The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  In the beginning, he was our frequent, our only, visitor for dinner, though he never stayed the night.

  Incredible though it may seem, my other life simply ceased to exist. I didn’t see my father anymore, seldom saw any of his friends, never went into the Mohawk Grill. At my mother’s insistence I quit my job cleaning Rose’s and I had to give up my golf ball business, too; in return for these considerations I again got used to clean sheets, freshly pressed shirts, dinners eaten at a table in the house where I lived. I saw Wussy once and he told me that Drew Littler was in the state mental facility in Utica. After I’d gone back to live with my mother he’d gotten himself arrested three times for trespassing at the Ward house, and each time he was thrown in jail, where he entertained the drunks and the duty officer by beating his own forehead bloody against the bars of his cell until he passed out.

  One day, about a month after we moved into the new flat, the doorbell rang and it was two policemen who wanted to talk to me about the disappearance of Willie Heinz. My mother informed them that she knew the family in question, and she was certain that her son had no more than a passing acquaintance with such a boy. I followed the cops down to their car and told them about the afternoon I’d come out of Our Lady of Sorrows and seen Willie race by, a police car in hot pursuit. They wanted to fix the exact date and time, and it turned out I was able to because of Jack Ward’s death. Nobody they’d questioned, it turned out, remembered seeing him after me, which was pretty spooky. Did he ever talk about running away? they wanted to know. Did he ever discuss his home life? I told them no. I wanted to add that he seemed incapable of running more than a few blocks without doubling back, but I didn’t know how to explain without implicating myself in about a year’s worth of petty vandalism.

  All in all, we were not unhappy, my mother and I. Greenwood Drive was not a bad place to live and the flat became home soon enough. “So many lovely things,” my mother mused one day, with her now familiar vague smile. She was examining one of the items I’d stolen from Klein’s Department Store. “So many lovely things, and I cannot remember owning them.”

  But in the hospital and then the nursing home, she had stared at a great many mysteries and had learned to accept what was.

  What she and F. William Peterson feared was another war. It was Sam Hall they were dealing with, after all, and they both had good cause to remember what that could mean. The lawyer had purposely taken a second-floor apartment for my mother and he’d installed new locks, front and back, at considerable expense, just in case things took an ugly turn. He also arranged for certain preparations at City Hall. Nobody asked me what I thought, but I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. Even with my mother eating Libriums, it wouldn’t have taken more than a phone call or two of the sort my father was a past master at to send her back to the nursing home, deadbolt locks or no deadbolt locks.

  Anyway, the attack never came.

  One afternoon, a week before summer vacation was to start, I came home from school and Wussy’s pickup was parked out front with the tailgate down, looking pretty thoroughly out of place on our green street. He and my father were coming out of the garage when I pulled my bike into the driveway.

  “Hello, stranger,” my father said, and a wave of guilt washed over me so powerfully that my knees went liquid. “You forget where downtown is?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then you must be invisible,” Wussy said.

  “We got it set up pretty good,” my father said. “It should go inside, really, but your mother wouldn’t hear of that.”

  I looked up at the row of windows along the second floor. A curtain twitched in one.

  When Wussy went back to the pickup, my father and I didn’t say anything for a minute. In the two years I’d lived with him we’d gotten to the point where, on a good day, we might actually converse, at least a sentence or two. But in the few weeks since I’d returned to live with my mother, we’d already lost the knack.

  “You gonna be all right here?” he said finally.

  I said sure. I’d be all right. I could feel my throat tightening. He and Wussy hadn’t fought the pool table down three flights of stairs just because he wanted me to have it.

  “She looks good,” he said. “She actually let me in. Showed me around and everything. I about dropped my teeth. She wouldn’t let Wussy in, of course, but …” he let the thought trail off. “She’s got it done up nice, though.”

  “Where are you going?” I said finally.

  “Away. For a while. I’ll be back, I imagine.”

  “When?”

  He took out a couple of dollar bills and handed me one.

  I said three threes.

  “Liar,” he said. He was right, too. There wasn’t a three on it, and I’m not sure I could have seen one if there had been.

  We walked down the drive to where the pickup stood. My father slammed the tailgate up. “That table’s worth seven, eight hundred dollars,” he said. “If she can’t stand to have it around, sell it. I don’t care. As long as you don’t get stiffed.”

  I said I wouldn’t sell it.

  “I didn’t fight very hard to hold on to you, did I?” he said, in reference to the fact that all he’d said to my mother that morning when she’d stepped into his apartment and announced her intention was, “All right, take him.”

  “It’s not what you probably thought,” he went on. “You’re better off here, that’s all. Away from the mess.”

  There was nothing left to do but cuff me in the back of the head, so he did. “We had some fun, at least, didn’t we?”

  I said we did, and it was true.

  After we shook, he got in next to Wussy and rolled the window down and grinned at me. “You don’t know it yet, but you loaned me a couple a hundred. I’ll mail it to you in a week or so.”

  “That’s all right,” I told him, “I don’t want it.”

  “You must,” he said, “or you wouldn’t have made me look all over for it.”

  And then he was gone.

  I didn’t see him again for ten years, nor did I ever hear a word concerning his whereabouts. Not a letter, not a Christmas card.

  I must have known I wouldn’t, too, because when they drove off, I went into the garage and shot rack after rack of pool beneath the bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling, just me and a cloud of silent, circling moths.

  29

  Robert Crane followed me out onto the bright patio, shading his eyes from the glare of the desert sun. From the foothills, the Catalina Mountains looked blue and close. Their very existence was surprising. Somewhere during the night I’d lost track of time and space. I couldn’t have passed the simplest reality quiz.

  Things can get that way when you’re playing losing poker in somebody’s basement—no windows, no clocks, nobody interested in windows or clocks. Finally somebody taps out, says piss on it, I’m going home. Home. A difficult concept, too long obscured by thick cigarette smoke and warm scotch.

  “What time is it, do you figure?” said Robert Crane, plopping down next to me on the other chaise lounge at the edge of the kidney-shaped pool. Neither of us owned watches, at least at the moment.

  “Spring,” I said.

  The sun was high above the Catalinas. Nine-thirty, I might have bet, if I hadn’t been betting and losing all night, all week, all month. Dog track, pro basketball, poker games.

  “Well,” Robert said. “You won their sympathy, anyway.”

  “That’s important to have,” I said.

  As a rule there was pocket money to be made playing poker with university professors’ who gambled nickles, dimes, and quarters once a month to maintain the relatively inexpensive illusion that they were normal people, real guys. It had taken real talent to lose so grandly—nearly seventy dollars—in such a piss-ant enterprise. “Anybody nervous about my paper?” I said.

  “Not really,” he said. “Though it’s beginning to dawn on them that they don’t know you.”

  “This will
happen.”

  “You okay till Monday?”

  “Fine,” I lied. “Great, in fact. I could use a lift back into town though.”

  We went back inside. Ben Slater, the fiftyish English professor whose house it was, was just coming up out of the basement carrying a tray full of dirty glasses, ashtrays, and other dregs of the long night. “Sorry about the beating,” he said, as if he wasn’t, particularly. “Think of it as part of your education.”

  We shook hands all around, and Slater told Robert Crane any time he wanted to introduce any more new blood into the game, he could go right ahead. There was a grandfather clock in the hallway and it said 8:00, not 9:30.

  “Nice fellow,” I said when Robert had backed out of the gravel drive and onto the pavement.

  “Actually, he’s not so bad,” Robert said. “He’s got his own problems.”

  I stared out the window at the desert, hoping to communicate through pointed silence that whatever problems Ben Slater might have, I wasn’t interested in them. Disliking him was the only purely pleasurable thing about the morning. Counting last night, I’d lost nearly a thousand dollars in six weeks, wiping out my savings account, which had contained the student loan money that was supposed to last me through the end of May, almost two months away. On Monday I’d sold my pool cue, and yesterday morning I’d given blood to get table stakes in Ben Slater’s poker game. My rationale was that by playing poker with Ben Slater and the boys I’d be saving money, a line of reasoning I’d borrowed from Robert Crane, who used it whenever he needed a night off from the dogs and away from his wife.

  For some reason I thought of Lanny Aguilar, my roommate, who’d accused me of being lucky. He and I had been sharing a three-bedroom apartment with another guy, all of us finishing degrees at the university, each planning to enter graduate programs the following year. And so we’d gathered round the stereo receiver that December afternoon in 1969 to listen to the new draft lottery and find out whether the government would insist we continue our educations in Southeast Asia. There’d been a bunch of us, I remember, all with vested interests. Lanny’s birthday had been first, his number nineteen.

  “Well,” he said, standing up, “that’s over.”

  Nobody said anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

  “In fact,” he went on, looking at each of us individually, “just about everything’s over. If nobody minds, I think I’ll go over to the library and write my will or something.”

  My own number had been 348 and when Lanny returned from the library later that evening, he’d lifted me right out of the chair I was sitting in and pinned me against the wall with his big forearm up under my chin. “Three forty-eight?” he said. “Three-fucking-forty-eight?”

  As we wound down out of the foothills, Tucson lay below us on the left, shimmering in the already considerable heat. At First Avenue we passed the horsetrack, recently abandoned and already reclaimed by desert weeds. The quarterhorses had run there for a short season until about two years ago, but it had been a hot, low-budget, dusty experience. I tried to think if I’d ever heard of any place that offered pari-mutuel wagering going under before. I couldn’t. In fact, it seemed a violation of natural law, the sort of thing that if it became common knowledge could seriously undermine the way things were done in America.

  “What was your draft number?” I asked Robert.

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “Curiosity.”

  “I don’t remember,” he said. “I ended up Four-F anyway.”

  I frowned at him. Robert was a big man. Fit-looking. “Flat feet?”

  “Acne.”

  “What?”

  “Really. If you had bad acne, they wouldn’t take you. Said the gas masks wouldn’t fit snug. I ate about a dozen Hershey bars a day for two weeks before the physical. Stayed up late, watched dirty movies, quit beating off, wouldn’t wash my face. You should’ve seen me.”

  “Pretty smart,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “Took me about a year to get rid of the rash. Couldn’t get laid. Couldn’t quit the chocolate. Got to be a vicious circle, kind of.”

  I looked over at him. He was absolutely deadpan. I examined his face for signs of acne. “Bullshit,” I said finally.

  “Good for you,” he grinned. “Most people believe that story. The acne was my fall-back plan actually. I’ve always wondered if it would have worked.”

  I didn’t say anything, unsure whether acne could be induced.

  “So what was your number?” I said when I remembered he’d dodged the issue.

  Robert flushed deeply. “Three sixty-six,” he admitted.

  “Come on.”

  “Really,” he said. “They had to account for February twenty-ninth, remember? Leap years between ’44 and ’50.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m a lucky prick. Watch where I walk. Step in my footprints.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing, if you think about it,” I reminded him. It was true, too. I’d met Robert and his wife Anita at a party six months earlier. Everybody had been pretty stoned and Robert, who was also pretty stoned, had confessed to me that he preferred less trendy vices. “You ever go to the dog track?” he wanted to know.

  We went the next night and I could tell right away he was compulsive. The funny part was that Anita was just as bad. They were finishing up M.A.s—Robert in psychology, Anita in English—and living in a dingy married student housing facility. By pooling their meager teaching assistant stipends and eating boxed macaroni and cheese dinners they were able to finance their evenings at the dog track. Anita was as savvy about the dogs as anybody I knew, and if Robert had left things to her, they probably would have been rich. But, of course, there were times when the dogs wouldn’t run for either of them, and then she would resort to writing freshman compositions for football players. She had a knack for writing a genuine C + paper on just about any topic. She knew just the words to misspell, how to mess up the sentences without messing them up too much, how to miss the point of the assignment narrowly and do the whole thing in language that never aroused the suspicion of the instructor. Robert said he’d tried it a couple of times, but he’d fucked up and written a solid B + essay for a borderline illiterate and the kid had gotten caught. According to Robert, he’d been the biggest, dumbest, nicest kid you ever met, and he hadn’t given Robert up, even when threatened with suspension. Now Robert stuck to the dogs and poker, and left the freshman essays on Heart of Darkness to Anita. When they were hitting at the track, their bank account swelled up to around five grand and they ate out a lot. When the right dogs ran out of the money they ate at home and bickered about whose fault it was until their luck changed. What they both feared most was the day they’d be so broke they couldn’t afford admission to the clubhouse.

  “So,” Robert Crane said, when we pulled up in front of my apartment and I’d finished telling him how Lanny had tossed me into the wall for having a 348 draft number. How he’d lasted two months in Vietnam. Robert was looking at me intently, a little cross-eyed, like when he concentrated on the racing form. “You figure if you keep losing long enough you’ll prove you’re just as unlucky as him, is that it?”

  I laughed at him. “Not even close.”

  “Okay,” he said. “My other theory is you’re just the dumbest gambler ever.”

  “You’re getting warmer,” I said, sliding out of his car.

  “Sure you don’t need a couple bucks till Monday?”

  “If I did, I’d say so.”

  “You don’t have to get pissed.”

  “I’m not,” I told him. “You’ve never heard of a losing streak, right?”

  “Your telephone’s ringing,” he said.

  It was. We could both hear it, all the way out there by the curb.

  “The pups run tonight,” he said.

  “The pups run every night,” I reminded him. “I
think I’ll take a break, if it’s all right with you. Losing is bad enough without having to listen to people tell you why it’s happening.”

  He put the car in gear. “You’re missing an opportunity. Monday you’ll have to lose twice as much to make up.”

  He was grinning at me, still cross-eyed.

  “And you are a butthole,” I grinned back.

  “A lucky butthole,” he corrected. “And proud of it.”

  By the time I got inside the telephone had stopped ringing, for which I was thankful. It was Sunday, my mother’s day to call, though she usually waited until evening. She was about the last person in the world I wanted to talk to.

  Portraying yourself as triumphant is no easy task when you’re in a tailspin. It requires energy, for one thing, imagination for another. And if you had sufficient amounts of those, chances are you wouldn’t be in a tailspin. Telling my mother the truth, unfortunately, was not an option. Ever since her nervous breakdown, she had an impossibly low truth threshold, as I had occasion to learn and relearn during those interminable years of high school when only lies contained the power to soothe. She was prone to upset. Doubts, minor failures, inconveniences, disappointments, quirks of fate—all flung her first into a tizzy, then into the bathroom for a librium to calm her nerves. She had left the hospital addicted, of course, though I hadn’t realized it at the time. But for the pills, she would not have returned at all. She took four a day, as a rule, but if I managed to upset her she’d take a couple extra. As many as it took. Then she’d smile at me, puppy-faced.

  Mostly, though, our days had fit nicely, end to end, and I was satisfied. The two years I’d spent with my father weighed upon me, more heavily than they had in the living. That first night in my mother’s new flat, when I slid between the crisp, cold sheets in my fresh pajamas, it occurred to me that I was lucky to be alive. Wussy had been right all those years ago when he’d warned me to keep a safe distance from the rockhead—he was a dangerous man. Living under Sam Hall’s roof, I had become a thief and a liar. I’d made dangerous friends and knew too damn much of the world for my own good. All of this was directly attributable to my father’s influence, it seemed to me, and I was thankful to have escaped it. In our new flat, there was wallpaper on the walls and rugs on the floors and a real kitchen and we ate dinner in the dining room. When I opened my closet, there were clean clothes hanging inside, and I bathed daily to be worthy of them, instead of waiting until I offended myself. I had a haircut every other week by a barber whose morals my mother approved of.