Mark Wisniewski - Watch Me Go

It doesn’t stop, though. It’s two white women in a Prius, speeding to wherever. When I get back in the truck, Bark says, “What you do that for?”

“To take their eyes off the drum,” I say.

“That was stupid ,” James says.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“He might be right,” Bark tells James. Bark waits until the speeding car, shrinking ahead of us down that straightaway, is out of sight, and I decide not to mention that the lid felt loose — they’d blame me for it. Bark glances behind us, U-turns, and takes off in the direction we came from. Now, with the drum gone, James starts talking as if he has to make up for everything we all three didn’t say since we left the woman’s house, asking why we did it, asking why he did it, saying we should have thought it over, should have discussed it in the privacy we had to ourselves in the crawl space — one of us, he says, should have put a foot down to keep all of us from losing our heads.

“We could have said no!” he shouts. “But we had to be greedy. We got all stupid for bad money!”

THERE ARE PLENTY OF OTHER THINGSabout Tom Corcoran any jury you face should know, things I learned in confidence because, for a stretch of some very intense days just a few weeks ago, Tug Corcoran opened up to me like a man possibly falling in love.

Things like how, on the very same morning my mother and I were on that crowded bus headed upstate to spend this summer with the Corcorans, Tug walked through his parents’ woods to his horse farm, then saw that Silent Sky, the only horse boarded in his care then, was gone.

Things like how he also then noticed a hole in his horse farm’s fence wide enough to roll a tank through.

And like how Silent Sky herself had never been a bolter, never as much as glanced whenever Tug had opened the gate to tend to her, so the question that not only appeared in Tug’s mind but then seemed destined to stay was: What — or who — had prompted Silent Sky to leave?

And see, Tug first tried to convince himself that Silent Sky’s owner, Jack Silverton, had taken her on the sly so he could euthanize her to cut expenses. But Jack Silverton had money — old, endlessly flowing money — as well as a soft spot for thoroughbreds, a soft spot that competed with Tug’s own.

So even before Tug finished jogging across the meadow toward the hole, he suspected Tom Corcoran of having something to do with this. He hated suspecting his own father, but if his father had taken Silent Sky to sell her for cash to gamble with? Well, he damned sure hated that, too.

And see, there was no denying the fence had been vandalized. Two birch-log planks had been cracked clear through, another yanked out toward the woods. Leading away from Tug were bar-shoe hoofprints, wide enough to assure him they’d been made by Silent Sky’s flat, spread-out turf hoof, and just before the hole the hoofprints were all crowded up, meaning she’d stopped to resist whoever had haltered her and led her out.

Then Tug heard “What the hell?”—and there, across the meadow near the path through the woods, stood his father, the same Tom Corcoran known to local gamblers as the retired jock who still hung around the track and couldn’t, for the life of him, contain his will to win big. Since Tom had retired from riding, there’d been plenty of moments like that moment right then: when the sight of Tom, a man who struggled to care for his family because his first love was to gamble, would irk the hell out of Tug. But there’d been plenty of worse moments, too, moments when Tom’s presence had made Tug want to strangle the man, like when Tug’s mother would ask Tom a favor and Tom wouldn’t pay her any mind, or when Tom would second-guess a bet he’d lost, or when Tug had gotten all charged up talking about his dreams about breeding champions on his horse farm and Tom would interrupt to say how proud he’d feel when Tug would finally leave the house for law school.

But like the good son he’d always tried to be, all Tug did now was calm himself. Though then there he was, saying directly to Tom, “Whoever kicked those logs was either large or fairly strong. Or, I guess, pretty pissed off.”

“Why would they be pissed?”

“No clue, Dad. You mind telling me?”

Tom raised his lucky blue coffee mug just past his chin, then held it there, inches from his unshaven face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“All I’m saying is that, of the two of us, you’re the one spending time and cash with grandstanders.”

Which was as bold as Tug had the balls to be back in June — about how tired he was of acting like Tom and Tom’s track pals hadn’t gone too far with gambling, fixing races, bookmaking, and whatever else they were up to.

“Tug, those guys don’t care about jinxed mares,” Tom said. “I mean, she had no real upside, right?”

“Yes, but why — I mean, what are you saying?”

“Just that I can’t imagine why anyone I know would’ve wanted her.”

“You can’t?”

“No.”

“Well, I can,” Tug said, not so much because he’d imagined reasons specifically . Though he still did suspect that any of the regulars in the Finger Lakes grandstand — including Tom himself — might have stolen Silent Sky to sell her to a rendering plant for gambling cash.

“Maybe it’s better,” Tom said, facing the hole. “Since a couple new boarders are headed here anyway.”

He went all still then, as if considering something most crucial, and Tug went still, too, remembering Silent Sky’s fondness for being scratched between her ears.

“Thoroughbreds?” Tug asked.

“No.”

“Standardbreds.”

“No.”

“Then I don’t get it, Dad. What, exactly, are we talking about?”

Tom gazed at an oak trunk beyond the cracked logs, sipped coffee from his lucky blue mug. He squinted as if he’d just swallowed something bitter, faced Tug squarely, then used an obviously put-on upbeat tone to say, “People.”

JAMES GOES ON ABOUT HOWhe hates being poor, hates the endlessness of it — it’s like we were all born into these rubber bags we can’t punch our way out of. There’s no light in his life, he says. Not even in summer. Never was. He never should have hung with us, even in high school. He should have listened to his mother when, after we won state, she said we were bad influences, God rest her soul.

But that’s as close as he gets to talking about the death in the drum, and his carefulness about that promises me there was death in there hands down, even though I’ve been waiting for him to zip it so I could say that, for all we know, we just dumped off a crammed bunch of laundry that got moldy after the creek rose and flooded the woman’s house. There’s a million things other than a person that could be in a drum was what I convinced myself while James went off like that, but now that he’s done, that million feels like a million too many.

Then a single word won’t leave my mind— fingerprints . Bark turns on the radio and presses SCAN, but it keeps coming back to this station that plays lite songs for white folks. He lets it play, though, and the news comes on, and I listen, expecting the dude to report a dead body found in a drum even though I know that’s impossible this soon. After the news ends, Bark snaps off the radio, and I imagine he’s thinking the same thing I am. For the rest of our lives, we won’t-but-will want to hear any news on any radio or watch it on TV.

And I don’t need to ask him if this thought is on his mind a mile or so later, because a glance from him, as we roll toward the city, tells me. He’s remembering how, just a week ago, as he and I walked side by side to a hauling job in Brooklyn, we came upon that Madalynn from our past, willowy Madalynn — she looking even finer than she had when I was the lucky brother to spend nights with her. How she was now walking toward Bark and me without yet realizing he and I were who we were, she side by side with an all but grown-up kid who, from the looks of things, must have been her son, Jasir. How after we all four came upon one another, Bark stopped her by simply standing right in front of her, forcing her, with his closeness and stillness, to look up at him. How that left me smack in front of Jasir. How Jasir was obviously as sinewy as I’d been at his age. But, see, that’s not what got me as the four of us stood there. What got me was how Jasir folded his arms over his chest a moment before I did. How, right then, as he and I stood there on that sidewalk, he was holding himself in the exact same way I always had and still do, palms flat against ribs, no telltale fists, just a wiry young man maybe protecting or hugging himself or both. And as Bark and Madalynn went on with their small talk, Jasir and I stood like that — arms folded to make each of us look far too much like the other — though we both played this off as if we cared only to listen to Bark and Madalynn. But, hell, if I heard anything right then, it was only Jasir’s thoughts, and what he was thinking was: This serious dude is your daddy no doubt. Looks too much like you not to be. Did it with your mama and good.