Gargantuan (4 page)

“I gotta go in the water, I’m freezing my dick off,” I announced to Ruby—then immediately felt funny for saying it because Ruby is, after all, a lady. I’ve heard some foul phrases come out of her mouth and I’ve always felt at home with her the way you usually only do with a guy, but all the same, she’s a lady.

She held my bag of clothes for me as I jogged ahead to the water. I stopped and took my boots off right at the edge, just where the snow ended and the water started. I ran in until I was waist high, dove under for a few screaming seconds, then raced back out.

“Good?” Ruby asked, handing me my bag.

“Very.” I pulled my towel out and wrapped it around my waist. Took my bathing suit off like that, right there on the beach, with just the towel for cover. I started packing on layers of clothing. Ruby just kept gazing out toward Brighton.

“Coffee?” I asked her once I had my clothes on.

“Nah, gotta wait for Attila to get back,” she said and, right on cue, a small blond man came running toward us. With him was a black guy, the two running in tandem, Attila’s head barely chest high to the black guy.

Attila stopped in front of Ruby. His eyes were huge and he looked insane. He was also soaking wet. The black guy stopped a few feet back, looking a little confused. I realized the black guy was the guy Ruby calls Rite of Spring Man, a sort of lunatic job that walks around Coney with a boom box on his shoulder blaring classical music.

“Someone just tried to kill me,” the jockey announced.

“What?” Ruby frowned, like she was hearing a bad joke.

“This guy saved my life,” Attila indicated Rite of Spring Man. “Somebody was trying to drown me.”

Attila’s teeth were chattering and his lips were turning almost as blue as his eyes.

This was all a little too much for me. I’d come out here to have
a quick dip, hadn’t even planned on stopping by to see if Ruby was around. Was just going to cool my head off a little then go home and see what the wife had concocted for dinner because in eight years of being married to the girl, I still sometimes go home full of hope. About dinner being palatable, about her liking me a little.

Ruby had covered the jockey in her fake fur coat and was saying something to Rite of Spring Man, who didn’t look particularly shaken about any of this and was just standing there looking mildly baffled under the steel-gray sky. I thought about just quietly walking away and heading back to my truck parked there in the lot near the Cyclone roller coaster. But at one point Ruby put her hand on my arm, letting me know she wanted me around. So I stayed.

I walked with Ruby and the jockey back to Ruby’s place, witnessing an argument between the two about calling the cops. Ruby couldn’t understand why Attila wouldn’t let her call them. Attila, whose sketchy past was mapped out on his face, was getting tenser by the minute and the veins on his neck were turning into ropes.

“I just don’t want to,” he was telling Ruby. “This is something
I’ve
got to take care of.” The jockey was talking with his hands, more like an Italian than whatever it was he was.

“Sal?” Ruby looked to me for support.

We were in her place by now, had come up the stairs, passed by her neighbor Ramirez’s open front door and seen him, as usual, sitting at his kitchen table, staring down into a cup of coffee. Ramirez had nodded at us as we’d gone ahead into Ruby’s.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to the girl, “I take it your man’s got his reasons for not wanting the cops involved.”

“Well, what are they?” Ruby asked Attila. She looked angry. I noticed she was pretty when she was angry. It had never been like that with Ruby and me, she’d never radiated even the slightest bit of sexual something around me and, in return, I’d kept my engine tuned down. I’m faithful to my wife most of the time anyway, straying occasionally when she goes on a particularly long jag of not wanting me inside her—she’s an adult student at Hunter College taking women’s studies classes and sometimes she gets notions
about not wanting a man inside her—but it’s not like I’ve ever strayed emotionally. And Ruby’s not my type anyway. I like my wife’s flaming hair, her big, well-made chest and her ass that sticks out like a shelf a man can rest his troubles on. Ruby is too small and sort of reminds me of a ferret.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Attila told Ruby as he shot a dirty look in my direction.

“I want Sal here. He can help,” Ruby said, though why she thought this I couldn’t tell you. I guess she had the idea that between my being a Teamster and my Italian family going back a lot of generations in Brooklyn, maybe I knew how certain things worked. Which wasn’t entirely off the mark. Though what with my back problems and being out on Disability for a while and my endless struggle trying not to take the Percocets the doctors had prescribed, it’s not like I was in the prime of my powers.

“So what’s up?” I asked Attila now. “Somebody got a hit out on you?” I was joking, but the way the guy’s bright blue eyes went dark, I saw I’d hit the jackpot. Oh boy.

“Attila?” Ruby’s head snapped toward him.

“I dunno,” Attila shrugged. “I didn’t think it was a real concern.”

“Didn’t think
what
was a real concern?” Ruby’s face was knotting up.

“Well, there was a threat,” Attila said, giving me another dirty look. He wanted me gone but he wasn’t gonna come out and insist.

“I didn’t think drowning was an approved method of offing someone though,” the jockey added, trying to be funny.

Neither Ruby nor I laughed.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on now?” Ruby said. She had a small red splotch in the middle of each pale cheek—her anger, showing itself like that in two tiny patches. My wife, she gets pissed off, her whole body turns bright red to match her hair.

“There’s a lot going on,” Attila said, hunching forward on Ruby’s green couch. “I’ve done some questionable things.”

“Like what?” she asked sharply.

“It’s a long story, Ruby.” Attila sounded very sad. “You know I haven’t had an easy time trying to make it as a rider. Some folks offered me a nice chunk of change to do some things I didn’t really want to do.” He fell silent, resting his palms on his small knees.

“You have to tell me what you’re talking about,” Ruby said, in a voice that made the jockey’s sad eyes focus on her. We both knew she meant business.

“Nothing that bad,” he sighed. “I held some horses back in a few races. Stuff like that,” he said. “Now I don’t wanna do it anymore. But it’s hard to get out once you’ve gone that route.”

“Oh,” she said, frowning. “So what’s wrong with calling the cops?”

“I call the cops, they call the Feds and the New York Racing Association, etcetera… I get my license revoked. I never ride again. I go back to a life of shit.”

I didn’t know what the guy had done before becoming an aging apprentice jockey and I had a feeling Ruby didn’t know many details either.

Still, for some reason, this little guy with his bright blue eyes was growing on me. Or maybe I just wanted to help out. I offered my services.

“You want, I could watch your back,” I said.

“Huh?” Both Attila and Ruby looked at me, not knowing what I was talking about.

“I could look out for you. I’m out on Disability right now. My wife’s never home and my kid’s off at school most of the day. I don’t watch my ass I’m gonna lie on the couch all day popping Percocet. I could come with you to the track. Keep an eye on you.”

“It’s not just at the track. They seem to know my every move,” the jockey said.

“Well,” I said, “I can’t be with you twenty-four/seven but just about. My wife hates me this week and my kid ain’t home much. Maybe if I made myself scarce for a couple of weeks I’d get appreciated more.”

Attila looked at me and blinked. So did Ruby.

It took a little more persuading and, to tell the truth, I don’t know what I was thinking, why I was so gung ho on the whole idea, but after a while, Attila agreed to it.

Ruby went in the kitchen to tend to those cats of hers and Attila and I stayed in the living room, talking about it all, him telling me the way his schedule worked each day. He seemed a little suspicious of my motivation for doing this. I would have been too. But it was just something I wanted to do. I couldn’t have explained it at gunpoint.

Eventually, I got up to go. I told them I was stopping next door at Ramirez’s place to ask him to keep his eyes open. The guy’s a piece of work. Never quite got over his tour in ’Nam. Which is to say, all these years later, he’s one alert and paranoid motherfucker. Couldn’t hurt to have him keeping an ear out.

After me and Ramirez shot the shit awhile, him telling me he was thinking of asking his girl Elsie to marry him, me telling him, What the hell, why not? And then asking him to keep an eye on Ruby, I went home.

Karen, my wife, was in the kitchen, doing terrible things to our dinner. Jake was in his room, doing his homework. The kid is studious. Makes me proud. I didn’t interrupt him, just cracked his door a little, and saw him hunched over his desk, already looking like some professor at age seven. I smiled to myself. Then went to watch what my wife was doing to that poor meat loaf.

I
was sinking into the middle of Ruby’s exhausted couch, turning my entire life over in my mind. Ruby was at her piano, sitting a little hunched, her small, not-so-graceful hands pulling beauty from the yellowed ivory keys. She was playing Bach. Her favorite. Sometimes I couldn’t distinguish Beethoven from Haydn from Schubert. But when she played Bach, I knew it.

The female cat came over and bumped her head against my foot repeatedly, as if trying to shake an idea loose inside her tiny head. My own head was full of images. The cold beautiful freedom of running on the empty beach. Nothing ahead but snow, sand, and horizon. Then I’d sensed rather than seen someone behind me. Before I’d had time to think, I was being wrestled to the ground, face-first. I struggled and yelled as I was dragged into the icy water. I took in huge involuntary gulps of cold salty sea and felt my head freezing as someone held it under the surface. I was kicking but I could feel myself weakening. I was on the verge of blacking out when suddenly my attacker let go. I pulled my head out of the water and saw a seagull dive-bombing a spot just in front of me. For a moment I thought the gull had somehow saved me. Then I saw a man standing on the beach, looking at me. I wasn’t sure if he was the one who had just been trying to drown me. I got to my feet and stood there, knee-deep in the water, looking at the tall black man.

“You okay, mister?” the man asked me.

“Did you just try to drown me?” I asked, feeling ridiculous, struggling out of the surf.

“Nope. That guy did,” he said, motioning to the right. I looked and saw a figure running away. “I was just walking along here and saw something funny going on,” he continued. “I yelled out, asking what the guy was doing and then he stopped doing it and ran off.”

“What’d he look like?” I asked.

“Big white guy,” the man shrugged.

It didn’t mean anything to me. I knew a lot of big white guys that might have a reason to hurt me.

“What color hair?” I asked the man who’d just saved my life.

“Had a hat on,” the man said. “You gonna be all right?”

I could tell the guy wanted to get going. He had done his good deed. I was shaken though and it showed. He offered to accompany me a ways and I didn’t say no. We jogged together back toward Coney where Ruby was waiting for me.

I hated to see the pinched look on her face and the way her gray eyes turned dark. She was standing with a big guy who looked Italian. I was wary for a minute, but he had a nice face. Right away they both seemed to know I was holding out on her, and I knew the time had come to tell her. Some of it at least. I was already regretting how my problems could cloud up what had, so far, been simple.

Ruby wrapped me in her red coat and wanted to call the cops. As for my savior, after nodding at Ruby, he just took off. I never even found out his name.

A number of hours had passed now and all the fire I’d felt in my body earlier was long gone. In its place was a fear that I could taste at the back of my mouth, like someone had put a gun barrel in my throat and left it there to rust.

RUBY STOPPED PLAYING
piano and turned to me. “Are you hungry?” she asked, frowning a little, like thoughts of my possible hunger had suddenly invaded and disturbed her.

“Always,” I said.

“Let me rephrase that. Will you eat something?”

“Something, yeah. What do we have?” I asked, feeling awkward the moment the words left my lips, thinking that the
we
and its implication of lasting coupledom was grossly forward of me.

Ruby either didn’t notice or wasn’t jarred by it. She got up from the piano bench. “Let’s see,” she said, heading into the kitchen.

I wrestled myself from the couch and followed her.

“I’m a miserable failure at food procurement,” she said, after opening and closing the kitchen cabinets a few times. She looked dejected and vastly appealing. She was wearing dark blue jeans and a long-sleeved red T-shirt that clung to her chest.