I called Tria Ward just that once from the Mohawk Grill, and then I took up pool, a magic, hypnotic sport, a Freudian playground of balls, stiff rods, a variety of holes to approach from a variety of angles, all promissory, all destined to be filled, eventually, regardless of the shooters’ skill. Don’t take my word for it. Watch a foursome of thirteen-year-olds around a pool table in somebody’s basement. See how long it takes one of them to see the cue as a makeshift prick, placed proudly between the legs and waved around to the detriment of lamps and wall hangings. No thirteen-year-old sharpie is ever content to just sink a shot, he’s got to ram it into the pocket manfully. He’d rather miss altogether, sending the ball skittering along the concrete floor, than have it roll harmlessly up to the precipice, quiver there a moment before giving in to gravity.
No thirteen-year-old but me, that is. For this is precisely the game I learned to play on the table my father and Wussy set up in our living room. After the Mohawk Fair in September, the chill winds my grandfather had known so well made a memory of the summer of 1960. It was then too cold to dive for golf balls or hang out at the Sacandaga Marine. I entered eighth grade, my last at Nathan Littler Junior High. When school got out I went home and shot rack after rack of pool feeling peaceful and glad. Sometimes I let Claude come with me because he had become even more of an object of ridicule after it became widely known why he always wore turtlenecks and talked in a hoarse whisper. He shot pool like he did everything else now, listlessly, expecting defeat, ensuring it by not concentrating or missing on purpose (no one could really have been so bad) on those rare occasions when he found himself in a position to win. Not only was I far too good for Claude, I was becoming too good for almost everybody, including my father, an indifferent pool shooter who could never keep his mind on the game, sometimes could not remember whose turn it was, having been lured into a nearby conversation at the bar. He was a little better when he played for money, but not much. After a while I could beat him easily, though I seldom did, afraid that he would intuit from my growing mastery that I was neglecting my studies, which I was. I continued to read voraciously, almost everything except that which had been assigned, and years later I was told that I occasioned many an argument among my teachers, some of whom claimed I was a brilliant underachiever, others that I was just another homegrown militant moron. I don’t remember coming to any conclusion about my teachers at all.
Pool I thought about constantly, seeing in my mind’s eye during civics class the brightly colored balls rolling straight and true over green felt. I played hundreds of imaginary games, mapping strategies, examining contingencies, discovering character flaws and weaknesses in my imaginary competitors. I stopped playing in public, not wanting anybody to know how good I was getting, but playing sometimes into the early morning hours when my father stayed out, bolting for bed only when I heard him coming on the stairs below. I had no goal in mind, no plan to check my progress by playing local studs, no need to boast. Playing was enough, and the table drew me like a beautiful woman, satisfying me, I’m ashamed to admit, completely.
When the old woman who had let my father and Wussy cart off the table died a few short months after her husband and the beneficiaries to her estate discovered the table missing, they tried to force my father to give it back, claiming he had duped a senile old woman into believing the table worthless. They believed it to be worth upwards of a thousand dollars. My father told them they could go fuck themselves, then hired F. William Peterson to tell them the same thing, later refusing to pay the lawyer’s fee. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had to surrender the table. Tria Ward, away at a private girl’s school in New England, I thought about seldom, and as the long gray Mohawk winter settled in, my world was lit by the hot bare bulb that dangled from the high ceiling directly above the table’s smooth green lawn and buffed mahogany.
That winter promised to be nip and tuck, like all my father’s winters. He got himself laid off, as was his custom, around Thanksgiving and signed up for unemployment the next day. After a few weeks the checks started coming and it looked like we’d be all right until spring. I knew I would, but my father was always a question mark because his habits never changed, even when his income did. If anything, not working was the double whammy where Sam Hall was concerned, because he not only didn’t have as much money, but even more time to discover uses for it. Once the leather shops started laying off after the holidays he didn’t have to go looking for a poker game. They were everywhere, the only visible sign of a fluid economy in town, if you didn’t count the half-dozen downtown gin mills and the Mohawk Grill, where Harry sold little but coffee, though he sold a great deal of that at a dime-a-cup clear profit. Most of the stores along Main closed at two or three in the afternoon on weekdays to conserve heat, and the snowbanks grew so high that only the heads of people on the opposite side of the street were visible. My father’s convertible, its rag top up for the season, he refused to park anywhere except in front of Klein’s, and he left it at increasingly crazy angles, the passenger-side wheels two or three feet higher up the bank than those on the driver’s side. One night in January there was a thaw and when we came down to the street in the morning a crowd was gathered around my father’s car, which was balanced precariously atop a fire hydrant that had been invisible beneath the snowbank the night before when my father had come home. It was barely visible even now, its yellow top wedged in behind the convertible’s right front wheel. By that night we were famous, a picture of the car gracing the front page of the Mohawk Republican. My father had me stand next to the convertible with my arm extended, so that it looked for all the world like I was holding the car up with one hand.
For a while he tended bar at The Elms on weekends and Mike’s night off, but then he stopped doing that and we didn’t go out there for a while. During the winter Mike’s business tailed off because people hated getting stranded way the hell and gone out there, two whole miles from Mohawk, when they could just as easily get stranded at Greenie’s or some other place in town. I suspected, however, that the real reason was that my father and Eileen were on the outs. The only thing he would say about it was that he couldn’t take being around Numb Nuts. There had to be more to it, though, because Drew Littler was seldom home. Since wrecking his bike, he’d turned eighteen and dropped out of school and become even more morose, hanging out at the pool hall all hours where he bragged about knowing how to hot-wire cars whenever he needed transportation. He was theoretically saving up for a new bike by shoveling snow and doing odd jobs that, according to my father, even a dummy couldn’t fuck up. He didn’t have much luck though, even with foolproof employment. When my father got him a job shoveling out the parking lot of a hardware store over on Union, Drew threw a shovelful of hard-packed snow through the second-story window and got canned.
That night Eileen met the three of us (Wussy was along) at the back door on our way in. Drew was at the small kitchen table eating a long Italian roll he’d stuffed with ham and cheese and everything else he could find in the refrigerator.
“Don’t start on him,” Eileen warned my father.
But my father had been steaming ever since he’d heard, and there was no stopping him, at least not right away. “Put that sandwich down a minute,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
Drew kept eating.
“First-floor window I can see,” my father said, standing over the boy. “A mistake. A dumb mistake, but … a mistake. Dumb for anybody else, normal for you. But how the fuck could you throw a block of ice through the second-floor window and sit there and tell me it was a mistake?”
“I didn’t say nothin’ to you,” Drew said.
This was true. My father had been anticipating the exchange all the way over in the car, figured that Drew would claim it was an accident, but had forgotten to wait for the boy to say it.
“You’re telling me you did it on purpose? You threw a block of ice through a window on purpose?”
“I ain’t telling you
shit,” Drew said.
“I wouldn’t either,” Wussy said. “I wouldn’t explain to nobody who parks on top of fire hydrants.”
“Bullshit,” my father said, surprised by Wussy’s disloyalty, despite its predictability.
“Bullshit yourself,” Wussy said. “Anybody didn’t know better would swear he was your kid brother.”
My father looked at each of them, saw that he was clearly outnumbered, shook his head and went back outside. In a minute we heard him shout, so we all crowded at the window to see what was up. He was standing in the middle of the drive and he had a shovelful of snow, which I thought for a minute he was going to toss at us. Instead he flipped it gently to the top of the snowbank. “I’ll do it once more, Zero,” he said. “Watch carefully. Even you can master this.”
One afternoon in early March, when the snow had turned as gray as the low sky and the weathered buildings along Main, I came home from school and was surprised to find the apartment empty. My father’s Mercury, more rust than metal after the severe winter, was parked at the curb out front. Lately, my father had taken to falling asleep on the sofa in the afternoons after long nights at the poker table, snorting guiltily awake when I came in, professing surprise to have drifted off, even though it was pretty obvious that he had “drifted” off several hours earlier. Today, though, I had the place to myself. I shot a few racks of pool waiting for him to show up, pretty sure he would because the car was down there in the street.
Shortly after five Rose stuck her head in and regarded me suspiciously. She left the salon the same time every day, her red hair a wine-colored cloud through the frozen glass of the door. Her stopping was unusual. She usually slid an envelope with my pay under the door sometime on Monday; otherwise, I rarely saw her.
She looked the pool table over as if it confirmed her worst suspicions. “You okay?” she said.
I said I was, trying to think if there was some reason I wasn’t supposed to be.
“Can you lock this door?” she said, twisting the knob.
“I guess,” I said. “If anybody wanted to.”
She studied me, reluctant, for some reason, to leave. I didn’t think she was waiting for an invitation to shoot a rack of pool or I’d have asked her. “You ever see your mother?” she said finally.
“Sometimes,” I said. In truth, it hadn’t been since Christmas. I hated for people to ask that question because it always felt like an accusation. “She’s in Schenectady.”
“Where would you live if you didn’t live here?”
“With him, I guess,” I told her. “With my father. Wherever.”
“You could live with me,” she said. “I suppose. For a while.”
It was clear that she had so little appetite for this prospect that I wondered why she’d bothered to give it voice. I told her thanks.
She was no sooner gone than I heard Wussy’s lumbering approach on the stairs outside. “I suppose we should all be thankful this ain’t no ten-story building,” he said, kicking his boots off in the hall and leaving his down vest on the floor next to them. “How’s things here in the Accounting Department?”
I said fine. My father had never bothered to scrape off the black letters stenciled on the door. It didn’t bother either of us, or even seem strange anymore.
We shot a couple of racks of pool. Wussy was a pretty fair shooter, but I stayed right with him, winning more than I lost, a fact that did not appear to impress him particularly.
“Let’s you and me go eat a hamburg steak, Sam’s Kid.”
It was dinner time all right and I was pretty hungry, but I said maybe I’d better wait for my father.
“We’ll just be across the street,” Wussy said. “Even Sam Hall could find us there without no trouble.”
That was true, so I went along, still wondering where my father could be. The convertible hadn’t moved and he wasn’t in it asleep or anything because I checked. I half expected to see him at the counter in the Mohawk Grill, but he wasn’t. Harry had a pretty good crowd and a waitress on the floor, but he came over to take our order personally.
“So?” he said.
“So,” Wussy agreed.
Skinny Donovan was there, two stools down, snoring peacefully, his head on the counter, cowlick astir.
Wussy and I ordered hamburg steaks. People looked at us, went back to private conversations, their heads a little closer together. I began to feel spooked. I didn’t mind eating dinner with Wussy, it wasn’t that. Maybe it was just that the usually noisy diner was so quiet. We could hear. Skinny’s bottom lip flapping when he exhaled.
“You might not see your old man till later in the week,” Wussy said when the food came, as if he hadn’t wanted to open a conversation until he had a pretext for abandoning it. “He said for you to go out and stay with Eileen for a few days if you want.”
“Do I have to?” I said, not wanting to ask the obvious question, not with the convertible sitting at the curb right across the street. I didn’t have anything against staying with Eileen, but I didn’t really want to. There had been other nights when my father hadn’t come home, or came home so late that it didn’t count as coming home, and I didn’t mind staying alone in the apartment. I was going on fourteen, after all.
Wussy shrugged as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I had to do something I didn’t want to. “You got money?”
I said I did.
“Take this anyhow,” he said, a folded twenty materializing from his flannel shirt pocket.
I said I was fine, really.
“Now you’re finer,” he said, stuffing the bill in my own shirt pocket. “Nothing could be finer. Than to be in Caroliner.”
If things weren’t strange enough, who should walk in right then but Eileen herself. She came right over and slipped onto the stool between me and Skinny Donovan, who gurgled but did not budge.
“So,” she said. “You want to stay with me for a couple days?”
“Why?” I said. “I’m all right.”
“Just till your father gets back?”
“Why?” I repeated.
“Why not?” Eileen said, trying to sound jovial.
I didn’t feel jovial. There were too many people who knew something I didn’t, and it was all too clear that they weren’t going to tell me. It wasn’t me, this time, either. Before, I had jumped to the wrong conclusion in the matter of my mother, but this was different. Then I had marveled at what great liars they all were, how well they’d concealed the truth. Now it turned out they were pretty pitiful at trying to pretend nothing was up.
“Do you have money?” Eileen wanted to know, bending down for her purse. If Wussy hadn’t been there, I’d have said no. I was suddenly angry enough to take a hundred and spend it. There was my father’s convertible sitting out there in the street, and here we all were talking about him as if he’d left town for the weekend. All I could think about was what must have happened. I saw the poker table, my father leaning forward to draw in the pot, somebody pushing a chair back and standing up, like in westerns. Or somebody else raking in the pot and my father standing up. Somebody pulling a gun.
Of course there were all sorts of places he could be. He could be in Las Vegas with Mike. They had gone before, gotten good and drunk and driven to the Albany airport. That made as much sense as anything, and it accounted for the car being out front. They would’ve taken Mike’s, and he wouldn’t have wanted me to know where he was going, either. I tried to picture him and Mike shooting craps in a big casino, but my imagination refused to conjure the scene. Instead I kept seeing him in a hospital bed, tubes everywhere, beneath an oxygen tent.
Wussy paid for dinner and the three of us went outside, leaving Skinny where he was, with his head on the counter. The cold March wind tunneled up Main Street, and we hunched our shoulders against it. There was a light on in the living room of the Accounting Department. I remembered distinctly turning it off before we left. A shadow passed before the shaded window, then disappeared.
Neither Eileen nor Wussy appeared to notice. Eileen was still talking to me, trying to convince me to come stay with her. I didn’t want to appear too anxious to get away from them, so I played it cool and just shrugged and waited for Eileen to get tired of talking to a blockhead. I saw the shadow three more times before Eileen observed that I couldn’t be anybody’s kid but Sam Hall’s, and Wussy said, “So long, Sam’s Kid. You know how to find me,” which I did, more or less. Finally, I said I thought I’d just do some homework and go to bed, and they gave up and drove off.
About half a block up the street was a black Cadillac with big tail fins I’d never seen before, and I remembered the men who had come to Mohawk looking for my father years ago, and how he had hidden out until they left. I walked by the street entrance to our apartment and glanced in, then headed up the street, then back again, this time going in, quietly, so as not to rattle the glass. The shadow I’d seen in our apartment hadn’t looked like my father’s. It hadn’t moved right, but I couldn’t be sure. At the first landing I leaned over the rail and peered up into the darkness between the banisters. I didn’t see any movement and the stairs were quiet except for the creaking that registered my own weight.
I fingered the keys in my pocket, recalling that I had one to Rose’s. If I was quiet, I could slip in there, open the door a crack and wait to see who came out. Whoever it was couldn’t stay in there forever. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a good plan.
I could tell her key by feel. The first thing Rose had done when she signed the lease was change all the locks, and her keys were different from the big, old-fashioned one that fit the door of the Accounting Department. On the other side of the frozen glass, whoever had let himself into our apartment was pacing, curiously unconcerned, it seemed to me, about the sound of his footfalls. When I turned the key in Rose’s door and the lock thunked audibly, the shadow in our apartment stopped pacing, but made no move toward the door. After a minute, it resumed again.