Authors: Mark Wisniewski
DEESH
I GLANCE OVER AT BARK,
who nods. Then I see that the horses are running, already on their way down the backstretch.
Because of their distance, I can’t tell if we’re winning, and then, because of the
odds board, I can’t see them at all. I hear names being called, but to us it’s all
about the one and the three. Then I see every horse out there bunched into a pack,
and as they reach the far turn, what looks like a three is in second. Then they’re
in their best full sprints toward and past Bark. Then they’re passing me, getting
whipped, with the three for sure in front. But the rest of them are gaining—or maybe
they’re not. The three might be fading, and a woman in the grandstand screams. And
then I watch the rear ends of ten horses, and I haven’t seen the one at all.
JAN
WHENEVER TUG COULD,
he’d fish with me.
And I always insisted that I, rather than he, do the guy stuff. I’d be the one to
hook the baitfish under its spine, and it was my eager fingers that adjusted the float,
and I’d add a split shot by using my molars as pliers.
And, most splendidly, I hoped, I’d cast.
Then we’d sit in silence that would ratchet up Tug’s insides, because, as I’d learn
later, he always felt far too serious when he was with anyone quiet, especially anyone
who knew horses. As a kid, Tug had rarely heard silence at the track, where either
some trainer was gossiping workout splits or some hot-walker was cooing into a two-year-old’s
ear, or some barn hand’s hose water hissed while the track announcer yelled
Who’s gonna catch him?
during a stretch run. The silences Tug had grown up hearing, certainly the memorable
silences now, had been between his parents, often just after his father had lost so
much cash at the track he’d refer to the experience as a “gofak” (good old-fashioned
ass-kicking). So, for Tug, silence now went hand in hand with a truce called between
spouses after vicious arguments about unpaid bills; it implied a woman was scared
because a man had violated her trust, or that a man was at his wit’s end because a
woman herself had agreed he should place some huge bet he’d then lost, not to mention
his head was spinning because the last time he’d
won
on a long shot, they’d both agreed that he should have bet more than he had. Such
silence had too often spilled out onto the yard and sometimes even past the first
piling or two of the pier, and too often Tug would retreat to the far end of the pier,
where, if waves or wind or geese didn’t speak up, he would hear silence as a pronouncement
that he was maturing into his parents’ worst financial burden.
Often, during the silences between me and Tug while we’d wait for muskies to bite,
I would think about my own father, and I’d picture the baitfish down near the sun-bleached
weeds, or my father’s breathlessness in the ancestors of those weeds, or both, and
I’d wonder if my father’s ashes had dissolved or joined the muck at the bottom.
And as Tug would admit later, he’d be thinking of my father’s death, too, and he’d
figure there was nothing he could say to fix any of that horror, so instead he’d just
dangle his legs off the deep end of the pier, facing the far shore, reading the pathetically
upbeat hardbound his mother had bought him at a tag sale,
So You Want to Practice Law
.
He’d apply this book’s advice to the man his parents wanted him to be, the man who
might finally make something of himself now that his horse farm had failed. He would
despise that man—a student and then parasite of law—and sometimes, while
he’d read, he’d sense an unsteadiness beneath his thighs, a quivering that was sometimes
his imagination but sometimes meant someone on the pier was walking toward him, sometimes
me.
And on some days, the bright ones, I’d begin my time outdoors by sitting on the pier
to read as well, though I’d sit only halfway toward the deep end, facing the tangled
weeds, where we’d often cast the float. If Tug had left the
So You Want
book on the pier, I might give a sentence or two of it a try, but mostly I’d read
one of the dozens of old
Racing Form
s I’d pilfered from Tom Corcoran’s sacred stack beside the living room couch. I’d
study the charts rather than what most gamblers read—past performances—and when Tug
finally conjured the nerve, on an unseasonably hot day I endured in only flip-flops
and shorts and a lavender bikini top, to ask why I preferred the charts, I said, “Because
my daddy did.”
Once, when we found ourselves both looking up from our reading at the same time, Tug
was all set to ask if I’d learned a priceless nugget from those charts, some key to
wisdom or gambling success, but I beat him to speaking up by saying, “Tug, you got
me all confused.”
“How’s that,” he said.
“I thought you were a . . . horse farmer.”
“I am. I mean, I was.”
I pushed a frizzed strand of hair away from an eye. “And?”
“And as you might have gathered, my farm isn’t quite operating at full capacity.”
I came close to smiling. I nodded and said, “I did gather that.”
“So . . .” He pointed at his copy of
So You Want to Practice Law
.
“So . . .
what
.”
“So when money isn’t flowing toward you at all, there’s—reality to consider.”
I perused the shallows for the float, which now sat deeper than the sun-bleached weeds.
“Fuck reality,” I said. “You know?”
I studied his face, critically, he thought. Then I continued reading, and he did,
too.
Or tried to.
“We’re
young
, Tug,” I called out, without looking up. “There
is
no reality. At least none that lasts very long.”
And then I gave him a genuine smile.
“So you’re suggesting,” he said, “that I just . . . hang in there.”
Again, I returned to my reading.
“I’m saying I want to be a jock,” I said, “and I don’t hear anyone telling me to do
anything otherwise.”
Because you’re Jamie Price’s daughter, he thought. But he didn’t dare say that then.
“So why should
you
give up?” I asked.
And then there I was, grinning even as I faced my charts, but then I looked up and
over at him seriously, and he shrugged, and, in a manner that I’d later learn struck
him as aggressively flirtatious, I shrugged, too, mockingly, a coy smile on me now,
aimed at him.
DEESH
JAMES IS STILL BESIDE THE FINISH LINE,
pointing but not yelling. Bark, with his arms at his sides, leans back against his
bench. Then both of them are walking toward me, as if I’m in charge.
“Well?” Bark asks James.
“I couldn’t tell,” James says. “They were all bunched together.”
Bark shrugs, his eyes aimed at the odds board, on the three boxes beside
WIN
,
PLACE
, and
SHOW
. A lit-up ten is in the
WIN
box, the other two boxes unlit.
“We were right to key them with every other horse,” Bark says. “
Nobody
would have guessed the ten.”
“Which means a big payoff?” I ask.
Bark nods. “If we win.”
Then, in the
PLACE
box, I see the lit-up number one. “Here we
go,” James says, and the whole board goes dark, blinks twice, then lights up. The
ten is still up over the one, the
SHOW
box still empty.
“The three was toward the front,” I say. “Wasn’t it?”
“It was when they passed me,” Bark says. “And it was
supposed
to stay up there.”
He won’t look at James, so I do.
“Well, James?” I say. “Did the three hold on?”
“It might have,” he says. “But I’m telling you, man—from where I was standing, I really
couldn’t see.”
“Sonofabitch,” Bark says, and I look at the board, where a clear-as-dawn number is
now in the
SHOW
box:
3.
“It’s not official,” Bark says. “And when it is, pretend it isn’t. The last thing
we need is someone following us out to the parking lot.”
“Let’s get in line,” I say. “Let’s get our cash and get out of here.”
“Just chill,” Bark says, but then he’s heading back under the grandstand, and James
and I jog to catch up.
“The three held on,” James says, and he clamps my shoulder like he did the first time
we won state, but hoop and all those wins back then hit me now as pretty damned small.
Because this win now, with its promise of the kind of cash a guy could really throw
around, has me wishing I could get back with Madalynn.
But I don’t dare mention Madalynn now.
Not around brothers like these.
I say, “You know it, men. And there was
no
doubt, right? Never any doubt we did it.”
JAN
ONE-POUND MUSKIES,
I soon learned, were worthless because Jasper wouldn’t pay a cent for anything that
weighed under six pounds. Tom Corcoran said Jasper refused such small ones because
possessing them could get you fined just as catching them could, but Colleen, in a
very
hushed conversation with me, said Jasper sold the muskies I caught to pros who’d
use them to win fishing contests—and that no pro cared about a fish unless he couldn’t
collar its neck with two hands.
Anyhow, Jasper would drive his metallic green ’62 Ford Galaxie down the road behind
the Corcorans’ house every morning just after sunup. If I’d caught any muskies the
previous day, I’d have hung a red mechanic’s rag on the hedge of milkweed bushes alongside
the road to town, and he’d stop. He’d sometimes sit in his Galaxie for a curious while,
maybe till the end of some song on his
AM dash radio, and finally he’d stroll, kicking dandelions, across the crabgrass.
Sometimes when he’d arrive I’d still be on the summer porch cot, not completely awake,
wishing for things like the pride my father must have felt when his mounts won big,
and Tug would already be out there on the far end of the pier, watching the sun rise
or whatnot, and my first perception of Jasper would be a quiet but strong knock on
the roadside screen door. Colleen would usually answer, my mother upstairs praying
or reading or still asleep, and I, in only a T-shirt but wrapped in the Corcorans’
quilt, would overhear Tom offer Jasper a coffee, a lemonade, or a Schaefer beer. Jasper
would usually say no but he’d sure be obliged for a glass of water, and then, after
the plumbing beneath me rattled and shook and squeaked, Jasper would pass the windows
that made for the south wall of the porch, bearing down on the lake as he sipped from
one of Colleen’s unmatched crystal goblets.
And Tug would have any muskies I’d caught alive in the lake, on his stainless steel
stringer near the shore, and Jasper would place the goblet on shale beside the half-dead
crab apple tree that had been split by lightning a year earlier and appeared lifeless
except for three green shoots near it—the same tree my father slept against on his
last morning alive. I’d get all stuck on the fact that, staring me right in the face,
was this same crab apple tree, and Tug would nod hello to Jasper, who’d crouch and
pull up the stringer, wipe his palms against the worn-shiny thighs of his trousers,
slide a finger under a gill of the largest muskie, then lift it. If you were close
enough you’d see its teeth and hear Jasper say, “Nine and a half,” or “Eight pounds,
ten ounces,” a proclamation that itself suggested his life of watching 1,200-pound
horses run had somehow left him with the sensitivity of a post office scale, and I
never, for the first
part of that summer, doubted him about that, or about anything. Then he’d slide his
cash-fattened wallet from his shirt pocket, undo the rubber bands around it, and pay
me if I was there or Tug if I wasn’t, Tug himself good as gold for making sure the
money would, one way or another, wind up in my mother’s purse.
Sometimes Jasper would pay fifty to sixty dollars a fish, making for sums that, to
my way of thinking, seemed impossibly high. Then he’d bend a finger into the shape
of one of the loops on the stringer, and, with a calmness that made you sure his experience
at the track had somewhere along the line taught him the pointlessness of worry, he’d
mosey back to his Galaxie.
DEESH
AS BARK ACCELERATES US
away from Belmont, it’s those three words—
We did it
—that keep running through my mind. But I’m not thinking about Madalynn or the trifecta
cash. Mostly it’s about the drum. Now and then I glance out Bark’s passenger-side
window only to picture the pigeon-toed woman’s yellow house, but already, without
even a kiss between the pigeon-toed woman and me, I have left her forever. I mean,
that’s how it’s always worked for me: I’m attracted to a woman and I run from her.
You might say Madalynn first started me on this pattern of behavior, but if so you
could also say Bark did, too. And now, here in this pickup truck, Bark merges onto
the Grand Central Parkway, and I ask, “Where we going?”
“My place,” he says.
“For what?” James says.
We cruise, each staring through the windshield. We come to a quick standstill.
James says, “I thought you wanted to go to Mississippi.”
Bark nods, squeezes the steering wheel.
James asks, “Bark, you hear me?”
“Uh-huh,” Bark says.
“You got an answer?”
Bark’s glare misses James to land on me, as if to say,
Li’l help, Deesh?
No doubt he wants my agreement. Through a closing hole in the traffic to his left,
he accelerates, and toward his right shoulder he says, “There’s something at my place
we should have.”
Shit, I think. His gun.
“Bark,” I say, “we really don’t need that thing.”
He’s gazing now, out the window to his left. “Deesh. If ever
there was a time.”
James, studying my expression, asks: “What.”
I hold up a finger, cock the thumb beside it, fire an imaginary bullet.
“
Oh
no,” James says. “I was with you on the drum, Bark, and I was with you on the bet,
and I’d be with you all the way to Mississippi. But not with no damned gun.”
“Then I’ll drop you,” Bark says, his quickness underscoring that he holds the trifecta
cash.
And his two buddies from way back, his glances at me and James probably tell him,
are still prep-school-boy scared about the contents of that drum.
Still I say, “Bark, you’re being stupid. I mean, a gun’s bad enough. But the real
thing is why, when hundreds of cops around here are already looking for you—and
peace
in Mississippi waits for you—why wouldn’t you just head for that peace?”
He smirks. He’s used this smirk before, to mess with me. If there’s one person in
the world he likes to mess with, it should be James in my opinion, but in reality
it’s me.
“Deesh,” Bark is saying now. “Why you always running?”
Again, traffic has us stopped cold. My eyes pin his. “Meaning what?”
“You know,” he says.
“Bark, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, though I know he’s talking
about Madalynn, who I’ve on and off suspected he’s slept with. I can’t
prove
he’s been with her in that way, but we have this running joke, he and I, about him
comforting the women I run from. We’ve never talked seriously about this joke, but
it’s code, if you ask me, for admissions that we’ve both called Madalynn in the middle
of the night more than once.
As for either of us admitting out loud that we both might still have it bad for her?
Now there’s something I’d never bet a cent on.