The Risk Pool

  “No,” I admitted. “There are times when I feel like I’m somebody I don’t like very much.”

  “But always somebody,” she said sadly, then added, “I never dislike myself. When I was younger and first began to understand that my father was doing something behind Mother’s back, I thought that if I could make him love me more, he’d love her too. I even told her that once, and she smiled at me like I didn’t understand a thing in the whole wide world. You don’t count, was what she said. Later that night when she heard me crying, she came in and explained what she’d meant. That Daddy was an adult, and that even though he loved me as a little girl, I didn’t count as a big girl because I wasn’t one. But it was too late. I’d already understood it the other way, and it had made the whole world make sense. All I had to do was understand that I didn’t count and then everything fell into place. When he died, that’s all I could think of.”

  It had stopped raining out, and somewhere below, on the highway, we heard a hot rod downshifting gears.

  “I was here that night, with my father,” I heard myself tell her. “The night half the town came out. I never felt so sorry for anybody. I couldn’t face you I felt so bad.”

  She covered her face with both hands, remembering. “It was awful. I’ll never forget it. All those people. They wouldn’t go home. My mother was glad they were there, so she could say look, he’s done it for the last time. How I hated her that night. How I hated everybody.”

  “Me too,” I said, remembering the woman who’d stolen the book from the Ward library.

  For some reason, I told Tria about it, though it did not surprise her. “All sorts of things disappeared that night. You wouldn’t believe the things they took.”

  “Yes I would,” I said, thinking that it hadn’t been just Drew Littler who resented the Money People. Most people who stole weren’t taking what they believed to be others’ property. They were taking what they themselves deserved, all the things they’d been cheated out of. That, now that I thought about it, was why I’d raided Klein’s. It had been an act of revenge, not avarice.

  “The car was the one that got us,” she said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Somebody swiped Daddy’s Lincoln,” she said. “That afternoon. When we got back from the funeral home it was gone.”

  She was looking at me so strangely—as if she thought it might be within my power to explain such maliciousness—that I felt a sudden, inexplicable wave of guilt so powerful that I imagined for a brief moment that maybe I had stolen the Lincoln and willed myself to forget the deed. This bizarre conviction was so real that I had to force myself to reason it out, that it could not be true. I’d been thirteen when Jack Ward died. I hadn’t taken driver ed until two years later in Mohawk High.

  The more I tried to shake the feeling of responsibility, the more guilty I felt about my present posture. Was I not at this moment a thief in the Ward house? Hadn’t I insinuated my way into their midst, misrepresented myself, stolen into Tria’s bedroom, taken … what? Nothing that hadn’t been freely given, surely. And maybe it had done some good. Maybe confiding in me about that horrible day was something Tria needed to do. I realized that her breathing had become regular and that she was asleep. I stayed awake watching the patterns made on her bedroom wall by the sliver of moon darting in and out of the clouds outside. At one point, what my imagination took to be a human form passed outside the window, but I did not dare disturb Tria, whose head lay on my shoulder, her gentle breathing providing a rhythm that I tried, without much success, to match.

  Tria woke me early. Her bedside clock said it was a few minutes before six and the clear sky outside the bedroom window was not quite blue yet.

  “I just heard Mother in the bathroom,” she said, up on one elbow to smooth hair away from my forehead, a gentle, wonderful intimacy that took my breath away.

  “You don’t make it easy for a guy to break camp,” I said.

  She covered herself, or tried to, with the sheet. “You better had, though, unless you want to meet her in the hall.”

  I could hear water running in another part of the house. “Let me take you to dinner tonight,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “But call me later.”

  “She’s liable to hear me drive away,” I said.

  “She’s probably seen the car out there anyway,” Tria said. “Don’t worry, though. She’ll pretend she doesn’t know. Things are always normal here, no matter how abnormal.”

  I got dressed and out the door quickly. My father’s Cadillac gave me a bad moment when it refused to turn over or even acknowledge that a key had turned in the ignition, but then the engine coughed to life with a plume of purple smoke from the exhaust. It hung there, intact, utterly refusing to dissipate, when I drove away, between the stone pillars and down the hill.

  The first thing to do was return the car. It was Saturday morning though, and there was no hurry. I’d left my father at Greenie’s with half a load on around 7:30 the night before, which meant that Saturday wouldn’t get under way for him much before noon. I didn’t want the car for anything, though, so I left it at the curb across the street from his flat where he couldn’t miss it. Then I walked to the corner and left on Main toward the Mohawk Grill. Out of habit I peeked in on my way by, and there was my father sitting at the counter eating eggs. The only other person was Harry, who was nursing his ritual Saturday morning hangover, the very apparent pain of which changed his personality not one jot.

  “Here’s the car thief now,” my father said when I slid onto the stool next to him. “How about some eggs?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Not a thing,” he said. “Just sitting here wishing I had a car is all. I walked all the way over to your mother’s and it wasn’t there either.”

  “You didn’t wake her up, I hope.”

  “You shitting me?” he said, as if to suggest that perhaps I’d forgotten that he was acquainted with her. “What’d you do, wreck it?”

  “It’s sitting right out in front of your place,” I told him.

  “Like hell. I walked all around the block. Two blocks.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve got twenty bucks says it’s right out front.”

  “Then you just put it there.”

  Harry set my eggs in front of me and went back to frying bacon and sausage, which he had sputtering in long even rows on the grill. My father finished his breakfast and amused himself by watching me eat mine, nodding as if he knew something worth knowing.

  “So,” he said. “You finally found a better place to park my car at night than your mother’s.”

  “Who, me?” I said. I liked those rare occasions when he didn’t know what was up. It was pure pleasure not helping him figure it out. “I’d check the battery cables,” I told him. “It wouldn’t start, at first. I think you got a loose connection.”

  “He is a loose connection,” Harry offered without turning around.

  My father ignored him. “Does that in the morning sometimes. When it’s damp. Rain out where you were?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  He nodded. “Guess who came home yesterday.”

  “Drew Littler,” I said. The name was out before I could call it back or figure out where it came from.

  “That’s a hell of a guess,” he said. “You run into him?”

  I said I hadn’t and hoped I wouldn’t.

  “Got his mother all in a tizzy already. Couldn’t call ahead, naturally, and say he was coming. Got to show up and give her a heart attack.”

  “How is he?” I said, trusting my father to intuit that I was not inquiring after Drew Littler’s health so much as his mood.

  “You should see him,” my father said. “He’s big as a house. Bigger. Moved his shit right back into the spare bedroom. Never mind waiting to be invited. Not Zero.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t call him that,” I suggested.

  My father lip-farted. “That’s what he is.”


  “That’s why you shouldn’t,” I said. “He probably resents the hell out of it, and he’s not sixteen anymore.”

  “Big isn’t everything,” my father said, catching my drift. “Smart counts too, you know.”

  “Where do you fit in?” Harry wanted to know.

  “I’m smart,” my father said, grinning at him. “Smart enough to outwit that big ox, anyhow.”

  Then he launched into the story of how he’d got Drew a job shoveling snow and he’d tossed an icy block of it through a second-story window and then claimed it was an accident. This story led to another.

  I’d heard them all, so I didn’t listen. I knew what he was doing, of course. He was getting himself all pumped up for what he considered to be an inevitable confrontation. He may even have started up with Eileen again to make sure there’d be no avoiding it. So I let him rant. There was no point in trying to slow him when he got rolling down this particular memory lane. I just grunted now and then to show I was still there, and thought instead about Tria, up on one elbow, her slender fingers trying to make sense of my own ragged curls. The idea of waking up next to her for the rest of my life was tempting. I couldn’t think of many drawbacks, if I didn’t count the fact that, despite our successful lovemaking, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tria Ward’s feelings for me did not run very deep. Her last remark—that things out there were always normal, no matter how abnormal—had stayed with me though. She’d delivered the observation like a punch line, but there’d been an edge to it, and I wondered if it was a warning I’d be foolish to ignore.

  I put it out of my mind anyway. When Wussy came in, I was glad to shake free of my reverie. He looked kind of in between. I couldn’t tell whether he was finishing up Friday night or starting Saturday. He slid onto the stool next to me, as he frequently did when the three of us were out together, a safe distance from the rockhead. “Guess who I just saw,” he said.

  My father got it right, the first guess.

  Wussy ordered breakfast, and we kept him company. Harry still didn’t have any other customers. I liked the diner early in the morning before it got crowded. In fact, I considered it almost worth getting up for. In another half hour, you wouldn’t be able to talk in a normal voice and be heard over the din of rattling dishes, but at this hour you could use your library voice and be heard. Neither my father nor Wussy possessed a library voice, but if they had, they could have used them.

  “You’re looking pretty pleased with yourself this morning, Sam’s Kid,” Wussy observed.

  I shrugged. Three guys came in from the poker game upstairs and joined us at the counter.

  “He’s just getting back with the car, I know that,” my father said. “I asked him where he parked it all night, but he’s not saying.”

  “Somebody smell his pussy finger,” one of the newcomers suggested.

  “You think you’d remember what it smelled like?” asked another.

  “Better than you,” said the first. “At least my finger isn’t up my ass always.”

  “Nope,” Harry said. “Not always.”

  I stood to leave, showing them all the finger in question.

  “Where you going?” my father said. “Stick around. We’ll go out to lunch later.”

  “I’ll see you tonight,” I promised. I knew what he had in mind, which was to sit around and get himself worked up, then go over to Eileen’s, ostensibly to invite her out to lunch. If I was with him, it would be worse than if he went by himself. Wussy was on to him too, I was pretty sure, and when the time came he’d find something else to do. If my father was alone, Eileen would probably be able to head off trouble, but not if he had an audience.

  It was a nice morning now, and I was deliciously tired. My mother’s flat was a fifteen-minute walk and I was nearly there when a horn tooted and F. William Peterson pulled over. “Seen your old man?” he said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Got some good news for him.”

  Since that was the case, I told him.

  “I tried to find him last night, actually,” Peterson said.

  “Strangely enough, he might have been home,” I said. My father had been clean-shaven and rested-looking at the diner, curious for a Saturday morning.

  “I never thought to check there,” the lawyer admitted. “Anyway, we got our break. One of the kids came forward and admitted they’d all been drinking and drag racing. We knew from the tire marks that there’d been a third car, but now it’s sewed up. All of a sudden everybody wants to settle. Looks like Sam may walk on this one.”

  “How’s the girl?”

  “Still in a wheelchair. That’s the bad part. Still, to be fair, I don’t think that’s your father’s fault. Not entirely, anyway.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  When he asked me if I wanted to go along and help spread the good news, I said no, I was tired.

  “Mom worried about me?”

  He shook his head. “Not too bad. She can’t make up her mind whether you were out all night or whether you got up early. It wouldn’t hurt to spend some time with her today. You’re always gone. Talk to her a little.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “She loves you,” he said, then added sadly, “More than anybody.”

  “I know,” I admitted, suddenly feeling the terrible weight of her love, threatening to rip through the thin fabric of lies and deception that it rested on. “I wish to God she didn’t.”

  “No use,” F. William Peterson said. “She can’t help herself.”

  37

  The telephone half woke me. My mother’s lowering her voice did the rest. With the shades drawn, it could have been night, but my watch said four-thirty and there was a ball game on TV in the living room. “Well, honestly,” I heard my mother say into the telephone, “that’s hardly my son’s fault.”

  Groggy, I sat up in bed, vaguely aware that I had been dreaming unpleasantly and that the dream’s interruption was likely to be even more unpleasant. I had fallen asleep thinking about the night before and Tria’s perfume, but sleep had turned it all bad. Now, groggy and in between worlds, I was convinced that it was Mrs. Ward on the phone, calling to report that I had violated the sanctity of her home and hospitality, gotten her daughter pregnant. I had nearly convinced myself that this was the only plausible scenario when my mother hung up the phone. “Honestly!” she said again.

  I listened to her pace, clearly trying to make up her mind whether to wake me. We’d spent most of the morning together and I’d tried to take F. William Peterson’s advice about talking to her. Nothing came out but words though, and most of them were hers. After a while I just listened, nodding and muttering an occasional yes, until finally she took my hand and said wasn’t it amazing. All those years apart and we could still see into each other’s hearts. She could read me like an open book, she said. Like it or not, we were simpatico. She held up two intertwined fingers to show me what simpatico meant. I said I thought I’d take a nap. She said she knew I was exhausted. She could tell. We were simpatico.

  There was a knock and my mother poked her head in. I was still sitting on the bed, still groggy. “Who was on the phone?” I said.

  “Eileen somebody. A friend of your father’s. Apparently she thought that a recommendation.”

  “Silly her.”

  “What gets into people?” my mother said. I could see she really wanted to know. She’d upset herself trying to figure it out. “It’s as if it’s our responsibility to …” she let the thought trail off. “Your father has apparently had one too many. You are requested to go get him.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting to my feet.

  “I’d let them call a cab,” she said. “Why encourage such behavior?”

  “I’ll go get him.”

  “Sure,” she said, her upper lip curling with sarcasm. “And when you’re gone, guess who’ll be here to answer the calls? Guess who all the Eileens in Mohawk will call to report your father’s activities?”

  “If you d
on’t want to answer it, don’t answer it.”

  “This is my home.”

  Her hands were shaking now. “Take it easy,” I said. “This is not such a big deal.”

  “My health may not be a big deal to your father, but it is to me. I’ve fought too hard for it to let him destroy it. Too hard. Too too hard. I’ll not have my home invaded.”

  I made a dramatic gesture of looking around the room, even under the bed. “Is he here? Who has invaded your home? Me?”

  “How do you think it makes me feel to see you at his beck and call? As if he ever cared about you. Don’t you think I know why you came back to Mohawk? Do you imagine I’m a complete fool? Do you imagine I think you came back out of any concern for me or my welfare?”

  She was still frozen in the doorway, and there was nothing to do but wait for her to move so I could pass. I’d seen her swiftly unravel like this before, sudden, unexpected lucidity pushing her toward the brink, before she could pull herself back again. It was always awful to watch, and the worst part was that I never felt the slightest softening toward her. I knew from experience—mine and F. William Peterson’s—that people who surrendered territory to my mother seldom won it back. I’d often wondered whether my stubbornness in refusing her demands was inherited from Sam Hall or an instinctive male response to emotional black-mail. Either way, I knew I could count on an almost unlimited reserve of stony resistance. I also suspected that this current confrontation had been brought on by the morning’s congeniality, an action that demanded an equal and opposite reaction. Thirty days out of every month she reassured herself that things were fine. On the thirty-first, she needed to consider an equally distorted negative reality, plunge herself into despair and fury, to the outermost inconsequential limits of her own continuing dream.

  She stood before me now, a full head shorter than I, an angry, self-pitying child full of terrible adult knowledge. “Why do you do it?” she said. “Why must you play Sam Hall’s fool?”

  “I guess he and I are just simpatico,” I said, holding up two fingers, wondering at my own cruelty, its ability to surface so quickly, so powerfully, so intelligently focused on the existing scar, already red and inflamed.