Gargantuan (12 page)

I scooped her back into my arms and held her until I felt the stiffness leave her body.

S
omeday I may actually have to break down and learn how to drive. It’s getting frustrating to have to take car services every time I need to get somewhere beyond biking distance. It’s just that cars seem like bad magic to me. I don’t entirely understand how they work and it strikes me as nothing short of miraculous that people aren’t constantly careening into one another. I have trouble even being a passenger. I keep imagining trucks colliding with whatever car I’m in, sending me flailing, severing limbs, cracking my skull open. If I were actually driving the damned contraption, I would probably go into cardiac arrest. I realize it’s profoundly un-American of me not to drive. But I never felt profoundly American to begin with. I’m from Brooklyn.

“The car service is coming in twenty minutes,” Attila calls out from the living room.

“Okay,” I say, but nothing is okay right now. At first, the idea of going to a motel seemed adventurous in spite of the fact that we’re doing it to safeguard Attila from harm. Then, when Attila mentioned the motel in Sheepshead Bay that happens to be the place where Ed and I first slept together, it rattled me. I tried to get over it. I’m not, after all, doing anything wrong. I just don’t need or want reasons to think about Ed.

I start throwing clothes in a weekend bag, then trap the cats in the bedroom as I go into the hallway closet to get the carriers out. Cats are not travel enthusiasts and the sight of their carriers usually sends them darting under the furniture.

“You okay?” Attila asks. He’s sitting on the couch, looking at me.

“Yeah. Cats hate travel.” I try attributing what must be my obvious low mood to worry over the cats.

Attila’s not really buying it. “You don’t have to do this, Ruby. You can leave town and forget you ever met me,” he tells me, opening his vivid eyes wide.

“I doubt that very much,” I say, putting the carriers down and walking over to him. He reaches up, takes my left hand, and softly kisses it. “Good,” he says.

We look at each other for a long moment and I feel him reaching a place in me, a savage place filled with crippling lust and tenderness.

“I’ve got to finish organizing stuff,” I say after a few moments of thick silence.

Attila nods.

I move into the kitchen where I pack up cans of Pet Guard and two catnip mice. I also bring my tiny portable coffeemaker. It’s dangerous for me to leave home without it.

A few minutes later, I’ve loaded the reluctant cats into their carriers and Attila hoists Stinky while I take Lulu and my overnight bag.

THE WOODLAND MOTEL
falls about twenty stars short of five. In fact, it’s barely a half step up from a hooker hotel. It’s a long tan
vinyl-sided building gazing out over an ill-paved parking lot that butts up against the edge of bustling Linden Boulevard. Some of the room numbers are peeling off the doors and the two cars in the parking lot have seen better decades. East New York isn’t known for its swank accommodations but the one thing this dump has to recommend it is that it’s about halfway between Coney Island and the racetrack.

Attila pays the driver, then unloads the cats as I walk into the office to check in. There’s a large woman sitting behind a bulletproof window. She’s avidly reading
TV Guide
and doesn’t bother to look up when I walk in.

“Hi,” I say loudly, wondering if she can hear me behind the partition.

She frowns, knotting a pair of highly unnatural-looking black eyebrows before finally looking up. Her eyes are tiny and dark.

She lifts her multiple chins at me which I take to mean “what do you want?”

“I called earlier, Ruby Murphy?”

She sneers slightly, asks for payment and, after I’ve given her my forty-nine bucks, hands me a key.

“Thank you.” I smile at her. She frowns again and goes back to the
TV Guide
.

Attila is waiting outside, obviously lost in thought. He’s staring down at his ungloved hands, picking at one of his cuticles. He doesn’t seem to register that I’m here until I’m two inches in front of him.

“Where do we go?” he asks, looking up abruptly.

“Room eight,” I tell him, taking Lulu’s carrier.

Room eight is decorated in a disturbing brown. The pressed-wood dresser is brown. The thin bedspread is brown and the dirty wall-to-wall carpeting may have once been tan but is now brown.

As Attila comments on what a very brown room this is, my entire life suddenly flashes in front of my eyes. I begin wondering exactly how all my highs and lows and in betweens have brought me here. I can’t say I ever had a vast plan. I never sat down and mapped
out where I wanted it all to go. If I’ve ever had any calling in life it was probably to run away with a small traveling circus. But by the time I was old enough to do such a thing, circuses were few and far between. So I drifted. Then settled at Coney Island and took up piano. I get a lot out of both my home and my instrument, but sometimes I wish I’d made a plan. Problem is, I don’t have an obsession the way Attila does. I want a horse pretty badly and sometimes I think I should go work at the track and get my fill of horses, but I don’t know enough to be anything more than a hotwalker and that, I know from experience, is a pretty difficult and incredibly low-paying job. So here I am. In a brown room with an intensely appealing but disturbed jockey with a price tag on his head.

“Are you feeling low? Is this too depressing?” Attila is looking at me intently.

“It’s fine,” I lie. “Let me just get the cats settled.”

I reach down and open Stinky’s and Lulu’s carriers. Their eyes are huge as they emerge. Lulu immediately darts under the bed while Stinky glances around, looks disgusted, and lets out a demanding meow. I get a dish from my bag and fill it with water from the bathroom sink. All the while, Attila sits on the bed, staring ahead.

I go over and put my hands on his shoulders. He looks impossibly sad. I can’t say I feel particularly cheerful myself. “I think I need a nap,” I tell him.

“It’s not that late.”

“I know. I’m tired though.”

He frowns slightly. The truth is I just need to shut the world out and I suppose Attila knows this. I grab my toothbrush and face cream from my bag and go into the bathroom. At least the bathroom isn’t brown. I stay in there awhile. I brush my teeth even though I haven’t eaten anything in a long time and I’m starting to feel starved. When I was growing up, both my mother and father were obsessed with fat. They never carried an extra ounce of fat and lived in fear of doing so. Unlike Attila, they didn’t have professions
that demanded fatless bodies. They just didn’t like fat. As a result, both my sister, Chloe, and I had phases of veering toward anorexia. We’d freak out if we saw anything resembling fat on ourselves. We were always hungry and avoided bread, sweets, and pasta like the plague. Then one day I realized I just wasn’t fat and I ate again. I have some meat on my ass but it belongs there. Chloe remains underweight.

I stand at the sink staring at myself. My face looks a little hollow and my eyes seem huge. I look frightened and hungry. I suppose I am both.

I come back out of the bathroom and find Attila lying on the bed reading
The Thief’s Journal
by Jean Genet. He picked it off my shelf one day and immediately became engrossed. The guy can read. In my time, I’ve associated with some distinct nonreaders but Attila’s not one of them. He rips through books about three times as quickly as I do. I lie down next to him.

“I’m going to nap now,” I inform him.

He looks up from his book and leans over to kiss me lightly. I kiss him back, then curl onto my side and close my eyes. I’m so weary I feel like I’m encased in cement. Stinky jumps up on the bed and comes to lie near my chest. I bury my nose in the fur of his neck and start counting horses, hoping to lull myself to sleep.

I
was in Clove’s stall, squatting down near the mare’s hind end, feeling for heat in her legs. She’d worked her five furlongs in a thudding minute and six seconds and had galloped out lethargically. This wasn’t normal. Even for an old claiming mare like her. I ran my hands down her cannon bone, then cupped her fetlock, expecting to feel a little filling or at least some heat. Nothing. I went over each leg. They were all fine.

Throughout my little inspection, Clove kept craning her neck to look at me. She seemed politely bewildered, happy for the attention but not sure why it was being lavished upon her.

“Why’d you work so dull, huh?” I asked the mare as I stood up and patted her neck.

Her ears shot forward and her eyes tried to tell me something but I couldn’t for the life of me guess what. I started scratching her cheek. Her eyes drooped shut.

“What’s the matter with Clove?” I heard a voice say. I turned around to find Lucinda, the exercise rider I’d hired to work my three horses for the duration of the Gulfstream meet, or until I finished up this particular investigation for the Bureau—whichever came first. As far as Lucinda knew, I was just some horse-loving guy who’d had an early midlife crisis and gotten a notion to train racehorses—and wasn’t really up to snuff just yet—which made Lucinda and me a good match. She’d been an A list exercise rider on the New York circuit but a serious accident had taken her nerve. She’d stopped
riding and had gone home to North Carolina. But, like any true horse person, Lucinda had gotten to missing the brutal hours, excruciating physical regime, and low pay of racetrack life. She’d come down to Gulfstream and some of the lesser trainers gave her a few horses to work each morning. She rode well. Had nice, quiet hands. Everyone said she wasn’t the same rider she’d been a year earlier, but I hadn’t known her then and she seemed to ride my horses just fine. I wasn’t blaming her for Clove’s dull work this morning.

“Oh, hi,” I said, smiling at the girl. “I can’t find anything wrong with her. Guess she was just feeling lazy. What did she feel like to you?”

“Hard to say,” Lucinda shrugged. “She wasn’t rank or anything. Seemed like she was into working. Just didn’t have much in the tank. You really gonna race her?” Lucinda tilted her head and squinted at me.

“Yeah, I’ve got to,” I said simply.

“You broke?” she asked.

“Just about,” I said. I was running my operation with money the Bureau had shelled out but it was a point of honor: I wanted to make money, not lose it.

“Then drop her down to ten thousand,” Lucinda said. “Either she’ll get claimed or at least maybe earn a little purse money.”

“Nah, I like her. I have hopes for her.”

Lucinda rolled her eyes at me but smiled a little, which was nice. She was a tense girl. Intelligent, even pretty, but tense, as if endlessly on the verge of snapping. I’d almost never seen her smile, so I was pleased to have provided amusement—even if it was at the expense of my mare.

“You have hope based on what?” Lucinda said. “The fact that she can outrun some goats?”

I’d told Lucinda how I’d found Clove: living in a tiny paddock on a goat farm outside Wellington, Florida. At that point I had just arrived in Florida, had claimed one horse, Karma Police, out of a race at Calder Racecourse and was hunting around for two more. On the afternoon in question, I’d been heading to Riggs Farm, a
small breeding and layup operation where there were a few older racehorses for sale. I was hoping to pick out two. I was driving to the farm slowly, taking back roads. I hadn’t been down here long and was surprised at how rural and lush the area was. It was one of those days when the world, and particularly this little patch of Florida, looked lovely. The sky was cloudless, the temperature hovering just above seventy. I passed a wide flat pasture filled with goats. I’d never seen so many goats in one place and I slowed the car down even more. Which is how I noticed the sign. A handwritten sign duct taped to a railroad tie at the end of the goat farm’s driveway: “Racehorse for Sale.” Generally, you didn’t go looking for racehorses at goat farms but what the hell. I pulled into the farm’s driveway. There was a series of sheds and, off to the side, a small yellow ranch-style house.

I parked the car and got out. No one came to greet me so I walked toward one of the sheds. Suddenly, a woman with a pitchfork materialized from I’m not sure where.

“You Sonny Boy?” she asked. She was holding the pitchfork like a weapon.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “My name’s Sam Riverman. I noticed your sign about that horse for sale.”

“Huh?” She dug her fingers into the pitchfork as if it were my flesh.

“You have a sign saying you’ve got a racehorse for sale.”

“Racehorse?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, motioning to the road where the sign was.

“Oh that. That’s Katrina’s sign.”

I waited for an explanation but none seemed forthcoming. Thankfully, a young woman emerged from the house and walked toward us. She was a sturdy, no-nonsense kind of woman walking quickly on short powerful legs.