The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  I told him I wasn’t.

  From inside we heard faint music, distant, as if it were coming from deep in the surrounding woods. It was louder when Wussy opened the door and yellow light spilled out onto the porch. A woman, naked from the waist up, was sitting cross-legged on a bar stool across the room, talking to the woman bartender, who was also topless.

  “This is on me by the way,” my father said. “I missed your graduation.”

  “You gonna wike up, Honey-bun, or just sleep through the best part?”

  The young woman was roughly my age, a better-looking girl than you might expect to find in a hunting lodge, though not much better. She was right, too. I’d gone right to sleep while she was in the little closet bathroom doing I couldn’t imagine what. She was astraddle me now, though, having pulled my jeans down around my knees.

  “I don’t mind jump-startin’ you, but I want you awike enough to know you got what you got.”

  That sounded reasonable to me. I watched her work for a minute, then asked her what was most on my mind. “Where are you from?” I said.

  “Marion.”

  “All right. Where are you from, Marion.” It wasn’t a Mohawk accent.

  “No, I mean I’m from Marion. Illinois. Where the penitentiary is. My boyfriend is in there, or was. They said they weren’t ever gonna let him out, but I was scared they might anyway. Which is how come I de-parted. He was trouble with a capital tee. How we doin’?”

  “Fine,” I said, though we weren’t. She had large, fine breasts, but watching them roll was making me seasick.

  “Good,” she said. “You know you feel just like a ace cube?”

  “I’m warming up though,” I said.

  “I can feel it,” she said, continuing her workmanlike assault on what ailed me. “I come up here, ’cause it’s a place he won’t think to look.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “It would take a stroke of luck to find you here.”

  It had taken a stroke of luck for me to find her, and I deeply regretted it. After a while she stopped. “I don’t thank you’re near as fond of me as you should be b’now.”

  “Marion,” I said. “Forgive me.”

  She must have, because I don’t remember any more struggles. When I woke up again, I was alone, gray light filtering in through the small window above the bed. It was incredibly still except for a hissing sound on the other side of the wall I’d been sleeping against. My jeans were still down around my knees, so I pulled them up, buttoned the fly, all the while listening to the hissing. When I pulled back the curtain and glanced outside, I saw it was Wussy pissing in an isolated patch of snow. He looked up and saw me.

  “First thing every morning,” he said, his voice flat and distant on the other side of the glass. “Can’t wait.”

  I checked the little room that Marion had disappeared into and discovered that it was nothing but a tiny dressing room, not a bathroom. There was nothing to do but join Wussy, so I did. By the time I got out there, he was finished, but he kept me company.

  “Snowing,” he said, and sure enough it was. When you looked up, you could see the flakes coming down through the trees, melting before they reached the ground. “Looks like you’re gonna have a good effect on him,” Wussy said. “Behaved himself last night for the first time in a hell of a while.”

  I looked at him in disbelief. If last night constituted good behavior, I didn’t want to know about the bad.

  “I wonder where he is,” I said, afraid he might be awake and listening on the other side of the wall.

  We found him snoring on the sofa, his mouth wide open, the way he’d always slept when we lived together. He snorted awake when Wussy kicked his foot. “It’s about time,” he said, sitting up, consulting his watch. He studied Wussy first, then me. “Well?” he said.

  “Well enough,” I told him.

  “Good,” he said.

  We went outside to where the convertible sat, all by itself now.

  “How’d the top get down?” my father said.

  Wussy and I looked at each other.

  “It was down last night?”

  “Right on the first try,” Wussy said.

  My father shrugged. “We must’ve froze, didn’t we?” he said, looking to me for confirmation. When I nodded, he grinned and said, “Let’s go see your mother.”

  On the way back to Mohawk, it occurred to me that sometime during the long night I’d gotten separated from my duffel bag. I was pretty sure I hadn’t had it with me when we got to the Big Bend Hunting Lodge, and Wussy was even more sure than I was, and my father was positive. Which meant it might be back there anyway, but probably not. If I’d had to lay odds, I’d have put it at the Night Owl or Mike’s Place.

  “I hope it’s the Owl,” my father said. “Mike’ll be asleep, and I can’t face Irma this early in the morning.”

  He was half sobered up and he insisted on driving home, license or no license. He didn’t care. Fuck ’em.

  “You tell ’em, Rockhead,” Wussy said. He was slumped down in the front seat, trying to sleep, but every time my father caught his eyes closing he’d swerve the car.

  “I’m on my way to work,” my father said. The way things stood, he wasn’t allowed to drive, except to and from his place of employment. Of which there was none, right now, because he wouldn’t be going back on the road for another week or two, depending.

  “What you’re on your way to is Canada,” Wussy said. “You missed your turn back there.”

  My father ignored him.

  “That asshole Angelo thought he had me last week, the prick,” my father said to me over his shoulder. “I’m in Mike’s. It’s about closing time. All revved up. I figure if I’m smart, I’ll walk, but it’s cold, so I say fuck ’em. I go around the corner where I’m parked. I look up and down the street. Nobody. Just me.”

  “Right,” Wussy said.

  “I get into the car. Pull away from the curb. Look in my rear view and—blip—here comes Angelo in the cruiser. You son of a bitch!”

  “You see that sign, Sam’s Kid?” Wussy said, pointing out the window.

  In fact, I had. It said we were five miles from Speculator, twenty miles from Indian Lake. There hadn’t been any mention of Mohawk.

  “So I whip around the corner, throw the car into park and slide over in the passenger seat. Angelo, he barrels right by. The dumb son of a bitch gets all the way down the block to the dead end, and he sits there. Where the hell did Sammy go, he’s thinking. He’s gotta be.”

  I could tell that Wussy was just waiting for my father to finish his story before pressing his point about the way we’re headed.

  “Finally his backup lights come on, and here he comes, backing all the way down the street, flashing his spot light into the driveways on both sides of the street. I don’t move. I stay right where I am in the passenger seat. Pretty soon he’s right alongside of me and he’s got the light in my eyes. There you are, you bastard, he says. I say, Angelo. What’s up. I got your ass, that’s what’s up, he says. I tell him, Angelo, shit is what you got. He says are you gonna sit there and tell me you weren’t just driving this car? Right on the first try, I say. Then who the hell was, he says.”

  My father stopped talking long enough to light a cigarette. We were climbing further up into the mountains, no doubt about it. Wussy was shaking his head.

  “I’m about to say some fucking thing when I look up, and who’s shuffling toward us, not even from here to that tree?”

  My father pointed, but as we were in the middle of the woods, it was impossible to know which tree he had in mind.

  “Untemeyer,” he said, when neither Wussy nor I offered to solve the riddle. “I say, Meyer, where the hell’d you go? He comes right around and gets in behind the wheel. To pee, he says, not that it’s any of your fucking business. What’s Angelo want? He wants to get me for driving drunk, I say. How can you be driving when I’m driving, Meyer says. We can’t see Angelo because of the light, but we can tell he’s
fuming.

  “That’s pretty funny,” I said, hoping to put an end to the story.

  “That’s not the funny part,” my father insisted.

  “No,” Wussy agreed. “It isn’t.”

  “The funny part is Meyer’s never owned a car in his life and he doesn’t have a license either. Everybody in town knows that but Angelo, and Angelo knows it too if he could think of it.”

  We came to a “T” intersection and my father stopped to dry his tears on his shirt sleeve. “Ah, shit,” he concluded. “Life, right?”

  “Life. Right,” Wussy said, grinning over at him.

  My father looked left, then right. “All right, Wuss.” He grinned back at his old friend. “Where the hell are we?”

  It took us a little over an hour to get back to Mohawk. Just outside the city limits, my father pulled over and let me take us in. When I parked behind Wussy’s pickup, which was right where he’d left it in front of the Night Owl, Wussy said, “So long, girls. I’m not going to be party to no breaking and entering.”

  In fact, my father had opened the trunk and located his tire iron.

  “I’m glad you finally come home, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy said. “Time somebody else was the Rockhead’s lookout. I’ll come visit you both in jail.”

  “You never did yet,” my father said before disappearing into the alley alongside the bar. When Wussy drove off, there was nothing to do but follow my father.

  He had the window open by the time I caught up. Unbelievably, he had his hands cupped to offer me a leg up. Even more unbelievably, I put my foot in the stirrup.

  It was pitch dark inside, but I knew right where I was. The smell of the urinal would have been unmistakable from across the room. When you’re snaking head first down a wall and you’ve got nothing to grab onto except wet porcelain, that same urinal is not only unmistakable, it’s real, especially when its last visitor the night before had not taken the notion of brotherhood seriously. I found the handle and flushed.

  “You pissing upside down?” my father wanted to know.

  I told him to just let go of my ankles, and when he did, I cartwheeled to the floor.

  “There’s a light switch somewhere,” he advised.

  Actually, I could see fine once my eyes had adjusted. I went out into the bar, half expecting to meet somebody with a mop and broom, or maybe a shotgun, but I had the place to myself. The brown light from the pitted smoky windows along the front was ghostly. I went along the bar to where my father and I had been sitting, but there was no sign of my bag. Nor was it out in the entryway. “Check behind the bar, dumbbell,” my father called from the men’s room window, and that’s where it was, too, wedged in tight beneath the sink in a pool of water. I tried to remember what I’d packed on the bottom.

  When I got back to the men’s room, I heard my father talking to somebody and concluded that Wussy, who could be counted on to break any promise to go home, had returned. So I shoved my duffel bag out the window, climbed up on the urinal, and poked my head out into the alley. The person my father was talking to was the tiniest cop I’d ever seen. “Here’s our burglar now,” he said.

  “Yup,” my father said. “Get your cuffs ready.”

  I climbed through the window and dropped to the ground where they were standing.

  “Meet Andy Winkler,” my father said. “The only cop in Mohawk that wouldn’t have shot you in the head coming out that window and asked questions later.”

  I shook hands with the tiny cop, who grinned up at me good-naturedly.

  “This is my son, and he’s all right,” my father explained, “just like his old man.”

  “Ned, right?” Andy Winkler said. “We graduated together. Class of ’65? Good old Mohawk High.”

  That was when I’d graduated, all right, but I was damned if I could remember Andy Winkler. It didn’t seem to bother him though. “You was college entrance,” he said. “I was voc-ed.”

  “What’s that?” my father said. “Shop?”

  “You got that right,” Andy said, then gestured with both thumbs to his uniform. “Turned out I done better than they expected.”

  “Want to look through that bag,” my father suggested, “just so you know?”

  “Hell, Sammy, I wouldn’t insult you. Ned either.”

  “You’re the jewel of the force,” my father said. “Go slow.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  I was sure of it.

  “Too bad they aren’t all like him,” my father said when we got back in the car. I couldn’t tell if he was serious. “His only trouble is that people keep beating him up.”

  “He’s awfully small to be a cop,” I said.

  “Not really.” My father turned the key in the ignition and the big convertible roared to life again. “Just too good-natured. When guys figure out he won’t shoot them, they take advantage. I keep telling him all he’d have to do is shoot just one and then he wouldn’t get his ass kicked all the while. But he won’t listen.”

  “Why not let me drive,” I said. I didn’t know what part of town he lived in and the storied Angelo could be anywhere.

  “Nah,” he said, doing a U-turn in the middle of the street and heading toward the traffic light. We’d gone all of twenty yards when he pulled over to the curb and got out.

  “Forget something?” I said.

  “Nope,” he said, pointing to the dark line of windows above the jewelry store. “We’re here.”

  32

  At my father’s suggestion, I called my mother from the pay phone at the cigar store and told her I was in Fultonville. I’d see her in half an hour.

  “Pretty excited, I bet,” my father said, as we climbed the stairs to his flat.

  In fact, she had squealed like a pig. She just couldn’t wait to tell Will, that old clairvoyant, who’d predicted the night before that something nice was going to happen to her soon, he’d felt it. By the time I got there she’d have bells on.

  “She says she’ll have bells on,” I told him.

  “That’s her all right,” he said. “Ding-a-ling.”

  Where the old apartment above Klein’s had borne a distinct resemblance to a bowling alley, my father’s present flat was much smaller, one room, really, plus a small bath that featured a sink, a commode, and a jerry-rigged shower stall. The living room itself was just long enough to accommodate the old sofa when it was folded out into a bed, which it happened to be at the moment. The television at its foot was new, but it sported the same old bent rabbit ears which pulled in the same old snow.

  “You don’t have to stay with her if you don’t want to,” my father said. “Wussy’s got a roll-away someplace.”

  The only place I could see to put it was on top of the pool table, which was wedged into the remaining corner and covered with a sheet of plastic.

  “I should though,” I said.

  “You’ll be kicking our mutual friend out of the spare room,” he said. “Or didn’t you know about that?”

  One of my very few rules in dealing with my parents had always been an adamant refusal to discuss each with the other. My silence had been known to infuriate both, but it kept my sanity and allowed me to pretend equal loyalty and affection. “I did, actually,” I admitted, without elaborating.

  “We had a little discussion about the arrangement one night,” my father said. “Right on Main Street across from the diner. He got lippy when I mentioned a couple of little things I didn’t like. Had to pick himself up off the seat of his pants.”

  “What do you care what they do?” I said.

  “That’s not the point,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, since it seemed like the point to me.

  He shrugged. “I figure let it go. Being around your mother is punishment enough.”

  I rooted around my duffel bag until I found my razor and stripped off my shirt. The way I smelled, it was a terrible temptation to shower first, but the bathroom mirror looked like the only one in the flat and it was already cloudy. I la
thered while he talked behind me.

  “Funny part is, he’s helped me out of one or two little scrapes. He’s not a half-bad lawyer, for around here anyways. Stands right up and talks to the judge and the judge listens. I just hope he doesn’t try that with your mother.”

  He came over and leaned in the doorway so he could watch me shave.

  “Last time I saw you, you weren’t shaving, were you?”

  I said that was true. I could tell he was trying to remember how old I was that last time.

  “You could have got luckier in the father department,” he said.

  “Or unluckier,” I said.

  “Not likely.” In the distorted, cloudy mirror, his face looked long, his eyes disproportionately large.

  When I’d showered and put on clean clothes, I felt very nearly human again. My hair was pretty shaggy, but I didn’t look bad enough to give my mother serious misgivings. We drove directly there, stopping just once when the Cadillac smelled hot, so my father fetched a couple bright yellow cans of oil from the spare case he kept in the trunk. He punctured these and turned them upside down into a plastic funnel, tossing them a great distance into an empty lot when he was finished.

  “What’s so funny?” he said when he caught me grinning.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was just thinking of something.”

  The morning had turned bright and warm. My mother was sitting in the sun on the second-floor front porch. She jumped up when the car pulled into the drive and came down at a dead run before either my father or I could get out of the car. She paused, questioning, only when she saw my father.

  “Look who I found getting off a bus downtown,” my father said, the lie more smooth and natural than the truest thing he’d ever learned.

  That night, to celebrate my return, we went out to dinner at The Elms, the restaurant Mike had lost in Vegas. My mother asked if it was all right if Will joined us, and I said sure, grateful for his company after the long afternoon. Besides, it was clear that “Will” pretty much had to come along if we were going to go, since it was his car that would transport us, his credit card that would eventually find its way under the check when that was presented. In return for these considerations, my mother consented to choose the restaurant, against F. William Peterson’s recommendation.