The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “It’s your mother,” I heard him explain, as if from a long way away. “She’s in the hospital.”

  It was F. William Peterson who had come to find me, though I never did find out how he himself learned of my mother’s breakdown and hospitalization. Of course, news in Mohawk traveled fast, and it would have been more of a mystery if he had not heard, eventually. In fact, my father had heard part of the story the night before at The Elms, where Eileen worked as a waitress, but he hadn’t believed it. She had finished her shift and they were having a drink when Darryl somebody—my father couldn’t remember his last name—came in drunk and walked right over to the table where they were sitting.

  “You hear about your wife?” Darryl Somebody said.

  “Don’t you have nice manners,” Eileen observed.

  “Okay, forget it,” the man said. “Screw it, in fact.” Then he went over and sat at the bar beneath the inverted cocktail glasses.

  My father had wanted to get up, but Eileen didn’t like trouble, especially where she worked.

  “Where does he get off …?” my father wanted to know.

  “He’s drunk,” Eileen said.

  But Darryl Somebody had Mike the bartender by the sleeve and was telling him a story. From time to time they glanced over at the table where my father and Eileen Littler were sitting.

  “Let’s go,” Eileen said. “I’ve had enough of this place for one night.”

  My father motioned for Mike to come over. Sam Hall was personal friends with about half the bartenders in the county.

  “What’s his problem?” my father said, indicating Darryl Somebody, who was studying his beer, now that he had no one to talk to.

  “No problem.”

  “What.”

  “Forget it, Sammy.”

  “Ask him if he’d like to tell me all about it outside.”

  “He claims he saw your wife wandering around downtown in her robe and slippers. Kept stopping people in the street and said she was looking for ‘him.’ When they asked who, she just smiled.”

  My father nodded. Darryl Somebody was watching them now, smiling vaguely.

  “You must be confused with your own wife,” my father suggested across the room.

  “I haven’t got no wife,” Darryl Somebody said.

  “Surprise, surprise,” Eileen said.

  The two of them left then, though my father insisted they wait a few minutes in case Darryl Somebody came out. But either Mike advised against it or my father’s reputation as a skilled bushwhacker had preceded him, because Darryl stayed right where he was.

  The reason I relate all this is that my father did, right there in the front seat of F. William Peterson’s big Olds on the way to the hospital. Eileen he didn’t mention by name, but I knew it had to be her. F. William Peterson listened to the whole tale politely, concealing his irritation. No doubt he too felt the absurdity of my father’s detailed rendering, as if Sam Hall’s reasons for refusing to believe what turned out to be true were more important than the reality of my mother’s pitiful condition. That’s the way he’ll tell it, even if she dies, I remember thinking. It will always be his story, about how he hadn’t believed it could be true, about how nobody who knew my mother could have believed it.

  When we got to the hospital, my father ran into someone he knew in the lobby, someone who wanted to know if he’d heard, and when he launched into the whole thing again, F. William Peterson took me aside.

  “Your mother is sedated,” he said, placing his pale, almost hairless hand on my shoulder. “You know what that means?”

  I nodded, growing increasingly apprehensive about whatever the man thought I needed to be prepared for. “You saw her?”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure though. She’s had what’s called a nervous collapse. I doubt she’ll be the person you recognize. And they’ll probably only let you stay a few minutes.” He paused briefly. “Your father won’t be permitted in at all.”

  Something about the way he said this gave me the idea that he himself had seen to it.

  “They’ll probably take her to Albany this afternoon. There’s nobody here that knows much about stuff like this. Not many people around here are smart enough to have a nervous breakdown.”

  He half smiled at his own observation and ran his pale fingers through the few tenacious strands of blond hair on top of his head. “You ready?”

  My father had his back to us and didn’t notice when we turned the corner by the elevator. The second floor looked deserted. There weren’t even any nurses in the corridors. Each room we passed was the same dull shade of green. Some of the occupants of the beds made small insignificant mounds beneath the sheets, while others sat upright, their mottled backs to the open door, as if contemplating flight through the transparent curtained windows. I didn’t see anybody who looked like he could pass a pop quiz on what day of the week it was.

  There were two beds in the room that contained my mother, but she was alone there, the other bed tightly made, its blanket and crisp white sheet tucked between mattress and metal frame. She lay on her back in the bed near the window, her thin wrists restrained by leather straps attached to the rails of the bed, though she appeared unaware of this hindrance. Her eyes had the same faraway look they once had when she thought about Tucson, Arizona, or San Diego, California. We went around to the other side of the bed, F. William Peterson hanging back several paces so that I alone would come between her and the white window. Whoever had put on her hospital gown hadn’t done much of a job, because part of her right breast was exposed, along with her rib cage, now clearly defined. F. William Peterson may have noticed too, because he retreated to the middle of the room.

  My mother did not appear to see me at first, but then her eyes began to focus and something like a smile of recognition formed. “Sam?” she said. “Sam?”

  Suddenly I was choking back tears and my throat was as thick as it had been that afternoon I’d eaten Oreos with Claude. “It’s me,” I said. “Ned.”

  Her smile changed, first becoming perplexed, then troubled, then inexpressibly sad, as if she’d been informed of my death. Her own tears welled up, but before they could be shed, she lost her focus. A bird had landed on the window ledge behind me and pecked at the glass with its tough beak before flying off with her attention into the white sky.

  That night, after my father got in the convertible and drove off, I let myself back into Rose’s and took the elevator down into Klein’s Department Store and filled a paper bag with the most expensive items I could find in the dark. I stayed there a full hour, shopping carefully, angrily. And when I was finished, I took it all over to our house on Third Avenue. F. William Peterson had arranged for the house to be locked up and I had no key so I climbed the maple tree up to the roof, then lowered myself onto my bedroom window dormer. The storm windows had not been put on, nor would they be that winter. Neither the screen nor inner window offered resistance.

  Once inside, I went back downstairs, unlocked the rear door and fetched what I had stolen. There was a pewter ashtray inscribed with something in Latin for the coffee table, along with a fancy cut-glass nut dish. On her dresser I placed the ornate jewelry box. The other stuff I scattered after removing the price tags and flushing them down the toilet. I mentally totaled what I had taken, and it came close to three hundred dollars, but I was neither satisfied nor ashamed. Until that night, I’d stolen only insignificant items: a cheap, imitation-leather wallet, a package of undershorts and socks, an athletic supporter for gym class (these were kept in a special place behind the counter in the sporting goods department, never on display). I had told myself that the store would never be aware of such trivial losses, that the truest test of my ethics was that I had the perfect opportunity to steal a great deal, yet took only the cheapest items. But try as I might to absolve myself, the petty thefts ate at me, especially at night when I recollected how much money I had in my account at the bank.

  But tonight I had stolen big. My only criteria
had been price and size. I had stolen out of pure malice and I felt not the slightest remorse, regretting only that I could not have carried more. If I could, I would have taken it all. What pure pleasure it would have been on Monday morning to see the store’s owner gape at the bare shelves, the astonished voices of the employees echoing off the walls and high ceilings in the emptiness I had left them.

  And so, after locking the house again from the inside, I went back to our apartment and waited for my father to return, not caring much whether he did or didn’t. Finally, I went to sleep and did not dream. During the night it snowed and the tall windows froze white and brittle. Winter. With a capital W.

  16

  In February of that same year my father started talking about heading west for a while. There were lots of jobs on the interstates, and it was warm enough to work in your shirtsleeves.

  “In your imagination,” Untemeyer grumbled from his end of the Formica lunch counter in the Mohawk Grill.

  My father took that as an invitation to the sort of dispute that might earn him a dollar or two without leaving the warmth of the diner, or even getting up off the stool.

  “Phoenix,” my father said. “I bet it’s fifty degrees there right now. In fact, I’ll give you a fin for every degree under fifty. You give me one for every degree over.”

  “You got that kind of dough, how about paying your tab,” Harry said, without turning around from the grill. We’d been eating Harry’s food on credit for the last couple weeks while my father figured his next move. I gathered that things worked this way pretty much every year. My father was a seasonal kind of guy. May through November he was flush, but along about Thanksgiving when the road construction dwindled, he’d get himself laid off and collect unemployment until late spring. The unemployment was meager though, compared to his normal summer earnings.

  “If you didn’t piss money away, you wouldn’t be in this fix every year,” Untemeyer offered, ignoring my father’s proposed wager. “You ever hear of banks? They’ll take your money and hold it for you till you need it. Pay you interest on it too, you chowderhead.”

  “Five bucks for every degree under fifty,” my father reiterated.

  “Take a hike,” said the bookie.

  My father nudged me. I was seated comfortably on the stool next to him, absorbing the heat from Harry’s grill, thinking about nothing at all. “You can’t get to Unc,” my father said. His favorite nickname for Untemeyer was Uncle Willie. “He knows I’m right, the bastard. Hell, I bet it’s sixty in Phoenix.”

  That was what he would do now—sweeten the pot until there was no way he could win the bet. In another half hour he’d be giving five to one it was a hundred and ten in Phoenix in February, so worked up was he over the fabled heat in the desert Southwest. The only thing that would save him in the present instance was that, except for Harry and the bookie, we had the diner to ourselves, and neither of those two worthies was dumb enough to bet with a man who’d been bellyaching for a month that he couldn’t even afford to pay attention. Another time they might anyway, just to teach him a lesson, but not today.

  “I bet it’s not sixty,” I said. It was so cold outside the Mohawk Grill that I couldn’t imagine it being sixty anywhere.

  “Are you shitting me?” my father said, as if this finally settled it. I was God’s own fool, a militantly unteachable dimwit.

  “So go to fucking Phoenix,” Harry growled. “Give us all a break. Give my customers a break. Look at this place. Untemeyer’s the only one who’s not scared to come in here.”

  It was true. Come February, my father was bad for business. Summers he loaned money indiscriminately and generally forgot how much and to whom. But the higher the snowbanks grew along Main Street the more these foolish loans began to weigh on him and he became more than a little insistent about being paid back. True, he didn’t know who owed him what, but he thought he did, and the more broke he got, the more clearly his memory functioned. Virtually everyone triggered some vague recollection, and whoever appeared in the doorway to Harry’s diner would be greeted with a “Look at this deadbeat!” And, likely as not, the accused would in fact be a deadbeat, but a deadbeat who understood that my father’s memory was of the most shadowy and elusive character. Having escaped payment for six months, they refused to pay up now and were deeply indignant when my father recollected a debt far larger than was actually incurred. Many of Harry’s regular customers had taken to sidling along the front wall of the diner and peeking in to make sure that my father was someplace else before entering.

  “Give your goddamn kid a break, too,” Untemeyer said. His own business generally tailed off when Harry’s did. “How the hell do you put up with him twenty-four hours a day? Tell me that.”

  I shrugged. In truth, I probably saw less of him than Untemeyer himself. There was school, of course, until the middle of the afternoon, and after dinner he’d usually disappear, sometimes to play poker, sometimes to visit The Elms to see Eileen and talk to Mike, the bartender. About the only time I saw him was in the late afternoon, like now. I could usually figure on finding him at Harry’s when I got off school. Sometimes, we’d eat dinner there. Other times at Eileen’s. If he wasn’t around, I’d eat dinner by myself in the apartment overlooking the gray, deserted Main Street below.

  Of the three, I most hated those dinners at Eileen’s because they were like sitting atop a powderkeg. When my father had money, we’d stop at the market and buy groceries to bring with us. Lately, though, he’d been taking a beating at the poker table and the bookmakers’, which meant that when we turned up, it would be empty-handed. That wouldn’t have bothered him so much if it didn’t rob my father of his trump card with Eileen’s son Drew, whom my father rode hard about freeloading off his mother. “It must be supper time,” my father would say when we’d hear the motorcycle, usually still a couple blocks down the street.

  “Lay off of him,” Eileen would warn.

  Lately, my father didn’t have much to say, though that, it seemed to me, actually increased the tension, because Drew Littler sensed that for the moment, anyway, he had the upper hand. The last time we’d gone over to the Littlers’ for dinner, the cycle had been parked in the garage and Drew had lifted his blond head from a comic book when we came in and called out, “Must be supper time,” to his mother.

  That had been over a week ago, and we hadn’t been back since.

  My father dug into his pocket and came up with two folded bills, tossing one on the table in front of me. “Well?” he said.

  I picked up the dollar bill and studied it. “Liars” was one of our favorite pastimes. Played with the serial numbers of dollar bills, the game developed some of the same intellectual rigors as handicapping horses. If you said four fives and there were only two fives on your dollar bill, then there had better be two more on the bill your opponent was holding. If there weren’t, and you were called upon to produce the four fives you’d claimed the existence of, you lost your bill. The idea was to trick your opponent into making a claim he’d have to support entirely on his own. If you could convince him that your bill contained, say, threes, and it was in reality devoid of threes, you could challenge him later if he claimed to have an inordinate number of them. It was a wicked little game that placed a premium on confident bluffing, misdirection and rapid analysis of probability.

  “What am I going to do with you if I go someplace for a while?”

  I shrugged and called three deuces.

  He studied his bill disinterestedly. “Three fives.”

  “Three eights,” I said, holding my breath. There wasn’t a single eight on my bill; I was hoping to trap him into coming back to eights later on. I did have three fives, but fives were what he’d just called and he might be using the same strategy on me.

  “Four fives,” he said.

  “Four eights,” I said, a little too quickly, trying to sound casual.

  “Your ass, four eights,” he said, but we always played strict rules. You had to say �
�liar.” “I know you’re not telling the truth, but I’ll let you skate this once because I’ve got five fives.”

  He had me and I knew it. I had three fives myself. No way he’d believe five eights. My only hope was that he too had three fives. That would make six between us.

  “Six fives,” I said.

  He was nodding and flicking his tubed-up bill with his black thumb and forefinger. “You better have five of them, you liar.”

  He unrolled his bill and showed it to me. One measly five. “If I could chain you in the basement and play you for a living, I wouldn’t have to worry about working.” That was one of his favorite lines, and he used it whenever we played Liars. When I won, which was seldom, he always accused me of having a no-brainer bill, the kind that had maybe four deuces on it and you couldn’t lose with it.

  “I’d be all right,” I said, though I hoped he wouldn’t go anywhere.

  He ran his hands through his hair. “Well, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll make out, somehow. White people don’t starve in America.”

  I wasn’t worried about starving. I’d been banking practically all of the money I made cleaning Rose’s and could have loaned my father a couple hundred dollars if there had been a good enough reason to. But then we really would be broke, and I preferred to let him just think we were. I’d save us if I had to, but not until I became convinced there was no other way. Right now we were only a hundred or so into Harry and two months behind on rent. The situation was far from desperate.

  Before we left, my father boxed a number with Untemeyer (he always had a dollar for that purpose) and then we crossed the street to our apartment, climbing the two dark flights of stairs. The local news was on when we came in. I watched while my father read the sports in the morning paper that Harry let him take with us. When the weatherman came on, he talked about how cold it was everywhere, even the desert Southwest, which was recording its lowest temperatures on record. They showed pictures of Phoenix, Arizona.