Gargantuan (14 page)

“Who’s that?” I asked her.

“Old Bill,” she said. “Hotwalker. Used to be an owner. His business went under and his wife left him. He showed up on the backside one morning going from barn to barn till he found someone who would hire him to walk hots. He was sixty-five then and this was a while back. Guy doesn’t have any sense about horses. He’s been stepped on and pinned against more walls than anyone I know, but he’s never let a horse get hurt or get away from him.”

I nodded in silent appreciation of Old Bill.

All three of my horses had their heads poking over their stall guards as they stared at me intently, ears forward, all of them too well mannered to bite at the air or kick the sides of their stalls.

“You got yourself three very polite horses,” Lucinda remarked.

“Yup. Figured if I’m gonna struggle along trying to keep claimers sound and feeling good, I might as well get some with nice manners.”

She laughed. She was sweet.

I gave the horses their dinner as Lucinda refilled their hay nets.

“I guess that’s it,” I said. “I’m gonna go home and do some paperwork.”

Lucinda stared at me with those strange blue eyes of hers. It made me nervous.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. She nodded but didn’t move. “Okay?”

“Sure,” she said. She looked sad.

I turned and walked very quickly to the lot where I had my Honda parked. The shots of whiskey had already worn off and left a headache in their wake.

As soon as I got inside the car, I turned my cell phone on, hoping to find a message from Ruby. There wasn’t one. The boss had called wanting a progress report. My cousin Erica had left a bubbly message asking me to call. Erica still lived in the old neighborhood on Long Island and periodically felt it her duty to call and bring me up to speed on the incredibly tedious neighborhood gossip, hoping this would make me divulge fascinating facts about cases I was working on. The girl couldn’t get it through her head that what I did for a living was basically incredibly fucking tedious.

I got back to the unattractive complex where I rented a small apartment. Because this is Florida, even a low-rent complex like mine has a swimming pool, and this particular pool is not known to attract any great beauties. Willow Clark, the sun-ravaged matron who spends 90 percent of her life lingering by the pool in a string bikini that does nothing to hold back her tides of flesh, was in her spot and, as I came by, lifted extravagant sunglasses and eyed me.

“Hi, Sammy,” she said, giving a little wave.

“Mrs. Clark,” I said, shoving the key in my lock and retreating into my apartment.

Cat came and rubbed her tiger-striped body against my legs. I picked her up, scratched under her chin, and pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to see if a message from Ruby had miraculously appeared. It had not.

I opened a can of food for Cat and poured myself a finger of whiskey. I drank it down quickly, trying to kill the headache. I made a few notes on my pad about Roderick even though I really hadn’t learned anything interesting. Eventually, I put a PJ Harvey CD on my portable machine. I can’t say it made me feel much better but at least it didn’t hurt.

I
’d left Oklahoma three days after I’d taken care of business with the dirtbags that had abused Sandman’s chestnut mare. It had been a big to-do in the town. The lady hadn’t been lying when she’d told Sandman that her brother was the sheriff. And the sheriff didn’t take lightly to someone blowing his sister’s head off. They immediately launched a big investigation. Apparently though, the dirtbags hadn’t told the sheriff about me and Sandman coming to take the mare back from them. The cops only paid Sandman a quick visit asking if he knew what had happened to the horse he’d sold those people. Sandman told them the lady lost interest and just gave the horse back. I guess that kind of thing happened often enough and Sandman was a trusted member of the community and so that was that.

As soon as the cops left, Sandman told me to split town and never show my face again. He never came out and said he knew I did those people in, but of course he did know. It was his shotgun that had done it and Sandman must have noticed it missing. I’d carefully wiped it down and taken it apart and put most of it in Dirt Stick Pond and the rest in Miller’s Pond.

I packed my few items of clothing. I put Crow, the dog I’d rescued from the dirtbags, into the Chevy and we drove off.

I drove east.

I was not too far from Baltimore when I ran out of money. I got a job in a box factory. At night, I slept in the car with Crow. They
wouldn’t let me bring Crow in to work though so I didn’t last that long there. I made my way to Laurel Park Racetrack and, after making a nuisance of myself awhile, finally found a lady trainer named Nancy Cooley who gave me a job walking horses off after their morning exercise. I moved into one of the dorms with eight other grooms and hotwalkers. Crow had to sleep outside but I built him a little shed and put my old sweater in it for bedding. Crow was happy. He’d put on some weight and his white coat was shiny and healthy. He’d been timid for a few weeks after I’d first gotten him but already he was coming out of his shell and people liked him. Things were okay for both of us.

Several months passed. Then a year.

I got promoted to groom and Nancy even had me rubbing a nice little stakes filly named Glassy Jane. She was a pretty chestnut filly, very calm and affectionate and basically a joy to look after. I still thought about Darwin though.

Finally, one day about a year and a half after I’d left Oklahoma, I found what I was looking for scouring the results charts in the
Daily Racing Form
. A three-year-old colt named Darwin’s Hiccup had run second in a maiden race up at Aqueduct, in New York. My horse had just been named Darwin. None of this Hiccup business. But maybe there’d already been a racehorse named Darwin and the Jockey Club made them come up with another name. I dunno. They’d registered the little guy as Darwin’s Hiccup. It was definitely him though. Listed his dam as Bubbledance and she was the one Sandman had told me about. The mare that had won a stakes race in New York.

The trainer for Darwin’s Hiccup was a guy named Robert Cardinal. Right away, I started asking folks around Laurel what they knew about the guy. At first no one had heard of him, but then it turned out that my very own boss had actually been his assistant for a few months a long time ago.

“He’s a good-hearted guy but he’s had some shitty luck lately,” Nancy Cooley told me in that no-nonsense way she had. “How’d you hear about him, Ben? He bringing a string down to Laurel? You
gonna turn your back on me and go work for Cardinal?” She was teasing me I guess. She was a nice woman. Always paid me on time and never poked into my business.

“No, nothing like that, Miss Cooley just he’s training a colt I’m interested in.”

“You’re interested in a colt? What, to buy? You been holding out on me, Nester? You some trust fund kid slumming on the back-stretch?”

She was laughing. Her blue eyes were sparkling and her choppy hair was sticking up more than usual, like it was laughing too. She was making me nervous though. I didn’t want to tell her the story about Darwin and me since it would lead back to Sandman and Oklahoma and, potentially, my having killed those people.

“No,” I said, “I’ve just been trying to pick out horses to follow and that’s one that I decided to follow. I’m just trying to learn.”

She grinned at me. Then patted me on the arm and bustled on down the shedrow.

I found the phone number for Aqueduct and called up asking for Robert Cardinal’s barn. A mean-sounding woman told me he was stabled at Belmont. I called there and actually got Robert Cardinal on the phone. When I offered my services as a hotwalker, he gruffly told me he had all the hotwalkers he needed. I wasn’t gonna let that set me back though.

The next day, I went into Nancy’s office. She was hunched over a condition book, trying to find the right race for a problematic two-year-old she’d just been given to train. Her hair was drooping a little and she looked tired.

“Miss Cooley?” I said, because she hadn’t looked up even though she must have sensed me standing there.

“Oh, Ben, hello,” she said.

“I’m sorry but I’ve got to give my notice. I’m gonna go up to New York. To Belmont,” I said, feeling sort of frightened but excited too.

“Oh? You got an offer up there?”

“Nah. Just always wanted to see New York.”

Nancy Cooley frowned a little.

“It’s a little tougher up there, Ben, you know. You’re a good worker and I’d recommend you to anyone who asked but you might have a hard time getting hired.”

“I know,” I said, “but I’m gonna take my chances. I appreciate all you’ve done for me. I don’t want you to think I don’t. And I feel bad about leaving Glassy Jane.”

“She’ll miss you. I will too,” Nancy Cooley said.

I felt a little embarrassed. I hadn’t known she cared either way. Sure, I was good with the horses but so were plenty of people.

“That’s nice of you to say, Miss Cooley.”

She looked at me for a few moments then asked when I wanted to leave. I told her as soon as she could spare me. She shrugged and told me to give her a few days.

They were a long few days. But, on the fourth day, she told me I could go. She’d gotten Mary, a young girl just out of high school, to take over the horses I was rubbing. I packed up my clothes and waited till no one was around. I’d never said good-bye to anyone other than my mother and I didn’t feel like starting. Even with the horses. Even Glassy Jane. She’d be fine and somewhere in her she’d know I was thinking about her. Crow and I walked to the parking lot where I had the Chevy parked and got in and started heading north.

As I got farther and farther up the New Jersey Turnpike things got uglier. Meadows and fields gave way to factories and swamps. There was more traffic than I’d ever seen in my life and the sky was filled with stinking smoke. Crow didn’t seem to like it. He’d curled up in a tight ball and had long stopped looking out the window.

Eventually, we were in a line of traffic waiting to go through the Lincoln Tunnel and I could see the skyline. It looked like nothing I’d ever seen, even though I had seen it in pictures.

Once we were in the city, I didn’t really know what to do. There was traffic and noise everywhere and people kept getting in the way of the car. Crow was sitting up again now, looking out, and he seemed as baffled as me.

We ended up sleeping in the car, in an outdoor lot. You weren’t supposed to sleep in your car but I paid the guy an extra ten bucks and he let me stay there. I didn’t sleep much though. Woke up before dawn with my teeth feeling mossy and my stomach rumbling. I locked Crow in and went around trying to find a working pay phone. I needed to call Belmont to get directions. Originally I’d thought I’d wander around Manhattan a little but now that I was here, I just wanted to get out to the track. Only I didn’t know where it was.

All the phones I tried were broken. Some of them had no dial tone, others didn’t even have a phone, just a silver cable with wires dangling like veins from a severed neck. I finally found a working phone inside a tiny grocery store. I dialed the number I had for Belmont but there wasn’t any answer. I tried three or four times and I could feel the guy at the counter staring holes in my back. I turned around and looked at him. He was a round, dark-skinned man drinking a beer even though it was barely past dawn.

“You know the address of Belmont Racetrack?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I was insane and told me to get out of his store.

The sun had come now, streaking the sky violent pink against the cold gray of the city. I went into a bagel store and bought bagels for Crow and me. Cream cheese on his, jelly on mine.

I went back to the car and the dog and I ate in silence, staring out at the weird world beyond the car windows. A pack of dark-skinned kids wandered into the parking lot and started looking at the cars. They were mostly boys but there was one girl who seemed like the leader. She was wearing a red down vest and skintight red pants that barely contained her body. She had a black slinky ponytail down to her ass and huge gold hoop earrings that danced when she walked. She shimmered toward my Chevy. I could see her skinny eyebrows knitting together, wondering what I was doing sitting in my car in a parking lot like that. She came to stand right in front of the car and leaned her forearms on
the hood and grinned at me. Crow was growling low in his throat. The girl and I stared at each other like that and then she came around to my door and motioned for me to roll down the window.

“Whatchudoin’ in there?” she said, jumbling her words together so fast it took me a minute to figure out what she’d said.

“I was sleeping. Now I just ate. Me and the dog,” I said, motioning at Crow.

Crow had stopped his low growl and was just staring at her.

“Whereyoufrom?” she said with the words all mashed together.

“Oklahoma,” I said and then wanted to kick myself because I’d decided I was never going to tell anyone where I was from lest it lead me to trouble.