Authors: Mark Wisniewski
DEESH
THEN WE ARE THERE,
on Belmont’s grounds, me and Bark and James, both of them, in hazier sunshine than
we came from, looking older than I thought we were. Bark buys a program, the thousand
again dented as it was to pay our parking and entry fees. He sits on a painted green
bench near where they bring the horses to saddle and pet them before they bust ass
out on the track.
“They already ran the first four races,” he says, a little pissed, probably because
it’s hours past noon and he’s gotten no kick from gambling. He slouches and studies
away while James and I sit on either side of him. All we need, I think, is for Bark
to find that one, best race. And to concentrate enough to pick the three horses in
the right order. The corpse in the drum means pressure, I know, but Bark, I remember,
played his best under pressure. In fact,
lack
of pressure was why
he
never made the pros or a college team. In
the high school games we knew we’d win, which was most of them, he could never get
himself to try all that hard, and, if you believed our coach, word got out he was
lazy. But in those few big games, the major-pressure ones, he always showed up to
leave sweat on the court, and even if his shot was off or he dragged down fast breaks
from being out of shape, he did the kinds of things that make championships, like
elbowing the wind out of the other team’s star when the refs weren’t looking, or giving
a soft high five just before I’d toe the line for a free throw.
Now he’s walking us to another green bench—beside the homestretch of the track. Again
James and I sit up against his shoulders. He’s flipping pages in his program, back
and forth from race six to race eight. He’s got it down to those two, he tells me.
I want race six so we’ll know sooner if we’ve won or not, but I don’t want to mess
with what all those numbers are teaching him. He holds race eight closer to his face.
He sighs. I look off around us.
“We’ll do it in the sixth,” he says.
“You know which horses?” James asks.
“The three horse for sure. And the one. It’s just a matter of whether we go with the
four, seven, or nine after that.”
“That don’t exactly sound solid,” James says.
“Just being straight with you,” Bark says. “What’s left of the races today are hard
as shit to pick.”
“Can we just go with the three and one to finish first and second?” I ask.
“That would be an exacta,” Bark says. “And
everyone’s
gonna box the three-one exacta. Which means it’ll hardly pay.”
“We can’t take the three and the one with all three of those other ones you like?”
I ask. “I mean, in trifectas?”
“That would be three different bets,” Bark says. “Meaning we’d
bet only three hundred–something on each. Which again means a lower payoff.”
“But we’d be more likely to win.”
Bark returns to studying, though I’d guess he’s also considering what I’ve said. Then
I’m sure he’s trying to figure how much each of those three trifectas could pay, but
then I’m not sure of anything.
“How much do we need?” he asks.
“Who knows?” James says. “But you’d have to think five or six grand would be cool.”
And here’s where I both believe we’ll win but also wish we wouldn’t. I wish we could
just get in Bark’s truck and go home. I want to start the day over. I want to go back
in time even before that, and meet the pigeon-toed woman before whatever happened
in her life that forced her to call Bark. I want to make love to her back then, night
after night, so often and well the drum will stay empty, and mostly I want to go all
the way back to Madalynn.
But today is not at all in that past. It’s today, and now race five is running, without
Bark betting a penny on it, which reminds me we’re here for serious business despite
the white college boys beside us celebrating their summertime freedom by drinking
beer, all of them hooting as the seven horse pulls ahead.
Bark looks up as the seven wins easily. He glances at the odds board and says, “Twenty-five
to one.” He hunches over to reread the program.
“You know what?” James says.
“Shut up,” I say. “Let the man think.”
“You’re right,” James says.
Seagulls almost land on the lawn inside the track, then swoop off. They’re headed
north, toward the drum. That seven horse was
headed north, toward the drum. Wind blows past the three of us—north, toward the drum.
“The more I look at this,” Bark says, “the more I can see
any
horse finishing up with the one and the three. And the way the crooks here fix these
races, any horse could
beat
the one and the three.”
“So what do we do?” I ask.
“Key
the one and the three with every other horse.”
“Which means what?” James asks.
“If the one and the three finish first, second, or third, we collect.”
“Sounds good,” James says.
“But they both have to finish in the top three.”
“Sounds tough,” I say.
“It’s as easy as I can make it,” Bark says.
“How much would we win?” I ask.
Bark shrugs. “Anywhere from double our money to a ton.”
“But like you say, what good is double our money?”
“Deesh,” Bark says, “we gotta leave here with
something
.”
Which tells me that, today, he’s lost faith in horses. If it were yesterday, or any
day before we moved that drum, he’d have enough faith for the three of us. But it’s
today. It doesn’t matter that he’s got more cash in his pocket than he’s ever had
at the track. Today is today is today.
We all three sit. The horses walk onto the track, a jockey on each. Then Bark stands
and says, “Let’s do it,” and James and I follow him under the grandstand to the betting
windows, where we wait in a short but slow line. Finally, Bark leans in close to our
teller, an old white lady. He talks so quietly she needs to lean, too, and then he
pulls out the cash and hands it over for a ticket he reads even after his feet begin
to shuffle off.
“Gentlemen!” the teller shouts. “Your change?” She’s holding three twenties, and James
jogs back to her, takes them, gives one apiece to me and Bark, then stuffs the third
in his pocket. We walk back out toward the homestretch, and it hits me I might have
done something for a twenty I’d never do again for all the money in the world.
Bark veers left, toward the bench near the homestretch. “Shouldn’t we watch closer
to the finish line?” James asks, but Bark keeps on. James stands still, knees locked,
yakking about how what we’d see from that bench won’t matter. About how he wants to
eyewitness the very end. About how, if all of us shout enough near the finish line,
we could affect whether we win or lose.
“Go ahead and shout,” Bark says. “I’m gonna watch from here.”
James huffs off, leaving me to decide who to watch with. I don’t follow him since
the last thing I need is the sound of his voice. I don’t sit beside Bark since I’m
pissed he’s the reason I went upstate. I stand where I am, partway between Bark and
the finish line—in front of the odds board beyond the dirt where they’ll run. It all
of a sudden doesn’t mean shit that the three of us won state twice together, hung
together on countless nights since, might end up together in Mississippi for the rest
of our lives. We’re all strung out along that wire fence like cousins who never met,
each of us as alone as the skinny drunk beside me, all of us as stuck inside ourselves
as whoever’s rotting in that drum.
And we stay like that until the horses are in the gate.
JAN
THE WAY THE CORCORANS
had it set up then was the three upstairs bedrooms went one each to Tug and my mother
and Tug’s parents, whereas I’d sleep on the first-floor summer porch, a long narrow
room surrounded by three walls of windows, the widest facing the lake. During the
day, this room was the best because all around were thick oak trunks and shiny rhododendrons
and white blooming wisteria, and there was a family of chipmunks who spied on you
and redheaded woodpeckers who charmed you by working upside down, and at any time
a metallic green hummingbird with a scarlet throat might zing past as fast as a falling
star, sip from a purple clematis, then dart to a lily the color of a conch shell’s
throat, with the jade and aqua and shimmering lake behind everything.
But at night, if you couldn’t sleep, you’d hear creaks in the narrow ceiling overhead,
let alone voices up there, sometimes hissed words
if not clearly angry phrases, always between Tom and Colleen, often about money. And
on my first night beneath such creaks and those voices, I lay under a lent comforter
on the cot alongside that porch’s only privacy-assuring wall, and outdoors beyond
that enchanted yard loomed that same body of water, waves on it throwing moonlight
at me, reflected brightness lapping along plasterboard inches from me if even a meek
breeze rose, telling me more directly than any voice above me that, yes, let’s not
deny it, girl: You lay within a furlong of the lake that took your daddy twice—first
when he drowned, again when your mother scattered his ashes from that pier.
And the longer I got worked up about how much easier my life could have been if my
father hadn’t drowned, the more I wanted to leave that porch, though doing so would
risk running into a Corcoran, which I did
not
want to do. What I wanted was to get away from both the lake and the Corcorans, maybe
go out in the yard between the house and the road, maybe, if I could muster the spine,
follow the path through the woods south of the house to Tug’s horse farm. Horses had
long, long been my means of escape; riding them helped me avoid people I didn’t like,
and on a saddled horse you also had more power than anyone who stood on human feet.
Naturally, then, in the middle of that first night I spent in the Corcorans’ house,
I wanted to see a filly or a colt I might take a liking to. Gnawing at me still was
Colleen’s caginess during dinner at the kitchen table that evening, when I’d addressed
no Corcoran in particular to ask how many horses Tug had in his care; she’d grown
all at once interested in whether Tom believed muskies were biting, as if there’d
been something about Tug’s farm she wanted kept secret.
Anyway I might have been more curious than brave when I pulled on my jeans and sweatshirt
and sandals and tiptoed from the summer porch through the musty living room into the
kitchen,
which was lit by a high-watt bulb in a frosted fixture. I took two McIntoshes from
the cracked ceramic bowl on the cherrywood table and, feeling not only brave but also
generous now that each of my hands could offer a horse a surefire gift, escaped through
the roadside door.
The lawn out there was a long stretch of crabgrass split by a path of flagstones sunken
by rain and time and the weight of an unknowable number of horse folk, and it struck
me that my father himself had probably walked on those stones, his actual flesh-and-bone
feet pressing each a microscopic bit deeper, and this realization saddened me. If
he hadn’t drowned and were still alive, I thought, he and I might be talking now,
and I headed left, then into the woods south of the lawn.
And in those woods I kept to the path Tug had cleared, a trail just wide enough for
thoroughbreds. I pressed on guided by the same moonlight that had haunted me on the
summer porch, and between the crowns of the trees on either side of me were also stars
strong enough to not only guide you but also to get you to thinking about eternity
and family and afterlife and anyone you really cared about, and I wondered: Is it
through one skinny ray—from the least visible star—that dead fathers communicate with
daughters? Or is it through sunshine?
And I did choke up a little while wondering this, but then I told myself to focus
on the future, on how I might be minutes from meeting horses, maybe one who’d prove
as wild about being ridden as I was about riding. Filly, mare, colt, gelding, bay,
roan, chestnut—no distinction would matter if this horse would love to run with me—and
then things went black thanks to a huge boulder on my right, more of a cliff, really,
a slice of the earth’s guts forced out past its skin by a glacier, it seemed. And
the darkness here was
thick enough to bring to mind bears and wolves and overly aggressive mama raccoons,
but it also made the stars directly above seem brighter—trying to connect with my
father was only a matter of looking up—and I stopped walking, as if stillness might
help me hear my father telling me, through the brightness of those stars, whatever
he had to say, maybe, I imagined, something like:
I walked there, too. And, yes, I’ve long loved you.
And I felt taller as I walked on, and then, to my right and just south of the boulder
itself, there it was, a huge, brightly moonlit meadow with a creek angled across the
middle of it and a birch-log fence all around.
And compared to the darkness in the shadow of the boulder, the brightness here, on
top of the openness, made you downright joyful, not to mention that miraculous feeling
you get when you stand witness to something as defiant of logic as a meadow dropped
into the middle of woods thick as hell. But then I noticed an uninhabited, shabby
lean-to near the southernmost run of fence, and out there near the creek, where horses
might have been drinking, there were none.
And there were none anywhere.
And part of the fence was missing—that section of birch logs was down. Maybe, I thought
then, a colt had felt too penned and took his best running start and leapt and failed?
Or tore open his coat bolting straight through? Either way I now guessed why Colleen
had been cagey: A horse had died and she hadn’t had the heart to tell me.
Then I thought, No. Not
every
thing ends with death. But I was glaring at the apple in my left hand as if it, rather
than some six-foot muskie, was death itself, and I chunked it, hard, at the hole in
the fence. My throw fell short, though it did bounce once and roll
close, and I headed back onto the path to the house, where, as soon as I stepped inside
the roadside door, Tom Corcoran glanced up at me, sitting as he was at the kitchen
table.
He took stock of me calmly, as though women always trekked into his house at this
hour, then asked, “What’s with the apple?”
“I thought there were horses.”
Spread out in front of him, I noticed, was a
Daily Racing Form
.
“There were,” he said.
“And?”
“Is it really your concern?”
“Well, I think I can say it
is
.”
“Well, then, let’s just put it this way: We had a small mishap.”
“When horses get lost in a forest, I wouldn’t call it small.”
“Then call it big.”
He turned the page of his
Form
, his way, I was sure, of saying he was done with this conversation, either because
Tug’s farm was indeed none of my business or because the numbers in the
Form
were all that should matter to anyone. I pulled the screen door behind me harder,
trying for a click I never heard, then stepped cautiously toward him and set the apple
back in the bowl, and as I headed for the living room to return to the summer porch,
he said, very quietly, “You’re just like your father.”
I stopped, facing the living room, which of course meant facing the lake.
“I mean, he was always going out in the middle of the night.”
I turned. “You mean for walks?”
“Sometimes the man would
run
.”
“At night?”
“He’d be out there getting a complete workout while every other jock was asleep. I’m
surprised your mother never told you.”
“My mama would rather pray to a ceiling than tell me the truth about my father.”
Tom’s watery eyes, unblinking and hazel and magnified frightfully by his glasses,
wandered from me to the sink. Then he returned to studying his
Form
, a script more important, it seemed, than every father and daughter and family in
the world. He struck me, as he squinted to read, as a formerly handsome man who might
feel expendable; a husband whose paunch had diminished some attraction to him; a father
whose thinned, graying hair probably scared the hope out of his son; a jockey whose
retirement hadn’t exactly helped the prospects of that same son’s horse farm.
“Come to think of it,” he said. He starred an entry with a plastic pen. “Early in
your dad’s career, he used to ride
at night.”
“Thoroughbreds?” I asked.
“‘Just trust and let ’em run,’ he’d say.”
“
Real
ly.”
He nodded. “The guy would slip the track’s night security a little cash, then go crazy
out there, galloping in the dark. He believed horses were happiest when they ran at
night. If you rode one through the dark, he’d say, you’d be forming a bond that would
help you win together from then on.”
What I was hearing right now, I figured, was Tom Corcoran being a plain old horse
guy.
He said, “The thing was, I tried it once, riding in the dark. Horse I was on wouldn’t
budge.”
And we were both studying each other’s faces then, as earnest, it seemed, as two people
could be, though I had no idea what he was trying to say—other than that he had his
own big mess of regrets and nostalgia and resentment and desire stuck in him, trying
to charge out.