The Risk Pool

  When the weather started warming up and the streets began to run wet with water from the still high snowbanks, there was nobody to tell me not to get my bike out and ride around Mohawk, so I did. Riding the bike felt both good and bad. Good, because it made me the envy of all the younger kids who upon seeing me went home to beg their sensible parents to haul their bikes up out of the cellar, to no avail, for another month or so. Good also because there are few things better than riding a bike after a long winter. A bicycle promises spring as surely as the hollowing out of melting snowbanks, the return of song birds, the first bright tulip bud. Still, there was something wrong with the bike that year. During the winter months it had occurred to me that a car was more suitable transportation for someone like myself, who’d be entering Mohawk High in September, and it occurred to me well after the fact that the money my father took was money I had been saving for a car. My father wasn’t just a thief, he was a car thief.

  So was Drew Littler, I discovered. The only reason I knew was that he asked me if I wanted to be one too. The idea was to sneak over to Kings Road where the expensive houses were, hot-wire somebody’s Cadillac, take it for a joy ride, and then park it in the Mohawk River. It was part of a new, intensified, comprehensive “Screw the Money People” campaign he had in mind. Swiping and/or destroying their transportation was a form of vengeance that particularly appealed to Drew since losing his motorcycle, and he bragged to me one day that he and Willie Heinz had already driven half a dozen cars into the Mohawk and watched them float off toward Albany.

  He had in mind to get himself another bike, a Harley he had all picked out, as soon as he could convince his mother to sign for it. The owners were willing to let it go for a song, too, their own son having been thrown from it and killed, and his memory still fresh in their minds. Once Drew had convinced them that the bike wasn’t right after the wreck and probably never would be, they’d settled on a figure and he’d gone home to find the down payment. The first hundred he found in the top drawer of his mother’s bureau. Then he went looking for my father.

  “Sure,” my father said when Drew Littler slid onto a stool next to him at the Mohawk Grill, interrupting our supper. “I’d love to loan three hundred dollars to somebody dumb enough to throw a shovelful of ice through a second-story window.”

  “Come on, Sammy, I’m asking you.”

  “Not really,” my father said. “Because you’re not stupid enough to think I’d give it to you. And even if I was stupid enough, your mother’d never go for it. You just think you’re asking me.”

  Drew fished in his jeans pocket. “If she don’t want me to have it, how come she just gave me a hundred dollars for a down payment.”

  My father never even stopped eating. Neither did he look at the money. “Let me get this straight,” he said, carving a fatty piece of rib steak away from the bone. “You want me to believe your mother gave you a hundred dollars toward a motorcycle?”

  “You want to bet she didn’t?” he said. He put a pretty good face on, too. I don’t think I’d have called him. But my father apparently saw the lie even in his peripheral vision, and before the boy could stuff the money back in his pocket he grabbed the bills and handed the wad to Untemeyer, who was seated two stools down, his customary spot at the end of the lunch counter.

  “Hey!” Drew Littler said, looking at the bookie so ferociously that the blood drained from the old man’s face.

  “Hey, your ass,” my father said, getting the boy’s attention back. “If your mother gave you that hundred dollars, I’ll give you another five hundred. In fact, if you even came by that money honestly, I’ll give you another five. We find out you didn’t, I put the money in my pocket. We can call your mother right now.”

  “She’s at work,” the boy said, so feebly that even I knew he’d been lying now. It was all over his face.

  “I know the number. Meyer here can call. I won’t even say a word.”

  “I got a better idea,” Drew Littler said. “I give you ten seconds to give me back that hundred or I break your face.”

  “Whose?” Untemeyer said, handing over the money. “His or mine?”

  “Nobody’s,” Harry said without turning around. “Go down to the pool room if you gotta fight. Kill each other, for all I care. Just not here.”

  26

  With Claude at Mohawk High and me in the junior high, I seldom saw him that winter. All things considered, he wasn’t treated that badly. True, some kids made choking noises when they passed the table that he had all to himself in the cafeteria, but they seldom got much closer or became truly abusive. No one wanted the responsibility of being personally acquainted with someone who’d tried to kill himself. About the cruelest thing was done by the principal of Mohawk High who, without being petitioned, excused Claude from his gym class requirement, an exemption granted only in cases of severe handicap. Not taking gym pretty much completed Claude’s ostracism.

  Not that he minded so very much. He’d taken to drawing elaborate, baroque dinosaurs in his spiral notebooks, and these appeared to satisfy him. No one, including his teachers, bothered to discuss his dinosaurs or anything else with him and he told me he didn’t mind school at all now that he was never called upon in class.

  Sometimes, if my father wasn’t around and nothing was doing at the diner and I was bored with shooting pool by myself in the Accounting Department, I’d get on my bike and head over to Claude’s and spend an uncomfortable hour with him and his mother. Their property was beginning to show the effects of the weather and Claude Sr.’s desertion. The rusted gas barbecue in the backyard tilted crazily, snow having been plowed up against it. Nobody had bothered to straighten the bowed crossbeam of the ramada after Claude hanged himself from it, and a fissure now ran the length of the empty in-ground pool. The house itself, though I couldn’t put my finger on anything wrong with it, also seemed different. It smelled like no one lived there, the way my mother’s house had smelled the day I’d broken in to furnish it with knickknacks from Klein’s.

  Whenever I turned up, Claude would have something he wanted me to examine, something he thought was pretty cool. Usually, he’d just hand me whatever it was without preface, as if he didn’t want to bias my judgment by alerting me to whatever I was supposed to appreciate. Sometimes it would be a comic strip, or a magazine article, a weird marble from his father’s collection, or one of his better dinosaurs. He liked watching me as I examined whatever it was. Claude had a wonderful eye for typos, the most amusing of which he always cut out and saved for me. Our favorite was from the Mohawk Republican, which reported the conviction of an Amsterdam man for “Rape,” it said. “Three cunts.”

  Most of the curiosities Claude showed me did contain something pretty interesting, if you looked long enough, but it was Claude’s facility at spotting them that was fascinating. Once he showed me a full-page color ad for Kentucky bourbon he’d torn from a magazine, handing me a magnifying glass, as if to suggest that, of course, I would want to examine it closely. The ad pictured a country road bordered on both sides by tall dark trees and just inside them a white fence, the kind used to border horse pastures. There was a pheasant in the foreground, and way down the road where the dark line of trees converged, was an oncoming car, an old Model T it looked like, though I couldn’t tell for sure, even with the magnifying glass. But that wasn’t what he’d wanted me to look at anyway. Finally, he moved my hand and the magnifying glass to a large bush in the left foreground, partially obscured by the pheasant. But beneath the bush was what looked like a child’s lifeless hand, palm up. The density of the bush made it impossible to make out anything else, but the more I looked at it, the more certain I became that the hand was real, not some doll’s hand.

  It was Claude who finally folded the page carefully and put it away in a drawer.

  “How?” I heard myself ask, and even now I’m not sure what I meant by the question. How had a dead child happened into a bourbon ad? How was it that nobody had noticed the hand and pre
vented the picture’s publication? How had Claude himself first noticed, something virtually undetectable with the naked eye? How had he known to look with a magnifying glass?

  One afternoon when I went to visit him and his mother, I had leaned my bike against the house and started inside when I heard an urgent tapping on glass. It was coming, I discovered, from the window of the house next door, where the dark curtains had parted sufficiently to accommodate Claude’s round white face. Come around, he was motioning, to the back of the house.

  He let me in through the screened porch and the kitchen, into a dark sitting room where the old woman I’d spoken to on the afternoon of Claude’s attempted suicide was bent over a large stack of 78 rpm records that teetered against the biggest cherry Victrola I’d ever seen. Its turntable, which folded up into the rich cabinet’s innards when not in use, now lay flat on a hinged door and was spinning noisily, awaiting a record. The speakers crackled and buzzed horribly, as if the idle needle were picking up energy and sound from the atmosphere.

  Around the room stood several other equally massive pieces of furniture—a credenza, a library table, and an oak secretary—along with a sofa, love seat, and chair, each sporting an identically faded pink floral pattern. With the curtains drawn, the only light was from an old lamp with an opaque shade. Claude was beaming, as if to say, Pretty interesting, huh?

  “The friend!” the old woman, whose name I later remembered was Agajanian, exclaimed when she noticed me. Arising lightly, as if she were filled with feathers, she was apparently delighted to see me, as if my arrival were long awaited. The old woman’s hair, as faded as the furniture, was wild, clamped down here and there by black bobby pins to ghastly effect, as if her hairdresser were a cruel child. The old woman was terribly thin, and her gray housedress was cinched at a waist not much larger than one of Claude’s thighs. “Please!” she cried, gesticulating wildly. “Have a seat. Do!”

  The love seat was right there, so I sat, but it was the wrong thing. “There!” she gasped. “Now you’ve sat right on top of Ralph, and he’s been cleaning those disgusting fish all day!”

  I looked over at Claude, who was beside himself with delight.

  “Baking soda!” Mrs. Agajanian said. “Tell your mother as soon as you get home. Nothing like baking soda to get out fish stink.”

  I promised I would, but she kept right on glaring at me until I slid over onto the other cushion and off the lap of the invisible Ralph. She found the record she’d been looking for and slipped it onto the turntable, which hissed even more ferociously now. I braced myself for the inevitable blast, but when the needle touched the surface of the spinning record, the terrible background noise vanished utterly. The music that replaced it was an instrumental arrangement of “September.” Mrs. Agajanian listened to a strain, then did a fluid waltz move that culminated with the old woman landing gracefully in the center of her armchair.

  “This was my husband’s personal favorite,” she said. “His name was Byron and he was a terrible queer, though he never told me until just before he died. Out of consideration for my feelings, he said. Anybody can believe that that wants to.”

  The old woman glared at me to see if I wanted to.

  “I’m a Christian woman, of course, and not the sort to abide faggotry of any description. He kept his secret until he was ready to die and there wasn’t anything I could do to him. He was clever about things.”

  She had a glass of something on the end table beside her and she took a sip from it.

  “God’s got him now, so it doesn’t matter.”

  When “September” finished she put on another record. “Saber Dance,” she said. “The S.O.B. liked this one, too.”

  We listened to the whole thing, the old woman tapping her foot to the increasingly frenzied beat, her hair even wilder now. I kept expecting the bobby pins to come loose and ping across the room at me and Ralph, whom I remained conscious of now, invisible or not. Ralph was her son, I discovered, and his refusal to quit cleaning fish when they had company his mother considered unreasonable. “I don’t see why everyone should be made uncomfortable just so you can show off,” she said to the cushion next to me.

  I was pretty relieved to learn there were only the four of us in the room, because I had feared there might be more. There weren’t, so I began to relax a bit. After all, Ralph was occupied with his fish and no trouble at all except for the smell. She read him the riot act about that and the fact that they were always knee-deep in scales, then went back to her husband, Byron. “I was always a sucker for tall men,” she admitted, and Byron had been tall and always neatly dressed in dark pinstriped suits. His dark beady eyes should have tipped her off, but they didn’t. She hadn’t discovered he wore a toupee until after his death. “Don’t ask me how I found out,” she said.

  When I asked her how come she played all his favorite records if she hated him so much, she explained that never once in their thirty-odd years together had he ever let her buy a record she wanted, which meant that if she felt like music, well this was it. She didn’t mind the music so much, she just hated the memories.

  “So,” she said. “Tell me about your girlfriends.”

  I was willing to let Claude go first, or even Ralph for that matter, but the old woman was glaring right at me. I didn’t want to admit the truth—that I hadn’t a girlfriend—for fear that the admission would be seen as evidence that I was destined for a life of faggotry like Byron. “There’s this one girl …” I began, thinking about Tria Ward and getting ready to describe her if need be.

  “Good!” the old woman thundered, looking over at Claude now, as if to suggest that he listen up, that mine was an example worth following. She seemed completely satisfied with my flat statement that there was a girl, as if she were quite capable of filling in the details. And indeed she slipped right into a reverie, a snockered smile spreading across her face, as she rocked gently, back and forth, in a chair that didn’t. In a few short moments she was fast asleep, leaving Claude and me alone with Ralph.

  When the old woman began to snore, Claude went over and covered her with a heavy quilt that lay over one arm of the sofa. In back of the chair he found a bottle and held it up so I could see. It was bourbon, the same brand as the one in the magazine ad. His eyes were alive with significance.

  For a minute the two of us stood there, watching Mrs. Agajanian’s narrow chest rise and fall gently beneath the quilt. I think we both feared that her breathing would stop right then with the two of us standing over her ghoulishly.

  We slipped quietly out the back and went over to Claude’s house. According to Claude’s mother, Mrs. Agajanian was all alone in the world and was subject to “spells.” She had no son named Ralph, never a husband, homosexual or otherwise. She was living in the house she’d grown up in, visited by her doctor, who wrote her prescriptions for the spells.

  Mrs. Agajanian’s nap must have been pretty short, because half an hour later, when I was ready to head back to the diner for my five o’clock rendezvous with my father, I heard a light rapping on the window, and there she was, her white face right up against the glass, faded hair ringing it like a thundercloud. It sounded like she had the Victrola on again, and she did the waltz move, the heavy curtains coming together as she spun away.

  27

  My father liked to wait until he was sure winter was finished before he went back to work on the road. That meant May, even when spring came in April. This year, though, he went back to work at the end of March. The reason he gave was that he owed me money, and for a while I thought I might get it back, or part of it. But, like the previous winter, we’d gotten behind a couple months rent and we owed Harry, too. Then Drew Littler got himself in a jam and my father loaned Eileen some money. My father’s ideas about debt were vague, cosmic. He figured if you had money and somebody needed some, you gave it to him, at least if the guy was all right and would do the same for you. Later on, if you needed it and he had it you could call on him. In the meantime, if you di
dn’t need it, you left him alone.

  My situation was this. I’d loaned him money, sort of. Because he needed it and was good for it, sort of. But I didn’t need it back, which meant I had no business worrying about it. Later on, if I needed it and if he had it, he was supposed to give the money back. If he didn’t have it, he’d regret the fact and wish there was something he could do. But right now, Eileen needed the money and I didn’t, so he gave it to her. The reason she needed it was that Drew had landed himself in jail after beating some Negroes half to death outside the pool hall. I hadn’t been there, but the event was recounted at the Mohawk Grill in several versions, each apocryphal after its own fashion. After listening to all of them, I did a composite sketch based on my knowledge of Drew Littler and those details common to the several versions of the event, tossing out variants that seemed out of character or attributable to the character and prejudice of the speaker. Having seen Drew Littler shoot pool, I absolutely believed certain aspects of the story that other people doubted. Drew believed that pool operated on much the same principles as weightlifting. He never could be made to understand that a cue ball could not be blasted through a dense cluster of balls and come out the other side with its original trajectory intact, like a fullback plowing through the line of scrimmage. It never paid to daydream when he was shooting either, because balls had a way of becoming airborne in multicolored blurs, rattling off walls and cracking along the floor at shin level. He attacked even the side pockets viciously.

  One afternoon, Drew and I had shot a few racks up in my father’s apartment. I didn’t like playing with him because he couldn’t win but hated to lose. I’d sandbag like a son of a bitch, but there was just no way to keep him in the game. The only time he ever made a shot was by mistake, after the cue ball had rebounded off seven or eight rails. He was that lousy. We’d been playing for about an hour, Drew’s face darkening with each successive loss. Wussy came in and drank a beer, watched us for about thirty seconds, said we both stunk, and lay down on the sofa. I purposely left the cue ball about three inches from the seven, which in turn was no more than three inches from the side pocket. Drew always approached easy shots hungrily, and when he lined this one up, I looked around the room for a safe place. What happened was something I’d never seen before and have never seen since. Drew Littler drove into the cue ball with such force that the felt tip of the cue stuck at the base of the side pocket, snapping the stick in three like a twig. The thick butt remained in Drew Littler’s hand, the slender tip vibrated in the side pocket like an arrow, and the long middle section, razor sharp on both ends, impaled itself in the back of the sofa where Wussy had fallen asleep.