Gargantuan

by Maggie Estep

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll find something.” He turned and went back outside. I was planning to make a run for it when I heard him padlock the door. I stood there, cold and scared, my hands throbbing from the rope. The dog was still in the room with me. We stared at each other. He was a cute dog. Mostly white. Shaggy hair. Some kind of mutt.

  He panted a little.

  I started eyeing the windows. They didn’t seem particularly secure and I was figuring I could kick them out pretty easily but, before I’d had time to get any further with this plan, my captor was back.

  “Here,” he said, setting a bucket on the floor.

  “Great,” I smirked. I had the sense that he felt bad about it, that, in spite of the fact that he was doing fairly unpleasant things to me, his heart wasn’t exactly in it. He untied my hands and I rubbed my wrists.

  “I’m gonna leave so you can use that in privacy,” he said, motioning to the bucket, “and then I’m gonna be boarding up these windows.”

  “Oh,” I said, deflated.

  He called to his dog, then went back out. I heard him locking me in. I stood hesitating, not particularly keen on peeing into a bucket. It seemed I had no choice though. I pulled my pants down and squatted. It was a relief.

  I’d barely rezipped my pants when the guy appeared outside the biggest window. He had a giant piece of plywood that he fitted over its exterior. Pretty soon he was pounding nails into the wall, imprisoning me.

  I took my pack of cigarettes out of my coat pocket. I lovingly lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Though I’d been trying to cut down, this didn’t seem like the time to be hard on myself.

  I could smell my own urine in the bucket, so I carried it to a far corner and covered it with a piece of moldy linoleum that I peeled off the floor. I thought about how miserable horses get when their stalls are dirty and for the first time I really understood. The guy pounded another sheet of plywood over the second window, but it wasn’t big enough to shut out all the light.

  I went over to look through the contents of the sagging cardboard box that was nudged against one of the walls. There were a few tattered children’s books as well as a hardcover copy of Balzac’s Père Goriot. I gratefully picked it out and opened it. The first third of the pages were missing but the rest was there and I felt ridiculously elated. As if finding two-thirds of a book I like was a sign that all would soon be well. I kept digging through the box and felt a flush of adrenaline as I found a rusted old carpet knife. Clearly the psycho wasn’t experienced at kidnapping or he’d have looked through this box. I put the carpet knife into my pants pocket and looked around. There was a shaft of light in one corner of the room, so I sat down on the cold floor, pulled my coat around me, lit another cigarette, and started reading Père Goriot. For a time I was actually transported to Balzac’s world. As I read, I kept picturing Balzac’s face as it looms out from the monument on his gravesite in Paris, which I’d visited once years earlier. Somehow, thinking of Balzac’s face made me feel better. For a while. Then I got really cold and scared and time refused to move.

  My captor doesn’t strike me as the person in charge of whatever is going on. Maybe the person in charge has already found Attila. I picture Attila’s face. His close-set vivid eyes. I think of how mean I was to him at the motel the other night. How suddenly everything in me had shut off as quickly as it had opened when we first met. I wonder at my own sanity. I pray that Attila is okay. I cry.

  BIG SAL

  32.

  If Wishes Were Horses

  I’m sitting in the living room with the TV on but I’m not seeing the screen, the living room, or anything other than a vision of Karen with her spandex workout pants rolled down over her shelf ass. I keep replaying the scene in my mind, but it’s not getting me worked up. It’s just making my heart break. Her note is there, on the coffee table, right where she left it. I’ve looked at it but I haven’t actually touched it. As soon as I saw it there, I knew what it would say. She’s gone. She’s taken Jake and they’ve split.

  “…for a few days or until I sort things out.”

  I have no idea where she is. Probably not at her mother’s since she can’t stand her mother. Karen’s got a couple of girlfriends but she’s always kept me away from them, like her relationship with the girlfriends is a thing I’m not allowed to sully. Not that it’s sexual or anything. Just that Karen likes her boundaries. She even likes the word boundaries and abuses it left and right. If I want to fuck her in the bathtub, there’s a boundary involved. My getting in the tub with her would violate the boundary of her being alone with her body. And maybe all these boundaries should have been a red flag. I don’t really know if you’re supposed to have quite so many boundaries in a marriage. In fact, right now, I don’t know fuck-all other than I got in late last night and felt like hell and now I feel even worse. It had been a rough day what with witnessing Layla’s death. Seeing that made me lose it a little and I’d gone off to think things through. I wanted to kill that jockey, but, eventually, I got to feeling bad about the poor jerk and went back to the track to try to keep an eye on him. I watched as he actually won another race. Afterward, I half expected that whoever had taken out Layla that morning would do the same to Attila. But no. I saw him go into the jocks room unmolested, then I saw him come out and I guess he was done riding for the day, he had his street clothes on. He went to the parking lot, got in a car I didn’t know he had, and drove off. I left it at that. Then I went to AA. Sat listening to the complaints of newcomers and the wisdoms of old crooked-nosed guys that have been sober forty years. Though I don’t usually go in for that kind of thing, I went to dinner with a bunch of people. Some Italian place on Thirteenth Street in Manhattan. We were in there half the night. Just shooting the shit the way a bunch of drunks do. Eating. Drinking Cokes and soda water. I didn’t tell anyone exactly what was going on with me, just said I had some troubles with the wife. One of the old-timers told me to just be patient. I figured maybe he was right. I’d give Karen some space to be crazy in and then maybe eventually she’d come around to liking me again.

  BY THE TIME I got home, it was late, almost one. Sometimes Karen stays up watching old movies but not this time. She was in the bedroom, apparently asleep. I tried shaking her a little. I wanted her to wake up and say good night. She didn’t move though.

  I slept in late. When I got up and went downstairs, I saw the note.

  I don’t know what she thought. What made her decide to leave when she did. Maybe she thought that I was out whoring all night.

  And now I have no idea where to find her or why she left and I’m staring at the TV screen, trying to think of something to do. Eventually, I decide to call Ruby. I dial her home number from memory but of course nothing’s ever that simple. She’s not there. I leave a message then go to the hall to get my cell phone from my coat pocket so I can look her cell number up. No luck on that one either.

  I glance outside and see that it’s started raining hammers and nails.

  For once, the weather agrees with my mood.

  I put my jacket on and go outside. It’s a lot warmer than it’s been and the rain is melting what’s left of the snow. It’s a damned mess out there.

  I get in the truck, start the engine, and put Beethoven on at full volume. The truck has become the only place that’s really mine anymore. As soon as Karen moved into my house eight years ago, she started redecorating and changing everything around and, over time, it got to be her house, not mine. Now I don’t feel that comfortable there.

  It’s Beethoven’s Third Symphony and after a while the relentless fucking cheerfulness of it starts making me see red. I take the CD out and listen to the rain pounding down on the truck. Eventually I start driving. I head toward the Woodland Motel. I don’t really expect to find Ruby there and, if he has any sense, Attila will have moved to Tahiti. But I don’t think of Attila as someone with a lot of sense.

  I knock at the door to room eight and nothing happens. I go to the motel
office, a tiny room with a metal and glass booth where presumably the front desk person sits, shielded from untoward clientele. The booth is empty though and there isn’t any kind of bell to ring. I call out a few times and eventually, an enormous white woman comes lumbering in. She’s so big she can barely squeeze through the door and has to turn to the side to fit. She has unnatural-looking black hair, some of it done up in little crooked braids, the rest hanging in greasy curtains. She’s wearing bright red lipstick and has drawn in dark black eyebrows the way crazy ladies always seem to, a sort of Joan Crawford look with the eyebrow pencil going way beyond where there could have been any actual eyebrow. She wouldn’t have been a good-looking woman under any circumstances but at her weight she’s downright scary. Plus, I figure, she’s got to be insane. No one in her right mind would do that eyebrow thing.

  “Yeah?” she snarls, showing me the brown stuff stuck between her front teeth.

  “Room eight, Attila Johnson, you know where he is?”

  “Ain’t nobody in room eight.”

  “There was yesterday. Short blond man?”

  “Oh yeah,” she says, looking a little animated now. “He’s gone. Guess you’d say he checked out.”

  She bursts into a horrible laugh that makes her body jiggle.

  “What?” I say, pulse accelerating.

  “He split, mister. Left his key in the room at least and, of course, his girlfriend had paid for the room ahead of time. But he’s gone.”

  “Oh,” I say, relieved. “All right, thanks.” I turn and walk away feeling her staring at my back.

  I DON’T KNOW why but now I’m determined to find Attila. I drive to the crummy little house where he rents the basement. I double park the truck and am about to walk down the three steps to his door when a woman’s voice calls out: “Can I help you with something?”

  I look to my right and notice a middle-aged woman standing in the doorway.

  “I’m trying to find Attila,” I say, forcing out a smile. She looks at me like I just crawled out of a sewage pipe.

  “That makes three of us,” she says, putting her hands on her hips. “I’m looking for him because I need money for the electric bill and that nice wife of his was by yesterday looking for him too.”

  I knew Attila had a wife, but I thought they’d long been separated. Or at least that’s what he’d told Ruby. I felt myself swelling with a protective feeling for Ruby.

  “Okay,” I shrug at the matron. “If you see him, tell him Sal was looking for him.”

  “Sal? That’s Italian?” she asks, cocking a judgmental Irish eyebrow at me.

  “Egyptian,” I say, turning my back to her.

  AS I PULL UP to the security gate at Belmont, I realize that the temporary parking sticker I’d been issued while chauffeuring Attila around expired yesterday. The security guard isn’t in a friendly mood and won’t let me through, so I ask her to call over to Henry Meyer’s barn. Violet answers the phone and, to my surprise, says she’ll come get me. As involved as Henry and Violet are with their horse lives, I wasn’t even sure they’d remember me by name, much less come fetch me. The security guard seems peeved, like she was hoping I wouldn’t be granted access. I pull my truck to the side and sit waiting for Violet. Ten minutes later, the good lady appears.

  Before I have time to stumble out any explanation of what I’m doing here or why, Violet gives me a cheerful hello and watches as the security guard issues me a pass and a parking permit.

  I offer to drive Violet back to her shedrow and she gratefully accepts, hopping into the passenger side of the truck. She’s wearing a huge red rain poncho but some of her hair has gotten soaked and is dripping onto the seat of my truck.

  “I’m sorry about the puddles,” Violet says.

  “Not a problem. Thanks for coming to get me. I guess you wonder what I’m doing here.”

  “Oh, I never wonder what anyone is doing at the racetrack.” She smiles.

  “Oh no?”

  “I fell in love with all racetracks the first time I set foot on one. I understand when someone suddenly wishes to be at the track.”

  “Oh,” I say, though I don’t feel like any deep love of the track has anything to do with my being here, don’t in fact know if I even like being at the track. I ask Violet if she’s heard from Ruby or Attila but she has not.

  “And certainly everyone is looking for Attila,” she says. “It has been quite a day.”

  “Oh yeah? What else happened?”

  “That cretin Nick Blackman was arrested is what.”

  “Nick Blackman? Who’s that?”

  “Crooked trainer. Ran his horses into the ground. He was evidently following orders from a Mafia person,” Violet says. “I’d long heard there were Mafia connections in racing but I’d really never seen evidence of such a thing.” She shakes her head. “I’d also heard rumors about Attila, but I chose not to believe them. It seems he put himself at risk by winning the race on Jack Valentine.”

  “Really?” I say, although that much I know to be true.

  “Oh yes. The FBI was here. As well as dozens of police officers. You didn’t think poor Layla’s death would simply get swept under the rug now, did you?”

  I tell her that no, I suppose I didn’t.

  “You go park the truck and then come to the office,” Violet instructs me. “I’ll tell you the rest.”

  I do as I’m told, dropping her at the barn then parking the truck. As I walk back to the shedrow, the rain starts coming down harder, punishing me. For what, I’m not sure.

  Five minutes later, Violet has installed me in the most comfortable chair in the office. I don’t know where Henry is but one of the grooms comes into the office and hands Violet a towel.

  “Thank you so much,” Violet says, bowing slightly to the guy. I can’t imagine grooms get bowed to all that much, but this guy seems used to it.

  Violet starts drying her long gray hair as she gives me details of the day’s events. I’m more than a little startled to hear her utter Uncle Davide’s name. I try keeping my face blank. I don’t want to have to explain to Violet how it is I know Davide Marinella, my friend Johnny, the bookie’s, uncle. Davide is known to everyone, including the FBI, as Uncle Davide.

  “It’s always the way with these Mafia people though,” she says. They’ve always got names. I’m sure this reprehensible Davide man is not in fact anyone’s uncle.”

  I shrug. The truth is, he’s uncle to a dozen or so of Johnny’s brothers, sisters, and cousins. According to Violet, Davide’s down-fall came in trying to fix that little race Jack Valentine ran in. All just to give his horse a chance. Stupid if you ask me. And surprising. I just wouldn’t have thought Uncle Davide to be stupid. Shows how much I know. Just about zero.

  “And, as a sad punctuation mark to these dark events, it appears Jack Valentine chipped a sesamoid bone. It will take him months to recover and we’re probably just going to have to pension him on a farm somewhere or sell him off as a pleasure horse prospect.”

  “I’m sorry, Violet, that’s a shame.”

  “It’s sad, yes,” she agrees, “but that’s horses.”

  I ask her a few questions about horse injuries, finding that in fact I am quite interested in all of this and on some level maybe racing really is getting in my blood. Which must be how I’ve somehow ended up here, sitting in a racing stable office at three P.M. on a Friday afternoon with rain coming down in rivers and a forty-something-year-old woman darting out of the office anytime someone walks by so she can try to cadge cigarettes. I don’t know if the entire backside of the track has been asked not to give Violet Kravitz cigarettes or if the collected lot of them have given up the habit, but no one seems to have a cigarette and Violet is getting increasingly fidgety. She doesn’t seem to have any actual work to do and we’ve tried and failed to reach Ruby several times, so finally I suggest I give her a ride to the store to get some cigarettes.

  “Certainly not, Sal.” She is indignant. “I am not going to buy
cigarettes. What do you take me for?”

  “Sorry, I just thought, well, I thought you wanted a cigarette.”

  “One. Not twenty.”

  “Okay. Sorry. I take it back.”

  This makes her laugh.

  “You still haven’t told me what’s brought you here on this unfortunate afternoon, Sal.”

  “Just needed to hear someone other than my head talking at me,” I shrug.

  “Well, should you need an ear, mine is in perfectly good working order,” she smiles.

  “Thank you, Violet, that’s nice of you,” I say, meaning it. “You need a ride somewhere or you staying here?”

  “Henry will be back soon. I’m going to wait for him here and do a little work,” she says, indicating a stack of paperwork on the desk.

  “All right then, Violet. Thank you for keeping me company.”

  “For tales of murder.”

  “Yes. All of it. Thank you,” I say, and I find myself bowing to her just as she did to the groom.

  I get back to the truck and put Beethoven’s Third back on because suddenly I can tolerate a little good cheer.

  I DRIVE OVER to Brooklyn and to the North Side, in the direction of Johnny’s candy store, wondering if it’ll even be open or what will be going on. I pull into a spot half a block away and am debating about whether or not I feel like going in there. For all I know, the feds have the place wired. I’m sitting staring ahead when I get the best idea I’ve had in a very long time. It occurs to me that my son Jake’s violin teacher, Marilyn Levy, lives right around here somewhere and that Jake happens to get his violin lessons at four on Fridays. It’s now four-forty-five. If Karen’s really trying to hide from me, she probably hasn’t taken Jake for his lesson. On the other hand, she’s so religious about my son having to learn to play the fucking violin, you never know. She might just figure I’d have forgotten about the lessons and their location.