Gargantuan (29 page)

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. He’s a rider though, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s a rider. And the paramour of our Miss Murphy though I had the distinct feeling the liaison wasn’t long for this world. But now I’m gossiping with a complete stranger. I hope you won’t think poorly of me.”

“No,” I say, feeling sick.

“You look dejected. Have I blundered horribly? Are you a suitor of Ruby’s?”

“Oh… I don’t know,” I say, making a helpless gesture.

“I’m a motor mouth,” Violet Kravitz says, visibly shaken. “I’ve blundered.”

“It’s really all right,” I say, trying to silence the woman before she divulges more unwanted information. “I should get going, it was nice to meet you.”

“Likewise, Sam Riverman, and if I do see Ruby I’ll certainly tell her you were asking after her.”

I nod, smile anemically, and walk away.

I go back to the parking lot and sit in the nondescript compact car for several long minutes. I feel paralyzed by my confirmed suspicions. I have been gone for months and I’m particularly lousy at communicating my feelings so I suppose it’s only fair that Ruby has taken up with someone. All the same, I feel kicked, and particularly incensed to learn she’s been sleeping with a crooked jockey with a hit out on him.

I drive back to the motel. I let myself in and find Cat sleeping in the middle of the bed, not even deigning to open an eye.

I sit down in an uncomfortable brown chair and stare at the dirty carpet.

A
t first, I was so scared I was sure I was having a heart attack. My chest felt tight and I couldn’t breathe. I kept hoping that we’d pass by someone I knew as we walked from the clubhouse into the parking lot. It didn’t happen though and I asked him if he was sure he had the right girl. After all, he hadn’t called me by name. He ignored the question. The way Attila’s world had been crumbling, I’d been half expecting something like this to happen, but I wasn’t sure what purpose my being kidnapped would serve.

When we reached the guy’s car he unceremoniously shoved me into the backseat. There was a white dog in the car and the animal started licking me, much to my captor’s chagrin. The guy scowled at the dog, sharply told him to get in the front seat, then started tying up my hands. I looked right into the guy’s eyes as he did this. He had light brown eyes clouded with trouble. His hair was longish, stringy, and dark. He was probably in his mid-twenties. He looked almost gentle, easily frightened. So I screamed. His hand flew over my mouth and he shoved me backward. I sunk my teeth into his hand. He found a rag on the floor and stuffed it in my mouth. Then, he searched me, finding my cell phone and taking it. He also took the forty dollars I had in a front pocket but returned the half pack of Marlboro Lights to my coat pocket. I wanted to tell him I desperately needed a cigarette but all I could manage from behind the gag was a horrible moaning sound that he chose to ignore. He shoved me under a dog blanket in the backseat of his car then started driving.

Between bouts of panic I thought about a whole lot of things as I lay under the smelly dog blanket with a gag in my mouth and my bound hands losing circulation. I thought about dying. In a surprisingly level-headed manner. I hoped that if it happened it wouldn’t hurt and someone would look after my cats. By age twenty-five I had begun announcing to my mother, sister, and friend Jane that I wanted to be buried in a nice graveyard with a tree and an old gravestone. People could conduct experiments on my body, transplant my organs, use my skin cells, whatever, so long as what was left of me went in a hole in the ground. My loved ones thought me mildly macabre for thinking about things like that at so young an age. Now I was hoping it hadn’t been prescient.

I thought about Attila too. And about Ed. Wishing Ed would save me. Hoping Attila wasn’t in even deeper trouble than I was in now.

After we’d been driving for about twenty minutes, the guy pulled over, got out, and came to take my gag off. It was like he’d been thinking about things while he was driving and decided he should have asked me a few questions.

“Where is the jockey?” he demanded.

“I have no idea.”

“Where!” he barked, shoving the gun toward me. I noticed that it was a tiny, almost feminine-looking gun.

“I don’t know! The last time I saw him he was at Aqueduct.”

“But where would he go after that?”

“I have no idea. And I don’t know what good I’m going to do you.”

“Please be quiet,” he said, pushing me back down and putting the blanket over my head.

He got back in the front seat and started driving again.

I waited a few minutes and then tried calling out a few muffled questions. He hadn’t put the gag back in, so I thought I could be heard from under my blanket. I asked if he expected to get a ransom for me and if so from whom. I suppose I was nervous enough to seem casual as I told him that none of my friends or relatives have any
money and that I’m of little or no monetary value to the world at large. By that point I wasn’t truly fearing for my life anymore. He told me to shut up and that he wouldn’t hurt me as long as I didn’t try any
funny stuff
. He said it just like that:
Don’t try any funny stuff
. As if reading from a bad script. I asked him if I could call my neighbor to feed my cats. He ignored me and when I asked again, he said no.

Eventually I just lay there, under the blanket, trying to stay calm. I managed to lull myself into a sort of dark reverie that was akin to sleep. I woke up when the car’s motion changed and we came to a stop. I had a throbbing headache and a dry mouth. My captor came and helped me out of the backseat. We were in the country. There were pine trees and snow. The air was cold and clean smelling and I could hear what sounded like a little stream running nearby. Ahead, there was a small white one-story house, and about a hundred yards back a little wooden cabin. As the guy told me to walk toward the cabin, the dog trotted at his side. It was almost bucolic seeming for a moment. Then my captor pulled some keys from his pocket, unlocked the padlock on the cabin door, and nudged me inside. It was just one big, dirty room and the floor felt unstable. There was nothing in it other than a sagging cardboard box and a chair with a broken back. An odor of mold and dust thickened the air.

“I need to pee,” I told my captor. This seemed to alarm him. He’d apparently never been here before either. He joined me in looking around the little room and discovering that there was no toilet in evidence. The cabin had two windows that overlooked the stream. I could hear it rushing out there and the sound was making matters worse.

“We’ll see about that when you tell me where to find the jockey.”

“I told you, I know about as much as you do. The last time I saw him he was walking into the racing secretary’s office at Aqueduct. Which I assume is far from here. Where exactly are we?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” the guy said, looking around nervously, as if there might be a sign announcing our location.

“Okay, so don’t tell me, but the fact remains, I have got to go to the bathroom.”

“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.

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.