The Risk Pool

  20

  About this same time, I joined a gang. Or rather, a commando strike force. Its other two members were its leader, Drew Littler, and a friend of his named Willie Heinz. Our purpose, according to Drew, was to right wrongs wherever we found them. Do what needed doing. Do what nobody else had the balls to do.

  I found this rhetoric, which Drew had borrowed from an old comic book, most appealing, especially in its unspecificity. It did not seem to me that we’d discover any of the world’s major wrongs here in Mohawk, but it was fun to imagine that evildoers contemplating nefarious activities would have to deal with us. We could count ourselves a deterrent, sort of like the magic powder that warded off elephants in the old joke. Basically, we roamed the streets at night in search of injustice. I was able to join the gang only when my father was out, but that was most of the time, what with poker games, trips to the harness track, and bars he sometimes couldn’t get past on the way home. Drew only bothered with the gang when his motorcycle was disabled, a day or two out of the average week. Then we’d meet out in back of the Littlers’ house sometime before sundown and head up into the park to train, where nobody would see our paramilitary drills and suspect our existence. Indeed, we spent an inordinate amount of time making sure there was no breach in our security. Drew was particularly worried about Willie Heinz, who was not very bright and who lived for our commando raids. In fact, Drew so completely distrusted Willie’s ability to keep a secret that he refused to give our gang a name for fear that Willie would spill the beans bragging about us.

  Once up in the woods we’d do calisthenics and practice the chain of command, which required that Willie Heinz do, without question, whatever Drew told him, and that I do whatever Willie told me. This arrangement was entirely satisfactory, since Willie never could think of anything to tell me to do. Drew himself was every inch a soldier. He wore thin t-shirts that had their short sleeves torn away so that his huge shoulder muscles were visible when we worked out. Willie Heinz and I had a tough time concealing our admiration for his big, tan torso and rippling biceps. He was exactly the sort of fellow to inspire confidence in his troops, and I was only occasionally discomfited to recall that my father had slammed one of his huge arms onto the dinner table with such force that the boy’s feet had gone straight into the air.

  I think Willie Heinz was even more envious of Drew Littler’s musculature than I, probably because Willie was tall, with a sprinter’s build that shamed him when he wasn’t in full flight. That, however, is what I will always associate Willie Heinz with: flight. He was the most unabashed coward I ever met, so cowardly, in fact, that his cowardice was impossible to hold against him, since you knew in advance what to expect. Running away with Willie always reduced the most serious of situations to comedy. His long, loping strides and churning elbows always seemed a preface to literal flight. You expected him to be airborne momentarily, and when he remained grounded he resembled nothing so much as a badly designed bird.

  Strangely, it was Willie Heinz who usually made flight necessary, and I’ve since come to the conclusion that he simply delighted in the sensation of fear. No night of roving the streets of Mohawk was ever complete until Willie Heinz had put an impressive mound of dogshit on someone’s porch and rung the doorbell. His terrorist attacks often came as a surprise even to Drew and me. We’d be walking peacefully down the middle of the street and without warning Willie would become possessed. “Arghh …” he would begin to moan, barely audibly at first, but rapidly getting louder. Then he’d pretend that something invisible had grabbed him by the elbow and was dragging him off toward somebody’s dark porch. If we knew what was good for us, we hightailed it. I’d get a good lead, but within a block or so Willie, his fists flashing high in the air, would blow by me, shouting, “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker,” about one motherfucker per stride.

  Such behavior always embarrassed Drew, who hated, I suspect, to see our high purpose trivialized by mere pranks and silly minor vandalism. He not only hated to run, he refused to. Nobody who got a good look at Drew ever wanted to chase him. Even when the police pursued us, it didn’t rattle our leader, who knew all the Mohawk cops and made small talk with them when they pulled over to the curb where he was strolling, alone by then, Willie Heinz and I having beaten a hasty retreat. Sometimes he sent them off in the opposite direction looking for us, once nearly causing our capture after we’d cut across lots and doubled back toward home, a maneuver much favored by Willie Heinz, who considered it the height of deception and who hated to run more than a block or two in a direction other than the one he ultimately intended to pursue.

  These were exciting times, but I worried about Drew Littler, who seemed never to derive much enjoyment out of our sneak attacks, even though our targets were invariably those who qualified as “Money People.” Often he seemed abstracted, vaguely annoyed with us for being younger, though Willie was only a year Drew’s junior. His opinion of Willie and me was none too high, and I knew he doubted he’d be able to count on us in a pinch. What troubled me most was that I could sense a pinch on the not-too-distant horizon. He had something in mind for us, some reason for hanging out with us, captaining our band. I watched him carefully when he thought I wasn’t looking, watched the purple worm tunneling beneath the skin of his forehead when he became immersed in thought. What, I continually wondered, could he want with us?

  As the summer progressed Drew Littler became more deeply moody and sullen, often not inviting me to ride on the back of his motorcycle on those evenings my father and I came over for dinner. Sometimes, he didn’t even want me spotting for him when he bench-pressed, once remarking that he was better off depending on himself. That hurt my feelings a little, but it was also a relief not to be around him when he was so morose.

  One sweltering evening toward the end of July, the phone rang just as Eileen and my father were finishing up the dinner dishes. Drew had roared down the drive a half hour earlier, and when she set the phone down, all the blood had drained from her face. She spoke through her wet fingers which had worked their way over her nose and mouth, prayer-fashion. “He’s done it,” she said. “He’s had an accident.”

  We all piled into the Mercury and my father backed it down the drive fast, scraping the rear bumper hard. When we came to the intersection, he started to turn left, toward the hospital, but Eileen said no, the trooper had told her the accident was out on the highway.

  My father was still for meeting the ambulance at the hospital, but Eileen was adamant and my father turned right for the highway.

  “Which way?” he said when we got to the stoplight at the intersection of Park and the highway. When Eileen realized she didn’t know, I heard myself say “Right” with such conviction that my father, who normally paid no attention to my opinion in such matters, did as he was told. The orange sun was down behind the dark trees which formed a corridor on both sides of the highway, peeking through in brief blinding flashes as we hurtled through the curves. It was the same time of day as when Drew had given me that first ride on the bike, and about a half mile from the entrance to the road that wound up toward Jack Ward’s house, I told my father to slow down. I’d hardly spoken when we came around a curve and saw the cluster of cars and people and flashing lights. Eileen was out of the car even before the convertible came to a halt.

  There were two police cars and an ambulance, but it was a middle-aged fellow in a red plaid hunting cap who was directing traffic around the flares that had been set up in the middle of the road. In the ditch across the highway a blue Impala sat, its rear door and hood caved in where the motorcycle had struck, its rear wheel collapsed in upon itself like a weak-ankled ice skater. Thirty feet up the embankment the mangled cycle had come to rest, an almost unrecognizable hunk of twisted black metal. Drew Littler stood over it, holding the detached handle bars in one hand. The fifty or so people who had gathered were staring at him, but no one was closer than twenty yards. Even from the other side of the road I could see
that his jeans and t-shirt were covered with blood.

  My father followed Eileen across the highway. “You the mother?” I heard one of the troopers say to Eileen, who had slowed as she drew nearer her son, who was surrounded on three sides by police officers and ambulance attendants, all of whom were keeping their distance.

  Apparently Drew had been just catching his breath, because a moment after we arrived, he raised the twisted handlebars of the ruined bike over his head and began to pound the cycle, shouting something I couldn’t make out.

  “There he goes again,” I heard somebody say.

  Several people laughed nervously.

  “I never see anybody so mad at a dead motorcycle,” another commented, “have you?”

  “It wudn’t the motorcycle,” said a huge woman. “It was the nut behind the wheel.” Everybody thought this was funny too, though as an old automobile joke it worked imperfectly with respect to motorcycles.

  A middle-aged woman in a yellow dress, who had been sitting on the ground next to the blue Impala and sobbing, quietly got to her feet to watch Drew go at the bike. There was a ragged tear along her forehead and the white towel in her hand was splotchy red. Each time Drew wailed the motorcycle with the handlebars, she covered her ears, though the sound he was making wasn’t particularly loud now. “Can’t somebody make him stop!” the woman screamed. “Can’t somebody just make him stop?”

  Nobody looked all that anxious to, and they must have figured that from the look of Drew Littler he couldn’t keep it up much longer. Each blow was increasingly feeble.

  “Look at my beautiful car!” the woman cried, as if noticing its condition for the first time. “Can’t somebody just make him stop?”

  My father and Eileen were talking to a tall trooper, while two others, their backs to Drew Littler, seemed to have been ordered to prevent anyone from approaching the boy until he’d spent himself.

  Near where I stood, a big red-haired man, full of momentary self-importance, was giving an eyewitness account of the accident, so I moved closer to listen.

  “At big kid aire … he come down from up aire” (pointing to the winding road that led to the Ward house) “goan like I never see. Like he forgot the highway was aire, till the last second. He sorta wakes up then and seen where he wuz, and then you know what that kid done?”

  Everybody wanted to know.

  “He just raised hisself up and steps off that murtercycle like he was parked along of the curb, and off that sonofagun went without him. Went over on its side, then bounced right back up like it was rid by a ghost, hit that aire blue car in the door and stuck like a arrow. That aire blue car went right up sideways on its wheels and flung that murtercycle off into the weeds up aire where ’at crazyboy’s beatin’ on her now. You never see nothin’ like it for weird.”

  There was a murmur of appreciation among the red-haired man’s listeners, but the man wasn’t finished.

  “And that aire crazyboy … summer-saultering along the road after that murtercycle like he can’t wait to catch up, screaming at it all the time. You never see nothin’ like it. Never even stopped to look at hisself afore he tuck off after that murtercycle to kill it. Beat on it with his hands until he come across ’em handlebars, yelling ‘I’m gonna kill the sonofabitch.’ Like ’at murtercycle was a person. He’s a crazyboy is what he is.”

  Down in the ditch the tall trooper talking to Eileen shrugged and my father started up the weedy bank. Drew looked over his shoulder once, then went back to beating the cycle with renewed purpose. I couldn’t watch.

  When I looked away, I saw Tria Ward standing on the other side of the road with a small woman an inch shorter than she. The girl had the same frightened expression she’d worn that afternoon at The Elms when we’d eavesdropped on our fathers’ conversation. She looked like she was straining to hear now, though I couldn’t imagine why. I looked around for Jack Ward, but I didn’t see him anywhere. The small woman with her looked to be in her fifties, but she was mummified, somehow, her skin shrunken tight over her tiny bones, like parchment. The spooky part was that she looked enough like Tria Ward for me to be sure that she was the girl’s mother, this despite the fact that Tria seemed, just then, to be even more beautiful than I remembered her, her long dark hair lush, a wonderful contrast to her pale white, almost translucent skin. When she saw me, I flushed, half hoping she wouldn’t recognize me, half praying she would.

  She smiled immediately, though somewhat fearfully, as if I was just the sort of person she expected to find in the middle of such a terrible scene. And, because of this, I felt the same insane urge I’d felt when we had been introduced in the restaurant—to apologize. For what, I couldn’t imagine. Her mother noticed me then and looked up at her daughter, then back at me, suspiciously, I thought, as if validating my need to apologize.

  “Hi,” Tria Ward mouthed, a silent, lovely syllable that gave me sufficient courage to join them. “Isn’t it terrible?” she said when I arrived. Traffic was now halted in both directions.

  This time I managed something better than a bleat, something to the effect that, yes, it certainly was terrible, though I wasn’t sure precisely what she was referring to—the wrecked Impala, the woman with the sliced forehead, the bloodied specter of Drew Littler, his awful yelping as he bludgeoned the bike, or the fact that so many people were gathered around in ghoulish enjoyment, hoping the show wouldn’t end just yet. I figured she meant all of the above.

  “Do you know him?” Tria Ward said, as if she suspected I must.

  “No,” I said, fearful of guilt by association. But my answer was a split second off in its timing, slowed, somewhat surprisingly, by real guilt. “My father does,” I added, and a fresh tide of guilt washed in. I hadn’t meant to implicate him, but it did seem wise to explain his presence on the opposite embankment where he had now arrived at the twisted pile of metal and the bloody, still raving boy.

  Drew had turned to face my father when he got close, and they each stood their ground now, my father just outside the reach of the ragged metal handlebar. We couldn’t hear anything, but I saw my father gesture in the general direction of the crowd; Eileen remained with the troopers and ambulance attendants. Drew studied the gallery for a second, as if this were the first time he’d noticed he wasn’t alone, but did not seem particularly impressed with the assembled mass. When my father held out his hand, Drew cocked the handlebar in response. I saw one of the troopers unsnap the strap on his holster.

  Silence descended on the crowd. Even the red-haired man had interrupted his umpteenth account of the accident. The only sound was the faraway rumble of an approaching dump truck still two hundred yards up the highway.

  And then suddenly it was over. Drew Littler dropped the metal bar and went to his knees, my father catching him as he pitched forward. Quickly, the troopers and ambulance attendants were scrambling up the hill, and I saw Eileen sit down on the asphalt. “He’s a crazyboy is what he is,” I heard the red-haired man say. “Thinks that murtercycle is a person.”

  “The nut behind the wheel,” the big woman said, but the crowd had changed and the reference become elliptical. This time nobody laughed, and the big woman looked confused and hurt. She remembered how it was to be funny.

  21

  Only when the ambulances disappeared around the curve heading back toward Mohawk did I realize I’d been forgotten. The attendants had rolled Drew onto a stretcher and struggled with his dead weight down the incline to the waiting ambulances. I thought they did a pretty good job, dropping him just the once, and then not very hard. Drew was about as big as the two attendants put together. They placed him in the second ambulance, which had just that minute pulled in behind the first. Eileen rode in the back with her son and an attendant, my father up front with the driver. The woman who’d been driving the Impala had the other ambulance all to herself.

  “Mother,” Tria Ward said, when the crowd began to disperse. “This is Ned Hall.”

  I don’t know what surprised me
more—that Tria Ward remembered my name or that she thought me worthy of introducing to her mother. Introductions were not part of my father’s normal social routine. When we went someplace, he more or less assumed that people would know who we were, or if they didn’t, they ought to. When pressed on the subject, he’d admit that, yes, I was his, but there were a lot of people I knew pretty well who had no idea what my name was. Some others, like Wussy, got too much of a kick out of calling me Sam’s Kid to use my name anyway. Now, being introduced by my correct name to someone like Tria Ward’s mother had an odd effect on me. On the one hand it was flattering, like suddenly being granted personhood, but also a little unnerving, because I wasn’t certain I’d prove worthy. Would she divine after a few exchanges that I didn’t merit so specific an identity and ask her daughter, à la Mike at The Elms, what’s wrong with him?

  “Hall,” Mrs. Ward repeated. “That is a common name, but not a local one.”

  I did not know what to say to that. I had counted eleven Halls in the Mohawk directory once, but I felt this might be the wrong time to volunteer that information.

  “That looked rather like a young man I used to know,” she said, pointing across the highway to the empty embankment where my father and Drew Littler had stood, as if she could still see them there. “His name was Samuel Hall, I believe.”

  I admitted that someone named Samuel Hall was my father.

  “He has not aged particularly well, has he?” Mrs. Ward said, as if she imagined that I might confirm her opinion by comparing the way I saw him now with her recollection of him as a younger man. “Of course, people live hard lives, don’t they.”