The Risk Pool

by Richard Russo

  “You’re thinking of Benny Raite,” somebody explained to the man who’d wanted to know if it was Benny.

  “They hire big coon kids from Amsterdam to be bouncers out there,” said the man Tree had tried to silence.

  Tree stared at him again. “This was Dick Krause’s kid, I’m telling you.”

  “Benny,” somebody said. “Benny Krause.”

  “Bullshit,” somebody else said. “I seen Benny Krause this morning.”

  “Benny Raite’s a bouncer,” said a third. “I bet you’re thinking of him.”

  They were still working on it when I got off at five-thirty. My father’s car was in front of the Mohawk Grill, so I stopped in. He didn’t look good. He was dirty from the road and his eyes were still red from the weekend. He was staring at two skinny grilled pork chops.

  “I meant to stop in,” he said apologetically. He usually did when he got home from work, before going home to clean up. “I was afraid I’d get started all over again.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  “Even I can’t be a dummy all the while,” he said.

  “Right,” Harry mumbled.

  “Want a pork chop?” my father said, ignoring Harry’s sarcasm.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Want two pork chops?”

  We both grinned. He really did look sick.

  “Tonight I go home,” he said.

  “Mind if I use the car?”

  “Go ahead. Leave it someplace I can find it is all.”

  I said I would. When I got up to go, he said, “You want to come work on the road with me?”

  At that moment, Untemeyer ambled by, his day done, the pockets of his black alpaca suit bulging with slips, heading for home, a destination he kept strictly secret to keep from being badgered. “They need a new flagman, right?” he said.

  “Meyer,” my father said. “Somebody’s gonna follow you home one of these nights and his financial problems will all be over.”

  “Not if he chooses tonight,” the bookie grumbled. “Besides, I get mugged every day by the OTB. I should have gone into prostitution.”

  “Who’d want to fuck you, Meyer?” my father said.

  “Any number of women,” Untemeyer said. “I got that certain something.”

  “You too?” my father said.

  “I get it occasionally myself,” Harry said.

  “The good part is he grows the penicillin to cure it with right here on the premises,” Untemeyer said, letting the door swing shut behind him.

  “Actually,” I said, “I may head back out west come September. Besides, I couldn’t do that to Mike.”

  “You’d make a lot more on the road is all,” my father said. “Work until it gets cold like I do. Would they let you start school in January?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do that.”

  “Two nights ago you were advising me to get out.”

  He shrugged, cut a small wedge of pork chop and put it in his mouth. “I wouldn’t let Numb Nuts run me off, is all. She’s a cute little shit, that Ward girl.”

  “That’s not it,” I assured him, not very convincingly, I thought, though it was true.

  “Okay,” he said cheerfully. “You’re sure you don’t want a pork chop?”

  On the way out to the Ward house I stopped at Eileen’s. She’d taken on a job cocktailing at the Holiday Inn, cutting way back at Mike’s, so I didn’t expect her to be home. She was though. By the time I turned off the ignition, she’d come out on the little concrete slab of a back porch where she stood drying her hands on a dish towel. She was wearing an old pair of corduroy slacks and a ratty sweater. Never a pretty woman, she had always possessed an athletic quality, and there was still a little of that left, though she looked more tired now, and in the good evening light I noticed for the first time, even at a distance, that she was coloring her hair.

  “Well, that explains it.” She grinned. “I knew it was Sam Hall’s car coming from a block away, but it didn’t sound like him.”

  “How does he sound?” I said, grinning back at her.

  “Louder,” she said. “Rougher. Faster.”

  I got out. “I’ll work on it,” I promised.

  “Also dumber. Sorry I upset your mother the other night.”

  “She gets over things,” I said. “It’s her specialty, in fact.”

  “I’ve often wondered whether she ever got over your father.”

  I snorted. “Years ago. Decades.”

  “I’m pretty damn near over him myself these days,” she said.

  Somewhere out back of the garage I heard a motorcycle cough to life and rev. I hated to think what that meant. The noise was so deafening we had to wait for the engine to die before we could continue.

  “Don’t ask me where he got the money,” she said, staring at and clean through the garage, as if she could see her son through solid wood.

  “I heard about a job,” I said. “That’s why I dropped by.”

  “You can mention it if you want,” she said, as if she hadn’t much faith that it would do any good. “He says he’s waiting for his ship to come in.”

  I looked around. “We’re a long way from the ocean.” And Drew Littler was a lot farther than the rest of us.

  I didn’t say that last, but Eileen Littler looked like she heard me, think it.

  “Some people got thick skulls,” she said. “As we both know.”

  “How’s the Holiday Inn?” I said.

  “Pretty busy. The flat track opens next week, so we’ll be full. The high rollers all stay in Saratoga though. The ones we get give their money to the track and that’s it.”

  “They don’t have a budget for waitresses?” I said. “Mike would love to give you more shifts.”

  “I might,” she said. “You could mention it to him if you felt like it. I hate to ask after telling him I wanted to cut back.”

  I said I would, though I hated to, knowing perfectly well why she wanted the hours. You didn’t have to be able to see through wood to figure it out, either.

  “So how is he?” she said finally.

  “Dad? I just left him at Harry’s trying to stare down a pork chop. He said he was going home.”

  She nodded unenthusiastically. “Greenie’s is home. And Mike’s. And The Glove. And …”

  “I hate to tell you, but come September I think I’ll be leaving.”

  The motorcycle started up again, then died again.

  “I’m surprised,” she said. “I heard you were in love.”

  “No, not really,” I said. “At least I don’t think so.”

  “You could do worse.”

  “I know,” I said. “Especially around here.”

  I could tell she didn’t care for the sound of that remark, and I had to admit, having said it, I didn’t care for the sound of it all that much myself. “I don’t know,” I concluded, which was far closer to the truth.

  “You’re good for him, is the only thing,” she said.

  “Not really,” I said. “I just get drunk with him. That’s all.”

  She shook her head. “You’re a good influence, believe it or not. He won’t embarrass himself when you’re around, or if he thinks you might show up.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” I said. “Sam Hall does as he pleases. He always has.”

  “Not anymore,” she said with such conviction that I almost believed her. “You just can’t see the change. I’ll tell you something else, too, since he won’t. He loves you.”

  “You too,” I said.

  “Not enough,” she said, shoving her hands in the back pockets of her cords. “I almost had him once. For a while there he’d get off work, come over, eat some dinner, play gin for fun. Sometimes just us. Sometimes Wussy. He got so he could walk by the pool hall and Untemeyer and the gin mills and all of it. Sometimes he’d mention you, and I’d say call, and he’d say what for, he’s doing fine.”

  “He’ll be back,” I said.

  She nodde
d the way people do to indicate that they’ve heard you, without necessarily buying into your point of view. “You think so.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “Well … lucky me.”

  On his back beneath the new bike, Drew Littler reminded me of the boy he’d been back when I spotted for him in the garage. Much of the former muscle had gone soft now, but when he lay on his back he flattened out and his blondish hair hung straight back, just as it had when we were boys. I wondered if it was strictly necessary for him to lie on his back that way. After all, it wasn’t a car he was underneath. “A one-owner,” he said, looking up at the big Harley critically, then at me, my shadow having fallen across him.

  “Who only used it to go back and forth to church,” I said.

  “That and haul his boat up to the lake,” he agreed. “Still do a hundred and twenty.”

  “Who’d want to go a hundred and twenty on a motorcycle?” It was a dumb question.

  “Let’s,” he said seriously. “Hop on.”

  He stood.

  When I said thanks anyway, he swung a big thigh over the saddle and the Harley roared to life so loud I took an involuntary step back. I had to wait for him to throttle down, and even then I had to shout.

  “I heard about a job.”

  He gunned the engine again, listened critically, then shut it down.

  “Out at The Bachelors,” I said, a little too loud, now that it was quiet again. I realized then that I had been wrong to come. The sound of my own voice was enough to convince me. “You know where that is?”

  “Tending bar?” he said.

  “Crowd control.”

  He grinned. “Bouncing. You think I’d be good at that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know I’d think twice before starting trouble.”

  “You be smart, no bigger than you are.” He stood straight and faced me with this observation, sucking in his gut. It pissed me off a little, but I was thinking twice.

  “I should mention they kicked the shit out of the last one and stuffed him in a dumpster.”

  “What’s the pay?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You know about the job.”

  “I just heard about the guy in the dumpster.”

  “And you thought of me.”

  “Right away,” I said.

  He nodded. “You sure you don’t want to go for a ride?”

  “Positive,” I told him, wondering if he was considering strapping me on against my will. To change the subject, I said, “Guess who I saw the other night.”

  He waited.

  “Roy Heinz,” I told him. “You remember Willie?”

  “What of it?” he said, his face a mask.

  “Nothing. I wondered if you ever heard from him is all.”

  “Why would I hear from Willie Heinz?”

  Somehow, it occurred to me, we were on the verge of hostilities again. His desire to provoke them seemed to have rhythmic peaks and troughs independent of the conversation itself. “No reason,” I said. “He looked up to you.”

  “Listen,” nodding vaguely in the general direction of the Ward house, miles away across the park and highway. “You can have it all, okay?”

  The weird part was that I understood him. No reference had ever been more oblique or sudden, but I had the feeling that this was what we’d been talking about all along, or what he imagined we’d been talking about.

  “Have what?” I said, trying to submerge the powerful feeling I’d had about him ever since the evening my father had beat him at arm wrestling and he’d threatened to break the arm he was suspended from. Drew Littler was insane.

  But his eyes went vague again and he offered me a big paw to shake. “Thanks for the tip on the job.”

  “Sure,” I said, accepting his offer, whatever it might mean. Then he kicked the Harley to life, did a circuit around the dirt yard, one booted foot dragging until the bike straightened and roared down the drive, narrowly missing my father’s convertible.

  Eileen’s white face was in the only window that looked out on the backyard and our eyes met across it as the Harley burned through gears and stop signs all the way to the distant highway.

  39

  That night at the Wards’ was the first of a new working arrangement. Tria’s mother met me at the door and explained that her daughter was not at home. The pages I had worked on the previous Friday had been typed up and added to the others in the plastic tray. Over three hundred pages worth now. About half the manuscript, I guessed.

  Nor was Tria in evidence the rest of the week, though when I arrived in the evenings the air was often rich with her perfume. The previous night’s work was always typed neatly and added face-down in the stack. Even more disturbing than her absence from the proceedings was her mother’s renewed presence. I began to feel as though I’d been the victim of some cruel slight of hand. I’d started out wooing the pretty daughter and ended up with the old hag, the basic plot of countless bedroom farces, only in my case the switch had been made not in the dark but rather in broad daylight as I looked on. Among the many reasons I wished ardently for Tria’s return was the grotesque possibility that someone would tumble to the fact that Mrs. Ward and I were alone in the house every evening and draw an unnatural conclusion.

  I didn’t have to search the house to know that Tria was not there. Her yellow Chevette was always gone when I arrived, her lingering perfume strong at first, then dissipating as the evening wore on. I probably would have worked late and waited for the sound of her car pulling into the garage were it not for the fact that Mrs. Ward no longer retired at nine, the way she had when Tria and I were working together. Now it was clearly her intention to remain up until I finished each night, as if she didn’t trust me to lock up on my way out. When she yawned, I suggested she go to bed, but she wouldn’t hear of it, no matter how her eyelids drooped. She fed us strong dark coffee that wired me good, but hadn’t the slightest effect upon herself.

  The main reason I wished she’d go to bed was so that I could stay up late and be done with the whole project as soon as possible. I no longer really wanted to go out there. Drew Littler’s remark that I could have it all, as far as he was concerned, rang in my ears, and the small library seemed more claustrophobic each night. As I paced around its perimeter to stretch my legs, clear my head, search for oxygen, I began to feel about it the way I suspected Jack Ward himself must have felt—that there was nothing I valued there, nothing of myself, nothing I wanted.

  Why then did I make the journey up that hill through the dark corridor of trees each evening? Part of it may have been, as Drew Littler suggested, the rather satisfying notion that I was permitted to drive my father’s convertible between the stone pillars that had once been a barrier to Drew Littler and me. Perhaps the fact that I had a standing invitation to visit continued to mean something long after the spell of the white jewel house itself had been broken. Maybe, in the end, that’s what such spells and such houses are about.

  And, too, part of the reason I continued to haunt the Ward House that August was guilt. I wanted to square things with Tria—though I wasn’t sure whether this was possible or even what it might entail. She had taken me into her bed, and I had betrayed her in the classic way that Mohawk men betrayed their women, perhaps the way most men betray most women. I planned a rather elaborate confession on the subject, an admission that I was unworthy of her, that she could do far better, that I was and always had been both selfish and corrupt. Moreover I had been treating her the way my father had treated my mother, the way her father had treated her mother. I was perpetuating … well, I wasn’t sure what, but I was perpetuating something. All of this was supposed to make her feel better. I know it made me feel better (I was twenty-four) as I rehearsed these observations.

  But the real reason I kept pushing my father’s convertible up the hill each evening was that in working over Tria’s grandfather’s history, I had rediscovered something of the strange, almost mystical delight I had felt i
n the Mohawk Free Library those years I had lived with my father. There in my cool little corner of the stacks, surrounded by books and periodicals I but dimly understood, I had felt connected to something as large and wondrous as the planet itself. With no teacher to direct my reading or to tell me in advance what to make of it, there was the off chance that I would go in a new direction. I often chose books by smell and was often rewarded. Sometimes I would look inside the back cover, where I would find a borrowers’ history, due dates stamped in purple ink. Volumes that had not been checked out in twenty or thirty years held a special interest for me. I felt like I was in direct communication with the book’s lonely author, that I would not have to raise my voice to be heard above the clamor of recent due dates.

  I now felt a similar intimacy with Tria’s grandfather, whose various relics made him a palpable presence in that icon-riddled room. I liked the idea that a man, many years ago, had labored over writings that I now labored over, that I could look inside his mind, see what occupied his thoughts, or at least those thoughts he chose to share with the world. And I wondered what he would have thought of me, a young man he couldn’t have imagined or predicted, who entered his house, and twisted his sentences around until they suited himself. At the time I imagined that the author must be terribly grateful.

  And I did love twisting those sentences around. It’s a pleasure that I fear very few people can comprehend, much less share. Surgeons who perform intricate operations that allow twisted, maimed, hulking cripples to walk upright may know something of the editor’s delight. I can only say that I discovered that summer in working over—and brother did I ever work it over—The History of Mohawk County, the joy of probing the opaque sentence until it surrendered something akin to meaning (this is what the son of a bitch meant!), making flexible (sometimes loosey-goosey, I fear) that which had been soldered stiff in a grimace of contorted syntax, giving energy and momentum to sentences stalled and flooded, like a carburetor, by leaden words. I was having a ball, and I do not regret in the least the many hours I labored over The History of Mohawk County. In fact, I didn’t even regret it years later when I saw a display of the book in the small front window of Ford’s Stationers, the closest Mohawk ever came to a bookstore. Having been rejected by dozens of commercial and university publishers, Mrs. Ward had somehow managed to convince a local press to do a limited edition. The editor, perhaps on his own initiative or, more likely, on the advice of the good Mrs. Ward herself, restored to the original every one of the thousand or so editorial changes I made, offering to the book-reading public of Mohawk County, her father’s vision, complete, unmolested, faithful, and, trust me, utterly unreadable.