The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “Who?”

  He looked over at me. “Who. Your ass, who.”

  Pretending ignorance never got me anywhere with him, somehow, though he never questioned legitimate dumbness.

  “Nothing,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie, since he certainly hadn’t said anything specific. But it wasn’t exactly the truth either.

  “Nothing,” my father repeated.

  When we pulled up in front of the apartment, a pair of big legs were sticking out of the dark entryway and onto the sidewalk. They didn’t move, but when my father turned off the ignition an empty bottle landed on the canvas top of the convertible and broke in the middle of the street. “Speaking of nothing—” my father said.

  When we got out, Drew Littler tried to stand, lost his balance and crashed backward through the fogged glass door and into the unlit hall at the foot of the staircase.

  “Get back in the car,” my father said.

  There was just enough light from the street to see Drew Littler trying again to struggle to his feet. I had half a mind to do what I was told for once, but I stayed where I was.

  “Come on, Sammy,” Drew Littler said. “Let’s do it. You and me.”

  “Do what, Zero?”

  “Don’t call me that. I’ll have to kill anybody calls me that,” he said seriously, as if the need to kill my father were to him a matter of infinite regret.

  “All right,” my father said, stepping through the door frame and into the broken glass. “What should I call you?”

  “Let’s fight,” Drew said, as if the proposal required my father’s permission.

  “Nah,” my father said.

  “Come on,” said Drew, disappointed. “Let’s fuckin’ fight. Kick my ass, Sammy. You’re supposed to be some kind of ass kicker. Kick my fuckin’ ass, Sammy.”

  “I got a better idea,” my father said. “We go upstairs, get a good night’s sleep, and fight in the morning when we’re fresh.”

  “No sleep,” Drew said. “Kick ass.”

  He didn’t look like he’d be doing any ass kicking to me. I’d got close enough to see pretty well. He was leaning up against the banister, a jagged piece of opaque glass sticking out of the top of his blond head. He seem unaware of both the glass and the ribbon of black blood that snaked down his neck and into his shirt.

  “Aw, Sammy,” he said, slumping onto the stairs. He was crying now. He ran his fingers through his hair where they encountered the shard of glass. Lowering his head between his knees, he shook his head like a wet dog until the fragment fell out. Then he began to moan. I missed what he said the first couple of times, then finally understood. “He’s dead, Sammy,” Drew Littler cried. “He’s dead.”

  He was way too big, and we had to get Wussy to help us. My father went looking for him while I stayed with Drew in the hallway. He was bleeding quite a lot, but my father said head wounds always did, and not to worry. Remember whose head it is, he said.

  Drew slept peacefully, slumped up against the wall. He smelled something awful, a mixture of sweet odors—whiskey and body odor and blood. And my guess was that he’d wet his pants too. I stayed with him as long as I could, then went outside to keep from throwing up. After a while my father returned with Skinny Donovan in tow.

  “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch,” Skinny said when he saw. “You sure he’s alive?”

  Drew groaned, as if in answer, then was still again.

  “Wha’d you do, Sammy? Knock his ass through the door?”

  “Didn’t have to,” my father said. “He fell through it.”

  “You need somebody to swear to it?”

  My father said he didn’t think so, though it was good of Skinny to offer.

  “He sure did show those coons where the bear shit in the buck-wheat,” Skinny observed, as if he hated to see someone of demonstrated worth so cruelly reduced. “You want to drag him upstairs?”

  “Let’s wait for Wuss,” my father said. “It’s three flights up and he weighs a ton. We’re liable to get halfway up and lose him.”

  “You and me and the kid could manage,” Skinny said, insulted.

  “Probably, but let’s wait.”

  Skinny shrugged. “Let’s wait outside then. It’s like a toilet in here.”

  In a few minutes Wussy pulled up and parked across the street. He’d changed back into his regular clothes, including his fishing hat. He shook his head at me. “More foolishness, eh Sam’s Kid?”

  We went inside and stared at Drew.

  “Which end do you want?” my father said, ignoring Skinny.

  “I don’t want either end,” Wussy said, but he positioned himself at the sleeping boy’s feet. “This one’s not quite so ugly, though … anybody check to see if he’s alive?”

  “He’s alive,” my father said, trying to get some kind of grip under Drew’s armpits.

  “Be just like you to have me lug a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound retard up three flights of stairs and then find out he’s dead.”

  Every time my father tried to lift, Drew’s arms went limp over his head. “You picked the right end, asshole,” my father said to Wussy, who had his hands locked under the boy’s knees. “I suppose you want me to back up the stairs, too.”

  “Only if you want him up there,” Wussy said. “I’m all for leaving him right where he is.”

  It took them fifteen minutes. Finally my father had to take one arm, Skinny the other, going shoulder to shoulder up the narrow stairs, cursing each other’s clumsiness every step. “Don’t fight, girls,” Wussy said, his hands still locked under Drew Littler’s tree-trunk legs. Somebody farted silently, gruesomely, and the three of them argued over who it was, finally settling on me, though I was both downstairs and downwind. Wussy complained about the fact that the boy smelled like bait, and Skinny said he must have pissed not only in his pants but his shirt as well, because that was clammy and wet, too.

  “Where?” Wussy said when they got him into the apartment.

  “Bathtub,” my father gasped.

  It took some maneuvering, but they finally got him in. Skinny sat down on the commode, deathly white and breathing hard. All three men were sweating.

  “You could stand a shower your own self,” Wussy said, glaring at Skinny Donovan.

  “It’s not me that stinks,” Skinny said defensively. “It’s him.”

  Drew’s blond head was still slumped forward on his chest, and the spot where the glass fragment had stuck in his skull was now black and matted, though the bleeding had pretty much quit. Wussy put a finger on the boy’s throat. “Well, you’re right for once,” he said. “He’s alive. Anybody call his mother?”

  “Run over to the diner,” my father said to me. “Take your time. Try not to scare her to death. Maybe we can get him cleaned up by the time she gets here.”

  They didn’t though. I took my time, like he said, and I didn’t tell Eileen anything except that he was with us. She must have heard something in my voice though because she pulled up behind my father’s car about a minute later and got out of her little car just in time to hear a billiard ball come crashing through the window above and land on the hood of Wussy’s truck across the street. During the minute or so I had waited for her, the deserted street had filled with Drew Littler’s howls, and they were more animallike than human.

  By the time Eileen and I got upstairs, my father and Wussy had succeeded in pinning Drew to the floor while Skinny Donovan, in a strictly unauthorized maneuver, kicked the boy in the head until he stopped trying to get up. Wussy had a big knot on his forehead, and my father’s little finger was bent back at an absurd angle. There were billiard balls everywhere.

  Thanks to Skinny’s pointed-toed attacks, the wound in Drew Littler’s head had opened up again and the boy’s face was ghastly with blood. He lay there on the floor beneath the two men, panting and crying and howling like a dog. Then, finally, he passed out again. This time they didn’t put him in the tub. Turning on the shower was what had revived him. Instead, Skinny Donov
an was instructed to go across the street and call a doctor my father knew. I offered to go, but they wanted Skinny out. Eileen had immediately fallen to kicking him in the shins for kicking her son, and she was now glaring at him as if she might start up again without provocation. When the doctor came, he found a blue vein in Drew’s arm on the first try. The boy never even twitched.

  The doctor recommended getting him out of his wet clothes and letting him sleep where he was—on my bed—until morning, warning that in Drew’s condition, his morning was likely to be midafternoon. Then we were to bring him to the hospital. The gash on his head, though not life-threatening, would probably require stitches and a tetanus shot.

  “You better go over to the emergency room your own self,” the doctor told my father, who, now that he had the leisure to do so, was studying his little finger and cursing it for refusing to go back into place.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said.

  “I’m not,” the doctor said. “The only one I’m really worried about is him.”

  I didn’t recognize this as a reference to me until I saw everybody staring at me. I guess I must have looked pretty pale. The sight of all the blood had me weak in the knees, and for about the last ten minutes everything in the apartment had taken on a vague, otherworldly quality. I didn’t think I would faint, but I was in the minority. Eileen, who didn’t look so hot herself, got a washcloth and put it to my forehead. The last thing I remember was that the washcloth came away red.

  When I awoke, Wussy and I were alone in the apartment, if you didn’t count Drew Littler (and there was no reason to). Eileen had gone with my father over to the emergency room. Skinny, who claimed a twisted ankle, had begged a lift home, but Eileen wouldn’t give him one, so he’d limped a couple blocks over to Greenie’s Tavern for rye whiskey and sympathy and the opportunity to tell the tale.

  All of this according to Wussy, who was in the bathroom examining the purple knot above his left eye. “You all right, Sam’s Kid?” he said when he spied me in the mirror.

  I said I was.

  “Me too,” he said, though the knot in the mirror continued to hold his attention. Nobody had troubled much about him when it came time to assess damages. They’d fussed about my father’s finger and Drew’s head and Skinny’s ankle, and even about me for getting bled on. Wussy, everybody just assumed, was okay, and that didn’t seem right to me, even though it turned out to be true.

  Drew Littler had taken the worst of it, that was for sure. He was sleeping fitfully now, one whole side of his face swollen hideously from ear to chin, his eye nothing but a narrow slit. The pillow beneath his head was pink.

  I knew what the doctor had said, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that he might rise up out of bed and go on the rampage again. I watched him nervously until Wussy came out of the bathroom.

  “What should we do it he wakes up?” I said.

  Wussy started picking up billiard balls, which lay scattered underfoot around the apartment. “Run like hell,” he said, but when he saw that wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for, he relented. “He won’t be in the mood for no more fighting for a while. If you were about a quart and a half low and had a broken jaw and only one eye to see out of, you wouldn’t feel like it either. The only thing that kept him going as long as he did was stupidity.”

  That was only partly reassuring. I was sure Drew Littler wasn’t out of stupidity.

  I helped Wussy tape a piece of cardboard over the hole in the window, and together we picked the place up, at least some of it. “We’ve lost the twelve ball someplace,” he said when there was a space left in the rack. I didn’t have the heart to tell him where it was. He was about the unluckiest man that ever was when it came to crossfires, and now his truck’s assortment of dings and dents was richer by one.

  It was late now and there was just one snowy station on the television. Wussy stretched out on the sofa and watched it for almost five minutes before he started snoring loudly.

  It was nearly two hours until my father and Eileen returned, and that gave me time to think. I was groggy, but too nervous to sleep. Drew Littler, it occurred to me suddenly, was dangerously insane. Maybe he had been all along. The meaning of those trips on the motorcycle up the hill to the white jewel house, where we’d stopped outside the stone pillars and just watched, until Jack Ward came out on the patio and stared us away—all of it made sense now. I hadn’t been able to comprehend Drew Littler’s insistence that the Ward house would be his one day.

  He’d expected to inherit it.

  * * *

  It was nearly daybreak before everybody got to sleep. Wussy woke up when my father and Eileen returned from the hospital, then fell asleep again almost immediately. My father tried to get Eileen to go home and come back midmorning, but she wouldn’t. She finally fell asleep curled up next to her son on the bed. I glanced at her there when I went to the bathroom, and felt bad for thinking then that she really was a homely woman. There were times when she was almost pretty, like when she waitressed at The Elms, all fluid, efficient motion. But when the motion stopped, it was like what had made her almost pretty drained or settled somewhere out of sight.

  My father, who was spreading a sheet on the pool table when I returned from the john, read my mind. “She’s not the prettiest girl you ever saw,” he said, “but she’s one of the best.”

  I said I thought so too, and he showed me his pinky, though there wasn’t much to see, taped as it was to the two fingers next to it. “Does it hurt?” I said.

  “Not much,” he said, flexing the fingers that would. “Did when he set it, but what are you gonna do?”

  I climbed up on the makeshift bed. “Where are you going to sleep?”

  “In there,” he said. “Just in case. Aren’t you going to put pajamas on?”

  I said I wasn’t. I didn’t plan to take my shoes off either. Just in case.

  “Don’t worry about him,” my father said, running the fingers of his good hand through his hair. “Some day, huh?”

  I said it was some day, all right.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Need anything?”

  I could have used a pillow, but that was the only thing. I didn’t want Drew’s (my) pink one.

  “Things get bad sometimes,” my father said, as if he thought that needed saying. “It’s nothing to worry about. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  I said sure, I understood.

  “If it meant something, it’d be different,” he said. “But it’s just how things are.”

  I finally fell asleep to the tune of Wussy’s whistling snore, the sky outside our Main Street apartment turning gray. Maybe the bad things didn’t mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to. For a while I was back at the Ward house, part of a long circular procession of perfect strangers filing endlessly past Jack Ward’s casket. I must have done that funeral loop a dozen times before I fell into a deeper, dreamless sleep.

  I never heard the footsteps on the stair outside, and the banging on the fogged glass door of the Accounting Department seemed at first a part of some new dream just getting under way. It must have gone on for some time before I struggled half-awake. F. William Peterson had just tried the door and found it to be unlocked. His face was white and he looked like he expected to find an apartment full of dead people, which, given the condition of the entryway below—broken glass everywhere, dried blood on the wall and a trail of it leading all the way up to our door—was a reasonable, if incorrect hypothesis. Behind him in the dark hallway was a small woman, and just as I became aware of her, I heard Wussy say, “Oh, shit!” and duck behind the sofa back he’d been peering over. My father was in the bedroom doorway in his undershorts. “Who is it?” came Eileen’s sleepy voice from the bedroom.

  I wanted to know, too. I sat up on the pool table for a better view, and until she stepped forward from the gray hallway into the full morning light, I did not recognize my own mother.


  28

  And so began the final stage of my boyhood in Mohawk. Later, as an adult, I would return from time to time. As a visitor, though, never again as a true resident. But then I wouldn’t be a true resident of any other place either, joining instead the great multitude of wandering Americans, so many of whom have a Mohawk in their past, the memory of which propels us we know not precisely where, so long as it’s away. Return we do, but only to gain momentum for our next outward arc, each further than the last, until there is no elasticity left, nothing to draw us home.

  F. William Peterson had managed it all. He had found my mother a nice flat on the second floor of a stone house on Greenwood Drive. The owner was an elderly woman whose husband had recently died, and she charged my mother less than the going rate for rentals in that area. I was part of the deal. I would mow the lawn with her rickety old mower in summer, rake leaves and incinerate them in the big rusted drum in autumn, shovel the sidewalk and the long drive that led from the street to the empty two-car garage in winter. (Neither we nor our landlady would own a car until 1965, the second half of my senior year in high school, when I bought a 1959 battleship-gray Galaxie to take me west to the university.)

  There was no way F. William Peterson could have saved the old house, and most of its profits had been eaten up, but we were far from destitute. The furniture was still ours and a few thousand dollars besides. And my mother, who had to continue her medication and was thus certified disabled, received a small Social Security benefit. From my new cozy bedroom window, I had a nice view of our quiet, tree-lined street, one of the ones Drew Littler and I had cased on his motorcycle.

  I think F. William Peterson had pretty much made up his mind to marry my mother once the matter of her still being married to my father could be resolved. I don’t think she had done anything to give him the impression that she would marry him, but she hadn’t exactly told him she wouldn’t either. At thirty-eight, she’d gone almost completely gray, a metamorphosis that had taken only a few short months once the process had begun. In other respects, however, she looked more youthful than she had in years. The terrible frailty that had laid waste to her girlishness in the year before her nervous breakdown was reversed, and she had put on some weight. The thin breast that F. William Peterson had caught a glimpse of inside the pale green hospital gown was ample again, and he couldn’t have admired my mother more had he made her himself from his own design, which in a sense he had.