The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  I don’t know why I didn’t duck into the salon. Maybe, in the back of my mind I was wondering why whoever was in our apartment had the light on. Somebody wanting to surprise my father would have left it off. And maybe the more I watched the figure pace, the more I listened to its impatient heavy footfalls, the more certain I was that I recognized it. (Lord knows I should have.) Leaving the door to Rose’s ajar so that I could beat a retreat in there if I had to, I faced the door to our apartment and turned the brass knob.

  Inside stood F. William Peterson.

  25

  Naturally, I blamed him. F. William Peterson was just the sort of person you took things out on if he happened to be handy. I remember understanding, when I saw him standing there in the middle of the room, why my father had beaten him up in the parking lot so many years ago. You’d kick him for the same reason you’d kick a faithful dog that didn’t know any better than to keep its cold, wet nose out of your crotch when you’d had the kind of day that diminishes a human being’s capacity for fundamental decency.

  He had come to tell me what nobody else would, and I hated him even more blackly than the liars. Hated him for the way he sat me down as if I were a little boy and told me not to think badly of my father just because maybe he’d done something wrong, just because he was in jail. I hated him for making the news bearable, for reminding me that even good people sometimes did bad things. It didn’t mean they didn’t love us. That I shouldn’t worry too much anyway, because if F. William Peterson was right, and he thought he was, things were going to start looking up for me very soon, and I didn’t want to waste my time being depressed when I should be preparing for the good times. I could tell that he would have liked to put his arm around my shoulder like I was his son, though he must have guessed that I would have none of that. When he was finally finished, when there wasn’t anything else he could think of to say and we were facing each other, I drove my hands deep into my pockets to prevent him from offering one of his.

  “He’ll tell you about it,” F. William Peterson said. “He should be the one, not me. I don’t think they’ll be able to hold him more than forty-eight hours.”

  The card he left me, with his office and home phone numbers on it, I tore to shreds as soon as the door closed behind him. It reached the snowy sidewalk below before he did. A block and a half up Main Street was City Hall, which contained the jail where my father was. From the front windows of the Accounting Department you could just see it if you turned out the lights and put your nose to the dark, cold glass. In fact, because of the angle and the thickness of the glass, it looked right next door, close enough to touch.

  If F. William Peterson imagined that my father was going to have a rough time explaining to me about why he’d been thrown in jail, he still had a lot to learn about my father. Much to everybody’s surprise he was out the next day. I’d skipped school and spent the day here and there, imagining that strangers I passed on the street could tell by the look of me that my father was locked up. I came home about the same time I normally did and noticed that the Mercury wasn’t sitting at the same angle in the snowbank, which meant that it had been driven and returned. Which meant that my father was a free man again. I found him right across the street drinking coffee at Harry’s.

  “Hello, Buster,” he said when he looked up and saw me there. “You gonna sit down or what?”

  I took the stool next to his. Tree was on the other side of him, looking hangdog. If he noticed me come in, or noticed my father notice, he made no sign. “I don’t know,” he kept saying. “I just w-w-wisht I knew what to do.”

  “Say hello to Tree,” my father said. As I’ve mentioned, Sam Hall wasn’t much on introductions, but there were certain people he introduced me to all the time and could never be convinced, even when both parties protested, that we’d ever laid eyes on each other. I said hello to Tree because it was easier to go along and because Tree was just as likely to have forgotten me, in which case I’d be all alone in claiming prior acquaintance.

  “I w-w-wisht I knew, Sammy. Honest to … Christ I do.”

  “I wish you did too, you pain in the ass,” my father said. “I got a problem or two myself right this minute.”

  Tree began to cry. “Jesus,” he said. “I know you do, Sammy. How do you think I feel asking. At a time like this, when you’re up sh … it crick yourself. I just w-w-wisht I knew what else to do.”

  My father slipped him twenty.

  “Jesus, Sammy,” he said, crying harder now. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You could go away and let me talk to my kid a minute.”

  It was just the sort of suggestion that Tree was looking for, now that he had the money. You could tell. It was something he could do by way of repayment. “Y-you got it,” he choked. “Anything. Y-you got it.”

  He got halfway to the door and remembered something and came back. “I just w-wisht I knew what to do,” he told my father. “If I knew w-what to do, I’d be all right.”

  “I know, Tree,” my father said. “You and everybody.”

  Finally, the door closed behind him.

  “Wisht he knew what to do,” Harry grumbled from way down the counter. “Anybody with half a nut could tell him what to do. Go home to his wife and kids and bring his paycheck with him. Once in a fuckin’ while, anyhow.”

  “Love,” my father said. “When he’s got the bug, he’s not himself.”

  “Bullshit,” Harry said. “It’s the only time he is himself. Problem is, he’s got a shitty self.”

  “And no taste, to boot,” my father said.

  “Argh!” Harry concluded, spitting onto the surface of the hot grill, where the wet spot crackled, jumped, and disappeared. It was late afternoon and he’d be cleaning it in a few minutes anyway before the small dinner crowd came in wanting grilled rib steaks, on special today because they’d been in the cooler a while and were beginning to look as gray as the surface of the grill.

  “So,” my father said. “I guess you heard about my little problem.”

  He ran his hand over the stubble on his chin as if the little problem he was going to tell me about was the loss of his razor.

  “It’ll get straightened out here pretty quick,” he predicted. Since we had the place to ourselves, he got Harry to change a ten so we could play Liars.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “Got to,” he said. “ ’Cause if I get screwed, some other people get it even worse. In another day or two they’ll figure that out, if they haven’t already. Once they do”—he lip-farted—“the whole thing disappears. It never happened even. That’s all. Simple.”

  “Simple,” I said.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He had me down to my last bill already and wondering if I’d ever learn to play the game. I wondered if I’d be any better playing with my own money instead of his. Maybe not. Maybe I’d be worse.

  “Wussy come by?”

  I said he had. “We had hamburg steaks.”

  “He pay?”

  I said he had.

  “You could look all over hell and gone and never find a better one,” he said absently. My father didn’t object to the word “nigger,” but he wouldn’t use it on Wussy except when Wussy was there to hear it.

  “Eileen came by too,” I said, and before I thought, “and Mr. Peterson.”

  “And he told you where I was, right?”

  I could have kicked myself. “He wanted to know if I needed anything, mostly. Eileen wanted me to stay with her,” I added, hoping that this new subject would take.

  “Funny the way he turns up,” my father said, as if he considered it genuinely curious.

  I won two quick rounds while he thought about it.

  “I like him,” I said, though I hadn’t the night before.

  “You do,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “You know what?” he said.

  “What?”

  “
I don’t.”

  There was no point in asking him why, because if I did, he’d tell me and get himself all worked up in the process. Eventually he’d get around to his lawyer speech and it was a long one, absolutely to be avoided if possible.

  “Let me tell you something about all these guys,” my father said.

  “Four sixes,” I said, and settled in.

  Blessedly, Eileen stopped in for a minute on the way to work, interrupting our Liars game and the lawyer speech. When she left, we ate some dinner and tried to get the Liars going again, though it was clear that neither of us felt much like it. Sitting there in Harry’s for so long gave me the idea that maybe we were waiting for somebody, though I couldn’t think who. Eventually, we left.

  Out in the street a thaw had begun, the temperature having actually risen since late afternoon, and water was running beneath the gray snowbanks along the gutter.

  “I wish I could have done it some other way,” my father said, “but I had to let you help out.”

  “Help out how,” I said, unaware that I’d done anything.

  I had though.

  “We’ll get you straightened around, don’t worry.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

  “I had that figured for your college,” he said. “So you won’t go through life a dummy.”

  The next day, on the noon hour, I cut lunch at school and ran downtown to the bank to find out how bad it was. My favorite teller got to break the news, and he looked pretty guilty explaining the bank’s policy with regard to minors. I was wiped out.

  In the end, things turned out pretty much the way he predicted, though it was years later, when I came back to Mohawk from the university, after a six-year absence, that I heard the story, overheard it in a bar actually, where my father was. I was the only one in the bar who’d never heard the story before.

  “Simple. Anybody coulda done it. My son was all of twelve,” he said, getting my age wrong, as usual (I was nearly fourteen), “and he coulda done it. The car’s out back of City Hall, right there in the parking lot. Somebody gives you a set of keys and a map. Then you drive the car is all. You get to where you’re going, you park the car, go sit in a bar and wait for your ride home.”

  Simple. You didn’t know what was in the trunk and you didn’t want to know. All you knew was that it was worth a couple hundred to somebody to have you drive it. If it was something really bad, it would have been worth a couple hundred more, so you’re not that worried.

  Simple, except that it had to snow like a bastard and he’d run into a roadblock at the entrance to the Thruway. Nobody was being let on without chains. My father had no idea whether there were chains in the trunk and wasn’t about to open it and find out. Never mind, he told the trooper. I’ll make the trip tomorrow.

  It wasn’t easy getting out of line at the Thruway entrance, but he’d have made it if not for the standard transmission, which he knew how to drive, but wasn’t used to. Trying to pull away in third instead of first, he’d stalled, then couldn’t get the engine to turn over. There was nothing to do then but sit there a few minutes and listen to the drivers behind him blow their horns. Nothing but roll down the window and give them all the finger. By the time he got the car started again, some of the drivers behind him had started to go around, and when he popped the car into gear it lurched forward just in time to clip the rear end of one of the passing cars, separating from its body the rear fender, which folded neatly and drove with an eerie screech up into the radiator fan of the car my father was driving, stalling him again. Even then, things might have been all right if the driver of yet another car, also trying to pass, hadn’t seen the collision, braked himself into a skid and sluiced sideways through the fresh snow until he came to rest with a barely audible thump against the rear of my father’s car. The impact was so slight that my father was not even sure he’d been hit, and the snow on the back window prevented him from seeing that the impact had popped his trunk open as cleanly as if a key had been inserted.

  It had taken ten minutes to get everything straightened out. My father exchanged license numbers with the two other drivers, got the fender extracted from the radiator, chatted with a helpful young trooper and even offered to get him Giant football tickets. My father was about to drive off when the trooper said, “Not like that,” and went over to close the trunk that my father, during the entire conversation, had not noticed yawning open like an invitation to the penitentiary. “Goodnight, Irene,” my father said to the man he was swapping stories with, the irony, the tragedy of the whole escapade still fresh after a decade. So much for simple.

  The good news was that my father knew enough about the whole deal to implicate a cop and suggest a thing or two about a couple of city councilmen. F. William Peterson handled the out-of-court negotiations skillfully and in the end my father was convicted of a misdemeanor and given a suspended sentence. Charges of transporting stolen property were dropped, and it was entered into the record that the contraband had been placed in the trunk of the car my father was driving by unknown, mysterious forces. He was even slipped a little something by the prosecuting attorney to help with the fine, and the men my father had protected slipped him a little something more for being a sport about spending the night in jail.

  “I been there before,” he shrugged, but admitted that the money would come in handy, since he was already mired in the lowest depths of the insurance risk pool and the accident was going to play hell with his rates. “I don’t give a shit about me,” he explained, “but I got a kid to support.”

  Losing my savings served me right, I had to admit. Having myself stolen, I considered myself, with some justification, a thief. And if there was some sort of cosmic accounting (did we not live in the Accounting Department?) at work in the universe, then I wasn’t square yet, for while I had never totaled up all that I’d copped from Klein’s I knew it had to be more than the four hundred dollars my father used to extricate himself from his “little problem” and never gotten around to paying back. Not only that, I knew I didn’t have much cause to be miffed at him, because he paid for a lot of things, like my tab over at Harry’s.

  What got me thinking and worrying, though, was that he had apparently known about my savings account all along. I wondered if he was surprised when he got out of jail and found out how much I had, or if he’d been monitoring my progress all along. One thing was clear—he had been way ahead of me, like always. He’d known and he’d not let on that he knew.

  And it wasn’t like I’d never been warned. According to my mother, Sam Hall had always been slippery with money. After the war, during that first frantic year when they were going to the track all summer long, she’d leave him in line at the two-dollar window and visit the ladies’ room. When she came out, he’d be just finishing up and he’d hand her the tickets to keep warm when they got back to their seats. When the race was over and the two or three tickets my mother held were officially worthless, he’d say not to worry, he’d held on to the winning ticket himself. And there between his thumb and forefinger would be a ten-dollar winner.

  The way such tickets occasionally materialized did not have the reassuring effect on my mother that he might have hoped, however, because she was smart enough to realize that the ticket’s existence had broader, unsettling implications. Somehow, she realized, my father had slipped out of the two-dollar line in favor of the always shorter ten-dollar one, then returned to where she’d left him so she wouldn’t be suspicious. She discovered that in addition to the pocket that held the tickets he admitted to, my father had other pockets, and these sometimes contained larger wagers she was kept ignorant of, which meant that she never knew where they stood. On a night when they appeared to be winning, according to the tickets he let her cash, my father’s other pockets might be bulging with losing tickets.

  She tried to regulate how much money they brought to the track so that she’d know when it was gone, but often he would have more than he admitted when they left the house
and he sometimes borrowed from friends once there. Putting the touch on people was something he was so adept at that the transaction was sometimes accomplished right under her nose without her suspecting a thing until later when she made him explain how they’d lost so much. The more she tried to keep tabs, the more sneaky my father became until, in the end, the track lost its appeal for her and she stopped accompanying him, which disappointed my father greatly. She wasn’t able to make him understand that she never knew which horse to root for, because she never knew where their real money rode. “I want you to tell me everything,” she insisted. “If you keep things from me, I’m lost. We’re lost.”

  I don’t know what his response to that was, but I can guess what his solution would have been. He would have wanted her to join him in the game—to have something secreted away in the inside pocket of her own blazer, something to surprise him with. You see, what I worried about most after he’d wiped me out was, ironically, what he must have thought of me for keeping my money a secret from him, or trying to. At the very least, he must have concluded that I did not trust his judgment, which of course was true, though hardly the inference I would have wished him to draw. But now I don’t think that ever occurred to him, or if it did, I don’t think he minded my reluctance to confide. And I don’t think it would have pleased him for me to be so foolish as to trust him completely.

  I had the good sense not to dwell on my misfortune or consider myself unlucky. The A&P, along with one of the seven remaining glove shops, had closed permanently that winter, putting another fifty or so men out of work and making the Mohawk Grill even more crowded with dejected coffee drinkers. My father would be going back to work on the road soon, and I was still employed. I kept my old savings account and continued to add to it. Ten dollars a week. The rest I put in a new savings account in a small bank way out by the marina and made sure they sent us no monthly statement.