Free Watch Me Go by Mark Wisniewski Page A

to Tug,was that she, The
Form
Monger’s wife, disappeared because an odds-defying losing streak had compelled The
Form
Monger to double down and borrow from loan sharks. Only days before The
Form
Monger’s wife disappeared, The
Form
Monger had bitched and moaned openly in the grandstand about how he was so jinxed
     he’d even lost one of his garbage cans. And ever since she went missing—that is, for
     the past fifteen-odd years—the conclusion of every grandstander has been that The
Form
Monger’s once-super-fine-looking and now-long-gone-from-sight wife’s remains are
     still out there somewhere, in that can.
    And what a jury would need to know is that a week or so after The
Form
Monger’s wife disappeared, The
Form
Monger himself showed up in the grandstand after the fifth race with his right arm
     wrapped expertly in gauze minus the hand he’d once assumed was as inseparable from
     him as his wife had been—the conclusion being that this hand had been sawed off at
     the wrist, drained of its blood (since blood leaves telltale stains) and hidden amid
     the contents of a Dumpster trailer-trucked to New Jersey.
    And people would also need to know that The
Form
Monger then came to be called The
Form
Monger because, perhaps as a coping mechanism and certainly as a way of scrounging
     up cash to bet, he’d soon begun obsessively scalping used
Daily Racing Form
s. And this is no lie: Nearly every day since both his wife and his hand disappeared,
     the guy has been at the track, pretty much always on the move, cruising up and down
     the grandstand’s concrete stairways to see if any
Form
s
lay discarded, sometimes following bettors to the parking lot to beg for their
“recyclables” (his word) if they appear to be leaving early, sometimes even rummaging
     through the track’s trash cans. And ever since the spring his wife disappeared, he’s
     struck track patrons as repugnant not onlybecause his stump remains gruesomely purple, but also because, as soon as he sells
     enough scuzzy
Form
s
to have scrounged two dollars, he bets using a system that eventually guarantees loss:
     He bets to win on the favorite.
    Anyway, now, in Tug Corcoran’s eyes at least, the Corcorans’ missing forty-gallon
     drum meant a serious warning. It meant someone in the Corcoran household might disappear
     like The
Form
Monger’s wife had. Maybe it also meant that if Tom Corcoran didn’t then pay off his
     losing bets, a hand or a foot of his would go missing, too. But what bore through
     Tug’s thoughts now, as Jasper drove to the first and only secret sprint my mother
     and I would attend with the Corcorans, was that it might have been
anyone
in the Corcoran house who was on the verge of disappearance.
    Why, Tug wondered, would the victim necessarily be his mother?
    If loan sharks did in fact abduct the person loved most by the losing gambler, the
     person now about to go missing—given Tom and Colleen’s marital problems—could be my
     mother.
    Or me.
    Or hell, Tug probably realized then, those chumps might go after a guy’s first and
     only son.
    And true, Tug’s concern about the missing drum now portending someone’s early departure
was
speculation on Tug’s part, or maybe just paranoia. But there was logic behind it,
     and it only knotted Tug up more to realize that this logic was not the bookish kind
     used by attorneys but instead the kind used by thugs.
    Like everyone taking that ride in the Galaxie that evening, though, Tug said nothing
     of this. Instead he sat stoically in the backseat between his mother and mine, with
     me (oblivious as I was then to the fact that the drum was even missing, let alone
     what itsdisappearance meant) directly in front of him, between his father and Jasper. Whether
     Tug would mention to his father or to anyone at all his fear about the drum was a
     question Tug analyzed for miles—because, as Tom tended to see things, fear not only
     meant you were a pussy, it also, even worse,