The Risk Pool

  He scratched himself, and for a minute, I thought he meant right then. I envisioned the two of us crossing Main Street, me in my new yellow windbreaker, him in his undershorts.

  In the living room he pulled on the same pants he’d draped over the sofa the night before. “You eat?”

  Like most of his questions, this one caused me to hesitate. Did I eat? Had I eaten? Did he want to know if I was hungry? Whether I usually ate breakfast? Whether eating was customary with me, as with other mortals? I took a stab.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “What did you eat?”

  “Nothing. I meant I’m hungry,” I said.

  He tucked his shirt in, and zipped his fly, the television having for the moment caught his attention. He placed each black-shoed foot on the arm of the sofa to tie his shoelaces, then pocketed his keys and brushed the cigarette ashes off the coffee table and onto the floor “Well?”

  We went down to the street. I walked right past the convertible, figuring he meant to go to the diner across the street. Instead, he got in the car. I retraced my steps and got in too, just in time to get cuffed in the head. “Pay attention,” he said.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Smile.”

  I did my best.

  We pulled away from the curb and rode silently toward the outskirts of town. For some reason, my spirits began to dip again. I was wearing new clothes and didn’t have much to complain about, but I couldn’t dispel the feeling that somehow my personal fortunes had taken an unmistakable turn for the worse. Everywhere, the leaves had begun to turn, but their brilliant oranges and yellows failed to cheer me. I thought about my grandfather. Fourth of July. Mohawk Fair. Eat the Bird, and Winter.

  Out near the highway my father pulled into a steep driveway and cut the engine. A curtain in the small brown house at the end of the drive twitched, then was still. My father got out, so I did too, confused as usual. There was a front door, but we went around back where there was a large, unshaded concrete patio. A blond-haired boy in a thin t-shirt, who looked three or four years older than I, was working on a dismantled motorcycle, parts of which were strewn all over the patio.

  “Hello, Knucklehead,” my father said when the boy looked up. I recognized the boy as being from Mohawk High, but didn’t know his name. He was big and good-looking enough to notice on the street, even if the girls he let hang on him were ordinary to ugly. He stood straight, studied my father for a second, then pointed at his own dick with both index fingers.

  “Don’t say it,” my father advised.

  “She’s inside,” the boy said, bending to pick up a greasy wrench.

  “Say hello to Zero,” my father said, nudging me. “He thinks he’s tough.”

  “Hey,” the boy nodded at me for a split second before returning to my father. “I am tough.”

  “You just think so,” my father said.

  “Someday we’ll find out,” the boy said, tossing the wrench into the air, catching it nimbly by the handle.

  “Careful,” my father said. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “Leave him alone!” came a voice from one of the windows directly above us. I jumped, but my father seemed to be half expecting it.

  “You dressed?” my father said, mounting the concrete steps to the back door.

  “It’s almost nine-thirty. What do you think?”

  My father held the screen door for me and we went in. There was a woman my mother’s age at the kitchen sink doing dishes, about a week’s worth, it looked like. Soapy to the elbows, she studied my father critically, as if she suspected him of bringing her some more.

  “Just wanted to make sure,” he said. “I got a weak ticker.”

  “I hate to be the one to tell you, but it’s not your heart that’s weak.” She dried her hands and forearms and stood looking at him. She was a gangly woman, sort of pretty and not pretty at the same time, with lively eyes that conveyed both amusement and irritation.

  My father touched the coffee pot with the back of his hand and, finding it warm, opened an empty cupboard, looking for a cup. The woman tossed him a wet plastic one from the mound on the drainboard.

  “I’m Eileen,” she said, offering a red hand, “since nobody’s going to introduce us.”

  My father ignored her, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Didn’t work last night?”

  “Yes, I worked last night,” she said angrily. “Some people have to.”

  “I dropped by,” he said. “You weren’t there.”

  “Then you dropped by after eleven. I was early waitress. For once.”

  “Mike lose his head?”

  “Must have. You could have called. My phone still works.”

  “I got tied up.”

  “Mmm,” she said.

  I had drifted off during the conversation. As usual, everybody seemed to know my father better than I did, and I always ended up feeling like an outsider. It had been the same when I was a kid. My father and Wussy had talked between themselves for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch, and when I was finally spoken to I’d be surprised to discover myself still present, a palpable if relatively unimportant part of the scene. Now, for some reason, my father and the woman called Eileen were suddenly looking at me, and I felt myself flush. “What?” I said.

  “What do you mean, what?” my father said. “Try and stay awake.”

  “Tell him to take a long walk off a short dock,” Eileen suggested to me.

  “If you don’t start being nice to me, I’m not going to take you out for breakfast,” he said.

  Eileen snorted. “Breakfast! Look at this mess.”

  My father shrugged. “Let Worthless do the dishes.”

  “That’ll be the day he ever does a dish,” Eileen said, glancing out the window to where her son knelt beside the motorcycle, her expression half affection, half exasperation.

  “He will if I ask him,” my father said.

  “You never ask him anything. The only thing you know how to do is threaten and call names.”

  “He pays attention, anyhow.”

  “That’s not the sort of attention I want.”

  “It would be a start.”

  Eileen grabbed a light coat from a wooden rack near the door. “Don’t go telling me about my kid.”

  “All he needs is his ass kicked,” my father smiled.

  “We won’t discuss it,” she said. “Shut up and take me out to breakfast.”

  We went outside, single file—Eileen, then me, then my father. “Don’t talk to him,” Eileen said. “Don’t say a word.”

  The boy looked up, saw us, nodded knowingly.

  “Sam,” Eileen warned.

  But my father had already moved past her. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Zero,” he said. “I got a job for you.”

  The boy held up a greasy bolt for inspection. “Good. I get five bucks an hour.”

  My father snorted. “You’ll never get five bucks an hour if you live to be a hundred. Unless it’s to go away and not come back. In the meantime, there’s a big stack of dirty dishes in on the sink, and your mother’s worked every night this week.”

  “So?”

  “So when we get back from breakfast, it’d be nice to see them done.”

  “Ignore him,” Eileen said.

  “Don’t worry,” the boy said, his voice even more pointedly contemptuous of her than of my father.

  “Who buys your food?” my father said. “Who gives you a place to stay? Who bought you this motorcycle you couldn’t live without?”

  “Not you.”

  “No,” my father admitted. “But I’m the one that’s going to pound the snot out of you some day if you don’t start remembering.”

  There was a flicker of fear in the boy’s eyes, though he covered it quickly. “Someday, right Sammy?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  Eileen had gotten in the car and she laid on the horn until m
y father turned his back on the boy. “The soap’s under the sink, in case you forgot,” he said.

  “I’ll think about it,” the boy said, and his eyes met mine before I could avoid them. His were sullen and dull now, as if he’d already had the snot pounded out of him and had never gotten over it.

  “The dishes will be done by the time we get back,” my father said quietly when he slid in behind the wheel.

  “I want you … to leave him … alone,” Eileen said, her voice a knife edge.

  “I want some breakfast,” my father said.

  I’d gotten in the backseat, and when he turned around so he could see to back out of the driveway, I instinctively turned around too, so I didn’t see the cuff coming. It caught me right on the cowlick. “Don’t grow up thinking you’re tough,” he said.

  “Like your father,” Eileen added.

  12

  Until my father told me not to, I worried about Rose not being able to afford fifteen dollars a week to have me clean the salon. It was a lot of money, enough to make a wealthy man of me, even if I only banked ten a week. “Don’t lose sleep over Rose,” my father advised. “She needs a wheelbarrow to cart all her money around.”

  I didn’t see how that could be. How much business could she attract up those three flights of narrow, unlit stairs over Klein’s Department Store? The only people who ever seemed to use them were my father and Rose and me. I understood only when I actually saw the salon that first Sunday. Rose’s business came up by elevator from the store below. Her ladies, most of them elderly, did their shopping and their hair in one trip. At closing time, an accordionlike mesh gate was closed and locked, preventing entry from the elevator. Similar grids were used in the department store on the two floors below.

  And my father was right. Rose had about the best business in town. That first Sunday he accompanied me to make sure I did the job right. It turned out he’d done the job himself when he was laid off. He showed me where the big vacuum and the cleaning supplies were. Then he showed me Rose’s big black ledger, which she kept in a poorly fastened drawer at the receptionist’s station at the elevator door. Along the left margin were the hours and half hours of the workdays—Monday through Saturday—and six columns across the pages which corresponded to the six chairs spaced evenly before the long wall mirror and individual sinks. For every hour and every chair at least one appointment was scheduled and dollar amounts recorded, sometimes in ink, sometimes lightly in pencil. We totaled up one day and multiplied by six to arrive at a figure for the week. I was so stunned by it that I went back over our calculations to find out where we’d goofed. We hadn’t though.

  “You should see the house she’s got up on Kings Road,” my father said, making himself comfortable with the racing form in one of Rose’s six reclining chairs.

  I doubted it could be as grand as the jeweled house on the hill across the highway from Myrtle Park.

  “Jack Ward’s place?” my father said when I described it.

  I doubted there could be more than one, so I said that was it. “What does he do?” I said, figuring he must have a pretty good business, like Rose’s.

  “Not a goddamn thing, that I know of,” my father said, not particularly interested. When he studied the racing form, he was hard to engage in idle chatter.

  “Where does it come from?” I said. “The money, I mean.”

  “Doesn’t come from anywhere. It’s just there. Been there for a hell of a while. You couldn’t spend it all if you tried.”

  I frowned at what seemed a silly observation. Of course you could spend it, I thought, and I said as much, too.

  My father shook his head. “You couldn’t do it,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “You just couldn’t,” he elaborated. “Jack’s trying like hell, and even he can’t. Which means it can’t be done.”

  It turned out that Jack Ward was an old army buddy of my father’s who had married into about the wealthiest family in the county and become a rich man. Since then, according to my father, he was trying to become a poor one again by throwing away money with both fists. But every time he thought he was making headway he discovered there was even more money than he’d thought. “Like shoveling shit against the tide,” my father concluded pessimistically.

  It struck me as an interesting problem to have, nevertheless. It shed new light on the forty dollars my mother had had me bring from the bank every week for us to live on. It had seemed a large sum, and I’d always wished I could be master of it for just one week, because I was convinced I could make it go a lot farther than she did. In fact, with forty dollars to live on every week, I had always considered us pretty well-to-do. Maybe there wasn’t money for everything we wanted, but I had figured that was a pretty universal condition. Other people couldn’t be all that much better off. Admittedly, there were people with cars, new ones even, but my mother had given me to believe that the people who owned them made extraordinary sacrifices to afford this single luxury. The fact that we never owned a car was, I believed, a matter of choice. We did not need a car, and by not owning one, we were able to enjoy whatever it might be that other people who did own them sacrificed. My mother had never been specific about what other people sacrificed, but she insisted they did, and I believed her. When I brought up the Claudes, she just smiled knowingly, and I thought long and hard trying to discover just what secret sacrifices they must have made to maintain a car and a swimming pool. About the only other extravagant wealth I’d ever personally encountered was at the dining table in the rectory of Our Lady of Sorrows, but my mother said the church didn’t count. She was talking about people.

  The idea of having more money than you could spend took adjusting to, and I considered it for a long time as I vacuumed brittle black hair off Rose’s red pile carpet, my father having fallen asleep in the chair with the racing form over his face. I tried to understand, but there were just too many holes in the theory.

  When I was finished, I turned off the noisy vacuum and my father started awake. “He could just give some away,” I ventured.

  “What?” my father rubbed his eyes.

  “The money,” I said. “If you couldn’t spend it all, you could give some to people who didn’t have any and let them spend some.”

  I could tell by the look on his face that it was a dumb suggestion, so I started on the sinks, sponging the circles of hair toward the drain until the porcelain glistened white. Then, together, we dusted the tables and rearranged the magazines and emptied the dozen or so small trash buckets. It was a long job, but with two of us working it went faster and, besides, I was getting paid. Not the sort of sum Jack Ward would have trouble spending, but a good-sized chunk by my own standards.

  “Take that trash down to the basement and you’re all done,” my father said.

  When I shouldered the big bag and headed for the back door, he stopped me and said not to be a dummy. I should use the elevator like a white man. When I pointed out that the grid was locked, he said I had a key, didn’t I? Well? And sure enough, the key I’d been given for the back door fit the lock on the gate, which lunged open when released as if on a well-greased, downhill track. I got on the elevator and pressed “B.”

  The doors opened again on a long, dark room with a low ceiling and glistening walls. A row of tall metal garbage cans lined the far wall, and in the largest of these I deposited my plastic bag full of hair and nail-polished tissues. When the elevator doors closed, I was left in total darkness and when I got back to the elevator I discovered I could not locate the button that would reopen them. I ran my hands up and down the adjacent walls, trying not to panic, but feeling fear rise in my throat anyway. It was terribly quiet there in the dark and when the big furnace clanged on a few feet away, I nearly cried out.

  There was no use banging on the doors, because my father was four floors up and, besides, I was nearly as frightened of needing to be rescued as of being trapped in the dark. After a while he would begin to wonder what had become o
f me and investigate. The elevator doors would open and the light from inside would clearly illuminate the button I could not find in the dark. It would be in plain sight, right where it should be, right where any dummy but me could find it.

  I knew it had to there, but I could not locate the button. I ran my fingers up and down the doors and walls, like a blind man reading Braille, but all they encountered was smooth, damp brick and steel. I went over the whole area around the doors several times, cursing inwardly, then finally crying tears of exasperation. Find it, dummy, I said aloud. It’s right here. It has to be.

  Finally, I decided on another tack. Feeling further along the wall, I started searching for a light switch, telling myself there had to be one in a basement with no windows. What I found instead, about ten feet from the elevator, was a wooden door that opened on a stairwell with a handrail, just barely visible. A faint light was coming from somewhere above, so I started slowly up the narrow stair, using the handrail as a guide. At the top there was a landing, then a right turn, then another flight. At the top of the stairs my heart plummeted when I saw that the passage ended at a single door, beneath which was a slender ribbon of light. Surely, it would be locked.

  But when I tried the knob, the door creaked inward and I found myself on the threshold of Klein’s Department Store, ground floor. Aisle upon symmetrical aisle stretched before me. The store was unlit except for the sunlight streaming in the long showcase windows a few feet away. In the nearest stood the boy mannequin wearing my clothes, his arms still extended outward, as if to embrace passersby on the street. From behind, he appeared awkward, paralytic, as if he were about to pitch forward through the glass. I let the door swing shut, the darkness suddenly welcome.

  There in the dark stairwell I remembered the conversation I’d had with my father in the convertible on the way home from The Lookout. We had left Tree and Alice inside, and I’d asked my father about something that had been puzzling me. “What will he do with them?” I said, referring to the roll of admission tickets Tree had said would disappear from the guard shack at the end of the season.