Authors: Mark Wisniewski
Still, I was confused about why Jasper wanted me to ride when Jasper himself had just
called me womanly.
“Anyway, what’s this horse’s name?” I asked. “I mean, the one I’d ride tonight if
what you’re saying is true.”
Tug wiped his hairline with the back of his glove. In heat this humid, his cheekbones
appeared sharp. One of his feet pressed down against a spindly birch log in a standing
section of fence, and I was sure he could break it easily.
“Equis Mini,” he said. He blinked away perspiration and sunshine. “Latin
for ‘extremely small horse.’”
DEESH
“TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION,”
Bark says to me, “I’m going to my place so we can stop being scared.”
“And you really think a gun’ll help us with that?” James says.
“I do,” Bark says. “And yes,
Jimmy
, that
is
just my opinion. But we are talking about a ride in
my
truck, so anytime you’d rather walk, I’ll be glad to pull over.”
“No need,” James says as he reaches past me to try to open the passenger-side door—and
I shove him back down, ticked off all the more since here I am again, playing peacekeeper.
Then Bark, too, gets all fatherly:
“Okay, James. My gun will be in that glove box in front of you, so you decide. Mississippi,
or your apartment. Choose your apartment and I will take you there. Not all the way
to your building, mind you, since your building will probably have
officers
in front of
its entrance, but I will drop you within, say, four blocks of those officers. It’s
just that you need to let me know what you want now, so I can plan the best route
through this traffic.”
Then we all three sit as still as we had when we’d been screamed at by our hoops coach.
It’s like we’ve scrapped and lucked our way this far, but now we’re all benched, losing
our biggest game. Then it hits me that what Bark told James goes for me, too—head
for Mississippi with an unregistered gun, or go home to wait for cops to knock.
“Then I’m out,” James says. “But don’t take me to my place, Bark.”
“Then where?” Bark says.
“My grandma’s.”
Traffic lets us move maybe three or four feet.
“In Queens,” James adds.
I roll down my window and look ahead and behind: cars as far as I can see.
“Fine,” Bark says.
“You take me there?” James asks.
“I
said
I’d drop you.”
And again, we all simply sit. This, I realize, might be our last conversation ever,
and as scared as I am about the drum and the gun, my throat catches because of plain
old sentiment.
Bark clears his throat. “Obviously the story we all stick with is that, today, none
of us went upstate.”
“Agree with you there,” James says.
“Today was all about the horses,” Bark says, “for all three of us.”
“Right,” I say, and now here’s Bark, asking where James’s grandma lives, up near Ditmars
or down toward Queensboro Plaza, and here’s James, telling Bark she’s just off Steinway
on about Thirty-fourth
Ave, and now here they go, talking restaurants and clubs in Astoria like Bark’s a
cabbie James just met. There’s no mention of the trifecta cash, not once. But I know
James has it in mind because
I
have it in mind.
Bark picks at an ingrown hair on his neck. James closes his eyes. I’m still deciding
if I’ll travel with Bark. My gut says play the same card James did—insist we go minus
the gun—but I can’t read Bark for whether, with one friend gone, he’ll value his last
more or prefer flying solo.
For a moment I want to say, James, you are
bailing
. Then we are whizzing ahead, and I can’t remember having rolled out of traffic, which
confirms that, for a stretch there, I lost myself in thought. Stress, I think. Or
are you just aging? Or were you thinking about Madalynn?
Then there we are, pulling over on a street full of houses just off Steinway, and
James’s posture straightens as he points at an upstairs duplex with white trellises
without vines. Bark brakes hard and James and I get out, and there, on that sidewalk,
I wonder how it feels to know one of your grandmothers, and I figure Bark wonders
this, too.
But Bark’s counting the trifecta cash.
“Maybe you’ll need it more than I will?” James says, though he’s lingering right there,
near Bark’s open passenger door.
Bark hands James a folded share. He snaps off another few bills and gives those.
“For Grandmama,” he says.
James nods, pockets his share, heads for the porch. Halfway up the stairs, he stops
and turns and nods at Bark, then at me.
“Cool,” he says.
“Right,” I say, but he’s already turned to ring his grandma’s
doorbell, so I get back in the truck, closing the door as we accelerate off.
Bark shakes his head and says, “Pussy.”
He means James, though what I also hear is that Bark is not at all up for another
request to travel unarmed.
Then he says, “You just know he’ll tell Granny about that drum.”
“Count on it,” I say.
“The way I figure things? She takes those extra twenties and he tells her they’re
from me? Best investment I ever made.”
And again there is more than words to Bark’s words. There’s the point that he still
holds my share of our money, that money still talks, that I’d be smart to stay on
the good side of power. And already I miss James, because James’s verbal flow always
gave logic a chance to be said out loud and considered. With Bark and Bark only, everything’s
glances and cash and manhood. There’ll be fewer quibbles without James, but there’ll
be fewer laughs.
Still, as Bark and I and his truck roll out of Queens, instinct from somewhere, maybe
the father I never saw, tells me that to abandon Bark now would be a loser’s move.
After all, Bark’s been my man since high school. He’s found me work when I’ve needed
cash. His time spent with Madalynn, platonic or not, proves we’re cut from the same
cloth.
On the Triboro, all lanes become jammed. Silence up here grows thorns. There’s no
arguing about the truth that the Belmont win, by assuring we’d travel in this rush
hour, cost us time.
Bark clicks on the radio. A truck jackknifed, the broadcaster says, and someone in
it died. No one will budge until everything’s chalked and photographed. I tell myself
this means fewer cops
looking for us. But then comes top-of-the-hour news about a murder in Putnam County.
“No way,” I say out loud.
Bark’s considered answer is, “You think?”
I don’t dare say a word, sure my voice would crack. If James were here now, we’d be
lectured. But now there’s no doubt about one thing. Bark is headed for his gun.
JAN
TOM CORCORAN HELD
his secret sprints on an abandoned runway six miles west of Varysburg, a flagging
town on the shore of the Tonawanda River. Jasper owned a dirt-road-accessed acreage
between two rolling hills there, and he and Tom ran the two-furlong races based on
an understanding that results would never be leaked to the
Form
. One of the horses would be connected to some gambling pal of Tom’s, the other to
what Tom called a “rookie owner,” a rich grandstander who knew nothing about training
but had recently claimed his first racehorse for fun. Rookie owners came and went
all the time—in fact Jasper’s theory was that horseracing relied on them—and Tom would
bump into them at the stables, try to take them under his wing, and give them tips
on feed, hay prices, and so forth. After he’d won their confidence, Tom would tell
them about secret workouts he knew of, two-horse
sprints where owners could assure their horses were tight without having impressive
workout times reported publicly. Without grandstanders knowing about the workout times,
primed-to-win horses, when they did run at Finger Lakes, would presumably command
higher odds, meaning, again presumably, that rookie owners could cash in on long-shot-priced
tickets. And of course nothing was certain but rumor had it that, thanks to a run
of luck that began with a secret sprint, one rookie owner quit his job laying concrete
to live in a penthouse with a view of pretty much all of Central Park.
To keep the sprints secret, owners supplied surrogate jockeys such as sons, daughters,
or neighbors. Rookie owners would agree to an evening, usually a Tuesday, the off
day at the track, and, given the nature of the horse people present, wagers took care
of themselves.
Tom and his gambling pals would arrive on Jasper’s acreage a couple hours early, so
they could slow down the rookie’s lane with water tanked on the back of a pickup and
rake the mud over, then double-check the rookie’s gate to make sure it was rigged
to open a half second slower.
A half second advantage is all you need in a sprint.
A half second puts you out in front by two and a half lengths.
DEESH
“HAND ME YOUR CELL,”
Bark says, and now, seeing I’ve already caved in about the gun, I want to say,
Man, who do you think you are?
But I know who Bark is. He’s the one driving. So all I say is, “Why?”
“We’re
disappearing
, man. I leave both our cells at my place, cops’ll figure we’re still in the Bronx.”
I yank out my cell, hand it over, hiss out a sigh I keep mostly to myself. Then we
are rolling again. We slow down, then glide. A block from Bark’s building, he double-parks,
gets out and jogs off, not a word over to me, which trips me about what he’ll do in
there. He has no woman to call is our current understanding, though I wouldn’t put
it past him to be speed-dialing Madalynn. I’d call her myself if I had my phone. I’d
tell her a disguised good-bye.
Then Bark’s back outside, across the street, walking toward the truck. His posture
says he’s armed. He ignores me as he gets behind the steering wheel.
“No need for it to be loaded,” I say.
“Right,” he says, without even a quick glance over.
Which, if you know Bark like I do, means his gun’s not only loaded—it’s begging him
not to stay hidden.
JAN
AS TOM AND COLLEEN CORCORAN
and Jasper and my mother and I and Tug crammed into Jasper’s Galaxie to head for the
secret sprint, the Corcorans’ yard struck Tug as emptier than usual, and he cringed
when he realized why: The forty-gallon drum his family had burned leaves in was gone.
Had Tug not been Tom Corcoran’s son, this drum’s absence would have struck him as
the result of petty thievery, but, of course, Tug would
always
be Tom’s son, so now, as Jasper’s Galaxie headed off, Tug considered a reality most
every Finger Lakes horse person had taken to heart at least once, the absence of The
Form
Monger’s wife.
That cautionary tale had played out semipublicly back when Tug was just the tongue-tied
kid who followed Tom around the track, and the upshot of this tale, as Tom once explained
it to Tug,
was that she, The
Form
Monger’s wife, disappeared because an odds-defying losing streak had compelled The
Form
Monger to double down and borrow from loan sharks. Only days before The
Form
Monger’s wife disappeared, The
Form
Monger had bitched and moaned openly in the grandstand about how he was so jinxed
he’d even lost one of his garbage cans. And ever since she went missing—that is, for
the past fifteen-odd years—the conclusion of every grandstander has been that The
Form
Monger’s once-super-fine-looking and now-long-gone-from-sight wife’s remains are
still out there somewhere, in that can.
And what a jury would need to know is that a week or so after The
Form
Monger’s wife disappeared, The
Form
Monger himself showed up in the grandstand after the fifth race with his right arm
wrapped expertly in gauze minus the hand he’d once assumed was as inseparable from
him as his wife had been—the conclusion being that this hand had been sawed off at
the wrist, drained of its blood (since blood leaves telltale stains) and hidden amid
the contents of a Dumpster trailer-trucked to New Jersey.
And people would also need to know that The
Form
Monger then came to be called The
Form
Monger because, perhaps as a coping mechanism and certainly as a way of scrounging
up cash to bet, he’d soon begun obsessively scalping used
Daily Racing Form
s. And this is no lie: Nearly every day since both his wife and his hand disappeared,
the guy has been at the track, pretty much always on the move, cruising up and down
the grandstand’s concrete stairways to see if any
Form
s
lay discarded, sometimes following bettors to the parking lot to beg for their
“recyclables” (his word) if they appear to be leaving early, sometimes even rummaging
through the track’s trash cans. And ever since the spring his wife disappeared, he’s
struck track patrons as repugnant not only
because his stump remains gruesomely purple, but also because, as soon as he sells
enough scuzzy
Form
s
to have scrounged two dollars, he bets using a system that eventually guarantees loss:
He bets to win on the favorite.
Anyway, now, in Tug Corcoran’s eyes at least, the Corcorans’ missing forty-gallon
drum meant a serious warning. It meant someone in the Corcoran household might disappear
like The
Form
Monger’s wife had. Maybe it also meant that if Tom Corcoran didn’t then pay off his
losing bets, a hand or a foot of his would go missing, too. But what bore through
Tug’s thoughts now, as Jasper drove to the first and only secret sprint my mother
and I would attend with the Corcorans, was that it might have been
anyone
in the Corcoran house who was on the verge of disappearance.
Why, Tug wondered, would the victim necessarily be his mother?
If loan sharks did in fact abduct the person loved most by the losing gambler, the
person now about to go missing—given Tom and Colleen’s marital problems—could be my
mother.
Or me.
Or hell, Tug probably realized then, those chumps might go after a guy’s first and
only son.
And true, Tug’s concern about the missing drum now portending someone’s early departure
was
speculation on Tug’s part, or maybe just paranoia. But there was logic behind it,
and it only knotted Tug up more to realize that this logic was not the bookish kind
used by attorneys but instead the kind used by thugs.
Like everyone taking that ride in the Galaxie that evening, though, Tug said nothing
of this. Instead he sat stoically in the backseat between his mother and mine, with
me (oblivious as I was then to the fact that the drum was even missing, let alone
what its
disappearance meant) directly in front of him, between his father and Jasper. Whether
Tug would mention to his father or to anyone at all his fear about the drum was a
question Tug analyzed for miles—because, as Tom tended to see things, fear not only
meant you were a pussy, it also, even worse, caused
more loss.
Don’t Bet Scared
Money was one of Tom Corcoran’s mottos, but this had never meant any Corcoran should
refrain from betting. It just meant they shouldn’t be scared.
Because, when it came down to it, Tom Corcoran
was
going to bet.
And Tom’s motto about not betting scared money did little to calm Tug now. All the
motto did was run through Tug’s mind and make his stomach queasy. Tug remembered a
trick Tom had used to fight fear of odds-on favorites, glaring directly at one’s opponent
to remind oneself this opponent would perish like everything else, but it occurred
to Tug that he himself didn’t know who his father’s opponent was. His father, for
the record, now sat motionless in the front seat, and it occurred to Tug that, at
this very moment, Tom might have been preparing to glare at his opponent as soon as
the Galaxie arrived at the secret sprint. But what really got Tug right then, as Jasper
sped on, was that he, Tug, was glaring intently at the back of his father’s head,
which maybe should have told Tug that his opponent was the very blood he and Tom shared.
Suffice to say the drum’s disappearance had Tug all screwed up, to the point that
he almost got emotional in that backseat, confused as he was by flared-up sentiment
and shock on top of his long resentment of his shame for having been raised in a family
prone to gamble, and he told himself not to mention the drum’s disappearance to anyone,
certainly not to me, since if he did, he might break down so pathetically I’d consider
him
worse
than a pussy.
Which was to say (using Tom Corcoran’s language) like a goddamned baby.
And after Tug promised himself to keep his mouth shut, he sat quietly for miles, glaring
at the back of Tom’s head.
And when Tug could finally breathe in the boggy smell of the Tonawanda River, it hit
him that
this
—the smell of a body of water he’d never fished or swum in—probably embodied the sum
total of the peace in him that night. And when Jasper finally turned down the puddle-strewn
gravel road that unfurled onto the acreage, I had already put on the riding helmet
Tug had treasured as a kid, and quite a few horsemen were already present, maybe thirty,
standing near their muddied cars and pickups, wearing Stetsons and pressed jeans and
new checked shirts. Tug recognized some of these men from when he was nothing but
a toddler at the stables, but there were also horsemen younger than Tom: slimmer,
meaner-looking men Tug had never seen, the kind of guys that struck one as criminals
whether one wanted to be an attorney or not, all with poker faces that, to Tug now,
suggested that Tom might have owed any of them a boatload.
Bill Treacy was unhitching a two-horse starting gate from a tractor, and Tom and Jasper
opened their doors and stepped out and stood on either side of the Galaxie, apparently
surveying the crowd. Tug envied me for this chance Tom had given me, renowned as Tug
himself now was as a failure at his attempted horse farm—and Tug felt stuck between
Colleen, who was gazing through the windshield at a new horse trailer behind a shiny
truck, and my mother, who seemed glued to the Galaxie’s backseat.
“Is the rookie owner already here?” Colleen asked. She said this as if only she and
Tom knew about the gambling he and she both did, and Tug smelled the lemon juice she’d
put in her hair to lighten
it. She rolled down her window. “Tom?” she asked. “Is the rookie already here?”
Tom’s navy blue T-shirt—all we could see of him—didn’t move.
“Tom?” Colleen said.
“Quiet,” Tom said, and Tug knew why Tom wanted quiet: If the rookie owner had already
arrived, it was possible
we
were being set up.
Tom took a step toward a group of horsemen, stopped, then walked quickly to Bill Treacy.
He helped Bill Treacy unhitch the starting gate, lit a cigarette for him while they
talked. Then he returned to the Galaxie.
“Come on,” he said without looking in. “We’re all right.”
I adjusted the helmet’s chinstrap, and Colleen stepped out and Tug stepped out, and
Colleen grabbed Tom fiercely by the wrist.
“He rigged it before we got here,” Tom said. “Because he was worried this particular
owner would come early.”
“So the rookie
is
here,” Colleen said.
“Don’t worry,” Tom said. “We’re all right.” He still had fewer white hairs than brown.
“We’re all right as long as we get gate number two.”
“But
Tom
,” Colleen said.
“Colleen? I’ve known Bill Treacy for twenty-odd years. Yes, the man’s dishonest, but
I know how he sounds when he lies.”
I stood beside Tug now, and Jasper headed off to the back of a trailer, then returned
leading Equis Mini by the reins. Equis Mini was indeed a tiny chestnut, thirteen hands
at most, but he had sheen without sweat and fine composure, too, and he wasn’t soaped
up at all.
Jasper saddled him, then settled him by ruffling up and patting down his mane. “Horse
looks right, Tom,” he said. “All he needs is
a top-quality jock.” He winked at me, and Tug studied his face, as candid a face as
any nearby.
I turned to Tug. “Should I do this?”
“Of course,” Tug said. “It’s what you’ve always wanted, right?”
Tom squeezed my shoulder and said, “Riders up,” and I took his leg up and mounted.
I felt regal up there, in command of the world almost, my vision actually sharper,
my worn jeans with holes in the knees apparently inviting the gaze of most every man
there. By some instinct of their own, it seemed, my hips urged Equis Mini forward,
and Equis Mini moseyed toward the gate. He looked tight enough for sure, ears pricked,
Jasper and Tom flanking him, Colleen and Tug flanking them, my mother finally stepping
out of the Galaxie.
Near the gate, Jasper handed me a whip, and Tom held my ankle. “Take him out to that
barbed wire and back,” Tom told me quietly. “You don’t want him standing as long as
it’ll take to make the wagers and so forth.”
“Sure,” I said, and Equis Mini responded to my heels, trotting proudly toward the
sun. He felt geared up and eager to run, and after we reached the fence and began
heading back, I saw the rookie and glanced off quickly, because his way of looking
at me assured me that, in his mind now, I was his to desire.
And now, as if Equis Mini were having misgivings of his own, he stopped trotting to
stand. Maybe it’s my weight, I thought. Maybe I will always be too heavy. He dropped
his head and held it low. He stayed there, fifty feet from the gate, as the rookie
jock was mounting his horse. I leaned down and whispered “Treat a lady right” into
his ear, and he seemed to consider this, then raised his snout and blinked.
But as Tug would tell me later more than once, the rookie’s
horse was all muscle no matter what angle you saw him from, the rookie jock easily
smaller than me. And then my mother sidled up near Colleen and held hands with her
as they stood on the number two lane side of the dirt track, and Tom climbed onto
the outside of the number two stall.
“I guess,” Tom said loudly, “we get this one.”
I steered Equis Mini toward him. “They’re entering their stalls!” a drunk on the rookie’s
side of the track shouted, and I pulled up Equis Mini, to let the rookie jock get
in the gate first. He did, and after his people closed him in, I turned Equis Mini
around and let him walk a big circle, to let the rookie’s horse get fractious, and
my glance over at Tug had me sure Tug was realizing I was a lot more experienced—with
both horses and men—than Tug had thought when he’d met me.
Then, after the rookie’s horse began rearing up and its jock flipped his whip under
his armpit, I steered Equis Mini toward the correct stall, and Jasper loaded him quickly
and Bill Treacy buzzed open the gate. Equis Mini broke cleanly and I whistled just
once; we straightened course and I heard nothing beyond breaths and hoofs hitting
dirt until we were well past the finish.
“Twenty-
one
flat!” some guy with a stopwatch yelled.
“That’s blazing!” someone else yelled.
Everything around me seemed unsteady right then, with Colleen, beside my grinning
mother, giving me a big thumbs-up.
“You won,” Tom shouted in my direction, and I eased Equis Mini out of a gallop. Tug
looked damned alone right then, waiting as he was, back there with his parents and
my mother and all those horse folk, to feel privilege kick in: If Tom had bet enough
to worry Tug as much as he had, Tug was now that much closer to affording law school.
But mostly Tug was thinking about that forty-gallon drum.
The rookie jock eased down his horse beside Equis Mini and me. Like one seasoned rider
to another, we talked half standing in our stirrups. In Tug’s mind then, there was
no question this other jock was chatting me up—and I’m here to tell you that, yes,
that’s exactly what the guy was doing. And after the guy told me no one had bet on
me, he was downright gross, saying things like how he himself didn’t at all mind the
meat on my bones, how my ass was making him hard right there in that saddle, how he
wished I would ride him that night, how the women’s restroom at the north end of the
grandstand was always pretty much empty, so if he’d ever see me at the track, all
I’d need to do was nod his way.