The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  Drew was sobbing now, but his fury had leaked away almost instantly. “I’m getting stronger every day, Sammy. I am. Every day. My day’s coming, Sammy, you shithead.”

  My father snorted at the idea, but the boy neither heard, nor reacted. I could tell from the lack of focus in his eyes that he was talking inwardly, trying to pump himself up again, not allowing himself to hit bottom, like a boxer talking rematch before his handlers could even stop the bleeding.

  “Be my day then. My day,” he said. “All you sons of bitches. My day.”

  He was on his knees now, rocking, his wounded arm tucked in to his middle, rocking there in the middle of the broken glass and pickle juice.

  “Good,” my father said, winking at me, his unwilling accomplice. “We’ll call it Dummy Day. We’ll crown you king, Zero.”

  17

  At his worst, no human being is attractive, and that day we’d all seen Drew at his worst, raging out of control, bent on destruction, even self-destruction. But most times he was not a bad sort, and he wasn’t nearly as dumb as my father and his teachers down through the years had concluded.

  He had, in fact, something rather like a personal philosophy of life, and unless I am mistaken, I am the only person he ever discussed it with, including his mother. In fact, he recruited me, along with another dubious fellow named Willie Heinz, to become members of an organization to implement his philosophy, an organization whose membership never did exceed three, though we had great hopes of expanding into a worldwide network. The only goal of our organization was to abuse rich people, all of whom Drew Littler hated with a white-hot passion. The “Money People” he called them, the people who thought they were too good, who considered themselves above the rest. According to Drew, who explained all this one afternoon as I spotted for him in the garage, it was the fault of the people who had money that those who hadn’t any lived difficult lives, a notion he considered original to himself. Though five years older than I, Drew was only two grades ahead of me just then, having been held back, once due to a prolonged childhood illness, the other two times as the result of academic failure. When he turned eighteen that May, he intended to drop out and go to work in a garage that serviced motorcycles.

  Trust me when I say he had neither read nor heard of Karl Marx. In fact, my guess is that nobody in Mohawk had actually read him, and in my later studies at Mohawk High, which I attended to sporadically, I can recall no more than a passing derogatory reference to Marx in social studies class. It was many years later, after I had taken a degree at the university and was thinking about Drew Littler, which I often did and still do, that it occurred to me that he was a Marxist au naturel, perhaps the only one ever produced in the entire county.

  His brand of Marxism was simple and in several respects unorthodox. He never, at least in my hearing, extolled the worker. In fact, he was openly contemptuous of people like his mother, who worked for wages, for the simple reason that the work didn’t seem to get them much of anywhere, and he intended to work only until he could get enough money to take his bike onto the open road. In the meantime he meant to wage war on those who had enough money to look askance at those who didn’t. People had been looking askance at him for as long as he could remember, and he thought it was about time to put a stop to that. To this end he had a plan.

  The first part of the plan was to lift weights, because he had observed that since his taking on physical dimension fewer people looked askance at him, at least while he was looking at them. And, too, I think he held great abstract admiration for physical strength. I could tell that when he lifted, the iron bar became a metaphor—that it represented something to him, a problem, a dilemma. When he shoved the bar up and away from him, he won a personal victory over whatever obstacle it represented, and when the bar defeated him, he took that defeat blackly, morosely, personally. It deflated him instantly, just as my father had when he slammed the boy’s wrist to the table.

  When Drew Littler first started giving me rides on the back of his motorcycle, we’d cruise the neighborhoods where the Money People lived, and it was surprising how thorough was his information on who lived where. When we leaned into the turn onto some tree-lined street, he’d slow so his voice could be heard above the roar of the engine, and he’d tell me who lived in the better homes and whether they were doctors or lawyers or just rich. It troubled him when he did not know or could not remember who lived in a particularly well-groomed house set back from the street, a late-model car in the drive. Then he looked for all the world like a kid who’s studied hard for a test, devised an elaborate way to recall disparate facts, then forgotten the key association. It’s a terrible thing to have a long list of enemies.

  The most amusing part of all this—at least it’s amusing now—is that there were so few people in Mohawk with any real money. Since the tanneries had begun closing down, the county had gotten progressively poorer, and most of the men who had made their money in leather had taken it with them to Florida. There was still some relative wealth on Kings Road and all along the east edge of the country club, and in the Jewish enclave near one entrance to Myrtle Park. Otherwise, houses that evidenced any genuine signs of material wealth were relatively scarce, and most of the once grand older homes had fallen into neglect, shrinking behind weed jungles and unpruned trees. But for Drew Littler you could qualify as one of the Money People if you had a picture window in the living room or a Doughboy pool in the backyard. It was from Drew that I learned the ultimate relativity of wealth—that wealthy people are those who have a dollar more than you do.

  How odd we must have looked, Drew Littler and I, cruising those neighborhoods we had no business in, slowing down on the quiet streets, looking the houses over with a cool appraiser’s eye, Drew pointing at them like a Beverly Hills tour bus director. Drew with his shaggy hair sticking out like straw beneath his Brando motorcycle hat, always wearing black, rhinestone-studded, impossibly pointed boots, dusty black jeans. And me, his little pilot fish and understudy, trying not to look like too much of a doofus. Up and down the streets of Mohawk we cruised, just the sort of people my mother would have been tempted to report to the police had she seen us slow down in front of her house, looking it all over, as if for means of nocturnal entry.

  But there was only one house we visited regularly. Up that long, winding drive through the woods we would climb until we burst out into the sunlight, the whole county stretched out below us, all the way to the black trees that bordered the river to the south. Then Drew would turn off the engine and dismount just outside the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the jewel-house property, and light a cigarette there, just looking, his face a dark contrast to its gleaming white facade. He never repeated what he’d said that first evening about the house being his someday, but I could see him thinking it and I’d remember my father’s nickname for him—Zero—and smile at his rippling back, as I too smoked under the cool trees.

  Sometimes, the man we’d seen that first evening would come out by the double garage, no doubt having seen us loitering, just outside his entryway, a mere hundred yards from his front door. I always expected to meet a police cruiser on our way back down the private road to the highway, but we never did.

  It was on one of these motorcycle excursions during the spring of 1960, that first year that I lived with my father, that we turned down Third Avenue and I saw the sign in front of our old empty house. I had not even been by since refurnishing the place with my plunder from Klein’s. The house looked different, smaller somehow, no doubt the result of my recent travels among the affluent, whose gabled Tudors and big split-level ranches had given me a new sense of the appropriate dimensions for a human dwelling. The house now seemed almost a miniature, as if people of normal height might be required to stoop in the doorways. Winter had taken its toll on the place too, and I’ve often wondered since how it is that the elements invariably do greater damage to houses that are not lived in than the inhabited houses on either side, as if granted some strange co
smic license for destruction. The house looked dingy and gray, its paint peeling badly under the eaves and beneath the arched peak. I couldn’t remember it ever looking so shabby before, and its sad condition, together with the For Sale sign on the lawn, combined to force a sudden, terrible realization—that my mother had died during the winter and no one had told me.

  “What’s the matter with you?” my father wanted to know when we returned. He and Drew were not feuding just then, my father having loaned him the money for new tires for the bike, but he still razzed Drew unmercifully, telling him, among other things, that if he ever had an accident with me aboard, he’d better just get back on the bike and keep riding, as far away from Mohawk as he could get.

  I said nothing was the matter.

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Don’t look at me,” Drew said, himself surprised when he looked over his shoulder at me and saw my dark expression. “I can’t be to blame for every fucking thing.”

  As soon as I’d seen the For Sale sign and realized what it meant, I’d concluded that my father must know. Maybe they all did. Eileen, surely. Drew, perhaps. Why else would he be bothering with me, giving me rides on the cycle when he could just as easily have been acting as chauffeur to one or more of his slightly overweight, dirty-haired girlfriends, all of whom nuzzled into the small of his back with large breasts. Maybe the men at the diner knew too. I tried to remember which of them had shown me special kindness recently, and the more I thought about it, the more evidence I came up with. Some of it was several months old, but there was no telling how long that sign had been on the terrace. Perhaps my mother’s death was old news. Maybe they’d already forgotten the secret they’d been sworn to keep from me. Many of them were men who forgot their own families without even being asked to. By now they’d probably forgotten my mother had ever existed.

  That night, when we were alone in the apartment, watching the eleven o’clock news, my father in his shorts, scratching himself thoughtfully, I told him I wanted to visit my mother on Sunday. My voice must have sounded odd, because he looked at me before answering.

  “Why not,” he said.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  I watched for a reaction, but there wasn’t any. Not that I should have expected one. In Liars my father could call six deuces without a single one in his hand for comfort and his expression would remain distant, abstracted, almost bored. Was it possible, though, that he didn’t know? Was it possible that my mother was so insignificant that she had died in Schenectady and no one had taken the trouble to inform us? After all, we had no telephone in the apartment, and I wasn’t sure the nursing home even had our address. Our mailbox inside the dark hallway below didn’t even have the name Hall on it and the mailman didn’t even bother to stuff it with junk mail. Anybody who wanted to contact my father left a message at Harry’s or Greenie’s or at the Littlers’ or one of his other haunts. Probably legal wheels were turning, my mother’s estate being settled by some downstate law office where no one knew of my father and me, or, if they’d heard rumors of our existence, could find no listing, no official record of it. If so, we deserved it, my father and I. No doubt some dark-suited man had appeared at the nursing home with a notepad, ready to take down information. Had my mother any relatives? Visitors? Surely someone came to see her? Leaned forward to kiss her hollow cheek? No, the good nurse would have been forced to admit. She had been alone. Died alone.

  “You better get a haircut then,” my father said, looking me over again, vaguely dissatisfied with what he saw, but unable to identify whatever else might be required to make me presentable to a woman who, assuming he thought her to be alive, he had no reason to believe would be other than diminished, withdrawn, sedated, or comatose, but whom he preferred to remember as beautiful, easily angered, possibly armed, and bearing a grudge.

  As I look back upon this period of my life from something like objective distance, what strikes me as strange and more than a little horrifying is the ease with which I had managed to banish my mother, to push her into some far recess of my consciousness. Most of the time I simply did not think of her.

  The only case I can make in my own defense is that I don’t think I was being extraordinarily cavalier or unfeeling. I know I loved her and feared for her. I banished her from the forefront of my mind for the same reason and by the same mechanism by which I willed myself to sleep through my father’s nightly assaults on our house when I was a little boy, at which time I simply could not afford to consider them. Any more than I could now afford to consider my mother’s horrible condition in the nursing home, or of what in the end would happen to her. At least I could not think of these things on a daily basis.

  There were times, however, during the long months between visits, that she would sweep over me in waves of memory, and I would feel terrible guilt, guilt so intense that I wished not to be alive. But after a while I’d succeed in filing her safely away again. Seeing the For Sale sign had sent me plummeting into the worst depression I’d ever experienced and my emotional state must have been apparent even to my father, who decided that Saturday afternoon, the day before the promised visit, that we’d go out to dinner someplace nice to cheer me up, or, failing that, be around other people who might be willing to share the burden of my moroseness. When he told me we were going out to The Elms it all made sense. When Eileen got off work, the two of them were going to sit me down and break the news. There wouldn’t be any trip to Schenectady on Sunday. There wasn’t anyone to visit anymore.

  As soon as we were on the road he started doing all the stuff I wished he’d do before turning the key in the ignition. Found his cigarettes wedged down in the seat, located a match, lit up, turned on the radio full blast, each station shouting at us angrily for a split second before disappearing. Finally he settled on the original station, cuffed me in the back of the head, told me to smile, watched me and not the road until I did.

  In short, he was a menace. As usual. The old rusty Merc pulled naturally to the right, a tendency he always failed to notice or correct until we’d drifted within inches of a curb of parked cars. Then he’d swerve suddenly, dangerously, back out to the center line and sometimes beyond. Whenever he saw somebody he knew, he always stopped. Right where he was. Beneath a traffic light, blocking a busy driveway. On a bridge. On the sidewalk. The kind of behavior my mother had always called selfish. His idea was that if people couldn’t get around him they weren’t trying very hard.

  “That new?” he said, eyeing me.

  I said yes, it was a new shirt. In fact I’d swiped it from Klein’s the night before, the first thing I’d stolen since furnishing my mother’s now abandoned house.

  He nodded, glanced at the road to make sure it was still there, then went back to studying me. “You don’t have to spend your own money,” he said. “You need a shirt, you tell me you need a shirt. That’s all.”

  I told him I would in the future, but right now I just needed the one. I knew what he was up to. I was supposed to get the idea that I would be coming to him for things now. That I could.

  “You just say, I could use a shirt … right?” he shrugged. “That’s all. That’s not so tough.”

  I said fine. I would.

  “How come your mother’s on your mind all of a sudden?”

  “She’s not,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t shit a shitter …”

  I said I wouldn’t, but he knew I would, and did, and was. “I just feel like seeing her. It’s been a long time.”

  We were out in the country now, the sky darkening in the west. Dark trees flew by and I just watched them to keep from having to look at him.

  “Fine,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t buy you a shirt. I’m not your mother, but I can buy you a shirt.”

  Back to the shirt.

  “You need anything else?”

  I told him no. I hadn’t even really needed the shirt. I told him I couldn’t think of anything I needed.

  “Nothing?” he
said.

  Nothing.

  The parking lot was packed and my father had to park over a tree stump. Eileen saw us when we came in and gave my father a thumbs down. The bar was crowded too, every stool at the horseshoe bar occupied, each of the small cocktail tables surrounded, the booths packed and virtually invisible in the thick cigarette smoke. One of my father’s real social skills, however, was carving out space in a crowded bar. Someone would pivot slightly and there he’d be, one elbow on the mahogany, clearing somebody’s highball glass out of the way with a sophisticated slight of hand, a twenty-dollar bill materializing in its place. Given this small opening he then managed somehow to look for all the world as if he’d been right in that spot since the building was erected. The illusion was so overpowering that those he displaced often apologized when they discovered him there.

  Mike and a new bartender were both pouring drinks, two-fisted, behind the bar, and it took the former a minute to gravitate to our end with about a dozen dirty glasses, which he bunched on the metal drainboard with another two or three dozen already sitting there.

  “So,” my father said. “What’s the story.”

  “Once upon a time there was a man who wished he was somewhere else,” Mike said. He had a quarter in his soapy hand, which he plunked in front of me for the jukebox, which was right behind the stool my father slipped onto when the woman who was there stood to search out the ladies’ room. There was already a song on, but only the thumping bass was audible above the noise in the bar.

  “One of my girls never showed,” Mike moaned.

  “Tough life,” my father said, surveying the room. “You bury your money out back?”

  “It’s in the bank,” Mike said. “In Vegas. In somebody else’s account. What’s the matter with him?”

  Him was me. I was pretending to read song titles on the jukebox.

  “Some damn thing,” my father said. “He won’t talk till he’s ready.”