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.
9
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