you.”
Gerelli’s gaze at the ceiling has me certain he’s thinking the worst.
“You can say caught,” I say, to Madalynn but him, too. “But not on the run. Because
I wanted to come back, to own up to you. To you and Jasir. That’s what my heart felt,
Maddie, and I promise you that. I wanted to
come home
, Maddie. You just need to believe I saw home as someplace with you and Jasir. And
that’s pretty much all I have to say.”
“And all I have to say, Deesh?” she nearly shouts. “Is that I can’t believe you!”
“Not ever?”
“Not that I can foresee.”
The sting of these words leaves me unable to move.
Finally I manage to say, “I still need to talk to Jasir. I need to know that at least
he
might believe me.”
“
Jasir
needs to believe the
truth
,” she says. “Like he always has.”
“Then please tell him the truth, Maddie: that I want to talk with him. So I can see
all this through. So he can know the whole truth on his own.”
“No way, Deesh.”
“Huh?”
“Jasir is
not
going to step foot near any Rikers prison.”
“No, Maddie: Jasir is not going to
end up
on Rikers. Which is exactly why he needs to talk with me.”
“Needed.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, knowing full well the answer to this question.
“Means it’s too late to be his father now, Deesh. Too late by years.”
And she nods at me, once but with aim as lethal as Bark’s and Gabe’s aim of that gun,
then gets up and walks out of the room, no slowing down or stopping, no turning back.
JAN
TUG TOLD ME THAT THE FIRST THING
he heard when he woke in his bed the morning after we first made love was nothing
for a long time, just a quietness similar to the silence he’d grown up fearing in
the house, save the fact that this silence said less about frustrations between spouses
and more about shock that another retired jock had passed on. There was also, if you
asked me, a certain relief to this silence, a calm because now, among this jock’s
survivors, fewer bets would be made, and then, as Tug lay in his bed, he heard
“Tug”
whispered
from behind his opening door, but rather than me it was his mother who stood there,
in the doorway, dressed for a trip into town.
He grabbed jeans from the floor, pulled them on.
“Maybe you’d rather not talk about this,” she said. She closed the door behind her.
“But I think we need to.”
Tug yanked on a shirt. “Okay.”
Sunglasses and purse and keys in hand, she sat on the edge of the bed.
“We’re getting money,” she said. “From the insurance. And, Tug, your father and I
had
two
mortgages. And our worst fights always happened when those stupid payments came due.
So I want to pay both mortgages off—so we can be done with them. Just pay both in
full so we can own this place. With no resentments.”
Tug smelled her dabbed-on lemon juice for the first time in weeks. “You’ll get enough
from the insurance to do that?” he asked.
“Yes, but not by much.”
“Then—I don’t know. Do what you want, I guess.”
“I’m thinking I will, Tug. But I wanted to tell you first. Because from now on, you
and I need to be much more open about things like finances.”
Tug nodded. Then, despite himself, he sighed. As open as she was being, this was her
unspoken way, it seemed, of proposing a deal: She’d keep this roof over their heads
if he’d find work and pay for everything else.
“Can I say something then?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“I mean, if we’re going to be open?”
She nodded.
“First thing I’m doing today is buy another forty-gallon drum.”
“
What?
Tug, why would you—Tug, we really need to consider—”
“We need to send a message, Mom. We need to say we consider all of his accounts closed
and paid in full.”
“You’ll do that by going to the
track
, Tug.”
“You’re right. You’re right. But if I show up there today with a new drum in the truck
bed, those chumps’ll have no doubts about
why
I’m there. I’m there to say: Got another drum, gentlemen. You want me to keep talking
to sheriffs, go ahead and steal this one, too.”
Colleen sat there for a while, lips pressed. She stood, stepped to the window, and
gazed out over the lake.
She cleared her throat and said, “And you actually think that will work.”
“I do,” Tug said. “Plus consider how you’ll feel the longer a new drum stays put in
our yard.”
She didn’t move, not even to breathe.
“I mean, seriously, Mom: Wouldn’t you sleep a lot better?”
“I really do want to say yes, Tug. Except there’s this one little thing.”
“What.”
“Your dad always asked that exact same question.”
Tug let this truth sink in, among the others, new and old.
Then he asked, “Well? How did you usually answer it?”
She shrugged.
“Apparently not well enough,” she said, and the way she both turned and stepped away
from him, as he sometimes had from me, assured him that he was his mother’s son.
So he tried for a hug, but she stiffened.
Nor would she let him see her face.
“Go,” she said. “Get the stupid thing. I’ll give you the cash—that is, if you really
think it’s for the best.”
“I do,” Tug said. “Believe me: I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“Then just buy one and let them see it at the track as quickly as you can. Just get
this whole damned thing over with.”
She glanced over at Tug, and Tug kept his eyes on her.
“But then, Tug?”
“What.”
“I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see anything
resembling
a drum sitting in our yard. I don’t want to stand in my kitchen and ever have to
as much as notice it.”
“Okay,” Tug said. “I’ll put it on the horse farm. We should probably quit burning
the damned leaves anyway.”
DEESH
THIS TIME IN A SPORT COAT,
his head shaved clean, Gerelli takes his place on the other side of the table in the
visiting room and says, “Someone’s been found,” and all I can think is
Jasir
.
But then Gerelli says, “Upstate,” and before he adds another word, my mind takes me
back to the stench I smelled in that crawl space, and now there’s no chance that my
gut feeling then—about death being in that rusty drum—was misguided, because here,
now, is my attorney talking about the discovery of an adult white male corpse identified
as Tom Corcoran, a retired jockey who was strangled.
And this attorney of mine and I are not teenage hoopsters shouting laughter. We are
not two men who’ve loved the same woman conning ourselves about the tightness between
us. We are not two experienced souls at wit’s end on some stream spilling our
guts about love. We are, as Gerelli puts it,
the accused and his counsel
, and now, as he also explains, we are the
apparent perpetrator of a
third homicide
and the public defender who, at this moment, feels tempted to
quit this insane profession altogether
.
And, now, we are quiet.
Until Gerelli says, “You look upset.”
I shrug. “Why would I be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you accusing me, Mr. Gerelli?”
“I’m asking you.”
“But are you
accusing
me.”
“I’m your attorney, Douglas. I’m trying to help.”
“How can you help when you don’t believe—”
And here my mind jumps to Madalynn to Gabe and back to Madalynn, and heat rushes quickly
into my face, and I turn away from Gerelli: I am welled up, yeah, a jailed-stupid
brother welled up.
But not crying.
“We’re going to have to work on our credibility, Mr. Sharp.”
“Fuck you,” I say. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Mr. Sharp, a footprint that matches your sneaker precisely was found near the drum.
And traces of similar dirt were found on your shoestring.”
“I didn’t kill the jockey, Mr. Ger—”
“And the gun that killed the cop was, without question, the same gun that killed the
guy in Pennsylvania. Do you hear that, Mr. Sharp? Do you know what all of this means?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” I say.
“And the problem is,” Gerelli says. “You want to know what the problem is, Mr. Sharp?
The problem is you didn’t tell me about
this retired jockey when I asked you my first question, which was the simple inquiry
of what happened. So now it appears you had something to hide.”
Gerelli grabs his chin with one hand, blinking nonstop.
He drops the hand but keeps right on sitting there, staring at me incredulously.