Authors: Mark Wisniewski
DEESH
YOU’RE NOT SCARED, I THINK.
And you’ve been cool around cops before. Still, I don’t like the look in this one’s
eyes: too self-assured and enthused for a stranger planning to stay cool also. I grab
the steering wheel and say, “C’mon, officer, you can’t just shoot a guy.”
“I can if I have reason,” he says.
“Well, I think it’s clear to everyone here that I haven’t done anything.”
He considers my expression, which I’d swear is blank. With his focus now off Bark,
I feel the tiniest victory—for my friendship with Bark and my kinship with everyone
born black and thin on love. The cop glances over the roof of the pickup, then to
his right, then his left. He is young, easily five years younger than Bark and me.
He says, “You double-parked, bro.”
“That’s not cause for arrest,” I say. “That’s just citation material.”
His finger, I notice, is on the trigger. I say, “Anyway, officer, since when does
a working brother’s quick double-park threaten your life?”
He studies me hard now, tacks on a seriously slow once-over, fascinated, it seems,
by my hairline, then my shoulders. He says, “Boy, why not just worry about
your
life?”
And all I can think to say is “Did you just call me
boy
?”
“Opie, you’re like fifty years out of date with that boy shit!” Bark shouts, and he’s
facing the windshield, maybe looking for more cops.
“You guys saying you have a problem with me?” the cop asks.
“Just trying to clue you in, man,” I say.
“Yeah,” Bark shouts, louder this time. “Y’all need to open your ears and learn from
us elders about how to be cool.”
“Maybe you should show me how to be cool out here,” the cop says. “Maybe you should
get your lazy ass out of this truck and stand in front of me like a man and tell me
why, in this country, any guy, of
any
age or color, can’t
jokingly
call another guy whatever the hell he wants.”
I clear my throat as an excuse not to swallow. He’s blabbing on like this, I’m sure,
because he’s power tripping if not looking for probable cause, and I’m all the more
sure that, by now, Bark’s got a finger on his trigger, too.
I say, “Officer, you need to know this about my friend: He’s had a history of unjustly
being called lazy.”
“I don’t give a shit about anyone’s history,” the cop says. “All I know is I’m looking
at an overweight black man being driven around with a six-pack on his lap. If that
doesn’t strike you as lazy, pal, you’ve got some serious self-respect issues.”
“Just chill, man,” I say.
“
Fuck
chill. I got a job to do, and I’m doing it.” The cop swallows now, the nose of his
gun rising. “So get out of the car,” he says quietly. “I want to see nothing in your
hands, no bottles, no phones, and I want both of your lazy asses standing still out
here.”
And being the let’s-just-get-along guy I’ve long tried to be, I wish that all three
of us—Bark, this cop, and I—could go back and start over, not back to five minutes
ago, but to our grammar school days, when we all could have grown up more mellow.
And it’s just after I wish this that Bark shoots the cop.
JAN
“WHERE’S YOUR FLASHLIGHT?”
Tug asked me.
“It’s broken,” I said.
“Let me try fixing it.”
“You can’t,” I said, now directly beside him. “I mean, there isn’t one. I just didn’t
want you to think I was weird.”
“How could you be weird? That’s simply not possible. All I wanted was to know what
you were doing out here.”
“I told you. Getting in shape.”
“So you
are
running.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why at night?”
“Because. My father did, to help him beat fear.” I kicked at a pebble, more butterflies
in my stomach, but somehow they felt smaller. And, really, that’s what I loved about
Tug Corcoran: Being
around him excited me yet made me feel altogether solid. “Because when you’re winning
a lot and getting tight mounts,” I explained, “jocks on long shots will box you in—because
they’re envious and they’ll do what they can to beat you. And when you’re boxed in,
you might luck into seeing an opening, which could scare you because you know you
could get bumped and go down. But you can’t fear going down. Because if you do, the
hole will close and you’ll lose.”
And it was obvious what Tug was thinking then. Everyone knows that, he thought.
Grandstanders
know that.
“Which means you have to trust,” I said. “And running in the dark helps you trust.
Because trusting means forgetting your fear, which running in the dark helps you do.”
Now Tug was the one kicking at pebbles. “How do you know all this?”
“Your dad told me some. That last part—about trust and forgetting fear—I made up.
But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know. Because trust can mean fearing but going ahead anyway?”
I went silent right then, and despite myself I kept still. But Tug seemed to feel
patient with me, all of me including my theories and habits whether they’d prove weird
or not. And it hit me that no one had ever felt patience like this for me, not even
my saintly mother.
And I asked, “Is that what it’s like for you?”
“Let’s put it this way: If I ran with you right now, I’d be afraid.”
“Because you can’t see the road?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t
look
at the road, silly. You look at the stars.”
I grabbed the sides of Tug’s head right then and aimed his face skyward, my fingers
partway over his ears.
“In the gap,” I said. “Between the trees on the sides of the road.”
And stars did form an obvious lane, wider than Tug would have guessed, it seemed,
and I wondered if I had him tempted.
“That’s our path,” I said, and I took his hand, and we began. We ran slowly at first,
side by side, and, as he’d later tell me on the summer porch, he watched the center
of the lane of stars and heard my footsteps beside his and allowed the asphalt’s flat
grade to assure him. He thought of potholes briefly and slowed down some, but then,
ahead, the sound of my footfalls thinned, so he accelerated, hearing that false wind
sound that had always suggested freedom to him, freedom his paths had never led to.
Then he was beside me, paced evenly with me, worried less about what bothered him
most—that damned missing drum—and soon, rather than worry, he simply thought.
It’s just a drum, he thought. The fact that it’s gone means nothing. You can’t lose
your mind every time he loses money. The guy loses but he wins and things generally
stay the same.
But as Tug and I ran on, he thought more, now about his father’s long-held theory
that when you really want something and almost get it but then don’t—like when you
lose a bet on a long shot by a nose—you taste both success and failure at the same
time, and as a result, you feel nothing. When Tom had explained this theory to Tug,
Tug had wondered if Tom was trying to tell Tug, or maybe his own self, that he and
Tug’s mother had never quite been in love. But now, as Tug ran with me, he wondered
if maybe instead Tom had been preparing him, in Tom’s indirect manner, for a life
in which Tug neither ran a horse farm nor
practiced law, a life in which Tug’s career chose Tug rather than the other way around.
And that career, Tug now thought, might not be impressive, lucrative, or rewarding.
It might be only a job, just a way to afford a mortgage or maybe only rent. After
all, there were plenty of people in the world, many of whom were regulars in the Finger
Lakes grandstand in fact, who were ecstatic about any grunt work tossed their way,
and it
was
possible Tug would come very close but then miss out on becoming what he wanted to
be, then instead become one of those people.
If this is your fate, Tug thought as he ran on with me, get used to it. But then he
felt incapable of impressing me—because if he did end up being a grunt worker, he’d
never be in my league. For a long stretch under those stars I had just shown him,
he resented his parents for raising him as they had, but then he assured himself that
they’d done their best, which was, of course, all a guy could ask for, and then I
reached a crossroads brightened by street light and sprinted across it, and he followed
me into this new darkness.
And this darkness felt denser yet safer until the sound of my footsteps stopped altogether.
I’d quit to catch my breath, so he quit, too. He came to a stop and turned, then stepped
toward me and stood maybe three feet from me, each of us with hands on hips, both
of us breathing hard and loudly, our natural way, it seemed, of conceding that the
nervousness we often felt in each other’s company would never be the same, I closer
to being a jock, he closer to being whatever he’d become, both of us closer to marriage
and maybe children, and, regardless of all that, both of us now sharing a bond that
could always be our secret, since right now, on this road, only we knew that we’d
thrown ourselves into sprints in this darkness.
And it was then that I stepped toward him and stood smack in front of him like I was
pretty much saying:
Do it.
Kiss me.
And after several consecutive moments that each could have been perfect, he took a
step back. Later I’d learn he’d done this because he’d seen that jerk hitting on me
at the secret sprint and figured I maybe needed a break from men, but just after he
stepped back, I wondered if he’d just blown our chances for a best-in-a-lifetime first
kiss. And then, the longer we stood, with no summer breeze or starlight between us,
the more I felt disappointment and doubt and an irksome new nervousness.
And I should probably also admit that it was then, as we stood there, that Tug realized
he’d always cherish me for telling him to let light from stars guide him, so he wanted
to thank me—though he was wise enough to know that thanking me out loud right then
might ruin whatever good moments we had left. So he decided to instead thank me with
a gift as soon as possible, not with anything near as risky as an engagement ring,
just something to let me know he cared for me, maybe even believed that, despite our
weirdnesses as horse folk, love between us was possible.
The problem with gifts, though, diamonds or not, was that they cost money, of which
Tug never had more in his pocket than the few dollars luck had spared him if Tom had
just won big. Yes, Tug had saved cash for college thanks to the horse farm’s best
days, but that cash had long been untouchable, sitting as it did in his parents’ savings
account.
What Tug needed—and soon, he realized—was work, any kind of work, even a low-paying
stint like mucking stalls for some trainer who’d recently won a few purses and could
now afford an extra hand. Though for Tug, employment had never come easily. Just after
high school, when he’d hunted for a job painstakingly—before
his parents had relented and let him use their meadow for his horse farm—owners of
the most lucrative horses and the thriving shops on Main had often asked him one question,
a question whose unfriendly undertow now made him cringe:
“You’re that Corcoran guy’s son, aren’t you?”
DEESH
THE COP LIES ON ASPHALT
less than five feet from me, and, from the sidewalk beyond him, a teenage brother
eyes me. He is not Jasir, but he still makes me realize how I, Deesh, look sitting
right here, in this pickup beside this fallen cop with a bullet-torn cheek.
“Go!”
Bark screams, the barrel of his gun now up against my ear, so I drive off, freaked
by death’s quickness, by Bark’s now undeniable bonds with violence, by the hundreds,
hell, thousands of nights I’ve hung with him. Were we ever blood-brother tight, even
when we won state? There has always been this tendency of his to end our conversations,
to not even answer my most direct questions. There has always been this unvoted-on
rule that, somehow, Bark is in charge.
Hell, right now, up against his gun, I am taking lefts and rights and swerving exactly
as he tells me to. I am speeding all the way to
the GW Bridge, where I accelerate onto the lower level, to hide us from the helicopters
he fears. Maybe, I realize, he’s played pals with me for those times when, against
my better judgment, I’d accept UPS’d packages full of baby powder and crack for him
at my address, or I’d answer his phone when common sense screamed it was stupid to
help him lay low.
And now, on the dash radio, there’s this white dude saying, “police activity in the
Bronx,” which means Bark and I aren’t far from millions of people wanting our faces
torn by bullets, too.
But the broadcast gave no descriptions, I tell myself, and to calm myself I try to
picture Mississippi, but Mississippi, right now, means nothing to me, no fellow tenants
sure to smile, no women I’ve slept with, certainly no Madalynn and definitely no Jasir,
and now Bark and I roll from the GW into Jersey, approaching overhead signs for Fort
Lee, I-95 South, the Palisades, Highway 1, Highway 9, I-80 West, something about the
end of I-95,
and Bark is screaming since I’m screaming since I’m clueless about where to steer.
The lane-lines are all screwed up, some new, some faded, some crooked, some suddenly
ending, a trucker in front of us veering as if to say
he’s
the boss of this stretch, so when I see his flushed-pink face in his side mirror
I scream at his move, at any racism in him, at the dead cop’s racism, at all of the
white hatred in the world.
JAN
THE FIRST TIME TOM TOOK ME
to the backside of the Finger Lakes racetrack, he drove up to the wooden arm keeping
us from the parking lot, and the guard in the booth said, “Got your ID?”
“You serious?” Tom asked.
“Track policy, sir. Always has been. Just got a new boss is all.”
Tom glared straight ahead. Tug sighed so hard his shoulders rose and fell.
“Your phone work?” Tom asked.
“Sir?” the guard said.
“Does your
phone
work.”
“I think so.”
“Call your new boss and ask him who Tom Corcoran is.”
And the guard made that call, which took an embarrassing while, but then the wooden
arm rose and he and Tom exchanged
nods, and we parked and Tom strode toward the shedrows, Tug following, me following
Tug while I tried to pretend I wasn’t excited as a mutt pup to be on a real racetrack’s
backside. Near one barn, Tom lingered for no reason apparent to me, and then, as if
to show someone what a fun guy he’d been when he’d jocked, he stole a carrot from
a feed bin and told a couple of chatting owners there
was
such a thing as a free lunch, so there were chuckles then, even a few laughs.
And there were a few people he knew enough to say hi to, some of them owners, though
mostly we gossiped with stable hands, and, for a while, Tug talked to one of them
about his horse farm, but if you asked me, people on that track’s backside soft-pedaled
Tug kind of like folks in Pine Bluff had done with me.
Then it was just Tug and Tom and I standing with paper cups of coffee on a freshly
hosed sidewalk, and Tug glanced past Tom and said, “Think you could lend me some cash?”
“For what?” Tom said. He stuffed his fingers into his front pockets.
“Thought I might join you in backing a horse today.”
Tom glanced at the grandstand. He cleared his throat, maybe to make Tug wait. Then
all he said was “Why?”
“Just to join you,” Tug said. “And just for one race. I just want to bet
one
horse and cheer it in for you. You know, like when you rode.”
Tom set his hands on his hips, a man wise enough to know a kissing-up son when he
saw one.
Finally he said, “What if we lose?”
Tug forced a smile, and Tom frowned, as if to etch that question—
What if we lose?
—into Tug’s soul.
“You guys won’t lose,” I said, and they both stared off.
And it was maybe a second or two later, as I remember it, that Tom Corcoran cussed—only
one word, but the bull’s-eye.
Then he said, “How much you want,” and he pulled money from his pocket, an inch-plus
wad of bills folded once. The sight of so much cash put a stir in me, and his finger
and thumb gestured the cash toward Tug, who could, or so it seemed, have as much of
it as he wanted.
“I don’t know,” Tug said. “Twenty?”
Take it all! I thought. Use it for your farm!
“Wanna start small, huh?” Tom said. He unfolded the bills and thumbed out four hundreds
to expose a fifty, then thumbed fifty after fifty until a ten showed. “No twenties,”
he said. “Tell you what. Take one of these and owe me the rest.” He held out a fifty
like some magician. “Just don’t get bet happy on me.”
And with a small nod, Tug took the fifty.
“‘Bet happy’?” I asked.
“That’s when you
think
you know something about horses when in fact you’re just lucky,” Tom said. “Happens
to young men who grow up around tracks.”
Tug shook his head, barely but more than once, and rolled his eyes.
“Remember,” Tom said. “The best smartness comes from your heart, so once you lose
sight of your heart, you’ll end up betting for betting’s sake.”
And here he again shot me the look he’d given me on my first night in his house, the
look that suggested he was trying to tell me something, which now seemed to be
Don’t mess with gambling
—
don’t even start,
and, yes, I appreciated him for that, but mostly I wished it was well past dusk and
I was out running with Tug.
“But here’s my simplest and best piece of advice,” Tom said. “And this goes for both
of you.”
I widened my eyes:
Yes?
“Always remember there are only seven important words.”
And Tug walked off in a huff, like any adult child fed up with his father’s advice.
Though he did then call over his shoulder, “Go ahead. Let’s hear the big seven.”
And Tom said, mostly to me,
“All you have to do is win.”
Tug was again shaking his head, well on his way to the grandstand, and then I heard:
“Hey, loser.”
And there, maybe sixty feet down the shedrow, in shade created by a warped plywood
overhang, stood a man I would come to know as Arnie DeShields. The darkness between
us barely dimmed his smile, which was white and thick and fake, and he, arms crossed,
was also white and thick—and tall, six feet if he slouched. So I could have looked
at him as a fount of insight about how I, a young wannabe jock already considered
overweight, might succeed at this track; here was a person whose size had always meant
he could never jock, yet he’d figured out how to be a player here.
“Watch his hands when I talk about Devilette,” Tom whispered, and he led me toward
Arnie while calling, “What’s the word, Arn?”
Arnie was all eyes on me as he spoke: “Pietro let us down hard yesterday.” He spat
tobacco juice, an orange shot raising dirt in an empty stall, and I knew—by the way
he kept his hands in his back pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet, along with
his deft but searing inspection of my breasts—that I’d better play it tough around
him.
“Pietro didn’t force you to put money on it,” Tom said.
“Who said I put money on it?” Arnie asked. And here he checked out the rest of me
with no apparent shame, as if he’d heard those rumors spread about me in my high school,
then said to Tom, “Alls I’m saying is that the man said he was going to send the horse—and
then the thing don’t even land in the money.”
Tom kicked down dirt. “Can’t control the jock once the gates open,” he said. “Right,
Jan?”
I nodded, and sunlight bore down through a hole in the roof.
“I suppose,” Arnie said, “you’re here to ask if I’m sending Devilette tomorrow.”
“It’s his third maiden race and he won’t be favored,” Tom said. He tucked in a side
of his shirt. “If he’s tight and you
don’t
send him, you’re insane.”
“Maybe I was insane to begin with,” Arnie said, and he folded his hands over his paunch
and cracked his knuckles, then let his fingers settle on his fleshy hips.
“Maybe we
all
begin insane,” Tom said, with a wink at me. “Anyway Jan wants to make her first bet
ever tomorrow. You can’t help her out with some information?”
He’s using me to get a tip, I thought, and I held my breath, trying to play it all
off.
“You want to jock and you’re already telling strangers you back horses?” Arnie asked.
“You’re not a stranger,” I said. “And I ain’t telling no one anything.”
He smiled so eagerly I could have slapped him right there. “Just remember me down
the line, girl,” he said. “After you collect on your first win bet ever.”
Then he gave Tom a quick, sheepish nod, as if it killed his male
pride to even imply what he was clearly saying:
I’ve gifted you. Now keep this secret so it pays off well.
And with that and nothing else, he walked off.
Tom followed for a step or two, stopped quickly and completely only to follow all
the faster, and encouraged by his speed as well as my curiosity about how a winning
horse looks the day before it wins, I followed Tom.
And the first part of Devilette I saw clearly was the white Texas-shaped blaze on
his snout. Then, as we headed for his unlit stall, I saw more of his head, coal black
and sturdy, the whole of him calm as a statue, mane braided too tightly. He didn’t
flinch when I petted his neck, but his eyes struck me as flat and mean, and he stood
easily three hands higher than Equis Mini had.
“He’s a monster all right,” I said, and Arnie and Tom nodded as if I, little Janette
Price, had out of nowhere been named resident expert on what it took to win.
“Filled out in the chest,” Tom said.
“Tight as a drum in a freezer,” Arnie said.
“You got his front ankles wrapped,” I said, remembering the wraps the hot-walker had
used on her gimpier trail horses.
“To keep Pietro guessing,” Arnie said.
“Gonna miss the post parade and unwrap at the last minute?” Tom asked.
Arnie shook his head. “I’m leaving ’em on. They won’t stop him from winning. I want
to beat that bastard Pietro and keep him guessing at the same time.”