The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  To say that he was a changed boy would be less accurate than to suggest that the Claude who’d got me to barf Oreos died at the end of the rope that afternoon, leaving behind another person entirely, this one without defenses. He no longer cared to compete with me or anyone. There were no more arm wrestling contests, sprints or eating tournaments, no more sarcastic remarks about my being a wimp. When pretty girls were around he stared at them forlornly, his hands in his pockets, working there but somehow without conviction, as if he’d lost the capacity to imagine pleasure.

  All in all, I preferred the old Claude, asshole though he had been. I doubt if I’d have befriended the new Claude if it hadn’t been for his mother, who seemed to take my visits as personal favors, medicinal in their effect. In fact, she looked about as forlorn as her son, and she never asked questions about where we were going or where we’d been when we returned after dark. She either trusted me completely or had concluded that I was the least of the dangers her son faced. I don’t think she ever discussed with anyone his attempted suicide or the sudden disappearance of Claude Sr. I’m not sure they even talked to each other. Whenever I visited, I never seemed to be interrupting anything, and I often got the feeling that there no longer was anything in that house to interrupt except silence. They often gave the appearance of having been watching each other for hours.

  It finally dawned on me that Claude’s mother was waiting for him to try it again, and that part of her gratitude to me for taking the boy away for a few hours was that the time he spent with me was the only time she could relax her vigilance, at least until school started in the fall. Often when we returned home, we’d find her deeply asleep in the big armchair that had been her husband’s. It faced the kitchen door and she would not wake up if we entered quietly. Then Claude would take a seat and watch his mother sleep and breathe, though this was too spooky for me, and I’d have to leave. I always wanted to get away before she woke up and saw her son sitting there looking at her from across the dark room, across the wide chasm of his experience and her imagination.

  23

  My savings account continued to swell. Between the money I got from cleaning Rose’s and the cash Harry slipped me on Fridays and the golf balls I sold on weekends, I was loaded. Life was good. After dinner at the Mohawk Grill, my father would shoot a rack of pool with me at the pool hall before heading out to The Elms or tracking down a poker game. I had an immediate passion for the game and before long I could shoot pretty well. Not well enough to beat my father, but pretty well. I’d have stayed there in the pool hall all night if I’d been allowed to. Around eight o’clock, however, the place would begin to get jammed and the crowd would get rougher and my father would put up our cues before things really got cooking and the sticks got used to settle disagreements. It was a rare night that did not generate at least one fight in the pool room, and while most of the combatants were either too drunk or too inept to hurt each other much, bystanders were sometimes mangled hideously. My father said if it was just him, he’d let me stay and shoot to my heart’s content, but there was one thing he never wanted to do, and that was report to my mother that I’d been killed in the pool hall. I couldn’t blame him for that.

  He understood my passion though, and one Saturday afternoon when I returned from selling golf balls there was a pool table sitting in the middle of the apartment. My father was on his back, swearing up at its underbelly, trying to level the table through the sheer force of his obscenity. Wussy was there too, stretched out on the couch with a beer, clearly enjoying himself.

  “Howdy, Sam’s Kid,” he said. “Come over here and watch this.”

  A wrench appeared, airborne, missing Wussy by a fair margin, but not the rabbit ears on the television, which clattered to the floor.

  Wussy drained the rest of his beer, crushed the can, and belched significantly. “When you finish with that,” he said, “you can fix the TV.”

  “What’s wrong with the TV?” came my father’s voice from under the table.

  “Nothing a master fixer like you couldn’t handle,” Wussy said.

  “Get your black ass over here a minute. Lift this table.”

  Wussy ignored him. “Well, Sam’s Kid, how’s the golf ball business?”

  That he knew about it was only mildly surprising. Wussy found out about most of what went on in Mohawk.

  “I hear they nailed your associate,” he said.

  I decided to play dumb. “Who?”

  “Who,” Wussy said. “Willie Heinz, who. Ankle fractured in about nine places. Totaled a brand new golf cart. Who.”

  I poured myself a soda and handed Wussy another beer.

  “You never heard of Willie Heinz, right?”

  “If I have to come out from under this table—” my father said.

  Wussy got up and lifted the big pool table effortlessly.

  “Don’t drop it, either,” my father said.

  “I should,” Wussy said. “Solve all your problems, right Sam’s Kid?”

  “Cocksucker,” my father muttered, apparently at the table. The legs were supposed to be adjustable.

  “Tells me not to drop it and then calls me names,” Wussy said.

  After a minute, my father crawled out from underneath and Wussy set the table down. Anybody could see it was cockeyed, but my father refused to believe it. Wussy set a ball in the center of the table and it rolled right into the corner pocket. “Perfect,” he said. “Shoot everything into that one.”

  “Cocksucker,” my father said. Then he looked at me as if the whole thing was my fault. I could tell they’d been at it a while. “Every time I fix it, it’s worse,” my father admitted.

  “Give up, why don’t you,” Wussy suggested. “Saw all four legs off, set the bastard on the floor. If the building don’t slope, you’re in business.”

  “Cocksucker,” my father said.

  “Lift it up a minute,” Wussy said. He never would have suggested this an hour ago. He always let my father go ahead with whatever he was trying to do until there was something in the tone of his “cocksucker” that suggested he was ready for help.

  When Wussy disappeared under the table, my father winked at me. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said. “I got a pretty fair grip on this thing. If it starts to go, I’ll shout.”

  But Wussy was through already and when my father set the table down, it looked about right. Wussy took a ball from one of the leather pouches and set it in the middle of the table, where it stayed. Then my father rolled it slow and we all bent to watch its miraculously straight path to the green bumper.

  “There,” my father said, cuffing me. “You got a pool table. Don’t tell your mother.”

  If ever there was an ideal place for a pool table, the Accounting Department was that place. The central cavernous room we lived in was far too large for us, the sofa and television taking up only a small portion, leaving the rest bare and conducive to lonely echoes. The table was a big tournament-sized one, but there was still plenty of room on all sides to circle and brandish a cue. The problem with pool tables outside of pool halls is that there’s never really enough room to play. There’s usually some basement post that makes one part of the table inaccessible, or a wall that’s too close, requiring a short cue wielded at a sixty-degree angle. But our bowling alley of a flat was perfect.

  The table itself was old, but in wonderful condition. I learned later that my father had had his eye on it for some time, ever since he learned that the man who owned it had gone into the hospital. The fellow’s wife had always hated having the table in her home and was contemplating its disposal when my father, having read the obituary column in the Mohawk Republican, appeared in their long drive with a pickup truck offering to cart it off for free. The widow, who was on her way to the funeral, agreed to let my father take it, provided he could get it out of the house before she returned from the cemetery. She and her husband had argued over the table for years and he’d told her flatly that she’d get rid of it over his dead
body. It was going to stay right the hell where it was until he was in the ground, he’d boasted, and it occurred to her now that if my father carted it off right away, it would rankle her husband in the afterlife.

  That night, when we finished eating hamburg steaks at Harry’s, my father pushed his plate away, studied me shrewdly and said, “Well?”

  “It’s a great table,” I said, guessing wrong, as usual. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” he said. “What’s this about you selling golf balls?”

  Confronted so directly, there wasn’t anything to do but tell him, so I did. I told him that during the week I scoured the woods that lined the fairways, that if I worked hard I could usually find a couple dozen balls there, that I didn’t figure they belonged to anybody since their owners had stopped looking for them, that I was providing a public service by reselling them so cheap. What I told him had just the right amount of truth to it, enough to sound plausible, not enough to worry him. I didn’t see where the woods were so different from the pond, or why the pro shop had any more right to sell other people’s lost golf balls than I did. Not telling the truth about precisely how I came to have the balls actually clarified the legal and ethical issues, it seemed to me, and therefore it wasn’t what a reasonable person would call lying. I knew I was vulnerable on the issue of being on the private golf course in the first place, but I didn’t think my father would raise it. He was a born trespasser who believed he had a right to go anywhere he pleased in a free country. In his opinion, signs that warned people to keep out did their job by keeping most people out, and the owners of the said property hadn’t a right to expect much more. Anybody that wanted him to stay out would have to tell him so personally.

  Anyway, my fabric of lies and half-truths had the desired effect, though I made a mental note, after telling my father that I found the golf balls in the woods, to leave my snorkel and fins over at Claude’s. He never asked me how much money I was making or what I did with it, so I was left to conclude that it didn’t matter to him that I was becoming a wealthy man. I charged most of my lunches at Harry’s and my father settled up each week, letting me keep whatever Harry slipped me for bussing and washing dishes during the rush. When he was working, Sam Hall cared nothing for money, or when it was likely to run out, or how much he’d spent the night before, or where. He paid his bills when he thought about it, then forgot and paid them again, or remembered paying them when he hadn’t and offered to settle the matter outside. He kept no records.

  All in all, I preferred his attitude toward money to my mother’s. She had always watched it carefully, as if money possessed magical qualities, chief among them the ability to vanish. She had always planned her paychecks from the phone company a month in advance and she never forgot a bill or when it was due. She even had a category in her ledger for “unexpected”—the run nylon stocking, the school trip to the Albany museum, the frozen water pipe in February. When nothing unexpected happened in September, she assumed two unexpected things would crop up in October, and over the course of a calendar year, she had “unexpected” pegged to within a few small dollars. She always congratulated herself on the fact that she had nothing to worry about, and wouldn’t have, as long as she continued to worry all the time.

  Though I admired my father’s nonchalance, his innocent faith that some fucking thing would give when it had to, I had to admit that I myself was more like my mother. I knew exactly what was in my savings account and I couldn’t understand my father’s unnatural lack of curiosity about my growing fortune. I had little faith in his “something’s gotta give” philosophy about bad times, and I delighted as I watched my money accumulate, not out of any abstract fondness for wealth, but rather from the conviction that the day was approaching when my father and I would be very glad to have it, and from the fear that no matter how much I saved, when that dark day arrived, we were unlikely to have as much as we needed. Not one fucking thing would give, whether it had to or not.

  So, when my father offered no objection, I continued to sell golf balls and even expanded my operation a little. Lying about finding balls in the woods gave me the idea that there might actually be some there, and it turned out that there were, though the pickings were slim in comparison with the pond. Still, come Saturday morning I always had between a hundred and two hundred balls for sale, and by Sunday noon I’d have another thirty or forty dollars for deposit. Plus the money from Rose’s. Plus the money from Harry. I was a money-making machine.

  Among my customers most Saturday mornings was Jack Ward, who always pulled the Lincoln over and got out, looking like an ad in a fashion magazine. When he was by himself, he seldom bought more than one or two of the best balls, which I took to be evidence of penury until I discovered he was one of the best golfers at the club. Sometimes, though, he had a young, blond-haired woman with him who talked him into buying her a half dozen or more. She was very pretty, with breasts that strained against the fabric of her shirt, but I didn’t like her because she acted like a schoolgirl, talking what sounded like baby talk in a paper-thin voice. Right in front of Claude and me she’d slip her hand into Jack Ward’s pocket and coo, “Buy me …, okaaay?” The “buy me” routine was a regular feature until one morning she noticed Claude off to the side, admiring her absently and playing with himself, his face more suggestive of infinite sadness than lust. The sight of him unhinged her and she stepped back quickly as if from a snake. “That’s revolting,” she said in her natural voice, which put her at about thirty, as opposed to the seventeen she’d been aping. I think she would have bolted for the safety of the Lincoln if her hand hadn’t been caught in Jack Ward’s pocket.

  The second or third time he stopped, Jack Ward recognized me as someone he knew, someone who’d been in his house, though he seemed puzzled as to how that might have come about. I reminded him that it was I who had saved the day when his daughter had lost control of the car. He nodded then. “And only three hundred dollars worth of damage to the transmission, too.”

  “That’s good,” I replied seriously, imagining that this extravagant amount might actually constitute a good deal for repairs to a car as expensive as the Ward Lincoln, and not wanting to appear unworldly. Then I asked him whether they’d decided if Tria would be going to Mohawk High.

  “She would be if it was up to me,” he said in a way that suggested it wasn’t up to him and that a lot of other things weren’t up to him either. “Call her sometime,” he suggested.

  I did. That very afternoon. We didn’t have a phone, so I had to do it from the Mohawk Grill. Mrs. Ward answered on the first ring, and when I identified myself she did not seem surprised. “She’s gone, you see,” Tria’s mother informed me. “School starts early in Connecticut. In August, you see.”

  “Get fuckin’ lucky, you jitbag!” Wussy bellowed from a few feet away, where he and my father were playing gin on the Formica counter.

  For some reason, I was unable to hang up the phone. I talked and I refused to stop talking. I mentioned having run into Mrs. Ward’s husband at the country club, intimated that our paths crossed there frequently, told her that he himself had suggested that I call. I asked after her own health and told her I was glad the Lincoln was all right now. I believe I even inquired after Mrs. Petrie, the cook, and asked to be remembered to her. All this I said, my back to the counter and the card players, my hand partially cupped over the mouthpiece. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m not sure I believed that Tria was gone. Wouldn’t her own father have known? But maybe he did. Maybe that was why he’d urged me to call, like telling someone to call you on Monday when you know you’ll be out of town. I think what I wanted from Mrs. Ward was for her to consider me worthy. Hadn’t I once been thought worthy? Hadn’t she referred to me as their savior? Was it possible that I had slipped so far, so suddenly, in her estimation? Would I ever get another invitation to join them for something cool?

  “There!” Wussy said. “Gin, you bastard.”

  “It must
be Dummy Day,” I heard my father say.

  24

  I have heard expressed more than once a theory that claims a direct relationship between skill at pocket billiards and a corresponding lack of skill in matters sexual. I lean toward the theory, especially if you happen to be talking about adolescents. In Mohawk, all the best pool shooters had reputations as ladies’ men, but I could never see where these reputations were earned or deserved. There was the general sense that guys who hung around the pool hall were men of the world, and stories of conquest travel even better over green felt than calm water. But I never knew back then, nor do I know now, a real stud with a pool cue who could carry on a normal conversation with a woman.

  I’m not talking about the sort of player who shoots well enough not to embarrass himself, who can make the occasional bank shot and still leave himself in position for the eight. I mean the guys who can do real magic, the ones who can’t find a game without leaving town and who leave town, often as not, in a hurry, their underwear still in a drawer at the Y.M.C.A., custom pool cue in its case tucked neatly under one arm. And I’m talking about that lower echelon of players who aspire to such an existence.

  The ignorance of such men concerning women is peculiar, many of them having participated greedily in numerous obscenities, and feeling no compunction about dropping their trousers in the dark room above the pool hall for some toothless old woman hired off the street at a flat hourly rate who has no idea how long the line outside in the hallway is growing. Such men are sometimes adept at slipping quietly up the back stairs to a dingy third-floor flat where graveyard husbands dwell with bored young wives. But this is the extent of their experience.