The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “You’re gone,” she said, looking first at my father, then at Mike. “You hear me? He’s all done here.”

  She was sucking on a maraschino cherry, its stem rotating in the gap between her large front teeth. Mike shrugged like it might be true. He didn’t even give me the usual quarter for the jukebox. Eileen appeared in the doorway to the dining room, shook her head in amazement, and disappeared again. The dining room was practically empty, except for two busboys clearing and prepping tables for the dinner crowd.

  My father winked at Mike and put an arm around Irma’s big shoulders. “Let’s you and me ditch this stiff,” he stage-whispered. “We’ll go throw down a blanket in the walk-in cooler. Like the old days.” Then he took the maraschino cherry stem and pulled.

  “Git!” she elbowed him hard in the ribs, though not as hard as she might have. He held his ground.

  “Your trouble is you just need a little of the old innee-outee,” he said. “Relax you a little, so you aren’t so mean all the while.”

  “How the hell would you know what I need?” she said, but even I could see she was loosening up under his outrageous onslaught.

  “I’m the expert,” he said.

  “You’re the eighty-sixed expert. Go be expert someplace else. Kill somebody else’s business.” She took a toothpick from the glassful on the bar and jabbed the back of my father’s hand with it, slipping neatly out of his embrace. “He’s history,” she warned Mike again.

  When she was gone, Mike slipped me a quarter for Duane Eddy and my father went around the bar and got himself a bottle of beer so Mike wouldn’t get in trouble.

  “You better watch out,” Mike warned him. “She ever takes you up on one of your offers you’ll be one sorry son of a bitch.”

  My father shivered at the thought. “I don’t know how you do it,” he admitted, his voice full of genuine admiration.

  “What,” Mike said. “I haven’t been as close to her as you just were in a month. I never come out from behind here you know.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “How did she get that way is what I always wonder.”

  My father shrugged. “It could have something to do with the fact that every time you get a couple grand ahead you take it to Vegas and come home without it.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yes, I do. Take her with you sometime. She works hard too.”

  “I always have more fun with you.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  Mike studied me, then returned to my father. “He looks better today, anyway.”

  “Took him to see his mother. We just got back.”

  “How is she?”

  “Better, according to my source. I’m the only one not allowed in.”

  “She should have been so smart fifteen years ago.”

  “She’s not so smart now. It’s our buddy with the fat lip that had it fixed. I so much as walk in the front door and I’m in the caboose.”

  “You figure he could fix it so I’m not allowed to see Irma?”

  “Probably.”

  “You cost me a round of ten drinks and two complete dinners, you know.”

  “You want some money?” my father offered.

  Mike waved goodbye to the idea. “The guy comes in once in a blue moon. Everybody else enjoyed it. I always said you were better than a floor show. Don’t offer Irma though, unless you want her to take it.”

  “All right, I won’t.”

  Eileen came in and sat down next to me. “How’s your mother?” she said.

  “Good,” I said, grateful to be spoken to.

  “Really? She’s getting better?”

  I nodded. Maybe it was true. When I’d left, the nurse told me that her eating in the dining room was a new thing, and that the dosage of her medicines was being gradually reduced. “She’ll be coming home one day,” the nurse had promised.

  Strangely enough, that was the last thing my mother had said. For the longest time she had stared quietly out into the deep snowy trees, so long that I had concluded that she forgot I was there. But then she had turned and taken my hand and said, “Be brave. Before long we’ll be home again.”

  By home she no doubt meant the house with the For Sale sign out front, the one that would be devoured by the cost of her care, whether or not my father signed on F. William Peterson’s dotted line.

  Some people came in and then some others. The Elms dining room began to fill. We were getting ready to leave when the door opened and the man from the white jewel house who sometimes came out and stared at Drew and me at the end of his long drive appeared. With him was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and she looked about my age.

  “Hey, look out,” Jack Ward said, squinting in our general direction. He was dressed wonderfully, like somebody from another part of the world who’d come to a modest party expecting an extravagant one. He was wearing a cream-colored, lightweight sport coat over a light blue shirt and peach-colored sweater and slacks. His shoes were white mesh. He was tanned, somehow (so was the beautiful girl), and his longish, light brown hair swept back from his high forehead and settled behind his ears as if each strand had been cut to a precise length and trained. “I think we’ve stumbled into the wrong place,” he said to the girl. “Look at this crew.”

  At the moment the whole crew consisted of Mike, my father, and me, and we were unsavory only in comparison to himself and the girl, it seemed to me.

  My father looked Jack Ward over critically. “Must be tops to be loaded.”

  “Sam,” the other man said as they shook hands, “it is. I recommend it to everybody. You remember my daughter Tria.”

  “I remember the little thing that used to bounce on my knee.”

  Tria Ward frowned and looked up at her father as if to inquire whether this could be true. But she did allow my father to put an arm around her. “Hi, dolly. Are you married?”

  Jack Ward had stepped away from his daughter’s side and made a circular motion to Mike with an elegant index finger. “And for yourself,” he added quietly. Magically, there was a crisp fifty between his middle and ring finger and he slid it across the mahogany as if he were proposing to Mike some secret transaction. “We can do this without fanfare, you and I,” the gesture seemed to imply. “It will be so quiet that no one will know that it’s been done, and that will be its beauty.” Almost as deftly, Mike spirited the money into the register before going to work, confident that Jack Ward did not intend for the money to sit there on the bar attracting attention to itself.

  What was most amazing is that I noticed any of this, because I swear I had not once taken my eyes off Tria Ward. I think I contemplated homicide against my father for putting his arm around her. Couldn’t he see how shy she was and how embarrassed to be hugged by an adult stranger in a dark lounge? How close to panic she was now that her father was no longer at her side? I was suddenly burning with indignation that my father thought he had the right to touch this lovely girl, herself as perfectly clean and fresh as her father.

  No, she told my father, she was not married.

  “That’s good,” my father gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You know, I happen to be available.”

  “You’re also just the sort of old goat she’s been warned about,” Jack Ward said, his grin displaying two rows of perfectly white teeth.

  “I tell you what,” my father said. “How about I introduce you to somebody your own age. He’s not as good-looking as his father, but you can’t have everything.”

  Suddenly, everyone was looking at me, as luck would have it, just as a song ended on the jukebox. Tria Ward gave me a weak smile, as if to acknowledge my reality, or perhaps the fact that I wasn’t too bad-looking, or that, yes, it was true, I wasn’t as good-looking as my father.

  And in response to her beautiful smile, I bleated.

  I remember the horror of it even now. The sound I made resembled no word. It didn’t even sound human. My father blinked, probably in disbelief, and for long terrib
le seconds nobody said anything. I flushed so deeply that my skin burned.

  During that first year with my father, I often had the feeling of having disgraced myself, but the moment I bleated at Tria Ward, I knew that if I were to become a murderer, a traitor to my country, and an abject coward in the face of battle, I would never feel lower or more worthy of universal disdain than I felt at that moment, a prediction, I am happy to say, that has been borne out.

  Fortunately, my humiliation was of major significance to me alone. I eventually discovered something like my normal voice, and I think Tria Ward and I had something like a conversation. We must have, because I came away from it knowing that she presently went to school at St. Francis, though she had attended a private school in Schenectady before that, both of which circumstances explained why I had never seen her around. Like me, she was entering the eighth grade in the fall, and she said she was trying to talk her mother into letting her go to Mohawk High the following year, though she thought she’d probably end up at Bishop McGuin in Amsterdam, or maybe this school in Connecticut.

  I think we were both more than a little conscious of the adult conversation that was going on next to us. Listening in on adults was a habit I’d picked up very young, and I remember suspecting that Tria Ward was the same way, that she was eavesdropping on her father even more intently than I on mine, as if she hoped to learn the answer to some urgent question, one she’d have just asked if she hadn’t known she wasn’t supposed to.

  My father was still needling Jack Ward about leading the good life.

  “We both know what the good life is, Sam,” Jack Ward said, his voice low and confidential. “The good life is not being shot at. Money. The rest of it. All fine and dandy. But not waking up in the Hürtgen Forest, hemorrhoids all adangle, no feeling in your feet—that’s the good life.”

  “They didn’t kill us, anyway,” my father said.

  “No, but they tried like bloody hell, and I got awful tired of it.”

  “We were trying, too.”

  “Not me,” Jack Ward said. “I honestly couldn’t say for sure I killed anybody. I just ducked, got off a round or two, tried not to hit any of our guys, prayed like a schoolgirl. You never prayed, did you.”

  “Never once,” my father said.

  “You wouldn’t shit me,” Jack Ward said.

  “We all prayed,” Mike said.

  “Never once,” my father insisted.

  Jack Ward smiled. “I never stopped till we passed Staten Island.”

  “You stopped then though, I bet.”

  “I did,” he admitted. “I made about a hundred deals with God over there and never honored one.”

  My father shrugged. “If he’s half as smart as the preachers say, he knew you wouldn’t.”

  “We never shook on them, is the way I look at it.”

  Mike was looking pale and nervous, as if he expected lightning. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” he said. “Don’t let Irma hear you.”

  “I got God covered anyhow,” Jack Ward said. “This one claims she’s going to be a nun, and her mother’s practically one already. I get prayed for all the time.”

  “For all the good it does,” Mike observed.

  That reminded my father of a joke, which he told at excruciating length. It was about a guy who was constipated and went to half a dozen doctors. Nobody could help. Finally, the last doctor prescribed a powerful enema, which the man took home with him, but he was back the next day complaining of even greater discomfort. When the doctor expressed surprise that the enema had had no effect, the patient snorted, saying he might as well have shoved them up his ass for all the good they did. In place of the word “ass,” my father substituted a humming sound, turning his back on Tria and me for the finale. I already knew the punch line (it was one of the eight or ten jokes my father told regularly) and so I watched for Tria’s Ward’s reaction to it, expecting disgust. Instead, her expression registered something like fear, as if somebody had once warned her that the world was a foul, vulgar place, though this was the first concrete evidence that it might be true. I felt very sorry for her, and if I could have thought of a way, I would have tried to convince her that the world was neither foul nor vulgar, the painful erection in my chinos notwithstanding.

  All that night I thought about Tria Ward. After her father took her away, into the dining room, my father and I left for a dinner of hamburg steaks at the Mohawk Grill, and there he finally got me to talk a little about my mother. What the hell, he said, he’d even sign F. William Peterson’s papers if I wanted him to. He just hated like hell to be taken for a ride, that’s all. Then he launched into a familiar diatribe about lawyers in general and F. William Peterson in particular, concluding that F. Willie was no prize, far from it, but he wasn’t as bad as most.

  As I listened to him talk and looked around the diner, which we had to ourselves this late on a Sunday evening, except for Harry and Wild Bill Gaffney, the town idiot, whom Harry looked after sometimes. Everything looked shabby, somehow. Shabbier than usual. And when Wild Bill used his index finger to scour the last drop of dirty coffee from the bottom of his cup, I wanted to cry. I was sensible enough to be embarrassed about feeling this way, for here I was, warm and decently dressed, with a plate full of fries dripping brown gravy in front of me, with over three hundred dollars in the bank that nobody knew anything about. My mother was not dead, as I had imagined twenty-four hours earlier, and for all I knew she might even draw her mind back out of the dark woods that attracted her and come home. In general, things were looking up, but for some reason I’d never felt lower, and when my father said he thought maybe he’d go out for a while, I was glad to have the rest of the night to myself.

  We ambled across the deserted Main Street, hands in our pockets, and up the stairs to our dark flat. I got undressed right away and pretended to read, so my father wouldn’t stay around the apartment any longer than he wanted to, about five minutes, as it turned out. Then he was gone, the convertible jerking away from the curb below, back toward The Elms to torment Irma and wait for Eileen to get off work. Harry came out of the diner below, Wild Bill shuffling behind him, and locked the front door, officially surrendering downtown Mohawk to ghosts. The Mohawk Theater, three doors down from the grill, had closed after Christmas, its dark marquee still insisting IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, A CLASSIC. The theater was the fourth business on Main to fail that year, though two of the others had reopened on the new highway that skirted town. Looming up behind Main Street was the dark top floor of the junior high, and behind it the yellow windows of the hospital perched atop the treacherous Hospital Hill. Beyond it, the vast expanse of Myrtle Park, its unlit winding trails too spooky to visit at night. I’d read about a place in Arizona called the Superstition Mountains where people had a habit of disappearing without a trace, and it occurred to me that you could disappear without a trace right here in Mohawk and that I probably would, eventually.

  On the other side of the park and the new highway, out beyond the city limits, was Tria Ward, and I thought about her and the scared look on her face when my father told the joke about the constipated man. Had her father recognized me as one of the boys who sat on the motorcycle at the end of his drive? Probably not. Probably it didn’t matter. The Wards were all safe inside the white jewel house. Safe from the lunatic Drew Littlers of Mohawk County, safe from boys like me who might be tempted to fall in love with their dark-eyed, convent-bound girl child.

  Somewhere in the gray consciousness of half sleep, though, my mind skittered away from beautiful Tria Ward and resolved a riddle that had been in the back of my mind all day. At the nursing home, I’d been asked to sign a big visitor’s ledger. There had been a page for each resident, and I had expected my mother’s to be clean. Instead, one illegible scrawl was entered there again and again, at least fifteen or twenty times. I had given it little thought, because it looked like the kind of scratching a doctor might be guilty of. Who else was there?

  When I started awa
ke, though, that signature seemed written in the air above my bed, and before the scrawl could disappear I was able to decipher it: F. William Peterson, it said.

  19

  When school got out for the summer, I had a lot more time on my hands, what with my father working on the road every day. Mornings I liked to spend at the Mohawk Free Library, an old stone building with a nice circular dome you could stand beneath and look up into. In the big archways just above the second floor were stained glass windows, and in the mornings the sun streamed through the eastern ones giving the stacks below a churchlike atmosphere, though the tall narrow windows along the first floor reduced the effect with a more natural light. All of the books were on the first floor, which also housed the loan desk, the children’s room, and the general reading room, where a few white-haired men gathered to talk loudly every morning over the Schenectady Gazette, which filled them in on events ignored by the Mohawk Republican. These were fierce, belligerent old men who wouldn’t stand for any shushing, and the librarians ignored the occasional complaint lodged against them, though an identical QUIET PLEASE sign posted in the children’s room was strictly enforced.

  The library itself was oddly shaped, as if the architect had followed the curve of the land, ducking around boulders and trees rather than removing them. Even the rows of shelves inside meandered, each a different length and height, sometimes stopping abruptly to accommodate a floor register or green pipe jutting out of the wall. My favorite place was a tiny, out-of-the-way alcove where a small oak desk and chair had been placed, one of half a dozen such scattered throughout the stacks. There I could take off my shoes and rest my bare feet on the cool slate floor and read for hours, uninterrupted by the low, confidential whispers of the librarians at the nearby circulation desk, the whirring of the large rotating fan near the front door, the distant barking of the old men in the reading room. If there was a new librarian, she might come check on me, suspicious of a disappearing teenager (I’d proudly turned thirteen that May and was worthy of the accolade), but the rest of the staff knew me, expected me, ignored me.